News without the noise
Hardware and devices: chips, phones, computers and the companies making them, from launches to supply chains.
266 articles · page 1 of 6
Tom's Hardware published benchmarks of Nvidia's Vera data center CPU, finding it matched or beat comparable AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors in some tests relevant to agentic workflows, though the reviewers note server performance depends on use cases and software optimisation.
Intel expects the mid-October explosion at its Fab 28 plant near Kiryat Gat, Israel, to cost about $600 million in lost revenue across the fourth quarter of 2026 and the first quarter of 2027, and to reduce shipments of 10nm-class server processors for months, the company said during an earnings call.
Intel CFO David Zinsner said during the company's latest earnings call that its budget-focused Wildcat Lake laptop chips are sold out, with demand having 'seen significant growth.' CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the chips' demand 'is outstripping supply,' adding that the industry is navigating one of the most significant supply shortages in history, driven by demand for artificial intelligence. Zinsner also warned that the memory shortage is unlikely to ease before 2028, telling investors, 'Make no mistake, we are not optimistic about next year in terms of memory.'
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan confirmed that the next-generation Nova Lake desktop processors will be the first client product to use the company's enhanced 18A-P manufacturing node, with further details to be shared at CES in January. The announcement came during Intel's Q3 2026 earnings call, where executives also said the company intends to take Panther Lake capacity offline to produce more Granite Rapids data center chips and warned of a significant contraction in the PC market.
AI computing demand is eating into production capacity for PC, smart-device and gadget makers, with PCB shortages and price rises expected in coming months, according to a Nikkei Asia report.
Fujifilm plans to boost production of magnetic storage tape by as much as five times, driven by soaring demand from AI data centers. The Japanese company will spend 10 billion yen ($63.3 million) to expand capacity at its Odawara plant, its largest investment in tape-based storage in around 20 years.
A pull request in the Raspberry Pi Linux repository has revealed traces of two new models: the Pi Zero 3 W and Pi 4 Model A, indicating that the company may be preparing updates to its budget computer lineup.
Apple has introduced four new power accessories for the Mac alongside the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR, according to 9to5Mac: updated 70W and 140W power adapters, a power extension cable and a World Travel Adapter Kit.
Akai is giving hackers and custom firmware developers early access to the MPC Sample Key, an unreleased sampler with open-source firmware, and is already showing off what the modding community has built for it.
Google and Xreal have put their Aura smart glasses on sale at $1,099, a price below the $1,279 Xreal charged for early preorders last month. The 95-gram glasses, paired with a tethered Android XR compute puck, display multiple virtual screens and went on sale today with the launch price available through the end of the year.
PsiQuantum, a quantum computing company whose first breakthrough is in AI data centers, says it has developed a device that routes light signals without converting them to electricity, allowing separate server racks to behave as one at speed-of-light latency with almost no heat and negligible energy use.
Apple's first touchscreen Mac is now available to pre-order, with the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display starting at $2,899 in the US and $4,599 in Australia. Apple and Amazon are both taking pre-orders for the 14-inch and 16-inch models, which sit $400 above the standard MacBook Pro and start arriving November 6.
· 19 sources
The latest hardware news centered on Apple, where reports pointed to touchscreen laptops and cracking folding iPhones, and on chipmakers posting strong AI-driven sales gains.
· 7 sources
NVIDIA announced that its RTX Spark laptops are now available from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI, pairing a Blackwell RTX GPU with a Grace CPU in a single superchip offering up to 128GB of unified memory and up to 1 petaflop of FP4 AI performance. The company also introduced Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, an open weight speech model, new controls for sharing GPU resources with background agents, and gaming updates including Phantom Blade Zero's launch.
The US Federal Communications Commission has again blocked TP-Link's attempt to win conditional approval to sell Wi-Fi 8 routers in the United States, alleging the company submitted false or incorrect information in applications for four router models and that three of the four exceeded permitted power levels, according to letters dated October 15, 2026.
Amazon has expanded its Echo lineup to five new devices, adding a smart alarm clock and a screenless camera speaker to the Alexa Photo Frame, Echo Show 16 and redesigned Echo Dot unveiled at its Echo hardware event on Wednesday. The Alexa Photo Frame is on sale now, and the Echo Show 16 is available for preorder, with all devices running the latest version of Alexa+.
· 3 sources
Amazon has turned its most capable smart speaker into a camera as well. The new Echo Studio with Home Camera, announced this week alongside a range of other Alexa devices, adds an integrated camera to the premium speaker, letting it monitor a room while the owner is away, show things to Alexa, and, soon, support video calls on Fire TV devices.
· 2 sources
Amazon has announced a redesigned Echo Show 16 smart display, priced at $499.99 with a wall mount included, with preorders opening today and a $100 discount available ahead of its release later this year. The device, shown at a media event in New York City this week, features a completely overhauled software experience that includes improved smart home controls and a redesigned calendar interface.
Amazon has launched the Alexa Photo Frame, its first dedicated digital picture frame, combining photo display with the Alexa voice assistant and a promise that owners will never be served an ad. The device is available from today, priced at $199.99 in black or $229 with a birch or walnut frame.
Nvidia and Oracle announced general availability of Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 rack and Vera CPUs on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Superclusters at Oracle AI World on Tuesday, giving Nvidia its first standalone CPU deployment at a hyperscaler, a week after Google Cloud made Vera Rubin generally available.
Hours before Apple is expected to unveil a new MacBook Pro with OLED and touchscreen, a leaker claims to have found visual assets in macOS 27 that appear to confirm the rumored Dynamic Island notch replacement.
Apple has published two new videos in its True Apple Watch Story series, telling how the Apple Watch helped one man overhaul his fitness and alerted another user to a medical emergency that doctors said had progressed to septic shock.
The Pentagon has approved a drone armed with a shotgun and grenade launcher for purchase by the US military and federal agencies, adding Skyborne Technologies' Cerberus MI to its Blue UAS List of vetted uncrewed systems.
Apple's second-generation AirTag has hit an all-time low of $23, down from $29, at Amazon and Walmart. The deal arrives as holiday travel season approaches, offering iPhone users an affordable way to track luggage and other belongings.
Apple on Tuesday unveiled a new iMac and a 14-inch MacBook Pro powered by the M6 chip, holding prices at $1,499 and $1,999 and bucking the increases Apple has applied to other products this year. Pre-orders open Wednesday, October 28, and both machines arrive Friday, November 6, with a redesigned MacBook Pro reported to follow as soon as Wednesday.
· 14 sources
Nvidia announced a series of multi-billion-dollar agreements with supply chain partners at GTC Berlin on October 21, aimed at overcoming severe bottlenecks in the production of AI accelerators. The deals span substrates, co-packaged optics, advanced packaging, and semiconductor testing, with commitments and production roadmaps stretching through 2028.
A leaked Geekbench 7 result for AMD's EPYC 9996, a 256-core server chip using the Zen 6c architecture, shows significant single-threaded performance improvements over a Zen 5 desktop processor when tested at the same clock speed, suggesting a potential double-digit IPC gain for the upcoming architecture.
Micron has dropped 4F² memory cells from its DRAM roadmap and will instead use wafer bonding, High-NA EUV lithography and new materials to keep scaling memory, with its chief technology officer saying at an event this week that the technology is 'nearing atomic limits.'
Former Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger is backing Nagare Labs, a Georgia Tech startup developing a memory technology its founders say can combine SRAM-like speed with DRAM-like density and be cheaper to manufacture than HBM or LPDDR. Gelsinger, now a partner at Playground Global, told The Register the technology could ease the memory constraints that make AI workloads so demanding, but the company remains at lab prototype stage with a goal of sampling tiles within four years.
Modders have discovered a way to remove Nvidia’s imposed half-speed AI performance limits on GeForce RTX 20, 30 and 40-series graphics cards using a firmware exploit, allowing peak tensor rates to double on some models, though real-world gains in AI workloads vary significantly and the unofficial mods carry warnings of potential hardware damage.
Aivres brought a range of NVIDIA-based systems to the OCP Global Summit 2026 in San Jose, headlined by the KRS8000V4, a fully liquid-cooled NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 AI rack, alongside a new fanless 2U compute tray for HGX Rubin NVL8.
iFixit’s teardown of Apple’s iPhone Duo reveals design choices intended to hide the crease on its folding screen, including a matte nano-texture cover and oval-shaped subpixels arranged at varying angles. The device received a repairability score of 5 out of 10, the highest the site has awarded a foldable phone.
· 2 sources
Repair platform iFixit says the screen cracks reported on Apple's new iPhone Duo are most likely caused by a piece of the hinge failing and pressing on the display from below, not by the display panel itself. The finding comes as Apple replaces affected handsets and reports of the fault spread across social media, alongside memes about the device.
· 15 sources
AMD has revealed the backstory of this year's Ryzen 7 5800X3D relaunch, saying chief executive Lisa Su was among those who pushed for the comeback and that the move was planned before DDR5 memory prices spiked, not in response to the shortage.
Apple has unveiled the all-new iPad mini, replacing the 2024 model with an 8.5-inch OLED display, the A20 Pro chip, a slimmer 5.4 mm chassis and IP67 water and dust resistance. The tablet starts at $699 for Wi-Fi or $849 with cellular, with pre-orders opening Wednesday, October 28, and first deliveries on Friday, November 6.
· 7 sources
More than a month after Apple announced its first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, a wave of optimised apps is starting to demonstrate what the device can do beyond the incremental upgrades of recent iPhones. From a Walkman-inspired music player to a notebook app that curls its pages, developers are using the Duo's two screens and hinge to create experiences that were not possible on a single slab of glass.
A newly surfaced video reveals industrial-scale Chinese workshops that are dismantling thousands of GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards and reconfiguring them for AI compute clusters, according to a report from Tom's Hardware. The footage shows production lines stripping brand-new cards of their original cooling systems and transplanting the chips into dual-slot blower designs for high-density server racks.
On Friday, October 23, Apple launched the iPhone Duo, its first foldable iPhone, at Apple Store locations worldwide. Senior executives John Ternus and Deirdre O’Brien welcomed customers at Apple Domain NORTHSIDE in Austin, Texas, while Greg “Joz” Joswiak and Vanessa Trigub greeted shoppers at Apple Fifth Avenue in New York City.
· 2 sources
Micron has revealed details of its next-generation G11 3D NAND memory, which it says will double storage density, increase input/output performance by 50%, and reduce data transfer energy consumption by more than 25% compared to its current generation. The company plans to begin mass production in the second half of 2027.
Sigma has announced the FP2, a successor to its compact fp full-frame mirrorless camera, promising an improved sensor, an articulating LCD display and longer battery life while keeping the title of the world's smallest full-frame body. The camera goes on sale November 11 at $2,199 for the body alone, or $2,749 with an upgraded EVF-21 viewfinder.
China's chipmakers are producing increasingly advanced processors without access to ASML's extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, but the techniques they rely on carry a growing price in defects, larger dies and poorer yields, according to industry experts and analysts.
Global PC shipments fell 21 percent year-over-year in Q3 2026, according to Counterpoint Research, marking the end of a two-year growth streak. The decline, which aligns with similar findings from IDC and Omdia, was driven by rising component costs for RAM, SSDs, and processors from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm.
Birdbuddy has launched two new smart bird feeders, the Birdbuddy Nook and the Birdbuddy Home, both previously announced at CES 2026 under different names. The Nook is a smaller, more affordable option aimed at making smart birdwatching accessible to people with limited space or budget.
· 2 sources
The Atari VCS, a retro-inspired mini PC that endured years of delays and name changes, is being retired. Atari has announced that the console's software store will shut down on February 1, 2027, effectively ending the platform's life.
Insta360 has announced a new wireless microphone system, the Insta360 Mic, positioned as a more affordable alternative to its Mic Pro launched earlier this year. Priced at $249.99 for a kit including two transmitters, a receiver and a charging case, the new model skips some high-end features while retaining colour E Ink screens and multiple microphone pickup patterns.
Tesla has started early production of its Optimus humanoid robot at its Fremont, California factory, but CEO Elon Musk acknowledged Wednesday that the robot still requires substantial work on its hands, safety, reliability, durability and artificial intelligence before it becomes a useful tool.
Micron has ended its two-decade pursuit of 4F² DRAM memory cells, concluding the architecture offers no meaningful density advantage and introduces unsustainable complexity and cost. The company will instead continue scaling conventional 6F² planar DRAM and eventually transition to 3D DRAM, a move that puts it on a different path from rivals Samsung and SK hynix, which still list 4F² cells on their roadmaps.
Apple has told Reuters it will have only "limited" iPhone Duo units available for walk-in customers when the device launches on Friday, October 23rd, after online preorders quickly sold out and some delivery estimates pushed into next year.