Updated July 21, 2026. Originally published February 6, 2026. Summary: If you are looking for the best computer for Claude Code in 2026, these are some top contenders in bang for your buck: the MacBook Air M5 (16GB/512GB, $1,199 to $1,255 on Amazon as of July 2026, depending on color). If you value RAM, additional ports, or don’t want Mac OS then I recommend a 32GB ThinkPad instead, $1,300 to $1,750 for current-gen. If you are on a tight budget:
Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5 on July 24, 2026. It is the new default model on Claude Max and the strongest model you can pick on Claude Pro. So why does the model picker in your VS Code panel still say Opus 4.8?! Before you go digging through your account or your plan, check the version. Opus 5 requires Claude Code v2.1.219 or later, and the list of models in that picker is compiled into the build you have installed.
Summary: I generate image-to-video (i2v) clips for a software project on a small consumer level GPU fleet: a flagship RTX 5090 and a cheap, always on RTX 4060. On a controlled raw render test the 5090 is about 5x faster per clip. But in a real overnight run where the two cards carried very different loads, their completion rates were only about 1.6x apart, and the 4060 finished a 74-clip batch in a reasonable 4.6 hours. Also, at the end
Summary: My Remote Desktop session into an old ThinkPad got progressively laggier. Ping said the network was perfect (1ms between host and client with no variation). Performance counters said the server was idle. I was about a day away from buying replacement hardware out of frustration with the lag 😣. The actual cause was a dropdown in the Remote Desktop Connection Experience tab that had the connection set to a 56 Kbps modem profile. 💡 Setting it to LAN (10
Summary: Apple raised prices across almost the whole Mac line on June 25, 2026. The general consensus is that this is due to a RAM shortage, and Dell, Lenovo, HP, and Microsoft all did similar things. A lot of the good sub $1,000 deals are gone for now: the MacBook Air M5 that drifted near $949 earlier this year is $1,299 today, and the MacBook Neo went from $599 to $699. It is a rough time to buy a computer,
Summary: Claude Code’s desktop app can SSH into a remote machine and run sessions there against your repo, MCP servers, and ~/.claude config. Setup is a four-field dialog, assuming ssh user@host (where user is your username and host is the hostname or IP) already works from your terminal. The non-obvious caveat: session history is siloed. The desktop app, the CLI on the remote, and the VS Code extension (if you use it) on the remote each keep separate session lists.
Q. I just got an email from distribution@bcbssettlement.com telling me I have a virtual Visa prepaid card waiting from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Subscribers Settlement. Is this real, or is it a phishing scam? A. If is is from that email and matches the info below it is real. These have been going out recently (May 20, 2026) and redemption can be very quick, no issues. Here’s how: to check before clicking, what the redemption flow looks like, and what
Have you ever been working in a VM, everything’s fine, then dialog pops up like this: VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (mks) ISBRendererComm: Lost connection to mksSandbox (3796) After that your VM is crashed and is powered off. Whatever you were in the middle of, gone with it. You start it back up, it runs for a bit, then it might crash again. 😢 Very not cool! This happened to me on a Framework Desktop system with AMD CPU, Ubuntu 24.04
TL;DR: There are a few ways to check your ChatGPT Codex usage, including: the web analytics page (covered in yesterday’s post) and the Codex CLI’s own status line, which can put live 5-hour and weekly percentages right at the bottom of your terminal session. The CLI method is easy to miss if you don’t have it enabled, thankfully it is super easy and configurable with the slash command /statusline. Codex CLI’s /statusline menu. Toggle the items you want, then press