News without the noise
Hardware and devices: chips, phones, computers and the companies making them, from launches to supply chains.
266 articles · page 2 of 6
Nvidia on Wednesday announced the DSX Pod AI Factory, a shipping-container-sized system holding seven of its Vera Rubin AI racks that can be trucked to a site and quickly connected, as the company continues its move from chip maker to provider of complete data center systems.
· 3 sources
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are laying out detailed production targets for advanced memory chips at their Chinese factories as they race to meet AI demand and fend off a fast-growing local rival, according to people familiar with the plans.
· 2 sources
Microsoft is planning two new gaming devices under its Project Helix initiative: a handheld by the end of 2027 and a console for the 2028 holiday season, with an internally projected price of $1,200 to $1,800, according to a Fortune profile. The console price, which could be reduced through a subsidy, would be the highest ever for the market.
Amazon has announced it is phasing out its Fire HD tablet lineup in favor of more expensive Alexa Tablets. However, buyers can still find a deal: the ad-supported Fire HD 10 has dropped to a new low of $72.99, down $82 from its usual price. The move marks a shift in Amazon's tablet strategy toward higher-end devices.
New York City-based Tuesday Labs has begun taking reservations for Voxel, a bipedal home robot it says will learn and handle routine household tasks. The robot, priced at around $20,000, is available to reserve for $200 and is expected to ship in 2028.
AMD has announced that its latest upscaling technology, FSR 4.1, is being extended to Xbox Series S and X consoles, as well as older Radeon GPUs, laptops, and handheld gaming devices, broadening access to performance improvements beyond the RX 9000-series launch in March.
· 2 sources
Google Home speaker owners are reporting that their devices have been continuously downloading hundreds of gigabytes of data in the background, a bug that Google says it is now addressing with a rolling fix.
Apple announced its first touchscreen laptop on October 28, unveiling a new high-end MacBook Pro with a tandem OLED display and touch input at its "Pro and tell" event in Los Angeles, confirming weeks of analyst expectations.
· 8 sourcesAI chip startup Tenstorrent has raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation, more than doubling its previous worth, as it scales production of chips designed for open-weight AI models and video generation. The round comes five months after the company reportedly received acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm.
· 2 sources
Arm has announced that its AGI data centre CPU delivers nearly twice the performance per rack as AMD's EPYC 9755 in agentic AI workloads, according to results modeled using a new CPU evaluation methodology developed with support from Fujitsu, Meta, and OpenAI. The analysis, commissioned by Arm and independently verified by Signal65, positions the chip as a leader in handling tool execution, retrieval, and state management tasks crucial for AI agents, though Arm acknowledges the method is not yet an industry standard.
Huawei has introduced OceanStor M900 Context Memory Storage at HUAWEI CONNECT 2026 in Shanghai, a storage platform designed to ease the memory bottleneck facing AI inference as context windows grow and agentic workloads multiply. The company claims the system can deliver up to 64PB of shared cache capacity, cut access latency to 60 microseconds and roughly double token throughput in typical AI coding workloads.
Tom's Hardware has reviewed the Asus ROG Strix XG27AQGNV, a 27-inch QHD IPS gaming monitor featuring Nvidia's G-Sync Pulsar technology. The review notes that G-Sync Pulsar, which syncs the backlight with the frame rate, provides smooth motion clarity without the brightness penalty typical of strobing, making this display a strong alternative to OLED for gamers prioritizing motion resolution.
Chinese electric vehicle giant BYD has unveiled its flagship Atto 8 e-SUV at the Paris Motor Show, claiming a charging breakthrough that could refill its 115-kilowatt-hour battery from 10% to 97% in just nine minutes, nearly matching the time needed to fill a conventional fuel tank.
Nvidia has reportedly denied that the GeForce RTX 5090 has been discontinued, even as the card remains missing from major retailers and sells for thousands above its launch price on secondary markets. Senior Vice President Jeff Fisher told Taiwanese media that supply chain constraints are real but that Nvidia is doing everything it can to keep shipping the GPU, contradicting weeks of speculation that production had been halted in favor of AI accelerators.
· 2 sourcesBose has introduced a new pair of wired noise-cancelling earbuds, betting on a resurgence in wired headphones that has seen sales rise this year after five straight years of decline since Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone in 2016.
Apple's iPhone Duo has seen shipping estimates slip from late October into next year within hours of pre-orders opening, with some markets already facing deliveries in February 2027. Scalpers on eBay and X are asking as much as $10,000 for the $1,999 device, the company said in a statement following the strong initial demand.
· 2 sourcesA software bug in Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses caused the devices to record audio without the wearer's knowledge, according to reports from multiple users this week. Meta has acknowledged the issue and said it has been fixed.
Apple has launched its own line of smart home devices, the Apple Home Collection, including cameras, thermostats, sensors, a smart door lock, and a video doorbell, codeveloped with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric. The announcement, which also introduces HomeView, Apple's first smart display, marks the company's first major push into producing its own smart home hardware after more than a decade of relying on third-party manufacturers through its HomeKit platform.
Cody Wilson, the gun-rights activist who created the world's first 3D-printed firearm over a decade ago, has unveiled a new handgun he claims is the first AI-made gun. Dubbed the WASP, the .22 caliber weapon was designed by a custom artificial intelligence model called GatGPT, which Wilson says can generate gun designs from scratch. The development highlights the growing accessibility of homemade, untraceable firearms and the challenges lawmakers face in regulating them.
A Chinese startup founded by Tsinghua University alumni has demonstrated a prototype extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light source for chipmaking, the latest step in China's drive to build the advanced lithography equipment it cannot buy from Dutch supplier ASML. Langdao Silex exhibited the device at the 26th China International Industry Fair in Shanghai, claiming over 15 watts of output power with 90 percent domestic components.
Reviews of the first wave of RTX Spark notebooks, including Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra and HP's OmniBook Ultra, are in, and they paint a picture of a new class of Windows-on-Arm machines that offer unmatched local AI inference for a steep price. With unified memory up to 128 GB and Nvidia's Blackwell RTX GPU core, these systems can run 70-billion-parameter models on a laptop, but the high cost and a slumping PC market may limit their appeal to developers and creative professionals.
· 3 sourcesApple's iPhone Duo, the company's first foldable phone and its most expensive iPhone ever, went up for pre-order on Friday and within an hour delivery estimates had slipped into late January 2027, with launch-day pickup inventory selling out. Apple described demand as 'nothing short of extraordinary' and said it is working to get the device to customers as quickly as possible.
· 6 sourcesA new class of Android-powered laptops called Googlebooks has arrived, aiming to challenge Windows and macOS, but early reviews suggest the operating system's phone origins are impossible to shake. The devices sometimes feel like a Chromebook and sometimes like a giant phone, but almost never like a premium laptop, according to one detailed review.
Microsoft has announced plans to scale its Azure Maia family of AI accelerators to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027, positioning Maia as the primary inference system for Microsoft products and services. The detailed architecture of the upcoming Maia 300 chip includes a custom AI transport on Ethernet, a unified fabric that merges scale-up and scale-out networking, and a NUMA memory layout, but the efficiency claim in the announcement has raised questions among practitioners.
Silicon Quantum Computing founder Michelle Simmons has announced the company will establish what she calls a world-first atomic-scale chip manufacturing plant in Sydney, declaring her company will be Australia's answer to OpenAI and Anthropic.
· 4 sourcesShelly has announced the Presence Gen4, a smart home sensor that uses mmWave radar technology to detect the presence, motion and activities of up to 10 people simultaneously without recording video. Priced at $84.99, the device is available today from Shelly's online store and will soon reach other retailers.
Global smartphone shipments fell by at least a fifth in the third quarter of 2026, as the AI-driven memory crunch pushed component costs up by approximately 350 percent and forced vendors to raise prices and cut back on budget devices. Preliminary estimates from IDC and Omdia put the year-on-year decline at 22 percent and 20 percent respectively, with both analysts warning that the market has not yet hit bottom.
Sipeed, a Chinese hardware maker, has announced the MaixStation, an AI mini PC powered by Axera's AX8860P chip that aims to compete with Nvidia's DGX Spark and AMD's Ryzen AI Halo. The 128GB model is expected to cost around $3,999 when it launches via Kickstarter at the end of 2026, putting it at the same price point as the equivalent Ryzen AI Halo configuration and well below the DGX Spark's $6,950 MSRP.
Nvidia's RTX Spark laptops are now generally available at multiple retailers, including Best Buy, B&H Photo and manufacturer websites, marking the broadest push yet for Windows on Arm in high-performance computing. The first wave includes devices from Microsoft, Asus, Lenovo, HP and Dell, with the Surface Laptop Ultra leading the lineup. Early reviews highlight strong local AI inference performance, with the RTX Spark chip outperforming Apple's M5 Max in some AI benchmarks, though gaming performance remains limited.
· 6 sourcesTSMC is considering expanding its US chipmaking capacity beyond its Arizona projects, with Texas emerging as a leading candidate, and is in active discussions with Elon Musk's Terafab venture — but the Taiwanese semiconductor giant insists that any facility it joins must be operated by TSMC, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei confirmed this week.
ASML has reported record quarterly revenue of $13.06 billion (€11.66 billion) for the third quarter of 2026, up 55% year-on-year, and said some customers are already placing orders for lithography equipment through to 2030, far outstripping the company's ability to expand production capacity.
Ledger opened pre-orders on Thursday for its $849 Atom crypto device, setting delivery for 2027, as it detailed new anti-tamper hardware and a partnership with Solana Mobile. The launch comes as the French company investigates modified wallets sold through a reseller in Asia that were used to steal tens of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency.
· 6 sourcesAmazon on Thursday unveiled two new Bee devices powered by artificial intelligence, an upgraded wearable called the Bee Frontier and a credit card-sized recorder called the Bee Eclipse, as the company steps up its push into AI hardware ahead of the holiday shopping season.
· 4 sourcesApple's newly announced HomeView smart display does not natively support video streaming apps, including the company's own Apple TV, requiring users to AirPlay content from an iPhone, according to the device's specification page.
GFiber, in partnership with Qualcomm and Gemtek, has announced a Wi-Fi 8 Premium Gateway aimed at customers on its 20 Gig fiber plan. The gateway, which uses Qualcomm’s Dragonwing NPro A8 Elite Platform, is designed to combine high-speed connectivity with native edge AI processing. Rollouts are expected to begin in 2027, with current 20 Gig subscribers using a Wi-Fi 7 gateway set to receive an upgrade once certification is complete.
Fujifilm has announced the Instax Square 2, a new square-format instant camera that stays true to the analog roots of the Instax line while introducing a physical filter switch that lets users slide one of two colored filters in front of the lens. The camera is priced at $119.95 and will be available later this month in slate blue, brick red and misty white.
Sony has reportedly taken down Overdrive, a homebrew storefront for jailbroken PS5 consoles that offered over 1,600 free PS4 and PS5 games, after a video demonstrating the installation went viral. Within a day, however, two clones appeared on GitHub, reviving the project.
SK hynix has detailed plans to reduce reliance on power-hungry CPU cores in its SSD controllers with an in-house designed core called the Hynix Transaction Processing Unit (H-TPU). The tiny, programmable cores handle repetitive I/O tasks with dramatically lower power and area consumption, leaving management functions to a traditional Arm CPU. The company aims to apply H-TPU across its NAND product line, beginning with next-generation enterprise SSD controllers.
As the price of a 32GB DDR5 6000 RAM kit reaches $450, driven by AI-fueled component shortages, Newegg has restocked a bundle that effectively prices the same memory at $151 when purchased alongside a CPU, motherboard and SSD. The deal, which includes an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor, Gigabyte X870E motherboard, 2TB SSD, a CPU cooler and a game, is priced at $1,165.99, a saving of $358.98 off the combined list price.
· 2 sourcesRetail prices for Nvidia's RTX 50-series graphics cards at a Tokyo PC store are running up to 41.1% higher than equivalent Amazon US listings, according to pricing data shared on Reddit and analysed by Tom's Hardware. The gap reflects a memory chip shortage and surging demand for AI compute, with reports that Nvidia is scaling back gaming GPU production in favour of data centre chips.
Science Corporation CEO Max Hodak announced at TechCrunch Disrupt that the company has implanted its PRIMA vision-restoring chip into a patient with Stargardt disease, an inherited eye disease that gradually destroys central vision. The procedure marks the first use of the implant for this condition, which is currently considered incurable.
· 2 sourcesApple has launched six new smart home devices under a new Apple Home Collection, co-developed with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric, giving customers a closer look at its push into home hardware at Tuesday's 'Welcome Home' event.
Apple has announced a new Apple TV 4K at its 'Welcome home' product launch event, the first refresh of the streaming box in four years. The new model features an A19 chip, Siri AI with hands-free voice control, and an upgraded Siri Remote with Precision Finding, with pre-orders open now and shipping set for November 13.
· 4 sourcesApple has opened preorders for the HomePod Mini 2, the first refresh of its compact smart speaker in nearly six years. Priced at $149, the speaker launches Friday, October 30, and is available to order now through Apple's online store.
· 3 sourcesMicrosoft has revealed its next-generation Azure Maia 300 AI accelerator, a rack-scale system the company says will deliver up to seven times the token throughput of its current chip while producing more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU systems, with deployments planned to scale to multi-gigawatt capacity from 2027.
Apple on Tuesday unveiled its long-rumoured HomeView smart home hub, a $299 7-inch display that doubles as a central control point for connected accessories, alongside a new lineup of smart home cameras, thermostats and locks developed with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric. The devices, announced at the company's second product event under new CEO John Ternus, are positioned as a showcase for the upgraded Siri AI that launched last month.
· 11 sourcesCXMT, China's primary DRAM maker, expects to launch its first 4F² product, a server DDR5 RDIMM, by the end of the year, company president Cao Kanyu said at the Integrated Chips and Chiplets Conference on Saturday, in remarks reported by Chinese business outlet Yicai.
Apple has opened pre-orders for its new HomeView smart display, with first deliveries set for November 13, but buyers of the wall-mounted model will need to pay extra for a mount and power adapter that are not included in the box.
· 7 sources