Weston Hale

Weston Hale covers personal computing for BitsFromBytes from Seattle, where he used to work as a hardware QA engineer at a PC OEM before pivoting into independent tech writing in 2019. He has built more than eighty custom PCs for friends, family, and local small businesses over the past decade, at rates he declines to share with his accountant. Weston runs a mixed home setup of a Linux workstation (Fedora on a custom build), a MacBook Pro for client work, and a gaming rig that doubles as his primary testing environment. His laptop and desktop reviews are informed by the failures he has seen as a QA engineer rather than by the marketing pitches, and he has particular opinions about how CPU manufacturers are inflating core counts to mask real-world thermal limitations. When not benchmarking or fixing someone else a motherboard, he rides a 1987 Honda CBX motorcycle that he and his father restored over three years in his father's garage outside Olympia.