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Geekom GeekBook M16: 30-second review

Geekom's GeekBook M16 is a business laptop designed for - as the company states, "enterprise pro, a developer, or an AI enthusiast." You can add general content creators (but not creative professionals) into that mix.

I mostly agree with that, although it's not the AI machine it could've been due to the limitations of the Core Ultra 9 chip it's using.

It's an interesting budget machine in the space. A nicely built, machined chassis that handles general computing tasks well.

Given the $899 price point, there is only one USB4 port, the webcam is only 2MP, and the keyboard and touchpad aren’t the best quality.

That said, the underlying platform is solid, even if you can’t expand the memory, and with a USB 4.0 port, it can be attached to a Dock if you need more ports or more than two displays.

Geekom includes a basic USB-C Dock in the box, so those who need a wired LAN port won’t need a full Dock or adapter.

This isn’t the best business laptop I’ve tested, but it's far from the worst, and demonstrates that you can get relatively recent platforms in these form factors if you are prepared to compromise on some aspects.

Geekom GeekBook M16: Price and availability

(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)

• How much does it cost? From $899
• When is it out? Available now in the USA
• Where can you get it? Direct from Geekom or online retailers

The Geekom GeekBook M16 can be bought directly from Geekom or via online retailers like Amazon.com and Best Buy. Prices start at $899.

TechRadar Pro readers can save an extra 8% when purchasing direct from Geekom or on Amazon when using the code TRGBM168.

The laptop pairs the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD.

• Value: 4 / 5

Geekom GeekBook M16: Specs

Item

Spec

Hardware:

Geekom GeekBook M16

CPU:

Intel Core Ultra 9 Processor 185H (16 Cores, 22 Threads, 5.1 GHz)

GPU:

Intel Arc GPU

NPU:

Intel AI Boost (35 TOPS CPU+NPU+GPU)

RAM:

16GB LPDDR5 (no upgrades)

Storage:

512GB M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD + M.2 2230 free slot

Screen:

16.0-inch IPS LCD, 2560 × 1600 (16:10)

Ports:

1x USB4, 1x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) , 2 × USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps), 1x HDMI 2.0, Audio Combo Jack

Camera:

2MP (1080p) Windows Hello compliant

Networking:

Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.4

Dimensions:

14.0 x 9.8 x 0.66in (355 x 250 x 16.7mm)

Weight:

3.8 lbs (1.73 kg)

OS:

Windows 11 Pro (pre-installed)

Battery:

99.99Wh Battery

Power supply:

100W (20V 5A)

Geekom GeekBook M16: Design

(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)

• Magnesium-aluminium chassis
• Diverges from the retail model
• Ports aren't labelled

The M16 is essentially the same machine as the GeekBook X16 Pro, but it comes with only a single SKU that offers less memory and storage. There may be some minor cosmetic differences, like the M16 doesn’t have a MicroSD card slot, but the core components are common, I suspect.

Geekom has machined the GeekBook M16 from a single piece of magnesium alloy, and that heritage shows in the finish.

The Titanium Gray coating feels warm rather than cold to the touch, and there is no flex anywhere across the lid or the keyboard deck. While not the highest quality finish, it doesn’t feel cheap either.

Where the design pitch starts to wobble is the weight. The review unit weighs a whopping 1.73kg on the scales, nearly half a kilogram heavier than the X16 Pro, and that difference is obvious the moment you lift it one-handed. A laptop sold on featherweight portability should not feel like this in the hand.

This weight discrepancy between this and the X16 Pro, I’m confident, is down to the battery that Geekom used in the review hardware, since very little else has changed.

(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)

Port selection is generous for something this slim, with two USB-C connections, two USB-A, a full-size HDMI, and a headphone jack.

The frustration is that none of them is labelled with a speed. One USB-C runs at USB4 and the other only at USB 3.2, and there is no visual way to tell which is which, short of plugging something in and checking. For a laptop aimed at people who might use a fast external drive or a high-bandwidth dock, that is a genuine oversight from Geekom, and worth calling out plainly rather than glossing over.

The keyboard includes a full number pad, which is a genuine convenience on a 16-inch chassis and something plenty of rivals leave out. Typing feel is a little on the spongy side rather than crisp, so anyone coming from a firmer keyboard may need a short adjustment period.

The keyboard is workable, but I’m less convinced by the trackpad. It does the job for general navigation and gestures, but it does not feel as refined as the rest of the machine, and precision clicking is not its strong suit.

Those buying a 16-inch laptop clearly want a good display, and the IPS panel on this machine offers 2.5K resolution, a 16:10 aspect ratio, and a 120Hz refresh rate. That extra vertical space suits spreadsheets, documents and code far better than a standard 16:9 screen, and scrolling feels smooth thanks to the higher refresh rate.

Geekom quotes 100 per cent sRGB coverage, which is close enough for everyday creative work without needing a color-calibrated reference screen.

(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)

Since many business machines get small upgrades during their working life, I like to take the backs off laptops to see what is possible on that front.

Removing the underside requires removing nine screws with a T5 screwdriver, but once they’re out, it's relatively easy to detach. Inside, the battery can be replaced, and there is an unoccupied M.2 2230 slot.

While the 2230 drive is an easy upgrade, the primary slot is 2280, so I’d probably recommend cloning the supplied drive to a larger one using that slot first.

The capacities of M.2 2230 aren’t great right now.

Also, these days, all memory comes pre-soldered, so the RAM in this system is the maximum it will ever have, even if the processors used on it can address 96GB.

Overall, this is one of those designs that is somewhat bland and lacks any sort of signature feature, but for many customers, that’s exactly what they want.

(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)

• Design: 3.5 / 5

Geekom GeekBook M16: Hardware

• Intel Core Ultra 9 185H
• Modest AI capability
• Wasted PCIe lanes

The Intel Core Ultra 9 185H is the flagship chip from Intel's first Core Ultra family, known internally as Meteor Lake. It packs sixteen cores across three types: six performance cores, eight efficiency cores and two low-power efficiency cores, giving it real flexibility between raw speed and battery-sensitive multitasking.

Turbo clocks reach 5.1 GHz, and in daily use, that translates into a chip that handles heavy browser sessions, office work, and moderate creative tasks without complaint. Cinebench multicore scores sit comfortably above a thousand points, proof that the hybrid layout genuinely pays off rather than existing purely as a marketing slide.

Graphics duties fall to an integrated Arc GPU built from eight Xe cores, clocked up to 2.35GHz. This was the point where Meteor Lake felt like a proper step forward. Games at modest settings run smoothly, video timelines scrub without stutter, and general graphical work feels far removed from the older Iris chips it replaced. It will never trouble a discrete GPU, but for a laptop chip doing double duty as a workstation and a light gaming machine, it earns its keep.

Then there is the NPU, which Intel calls AI Boost on this silicon. On its own, the dedicated neural engine delivers around 11 TOPS. Add contributions from the CPU and GPU, and Intel quotes a platform total of 35 TOPS. That was a genuinely new capability when Meteor Lake launched, letting local AI tasks like background blur, transcription and some generative features run without leaning on the cloud.

The trouble is that time moves fast in Silicon. Microsoft set the bar for its Copilot Plus program at 40 TOPS from the NPU alone, and the 185H simply does not reach it.

Intel's 200 series chips, split between Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake depending on the segment, push NPU performance well past 40 TOPS on the Lunar Lake side. The newer 300 series, built on Panther Lake, goes further still, pairing a stronger NPU with a genuine jump in graphics performance too.

(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)

So is the 185H still worth having? Yes, with a clear head about what it is.

It remains a strong general-purpose chip for everyday work, and its Arc graphics still beat plenty of rivals from its own generation. What it is not is a true Copilot Plus chip, and anyone chasing the latest on device AI features should look at the newer series instead. Judged simply as a capable, well-rounded laptop processor for typical work, there is still very little to complain about here. It has aged into a dependable middle child rather than a has-been, useful for exactly the sort of laptop you might have in front of you now.

Where this design isn’t well-served is that the Core Ultra 9 supports 28 PCI lanes (PCI 5.0 and 4.0), and the ports provided use hardly any of them. Given how much unused PCIe bandwidth was available, why is only one USB-C port USB4 spec? This chipset does support Thunderbolt, and if this were a Mini PC at this price point, I’d be expecting that, but only one USB4 port is poor considering the small army of unused PCIe lanes.

When I look at the number of mini PCs and laptops using this Meteor Lake silicon, I’m inclined to conclude that Intel made far too many of these wafers and now has unused bins clogging the channel they use to move 200- and 300-series chips.

If that’s an accurate analysis, then we’re likely to see more machines like the M16, where Intel attempts to off-load them before they’re four generations back.

• Hardware: 3.5 / 5

(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)Geekom GeekBook M16: Performance

Laptops

 

Geekom GeekBook M16

Acer Swift Edge 14 AI

CPU

 

Intel Core Ultra 9 185H

Intel Core Ultra 7 258V

Cores/Threads

 

16C 22T

8C 8T

TPD

 

45W

17W-37W

RAM

 

16GB LPDDR5

32GB LPDDR5X

SSD

 

512 GB KINGSTON OM8TAP4512K1

1TB Kingston OM8PGP4102Q

Graphics

 

Intel Arc Graphics

Intel Arc 140V

NPU

 

Intel AI Boost (11 TOPS)

Intel NPU (47 TOPS)

3DMark

WildLife

18,030

20,983

 

FireStrike

7177

8003

 

TimeSpy

3815

4065

 

Steel Nomad.L

2638

2989

CineBench24

Single

94

120

 

Multi

631

389

 

Ratio

6.70

3.24

GeekBench 6

Single

2337

2757

 

Multi

12104

11148

 

OpenCL

33402

29692

 

Vulkan

35602

33890

CrystalDIsk

Read MB/s

5979

4805

 

Write  MB/s

3756

3905

PCMark 10

Office

8133

8206

 

Battery

23h 21m

18h 28m

Battery

Whr

77

65

 

PSU

100W

100W

WEI

Score

8.2

8.8

My comparison machine, the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI, is a smaller display option, but it uses a newer 200 series processor, the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V.

As is evident, the improvements Intel made between Meteor Lake and Luna Lake weren’t subtle, and the Core i7 on the Acer performs better pretty much across the board. It’s dramatically better on single-core exercise, even if in some situations the GPU utilisation is slightly better on the older chip.

And, for those wondering about 300 series silicon, like the Intel Core Ultra 7 355 on the Samsung Galaxy Book6 Enterprise Edition, I recently covered, it performs even better.

There is no ‘golden age’ of mobile processors to discover, and the newest ones are genuinely better in almost every respect.

(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)

In testing, this machine lasted 23 hours and 21 minutes, and that’s better than the extra 12Whr of battery capacity the M16 has over the Swift Edge 14 AI might suggest.

I think a factor in this is the amount of RAM, since keeping 32GB of RAM alive for the life of the battery probably uses more power than the 16GB on the M16 consumes. It’s one of the few ways that having less RAM is actually an advantage.

What isn’t covered in these benchmarks is AI, and that’s lucky for the GeekBook, because it would get slapped by any 200 or 300 series processor, even a Core Ultra 5.

Overall, if you are looking for a workman-like system that has decent battery life and performs adequately on office tasks, the GeekBook M16 ticks enough boxes. But it’s not a machine for power users or creatives, unsurprisingly.

For those interested in the screen, I gave it a full analysis using the Datacolor Spyder X2 Ultra, and it was better than I’d anticipated for a side-lit IPS screen.

The gamut representation was 98% sRGB and 78% AdobeRGB and P3, which is fine. The brightness is capped at just over 300 nits, and the contrast is at about 1060:1.

The weaknesses of this panel are a mediocre tone response and poor white point accuracy.

But the usual challenges of luminance and colour uniformity aren’t a big issue here.

Overall, the screen is better than I’ve seen on some big-name brands, even if it can’t compete with the AMLOED displays that some products rock.

• Performance: 4 / 5

(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)Geekom GeekBook M16: Final verdict

Customers of Geekom getting the M16 are getting a much cheaper machine than the spec might suggest. It is roughly the same chassis, screen and platform as the X16 Pro, but with less memory and storage, but 23% more battery.

This is an interesting option for those wanting a reasonably punchy machine but without burning the budget down entirely with the latest processor platforms.

The only thing I’d like to see from this brand is more attention to detail, especially in respect of labelling ports. This would have been less of an issue if both USB-C ports had been USB4, and there are few valid excuses I’d take for why they aren't.

Those points aside, and a trackpad that might have been better, there are many positive things about this design that only a few years ago might have been described as a flagship model.

It isn’t super-cheap, but with rising memory and storage costs, hardware under this lid might look like more of a bargain as time goes by. And, compared with 200 and 300 series machines, it's definitely on the budget-friendly side of the line.

Where I’d be careful with this hardware is deploying it to a student, because it's difficult to assess how much abuse it can take, and carrying this all day might prove tiring.

Should you buy a Geekom GeekBook M16?

Value

Competitively priced for the specification

4/5

Design

Lightweight magnesium chassis, but it needed more USB4

3.5/5

Hardware

Intel Core Ultra 100 Series CPU, and a massive battery for long runtime.

3.5/5

Performance

Not cutting-edge Intel tech, but good enough for many tasks

4/5

Overall

A practical system with enough battery for a long working day that’s less than $900

4/5

Buy it if...

Battery life is important for your workflow
With nearly 100Whr of battery, this machine runs for an inordinately long time on a full charge, and it’s much more than the typical 60-80Whr that most machines using the same Intel platform get given. Having a battery capacity that can run this machine actively for nearly a day is impressive.

You're on a budget
While alternatives typically go for a Core Ultra 5 or 7, this one has the full Core Ultra 9 processor, and that adds cores and performance. The only caveat is that these 100 series chips aren’t great for local AI, and the 16GB RAM capacity is also an LLM limitation.

Don't buy it if...

You need a highly portable machine
If you travel regularly and are sensitive to weight, a laptop that weighs 3.8 lbs or 1.73kg is excessive. Its associated charger doesn’t add much extra, considering it outputs 100W, but that’s the only light at the end of this tunnel.

You like to upgrade

The 16GB LPDDR5 memory is soldered onto the mainboard and cannot be upgraded. Users looking for long-term flexibility or future-proofing may find this limiting, especially if workloads grow more demanding over time.View Deal

Titus Welliver is a busy man these days. The actor is about to star in new MGM+ series The Westies, which is a fictional take on the misadventures of the real-life Irish-American crime family of the same name.

Welliver plays the FBI agent responsible for tracking the gang down. For the hardcore fans among us, it's fitting casting, as the role isn't that far removed from the character we know him best for: Detective Hieronymus 'Harry' Bosch.

Since 2014, Welliver has played the role across the main Bosch series, spinoff Bosch: Legacy, and spinoff of a spinoff, Ballard.

Here's where things get really exciting for crime drama fans. Not only is Welliver confirmed to return for new episodes of Ballard season 2, which is rumored to release later in the year, but Bosch creators are currently planning for a "standalone movie."

'We've got some ideas'

"I do three episodes of Ballard per season, so I've just finished doing that," Welliver tells me ahead of The Westies' debut on July 12. "And MGM+ is doing the Bosch prequel, Start of Watch. Cameron Monaghan is playing young Harry at the very beginning of his career as a uniform cop... but I have nothing to do with that."

This isn't too surprising, with developments on Start of Watch already being widely reported. The series doesn't have a release date as of yet, but we can expect it sometime between late 2026 and early 2027.

Welliver continued: "Michael Connelly (Bosch author), Henrik Bastin (executive producer), other people and I have some ideas about a possible standalone film. We've not seen the end of Harry Bosch, that's for sure... I will say that much."

If a standalone movie is only an idea at this point, it makes sense that we don't have any further details yet (for one, it hasn't even been greenlit).

If it does go ahead, we can perhaps expect it to look like action movies featuring the two famous fictional Jacks: the Jack Ryan movies, starring John Krasinski, and the Jack Reacher movies, which starred Tom Cruise.

At this point, it's all speculation. But I trust that Welliver's parting words about us not having seen the last of Bosch are referring to something other than his appearances in Ballard... call it a hunch.

In the meantime, you can stream Bosch, Bosch: Legacy and Ballard on Prime Video.

• A developer has created an AI reader tool that replicates Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter
• It uses an image-input LLM that reads your handwritten messages as PNGs
• The creator keeps the tool's interface simple, but it's not the easiest to install

Harry Potter fans listen up: someone has managed to develop a feature that lets you speak to Lord Voldemort himself through one of the best ereaders — well, kind of.

Canadian developer Maxime Rivest used Claude Fable 5 to reimagine Tom Riddle’s famous diary from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets as an interactive AI mod feature for the reMarkable Paper Pro — and the result is pretty impressive.

Just as how the diary is featured in the book and the 2002 movie, ‘Riddle’ allows you to write a message on your ereader using the stylus, and, after a brief pause, your message will then fade into the paper. Then, a reply will shortly appear on the ereader in an animated cursive font similar to Tom Riddle’s — mimicking the feel that someone is writing back to you from a different realm.

It looks pretty clever, doesn’t it? Well, it’s all thanks to the magic powers of AI.

I love it when technology feels like magic. pic.twitter.com/7wbjyhyL8DJuly 4, 2026

Rivest, who used the reMarkable Paper Pro’s on-device software development kit to create the tool, says he wanted to design an interactive AI experience that felt as though you were writing in a regular notebook. There are no touchscreens, keyboards, or animated chat bubbles involved, instead he sticks to simplicity.

The feature is built with an image-input compatible LLM, so when you hand-write your note or question, this reads your message as a PNG which is then sent to the AI model. From there, it generates a reply and sends it back to the E Ink display. According to its GitHub listing, ‘Riddle’ works with OpenAI, OpenRouter, and Groq APIs, and local servers that support image input.

That said, downloading it isn’t the easiest. For starters it only works on the reMarkable Paper Pro in developer mode with a launcher installed. The tool’s GitHub page also states the following:

“This modifies your device. It runs as root, stops the vendor UI (in takeover mode), and drives the e-ink engine directly. It has only been tested on a reMarkable Paper Pro (ferrari, aarch64, OS 3.26-3.27). It may not work on other models or OS versions, and you use it entirely at your own risk. Not affiliated with reMarkable AS. Keep SSH access working before you install anything — that is your escape hatch.”

Since Rivest shared his video demo, it’s garnered a handful of responses that are equal parts amazed and spooked. One user on Reddit says that reMarkable should consider adding this as a flagship tool for their next-gen ereader.

Rivest has been just as active with replying to online comments, noting that this is “just [his] first chapter with the project. Alongside his ‘Riddle’ tool, Rivest also unveiled an interactive Marauder’s Map feature that he's developed, another artifact taken from the world of Harry Potter.

I dug into the laws and found exactly what you need to know about saving and using video clips on your home security camera, including footage shot outdoors.

Graham Platner is facing growing pressure to end his campaign for U.S. Senate in Maine after Politico reported an allegation of sexual assault. Platner has denied the claim.

NPR's Steve Inskeep speaks with Democratic strategist Joel Payne about prominent Democrats on the national and state level urging Graham Platner to withdraw from the Maine Senate race.

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The company's latest value earbuds have built-in storage for voice capture directly to the buds.

Remember Project 2025? Democrats are building their own governing blueprint, and one proposal takes aim at the "annoyance economy": robocalls, endless hold times, hidden fees and other everyday frustrations.

• 97% have implemented AI, but 47% are waiting for meaningful AI ROI to be realized
• 79% say key operation decisions still require manual intervention
• AI could seriously help Q4 shopping habits

New research has claimed even though nearly all (97%) retailers have implemented AI in some form, more than two-thirds (69%) say they only respond to operational problems after those issues have already affected commercial performance, implying that most aren't planning ahead.

As a result, nearly half (47%) are still waiting to see measurable returns on investment from their AI spend, the report from UiPath found.

This comes as many struggle with the same challenges that have plagued AI adoption for years, with 42% still struggling with poor data visibility.

AI adoption is high, ROI is low

A third (35%) of UK retail leaders even continue to blame legacy technology for slowing them down, despite years of studies and reports implying that complex tech stacks and poor data quality are among the biggest blockers to successful AI. Delayed decision-making and inventory inaccuracies also contribute to delayed and unsuccessful AI rollouts.

Poor tech even extends to inefficiencies today, with four in five (79%) retailers saying most, almost all or all key operation decisions still require manual intervention, slowing response times and limiting AI's realistic impact.

"Often, businesses blame supply chain disruption when the real problem is that they’re making decisions with incomplete or outdated information," Retail Director Catherine Frame wrote.

UiPath says the companies that will see the most success with AI will be the ones who achieve "operational excellence," rather than the ones that blindly invest in AI. In other words, the same solid data and tech foundations that reports have been calling for for years.

Looking ahead, margin protection looks to be one of the biggest commercial risks as we enter the final quarter of the year, and the biggest one for commerce – while companies will struggle to achieve "operational excellence" and effective AI by then, it certainly highlights a major area where AI could support.

Descendants of Dred Scott and Chief Justice Roger Taney spoke about reconciliation at a church in the shadow of the Supreme Court last week as the high court wrestled with race and who can be an American.

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Heat waves are becoming more common and intense as a result of climate change — and roads are suffering as a result. Are the nation's roads up to meeting the challenge of a warmer, wetter future?

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President Trump's arrival in Ankara kicks off another potentially tense meeting for NATO.

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The French president's office said that Macron was safe and that his meeting with Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa would continue as scheduled.

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Graham Platner faces calls to end his Senate bid after sexual assault allegation, NATO summit begins in Turkey, U.S. men's run at the World Cup ends with loss to Belgium.

This $30 Mac bundle gives you 27 apps for productivity, design, and more — used across home and business.

The post Unlock 27 Mac Apps for Productivity, Design, and Dev Work for $29.99 appeared first on TechRepublic.

This Dell Latitude 7300 offers dependable performance for pros who need a portable everyday work machine.

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Texas' controversial age verification law remains in effect while free speech advocates and tech critics fight it in court.

Atlas has some serious soccer skills. Learning them involved "massive trial and error."

The launch, using a dummy warhead, took place the same day Australia and Fiji signed a mutual defense treaty meant to counter Chinese influence in the Pacific.

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Iranian state television said the tanker came under attack after ignoring warnings but did not directly claim the assault.

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