One of the unfortunate drawbacks of social media is that anyone, and I mean anyone, can now have a public feud that the rest of us have to witness. Case in point, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk are having a tiff on X, and it's starting to get out of hand.

Responding to an X post from Elon Musk, in which the SpaceX CEO and world's richest person declared that Altman "takes scamming to a whole new level," the OpenAI chief said: "Homeboy you're the one selling public market investors on short-term space data centers."

To which Musk replied: "We start flying them next year. Maybe you can come see them if your parole officer approves."

"After stealing an open source AI charity, you then stole all of Apple's phone technology! Wow." Musk continued. "What do you plan for an encore? That's tough to beat."

The open source AI charity claim relates to the much-reported Musk vs Altman trial earlier this year, in which the former accused Altman and OpenAI of breaching a non-profit contract by pivoting into a for-profit business, with Musk alleging he had been deceived into donating $38 million earlier in the company's history.

Musk lost the trial after an advisory jury decided the statute of limitations prevented a verdict in his favour. As for the Apple claim, the company has filed a lawsuit against two former employees who now work for OpenAI, alleging theft of intellectual property.

Apple claims that one of its former staff members "surreptitiously accessed and downloaded dozens of Apple’s confidential hardware-related files, including voluminous, detailed information about unreleased products, engineering presentations, technical specifications, and proprietary project data," before using that info to help OpenAI, among other complaints.

As you would imagine, the replies to Musk and Altman's posts regarding these issues are full of cheerleaders for either side, along with various other allegations against both tech chiefs. Because it's the internet. And civilised debate is apparently a rare thing.

As is, I don't know, arguing in private? Reading these posts is a bit like stumbling into a WhatsApp group you weren't supposed to join. Both seem to have withdrawn from the internet slappyfight for now, hopefully because someone from their respective legal teams has told them it might not be the best idea.

Or perhaps a second round is in the works, who can guess? Still, there's little love lost between the two, and a whole lot of drama playing out on a very public stage. Anyone got any popcorn?

A report from The Wall Street Journal tells the tale of Tim Cook's visit to the White House last summer, in which the Apple chief attempted to persuade the administration to abandon plans to impose tariffs on 100% of all semiconductor imports.

Apple was eventually granted an exemption to the tariffs, in return for a commitment to invest $100 billion into US manufacturing efforts. However, the WSJ says that US president Donald Trump and US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick also "urged" Cook to use Intel's manufacturing plants to make some of its chips.

Later that same month, the US government converted $9 billion in federal grants into a 10% stake in Intel, making it the company's largest shareholder. Trump announced in June of this year that Apple had agreed to build chips with Intel in the US in a Truth Social post, although neither company has issued a formal confirmation of the deal beyond a reported preliminary agreement.

According to the WSJ, Apple plans to have Intel make chips for Mac laptops and iPhones, according to one of its sources familiar with the negotiations.

Intel's stock price, meanwhile, has risen significantly over the past year, more than quadrupling since CEO Lip-Bu Tan took over the reigns in March of 2025. As the outlet reports, much of that good fortune can be attributed to CPU demand for AI servers, but the WSJ argues that the Trump administration's "financial and strategic patronage" has been "the more crucial factor."

Tan is said to visit Washington around once a month to meet with officials from the US Commerce Department, and "talks on the phone regularly" with Lutnick. Meanwhile, Bill Frauenhofer, described as the US government's "chips czar" is said to receive a quarterly briefing from Intel CFO David Zinser, with members of his staff meeting regularly with Intel executives.

All of which is to say, Intel's links with the US government seem to run very deeply indeed, after previous years of financial strife. And Apple, for its part, will be keen to secure chip manufacturing capacity for its products beyond that of TSMC, given the Taiwanese chip giant's capacity constraints in the middle of the AI boom.

So, the deal between the two makes a lot of sense. However, this arrangement certainly fits with the Trump administration's push to bolster chip manufacturing on US soil, and given the federal investment in Intel, it also appears to be a good bet financially for all involved.

Not least of all Apple, which, if these reports are correct and the deal goes ahead, managed to avoid some major tariffs in the process. Make of that, as they say, as you will.

With the memory crisis in full swing, it's becoming harder and harder to justify that PC upgrade. Though some will simply have enough money not to care, or will be forced to upgrade through breakages, others will simply go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over. Well, that waiting seems to have resulted in a pretty large decline in PC shipments, year-over-year.

According to analysis from the IDC, worldwide PC shipments have fallen by 4.9% between Q2 last year to Q2 this year (via Wccftech). This is reportedly "the first decline after nine consecutive quarters of growth" and, you guessed it, the memory crisis is to blame.

Tracking shipments last year and this year, ICD reports Lenovo dropping from 17 million units to 16.6 million, HP from 14.3 million to 13 million, Dell from 9.8 million to 9.3 million, and Asus at nearly flat growth. The only winner over the last year is Apple, which grew from 6.1 million to 6.7 million, representing a pretty substantial 10% increase. Apple also jumped from an 8.5% market share to a 9.9% market share.

Despite declining shipments, many of these companies aren't losing that much in revenue. That's because they can counteract the loss of sales through rising memory costs by getting consumers to pay for the price-inflated stock. Jitesh Ubrani, the research director for consumer devices at IDC, says, “The real story here is the disconnect between units and dollars: shipments are falling, but revenue is climbing because vendors are pushing through price increases faster than demand is dropping.”

IDC says that supply chain management and capabilities will continue to be incredibly important going forward. Some major manufacturers will be increasingly signing long-term contracts to supply memory and storage for devices, in order to keep selling through the memory crisis. That probably doesn't mean good things for smaller operators, as they'll have to navigate the larger companies' increased buying and negotiating power.

Others, such as Apple, have managed to capitalise on the problem with the launch of its budget-oriented MacBook Neo. Jean Philippe Bouchard, the vice president for consumer devices at IDC, says, “Apple’s share gain coincided with its latest product launch, the MacBook Neo, and while the company did raise prices in line with the broader market, it still remains well positioned against rivals facing the same cost pressures.”

It's worth noting that this is a report on global PC shipments, not necessarily gaming PC shipments, which have historically fared better during periods of decline. But these are far from normal times, and the memory crisis seems set to rage for another year at least.

Bernstein research analysts reckon SK hynix will significantly reduce its prices by the end of 2028, but we are likely to see more increases before then. And even then, that's a pretty optimistic outlook. If the memory crisis only lasts for another year and a half, I'd consider us rather lucky. It's anyone's guess what the PC market will look like by then, and who the winners of the memory crisis will be.

Apple has bitten the bullet. The house that Steve Jobs built took its store offline a little earlier. When it came back, punters were confronted with a bleak new reality: Macs and iPads are now hundreds of dollars dearer. Here's a tasting platter of new starting prices:

• The MacBook Air now starts at $1,299, up from $1,099,
• The MacBook Pro now starts at an eye-watering $1,999, up from $1,699.
• The MacBook Neo will now set you back a minimum of $699, up from its original price of $599.
• The iPad Air now starts at $749, up from $599
• The iPad Pro now starts at $1,199, up from $999
• If you were gonna splurge, get ready to splurge all the more: the M4 Max Mac Studio is up to $2,499 from $1,999

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Until now, Apple had managed to be the one exception to the memory crisis. Even as the waters rose for everyone else, the company's prices generally stayed firm, held steady by one of the most valuable corporations on Earth's relationship with suppliers and, perhaps, the fact it already prices its tech to make a comfy profit for itself at the best of times.

"We have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices,” Apple said in a statement picked up by the Wall Street Journal. “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly."

At least for now, Apple is not increasing the price of the iPhone, its number-one moneymaker, but it certainly hasn't said it won't do that. Indeed, just last week outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook told the WSJ that "Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable… we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable."

For as much as I am certain Apple likes making money, it's not happy about this (much like Valve is not happy about the expensive price of its new Steam Machine). In that same interview, Cook said that "We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line." Amen to that, Tim.

This is not the first time the idea has been mooted. And the source here is either about as authoritative as it gets or as unreliable as humanly possible, depending on how you look at it. But President Trump says that Apple has agreed to make chips with Intel in the USA.

Specifically, in a Truth social post Trump said, "First, we helped bring in Nvidia, and they agreed to build their first level Chips with Intel. Next, Elon agreed to build his TerraFab, the largest Chip Factory in the World, designed together with Intel’s Technology team. And, finally, Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and build its Chips in America."

It should be said that there is, as yet, no official confirmation of any of this from the companies concerned. Indeed, that includes not only Trump's claim that Apple has agreed to make chips with Intel, but also with Nvidia.

Nvidia and Intel are very much on-the-record about a collaboration. But thus far, that's about combining Intel CPUs with Nvidia GPUs. Exactly how those chips get made hasn't been detailed. Nor, inevitably, are there any specifics regarding chips Intel might make for Apple.

That said, there have been rumours for some time that Apple could use Intel's fabs to make certain chips. Much of the coverage suggests that Apple could choose Intel to make lower-cost chips, perhaps for mainstream iPhone and MacBook models, while the really high-performance, cutting-edge stuff for Pro models remains at TSMC.

Almost any deal with Apple would clearly be a huge win for Intel and its nascent customer fab business. Unsurprisingly, Intel's stock price leapt up 7% following Trump's announcement on Truth Social.

Equally unsurprisingly, Trump called out Intel's stock price gains of late, saying, "We decided to help Intel in exchange for 10% of their shares. Is that too much or, too little? They were worth around 100 Billion Dollars when we made our offer. Now they are worth over 600 BILLION DOLLARS! Nine months, and they’ve increased in value over HALF A TRILLION DOLLARS. America’s stake is now over 60 Billion Dollars. When was the last time a President made America money?"

For now it's unclear what, if anything, Intel and Apple have agreed. If there is an agreement, it will no doubt be years before the first Apple chips flow from Intel's fabs. Any deal may well be contingent on the performance—or yields—of Intel's new 18A and 14A nodes. If it's not good enough, Apple may have an exit written into the deal.

So there may be a deal. But it doesn't necessarily follow that there will definitely be chips. As ever, watch this space.

Courtesy of the RAMpocalypse, companies are raising prices for their memory-loaded products left, right, and centre. Apple products, however, had previously remained mostly (though not completely) untouched. No longer, though, as the company CEO Tim Cook tells the Wall Street Journal.

"Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable. We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable."

This is not your usual shortage, he explains: "This is a hundred-year flood. I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years."

Cook told the WSJ that both storage and memory are problems, but regarding DRAM specifically, he said:

"There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases. We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line."

He also explained that the company is open to taking a hit to keep prices low:

"We’re willing to use our balance sheet to help be a part of the solution. Obviously, more capacity is needed."

That's one of the benefits of being a big company like Apple and having a sizeable profit margin: you can take supply cost increases on the chin and keep your products priced as they were. To an extent, anyway—it seems Apple is now finally admitting it cannot keep things as cheap as they were.

To be clear, the company hadn't managed to keep everything completely normal until now. Not too long ago, Apple discontinued its entry-level Mac Mini model, effectively raising the minimum price you could spend to get a cheap Mac desktop.

That being said, the actual prices for the models that were being sold stayed the same. And there was the launch of the MacBook Neo, of course, which is a cheap laptop compared to Apple's usual pricing, and seemed like a small bastion inside the wider PC market, which kept (and keeps) raising prices. One thing that's probably helped is the fact that Apple software makes very good use of memory, meaning not as much actual capacity is usually needed.

But the good times are no longer, and there's no silver bullet to fix it all, unfortunately. Cook also told the WSJ that it won't be trying to make its own memory and storage facilities: "We can’t do everything. We know what we’re good at."

At any rate, new fabs take a long time to spin up, even for players already in the chip fabrication game. And on that front, we've got a while to go until the big players finish their new ones. Until then, it'll likely be a game of 'grin and bear it.'

Now that AI is being shoehorned into every app or operating system these days, whether you want it or not, attention is being increasingly turned to the user interface. At one end of the spectrum, you have Google and Microsoft's unaccommodating efforts, and at the other, you have Apple's new orb-of-wonder, actively lighting its 'surroundings'.

Later this year, an updated, fully AI-powered version of Siri will make its way to all of Apple's operating systems, though developers can already access it. For the likes of iOS and MacOS, Siri AI's interface isn't especially noteworthy, but on visionOS, the software that powers the Apple Vision Pro, it really stands out.

As briefly demonstrated in a post on X by Brad Lynch, project manager at EOZ VR, the Siri AI interface takes the form of a glowing ball that you can move around in the virtual world. You'd expect that for an augmented reality setup, but what makes Apple's effort special is the little matter of the ball's lighting.

The AR rendering of the ball includes an environmental effect, whereby surfaces and objects are 'lit' by the Siri AI interface. Hardly a revolutionary thing, but visual clues like this significantly help with how well virtual objects are experienced and interacted with in an augmented world. If you look at the visionOS windows in the clip, you'll see that they appear flat and unnatural because they cast no shadows or light.

For me, though, it's more about the fact that Apple has spent some time thinking about the interface, whereas Google and Microsoft have done almost the complete opposite for Gemini and Copilot, respectively.

Fire up the latest version of Excel, and you'll be treated to a Copilot button that hovers over the spreadsheet. You can't move the icon yourself; all you can do is 'dock' it to the edge of the window. But even then, it still overlaps cells, and the only way you can solve this problem is by disabling Copilot entirely (File > Options > Copilot, if you're interested).

At least you do have that option, though, unlike with Google's products, where Gemini icons festoon every application and first-run instructions routinely pop up, no matter how frequently you acknowledge or dismiss the reminders.

No PC user needs to be told just how crucial the user interface is for an application. Apple's Siri-ball for visionOS isn't a miracle of design or coding: it just puts the user's experience first, over everything else, something that Google and Microsoft really don't seem to care about these days. You wouldn't want a ray-traced globe illuminating your spreadsheets, but a little more interactivity would be very welcome.

If you've kept your eye on Computex in previous years, this year might have felt as peculiar to you as it did to me. There was, of course, as much in the way of AI as we were expecting, but in addition to that, some of the nominally gaming-oriented products seemed a little... non-gamer-y.

There are likely many reasons for this, but one thing that dawned on me partway through the computing expo was just how big a role Apple has probably played in this.

The laptops we've seen containing Nvidia's new RTX Spark chip are good examples. In design, they all look to be very slim, very sleek; very MacBook. That's also true for the MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI+, the new Microsoft Surface, of course (that one's not a surprise), and the initial RTX Spark machines from Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo. No doubt further RTX Spark laptops will follow suit, too.

There are obvious parallels to be drawn with the RTX Spark chip itself, given it's Arm-based, but that's a more complicated story for another time.

Amongst other 'we're not Apple, honest!' designs, probably the most blatantly Apple design I've seen from Computex (and I actually like the look of this, to be clear) is a new keyboard from Keychron. No, not the carbon fiber one, the low-profile one with magnetic switches that looks very much like an Apple Magic keyboard.

Another is the Framework 13 Pro. This isn't a new-for-Computex thing specifically, but it was on show at Computex—much to our Dave's delight, as he got to try it out and was impressed with it. It's been explicitly referred to as the "MacBook Pro for Linux users".

It won't have been inspired by the Neo, but MacBooks in general? You bet. Dave explains: "Everything about that Apple-baiting tagline makes even more sense now I've got to touch the device and talk about exactly what Patel means by it."

We can't forget the Apple MacBook Neo, though, even though it's very recent. Apple's latest MacBook will probably influence things massively moving forward, and it seems to have already started to do so.

The MacBook Neo entered the market right when prices for much other tech were skyrocketing, and it set itself apart by offering decent performance for day-to-day tasks with a typically smart Apple design, all for a low price tag. Well, low for Apple, that is, and to be honest, pretty low in general, too.

Market conditions and its value proposition had it quickly selling more than Apple had really prepared for. It's had people running to overclock it in the most outrageous of ways, and even though it's only running an iPhone chip, it's mighty capable at day-to-day tasks in native apps. In fact, we've just heard reports that Apple is doubling production of the Neo to help deal with people's insatiable demand. It's a bit of a gem in a quagmire of a market if you're on a budget.

Now, obviously, I don't mean to imply that the Neo's gaming performance will inspire loads of PC gaming manufacturers. Not least because, as Ian discovered in his review, it's not really viable for gaming. But when it comes to design and hopefully pricing, I'd be surprised if we didn't see some influence.

One product which seems to have genuinely learnt the right lesson from the MacBook Neo is the new Dell XPS 13, which even matches the Neo on price if you're a student (and isn't loads more expensive if you're not). It's paired this price tag with a similarly MacBook-like sleek design. And this one might actually have some (light) gaming chops, especially if you get one of the Panther Lake versions that's said to be on the way, though this will presumably up the price.

The Neo's pricing really should be emphasised, because we can't forget that the reason people are emptying it off the shelves isn't just for that sleek Apple design: it's because it's so cheap. And as our Andy points out, that pricing factor is one thing that sadly seems to have been forgotten by many companies during this year's Computex.

Suave high-end hardware is nice and all, but seeing too much of it leaves a bitter taste, given the consumer market is as bad as it is right now.

There's been plenty else at Computex, of course, but it's hard not to see Apple's influence in different areas. Let's just hope the Neo's popularity encourages more companies than Dell to take inspiration from the Neo's price as much as its design.

The AI giveth. And it taketh away. Or something like that. I bring you news of conflicting reports around computer sales. On the one hand, new data predicts PC sales will tank pretty badly over the next few years. On the other, Apple is reportedly doubling MacBook Neo production. So, what gives?

The PC sales data comes from a reputable source, namely research outfit IDC. It is predicting that PC sales will be down by 11.3% in 2026. Perhaps worse, IDC's outlook has 2027 almost as bad and even by 2030 PC, sales won't quite have recovered to 2025 levels.

"The culprit is a persistent memory shortage with no meaningful relief expected before the end of 2027. The knock-on effects are significant: prices are rising and PC manufacturers are struggling to maintain full product portfolios," IDC says.

The catch is that IDC says PC shipments actually grew in the first quarter of 2026, by 3% versus the same period in 2025. "But that strength was largely borrowed from the future. Buyers, both consumer and commercial, accelerated purchases ahead of anticipated price hikes and product availability constraints," IDC says.

The implication is that PC sales are now going to fall off a cliff. But that isn't quite the case across the board. In fact, Apple's MacBook has been selling so fast, it has singlehandedly "prompted IDC to revise its notebook forecast upward."

Indeed, the Neo is proving so popular, IDC thinks it will force the PC industry to, "respond with a combination of new silicon, a more efficient OS from Microsoft, and aggressive promotional pricing."

This all ties in with reports that Apple has doubled production of the Neo in respond to huge demand. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reckons Apple is increasing its initial target of five million Neo units for 2026 to fully 10 million.

This follows Apple CEO describing customer response to the Neo as "off the charts." It does really all make sense. The budget-priced Neo came out just as computers more broadly were getting more expensive. So, Apple's timing turned out to be perfect.

Apple is also arguably one of the few companies with sufficient clout to somewhat mitigate the current memory crisis, be that through forward contracts or just a bit of arm twisting. Which is presumably why it can keep selling the base Neo for $599 while many other computer brands are increasing prices.

The MacBook Neo is an impressive machine in many respects. Beyond the fact that it starts at $599 and makes for a very good productivity laptop (although not so much for gaming), the cheap-but-cheerful machine's popularity appears to have taken even Apple by surprise.

In the Q&A section of the company's recent Q2 2026 earnings call, in which the company reported 17% revenue growth year-over-year, CEO Tim Cook confirmed that the Neo is currently supply-constrained. "We were very bullish on the product before announcing it," said Cook. "But we undercalled the level of enthusiasm."

The outgoing Apple chief highlighted that the device's aim was "focused on getting the Mac to even more people than we were reaching before," which certainly explains the very competitive price tag. "We're very focused on customers new to the Mac and customers that have been holding on to their Mac of a very long period of time."

Beyond regular consumer uptake, Cook said the company was also "seeing school systems like the Kansas City Public Schools" switching from ageing Chromebooks and Windows PCs to the new Neo.

"I'm hearing anecdotally more and more of those kind of stories, both happening at the school system level and at the individual consumer level. And so we could not be happier with how things are going at the moment."

Still, supply constraints appear to be a fly in what is otherwise an excellent-looking ointment for the Cupertino-based giant.

Although reports say the company now aims to produce 10 million units of the affordably-priced machine, Cook's later comments suggest Apple is not entirely immune from the memory crisis affecting the rest of the industry—despite its Unified Memory Architecture tech making the most of smaller RAM amounts.

"In the December quarter, we really had a minimal impact due to memory, and you can kind of see that in the gross margin results," said Cook.

"We said it would be a bit more in the March quarter, and we did see higher memory costs... and they were partially offset by benefits from carry-in inventory that we had," he continued. "For the June quarter... we expect significantly higher memory costs. They are also partly offset by the benefit of carry-in inventory.

"I can tell you that beyond the June quarter, we believe memory costs will drive an increasing impact on our business. And we'll continue to evaluate this," the Apple CEO concluded.

So, despite the very strong financial figures overall and huge demand for its new budget laptop darling, Apple is still managing supply issues like the rest of its competitors. In the meantime, though, it's looking like a bit of a red letter day for the company.

And while it's too early to get the precise sales figures of the newly-launched Neo, they sound like they're going to be very impressive—providing supply can catch up with demand.

If this report is true it's not exactly surprising, but it's still kind of shocking. Apple has reportedly "given up" on its Vision Pro VR headset.

According to Mac Rumours, the latest M5-powered revision of the Vision Pro has been a "flop". As a consequence, "Apple has apparently stopped work on the Vision Pro and the Vision Pro team has been redistributed to other teams within Apple."

Mac Rumours claims that Apple plans to pivot to smart glasses, the first iteration of which will be similar to the Ray-Ban Meta glasses and lack any kind of display. Apple eventually hopes to integrate some kind augmented reality display into its smart glasses, but reportedly the technology just isn't there to do that with sufficient power efficiency.

This is still just a rumour and, to be clear, the Vision Pro can still be bought from the Apple website. Notably, in late 2024, the Vision Pro was said to be out of production, only for an updated headset with the M5 chip to be released in October last year. But sales of the $3,500 headset are widely reported to have been slow. Anecdotally, how many people do you know that have a Vision Pro? Quite.

As for what all this means for VR generally, it's hard to say beyond the fairly obvious. What with Meta more or less throwing the towel in on the Metaverse, suffice to say that the broader VR landscape, at least in terms of really major investment from the major tech entities, doesn't exactly look vibrant, does it?

Put another way, if Apple can't make mainstream punters switch on to VR, who can? In terms of that mainstream adoption, the sticking point is surely the bulk, general poor ergonomics and questionable aesthetics involved with current technology. Who really wants to walk around wearing a massive headset with marginal battery life?

For purely gaming, of course, there's both much more immediate appeal and more going on, with a mini industry of gaming headsets and, most recently, Valve's new Steam Frame headset. But it's still a totally different ergonomic and use-case proposition to a conventional display and surely less versatile.

If you upgrade your gaming monitor, in other words, likely it will be an upgrade for your general computing, too. But a VR headset bought for gaming is more likely to be restricted to that use case, maybe with some video consumption thrown in.

Personally, while I love the idea of VR, I've never been sufficiently blown away by available VR headset solutions and experiences to actually spend my own money. I'd want something that's somehow lighter, cheaper and higher resolution. Admittedly, I haven't tried the Steam Frame, but it seems more incremental than revolutionary to me, so I can't see it getting my money—if Valve ever prices the thing up.

Even we've been impressed by Apple's MacBook Neo, and we're called PC Gamer. It's essentially an iPhone 16 Pro wearing a laptop suit, and makes for a pretty tempting lappy when you take into account the lovely chassis design, decent screen, and the fact it starts at $599.

It's a laptop that seems destined to capture the market for those who need a stylish, functional machine for minimal amounts of cash. Reports indicate that Apple has ramped up production to 10 million units in response to strong demand, and new market research suggests it will help propel Apple's position in the laptop space to new heights.

According to Techpowerup, a report from market research firm Sigmaintell projects that Apple is set to become the third-largest laptop vendor by the end of 2026. The company is anticipated to sell roughly 28 million MacBooks this year, which would represent around a five million unit increase over 2025.

That would put Apple ahead of computing giant Dell, and behind Lenovo and HP, with projected sales of 43 million and 36 million units respectively.

With the MacBook Neo now taking care of the lower end of the market, and Apple's higher-end machines filling out the rest of its laptop product stack, the company now looks to be in an enviable position .

And that's before we take into account the company's approach to memory usage. Its Unified Memory Architecture, in which components share the same limited pool of RAM (instead of separate chips for the CPU and GPU), means that its laptops are not as reliant on the memory supply chain as others. In the middle of the RAMpocalypse, Apple's all-in-one approach may well be an ace in the hole.

Plus, the company doesn't need to use providers like AMD, Intel, or Nvidia for its internal hardware needs, which helps to keep its costs low and its output uninterrupted. Time will tell as to whether these projected figures prove out in practice for the Cupertino titan, but it certainly seems to be a rosy outlook as things stand.

Occasionally, I encounter a story that speaks volumes in a single image. It tells of human strife, endeavour, and an unwavering commitment to triumph in the face of adversity. This is one of those images.

My dear colleague Jacob Fox directed me to the r/pcmasterrace subreddit this morning, so that I may behold what he too has seen. And it's this Mac mini, with what I will call an "unorthodox" cooling setup.

I can't afford AC, so built this DIY watercooler for my mac mini, temprature dropped from 74°c to 49°c from r/pcmasterrace

At the risk of ruining the subtle beauty of what Reddit user kartikgsniderj has created, I'll attempt to explain what I see. I think what we're looking at here is a Mac that's been given a heavy ridge of packing tape around the outer chassis to act as a water cooling tray.

This, as the thread title reveals, is a cooling system—and apparently an effective one, too. As our redditor can't afford air conditioning, they "basically sprinkle water drops on top of tissue paper," to cool their machine, which is then presumably collected in the packing tape "tray", so as not to ruin the electrical components underneath.

Temp reductions of 74 °C to 49 °C are nothing to sniff at, though, and evaporative cooling is a thing. And I've been known to break out the packing tape in times of emergency, as well as enduring hot summers without the pleasure of air conditioning.

Still, I fear for the day this setup experiences an inevitable accident. The moment when that fragile tape lets go at a crucial junction, allowing water to drip into the vents and ports beyond.

There's a chunky power supply in there, too, you know. For goodness sake, do not attempt this in your own home. Water and mains power absolutely do not mix, and while the ingenuity here is notable, it's still a very, very bad idea.

Tim Cook, 15-year CEO of Apple, has just handed the reins over to the company's hardware engineering senior vice president, John Ternus. In a 'community letter from Tim' to the 'Apple community', Cook explains:

"Over the coming months I will be transitioning into a new role, leaving the CEO job behind in September and becoming Apple’s executive chairman. A new person will be stepping into what I know in my heart is the best job in the world.

"That leader is John Ternus, a brilliant engineer and thinker who has spent the past 25 years building the Apple products our users love so much, obsessed with every detail, focused on every possible way we can make something better, bolder, more beautiful, and more meaningful. He is the perfect person for the job."

After joining Apple in 2001, Ternus started his current SVP role in 2021 and, among other things, has had a lot to do with Apple's shift over to its M-series CPUs, which are incredibly efficient and have given the x86 crowd more than a run for their money.

He also led the MacBook Neo charge, and that laptop looks to be very efficient for the price, too—at least when it's doing basic tasks in native apps. And I suppose the fact that it is basically an iPhone in a laptop's body could therefore be taken as a compliment to iPhones or macOS.

Ternus will be heading the company at a point when it is worth just shy of $4 trillion. Though Cook is eager to point out that "this is not goodbye" but a "moment of transition." With Cook staying as an executive chairman, he should still be able to work with the new CEO in directing the company if needed— though the reins are firmly in Ternus' hands now.

It wasn't that long ago that you could happily use an Nvidia graphics card in an Apple Mac, either for gaming or to use Team Green's CUDA ecosystem. But once Apple switched to its own rendering API, that was the end of it all. Until now, that is, because thanks to a new open-source driver, you can go all AppleCUDA once again.

Coding and tech YouTuber Alex Ziskind (via Videocardz) has posted a video where they try out this new driver on a Mac mini, connecting a GeForce RTX 50-series graphics card to it via an eGPU dock, over a USB4 cable. The secret (well, not secret now) sauce is an app called TinyGPU, developed by tiny corp, which also created the special driver that it uses to make everything work.

One important thing to note is that Apple has fully approved all of this, as well as AMD and Nvidia, so you don't need to be doing any kind of homebrew shenanigans or the like: just plug all your hardware together (making sure the graphics card is correctly powered), install the app and driver, setup your compiler, and you should be good to go.

Now, before you get excited about being able to do some serious gaming on a Mac with that spare RTX 5090 you happen to have lying around, tiny corp's work is focused on AI only. And even then, Ziskind shows that there is still a lot of performance being left behind, especially with the 5090 that they used.

In general, while all three tested RTX 50-series graphics cards crunched through considerably more tokens per second than the M4 Pro powering the Mac mini, the software stack wasn't making full use of the Blackwell GPU's capabilities.

But this isn't to take anything away from what tiny corp has done, and if you have an AMD RDNA 3, Nvidia Ampere, or more recent GPU, then you'll be able to get stuck in yourself and see what kind of AI experiments you'll now be able to do on your Mac.

Since all of tiny corp's GPU runtimes are open-source and available on GitHub, I wouldn't be surprised if someone figures out a way to get everything working with games, too, though this is likely to be one heck of a challenge.

It's fair to say that Apple's new MacBook Neo has given the Windows-based laptop market something to think about. Powered by the same chip used in the iPhone 16, the $599 computer has reportedly been selling very well. That's despite it only having 512 GB as the best storage option. But if you're as handy as one YouTuber is at electronics work, doubling that amount is a distinct possibility.

The 'tuber in question is dosdude1, and their latest video is pretty simple in premise: take the base Neo model, with 256 GB of storage, yoink out the original NAND flash chip, and stick a beefy 1 TB module in there.

Dosdude1 begins by checking that the new flash chip is completely blank, using a dedicated device and piece of software, before kitting it out with a full array of solder balls. None of what I've just described is a trivial task, even if one has all of the necessary equipment, but it's certainly a lot easier to do than the next stage.

Like many low-cost laptops, the MacBook Neo uses a single, soldered NAND flash chip to store data. Normally, removing such chips is quite easy: You simply heat the component to the point that the solder balls melt and gently prise the chip away from the circuit board. However, in this instance, the flash chip is surrounded by lots of surface-mounted devices (SMDs) and the underside is jammed with 'underfill'.

Not that this seems to deter dosdude1 in any way, but with judicious shimmying with a tool, and plenty of heat, the original flash chip comes off with nary an issue (though one SMD had to be removed first, to allow for the tool to get into the underfill).

Interestingly, the mounting area on the circuit board has more pads than the flash chip does, so it's possible Apple designed the Neo to use a physically larger flash device to have bigger storage options. Given how expensive SSDs have become, it was probably dropped due to cost reasons.

Anyway, the old chip gets swapped for the new one in a matter of moments, and then it's time for the final stage: Getting the Neo to run in DFU mode, and then use another Apple device to transfer the operating system and other files to the 1 TB drive. Dosdude1 has clearly done this many times before, because the whole process seemed to run without a hitch.

And voila! They're now the proud owner of a 1 TB MacBook Neo. The only question I have about all of this concerns the fiscal element. The 512 GB Neo costs $699—$100 more for double the storage—so if you already have the electronic gubbins and expertise required to do the flash lobotomy, it would seem to be a very sensible thing to do if you could get a 1 TB flash module for less than $200.

Alas, a quick browse of Ali Express suggests that such chips are more expensive than that, but I'm sure a savvy electronics shopper could get one for less. Apple demands around $200 more for a 1 TB 13-inch MacBook Air than the base 512 GB model, and the same price gap on the Neo could make it look like a rather poor option.

Then again, you've got little chance of picking up a 1 TB gaming laptop for $899, so perhaps not. Looks like dosdude1 knew exactly what they were doing.

Apple's new MacBook Neo is reportedly selling so well that the company may soon run out of A18 Pro chips to stick in it. Which has got me thinking: Why can't we have more similarly simple but appealing and affordable PC gaming devices? Ya know, like the Steam Deck?

Tim Culpan, a tech journalist based in Taipei, Taiwan, says his sources are telling him that sales of the MacBook Neo have surpassed Apple's expectations to the point of creating a "massive dilemma."

That dilemma is centred on the A18 Pro chip at the heart of the Neo. Famously, it's basically just an iPhone chip. But Cuplan's basic contention is that Apple had only planned to make so many MacBook Neo, which was intended to essentially be built using leftover A18 Pros.

Apparently, the plan was to sell around five to six million units. In the medium term, Apple intended to switch the Neo to the newer A19 chip. The problem, as Culpan has it, is that the Neo is selling so fast, stockpiles of the A18 Pro will run out before the new A19-based Neo is due to launch.

That puts Apple in a tricky position of deciding whether to commission TSMC to spool up more A18 Pro wafers, which would be much more expensive than the original batch of chips. Partly, Culpan says, that's because the A18 Pro chips in the Neo are binned down to five GPU cores from the six actually in the die, and many would otherwise have been thrown away, making them effectively free.

Whatever, there are two or three interesting-ish issues to ponder here. First, the MacBook Neo proves that even in this weirded-out tech market, you can have a smash hit at the budget end of the market if you get the product right.

The second is how the Neo makes the gaming PC market look rather obsessed with performance and specs. For me, one of the most appealing PCs of recent years has been the Steam Deck.

It's a polished but unpretentious and price-conscious PC gaming device, and we need more of them. That's why I've found the broader PC handheld market a bit disappointing. There are too many premium-priced models that are so expensive, all they're really good for is making gaming laptops look like good value. And that takes some doing in the current climate.

All of this also feeds into the gaming console sector, which seems to be in a state of acute stress, with Xbox's very existence in question and Sony seemingly pushing the PlayStation ever more upmarket.

There, too, the appeal of a simpler and more affordable device seems pretty obvious. The sector probably needs more Switch 2s, not a move further up market.

Anywho, maybe one of the big boys in the PC gaming industry could come up with something. Nvidia could easily do it in technical terms, and of course, has its own PC chip coming out soon. But if Nvidia was ever about making gaming more mainstream, it's hard to see evidence for that in recent years.

I think a lesser-known brand would struggle to get traction with such a device, so what this all comes down to is probably predictable enough. I'm going to have to make do with the Deck for now and wait for Deck 2, whenever that arrives, or see how low Valve can go with the Steam Machine, all the while the memory crisis makes everything so much more expensive. I can't see any other company making an impact.

Hardware Canucks has tested the latest Dell XPS 14 laptop with a Panther Lake Core Ultra 7 355 chip at its heart, and the battery life appears to be nothing short of astonishing. The channel recorded a 43-hour+ result when performing a Chrome web browsing test, beating out the latest MacBook Air 15 by roughly 28 hours.

Hardware Canucks attributes the result to a combination of the laptop's variable refresh rate display and a high-density 70 Wh battery. The MacBook has a more conventional 66 Wh unit, along with a more standard-spec display. Given the power efficiency of Intel's latest mobile efforts, I'd say the chip itself would likely have a large part to play as well.

In the YouTube video playback test, the Dell machine also managed to pull massively ahead of its Apple competitor. The XPS 14 delivered 20 hour, 21 minutes worth of video playback, while the MacBook 15 Air managed a still-impressive 14 hour and two minute score.

In the gaming test, however, the MacBook Air 15 managed to gain a significant lead with a four hour and ten minute maximum, compared to the Dell's two hour 38 minute battery life. That's a shame, especially as the Core Ultra 355 has the standard Intel Graphics iGPU, and not the surprisingly-punchy Arc B390.

From my own Panther Lake battery life testing with that particular iGPU, I can say that it feels pretty revolutionary to be playing games on the train at high frame rates without being plugged into the wall or worrying too much about the remaining charge. What can I say, I'm used to traditional gaming laptop battery life, which is usually far from impressive.

Even having had some personal experience with a PTL laptop, though (albeit one with a more powerful, top-of-the-line chip under the hood), I wouldn't have predicted a browsing battery life result for the lesser-chipped version of nearly two days.

It looks like the variable refresh rate display really is doing some heavy lifting here, alongside the efficiency gains of Intel's new silicon. What's next, gaming headsets that last for weeks? Oh yeah. We've been there for a while already. Never mind.

Although it's not designed for it, the MacBook Neo user might naturally wonder: Is there a way to crank even more performance out of the laptop for gaming? To that end, tech YouTubers Jakkuh and Zip Tie Tech are here to help. Happy birthday, Apple.

After noticing the cheap and cheerful Apple MacBook's GPU tends to run at 105 °C "under basically any load", Jakkuh enlisted tech YouTuber Zip Tie Tech to help him set up some water cooling with the Neo.

One reason the Apple MacBook Neo has garnered so much attention, even from non-Apple folk, is undoubtedly because the PC market is so expensive right now. At just $599, the Neo is a bit of a breath of fresh air considering the usual price for Apple laptops. However, it's not got the best specs, and while it does run standard MacOS apps very well, and our Ian's review shows that it's not the worst at gaming, it's certainly far from being the best.

By default, the laptop only has what looks like a thin graphene pad to keep its six-core A18 Pro cool. Before getting things set up for the full water-cooled solution, the duo swapped out this thin pad with a spare M.2 thermal pad. The results were already impressive with just that change, moving from a 1257 to a 1430 score in 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme (14% higher).

The solution they ultimately end up cooking up involves a copper plate and acrylic water block sitting on top of the chip, with tubing connecting things up to a smart home plant watering pump and a Hayden Automotive 1011 power steering oil cooler that's designed for, umm, a steering wheel.

To start with, though, the waters were tested (pun intended) with a 3D printed plate rather than a copper one, which was then fitted to a 3D printed water block, later to be replaced with an acrylic one. The latter required some complicated and expensive measuring and CNC milling to replicate the 3D print design. This was not just to make the overall design and the holes, but even the threads for the holes, which is obviously a very precise and intricate task.

The CNC mill was also used to fashion the copper plate, including some fins: "We don't even need fins, but we're gonna make them anyway... We're gonna try." After thinning down the wrong bit because it wasn't making proper contact with the processor, the rest had to be thinned, too, and thankfully, "minty contact" was eventually achieved.

I'd probably not be too intimidated by the thought of setting stuff up in software and getting it machining, but there's also tons of finicky stuff you have to actually use your steady hands for. Including making a custom o-ring to fit between the plate and the block.

Then, of course, there are the last big pieces of the puzzle: hooking the plate-block combo up with tubes for the semi-custom loop (a water block to tube to power steering cooler).

The two DIY-ers then milled a hole in the MacBook Neo's chassis backplate for the water block to fit through. Finally, thermal paste was lathered on the processor, and after a little more filing to get the backplate cut-out to the correct size, it was all put together. This obviously added some significant thickness to the Neo, meaning a (3D printed) laptop stand was required.

The final touch was getting it set up with the tilted laptop stand, fitting the pump to one side of it and the water block to the back of the Neo's display. After some more fiddling with the tubing, the water cooling setup finally worked, though it did make the weight distribution of the laptop a little unbalanced, even on the counter-tilted stand.

Difficult though it may have been and cumbersome though the final product may be to hold and use, the results are impressive. The first benchmark result shown scores 1938 for the water-cooled MacBook Neo, which beats the base Neo's 1567, the thermal-padded Neo's 1819, and even the MacBook Air M1's 1836.

Well, on a multi-core Cinebench test, that is. 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme, on the other hand, showed a rise to 1450 from 1257 (base) and 1430 (thermal padded), setting a new world record for the A18 Pro's GPU in the process.

Still, none of this is likely to make it a very good gaming machine. For one, you're still only dealing with 8 GB of memory, and that's unified, meaning it's shared between both CPU and GPU.

And despite it beating some x86 chips in some respects (in single-core performance on its two P-cores), the laptop's A18 Pro is still just a phone chip that's running desktop apps. Not to mention the obvious limitations of the MacOS system for game compatibility, which might have improved a lot, but still isn't ideal.

Apple turns 50 today. The big 5-0. That company from Cupertino, California is one of the biggest success stories in tech. It's built an empire from selling phones and laptops to people that have moustaches tattooed on their fingers and unironically wore suspenders in 2010. A mighty accomplishment.

Alright, I will lay off the sarcasm for Apple's big day, even if it is also April Fool's—arguably the worst day on the calendar. Even a PC gamer such as myself can admit what Apple has achieved in recent years is impressive. It's no longer selling Intel-powered laptops with fewer options at higher prices. It's selling homegrown, powerful Arm silicon with an OS and software stack that feels more in sync than Microsoft or anyone else could dream of.

It's easy for PC users to poke fun at Apple users: everyone's buying the same thing for the same high price. And Apple has done its fair share to reinforce that snarky relationship. In my mind, it was just a couple years ago—though, in fact, 20 years have passed—when the company lived rent free in PC owners' heads with the launch of its very popular adverts, known for the opening line, "I'm a Mac. I'm a PC." These painted PC users as snivelling dorks. At the very least I'm not snivelling.

But I've recently ditched Android in favour of iOS, if only to a) ditch Google, b) try something new, and c) get my hands on an A18 chip. I've even bought an iPad Mini since and am now enjoying the excellence that is the Apple Pencil Pro. Despite being a many-decades lapsed Apple user, and now running both Linux and Windows day-to-day, I like my Apple devices.

But forget Pencils, Apple's strongest feature, at least to a performance-obsessed PC gamer such as myself, is the silicon.

When it first announced the M1 chip in 2020, ditching a long-standing relationship with Intel in the process, I had feared the worst for Apple's ecosystem. Mobile applications do not replace desktop applications. Let alone mobile applications running on an Arm-based processor, which is what Apple's silicon is. But that line between mobile and desktop is thinning. No more so since the release of the MacBook Neo.

The MacBook Neo was well reviewed by our Ian Evenden. As by many more. It's an affordable laptop that's powered by a processor previously used in iPhones. It's not just a mobile chip in the sense that it's for laptops. It's literally a mobile phone chip. A mobile phone chip that's competitive with older M-series chips and shares similarities with the M4 chip, only smaller, and requiring only a cutesy motherboard. It's not something you could fathom on PC, but Apple can do it; made possible by the company's in-house chip design and total ownership of the silicon and software stack.

Apple didn't start designing chips when it made the M1. It began working on its own Arm-powered processors way back with the A4 chip in the iPhone 4—that was actually the last iPhone I owned before this one. It wasn't starting from scratch: it had developed a pile of mobile chips before it ever turned its hand to something more powerful for use in its laptops and, later, high-end iPads.

It also had the foresight of building out its MacBook operating system, OS X, to more easily switch between underlying architectures. Switching from PowerPC to Intel in the early noughts meant Apple had already laid the groundwork for a momentous architectural shake-up. It made that switch at the time by cleverly anticipating the move all along: OS X had already been running on Intel chips for years prior to Apple's announcement. Developers, too, could get their applications ready for the switch with tools like Rosetta.

Rosetta was introduced around 2006 as a translation layer to run software designed for PowerPC chips on Intel chips. That was a big shift. Later, Rosetta (Rosetta 2) was introduced to do something very similar for the modern era of Apple devices: run software designed for Intel chips on Apple silicon chips. Rosetta 2 will mostly be ditched by 2027, meaning that's when developers need to ship an Apple silicon-native application or ship out.

Apple gets to force big changes on developers by holding the keys to both software and hardware. Microsoft, on the other hand, can only push developers in a direction. Windows on Arm is not a wholesale shift for Microsoft from Windows on x86. It's doing both, because it has to. The PC market is totally dominated by x86 chips, and it takes a company like Qualcomm to design and spend a lot of money trying to break into the PC market with an Arm-powered processor to incite any sort of major change.

Mercury Research suggests Arm PCs, including those with Apple's M-series chips, make up roughly 13% of the overall client market. Compare that to around 6% in Q1, 2021, this marks a huge increase in a relatively short period of time—AMD has been fighting tooth and nail with Intel for decades to earn roughly 25% of the market. Though the release of Qualcomm's most recent X2 chips hasn't moved the dial much. This time last year, Arm share in client PCs was estimated to sit at, again, around 13%.

Our hobby of PC gaming and DIY builds is far better for the flexibility afforded to it. However,

while I do not want its singular influence over my gaming rig and what's in it, Apple has leveraged its total control over its own hardware and software incredibly well over the past few years.

Just look at Ian's performance testing for Apple's most recent M5 chip in GeekBench 6. In the new MacBook Pro, the M5 hit a single-threaded score of 4,310. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D, ostensibly the fastest desktop processor for gaming today, scored just 3,332. The Core Ultra 9 285K reached 3,214. Need I remind you, the M5 is in a slim 14-inch laptop. The performance from this chip is quite extraordinary.

Qualcomm also finds pace in testing with its latest and largest Arm processor, the X2 Elite Extreme. It remains slower than Apple's comparative M5 silicon in single-threaded performance but blasts past Intel and AMD's chips, the Core Ultra X9 388H and AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, respectively. It also has 18 cores in total for big multithreaded gains.

That said, we do have to talk about the elephant in the room. A big one for a website called PC Gamer. That is, of course, gaming.

Gaming is traditionally Apple's weak point. Even with the best will in the world—and a sizeable GPU—the M5 just isn't going to be the choice among gamers. The Intel Arc B390 iGPU found in Panther Lake, however, is a graphical wunderkin in our testing. Though I don't think we're far from a reality where gaming on Apple is more commonplace.

It is possible to play games like Resident Evil Village, Death Stranding, Cyberpunk 2077, and Control on a Mac. Native support, and whether said support is worth it for developers, being the biggest hurdle for gaming on Mac rather than explicit hardware capability.

Though there are exciting developments in the world of Arm gaming. The Steam Frame, Valve's upcoming VR headset, runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (SM8650) processor. It uses a translation layer called FEX to translate garbled x86 commands into something its Arm chip can understand. In doing so, it loses around 10-20% of performance (as of late last year when I asked Valve), but it works. I tried it, it was good. Valve is also running a translation layer to run games for Windows on the Linux-based SteamOS at the same time.

As I've said before, Valve is all in on Arm and even launched a native Steam client for Apple silicon in June last year.

Apple has something similar: the Game Porting Toolkit. It's intended for evaluating the possibility of a native Mac port, rather than rolling out for users to give it a go. Nevertheless, we are reaching a point where the question of how you translate a game designed for Windows and x86 to Arm and other operating systems is high on the agenda. Microsoft is something similar with Prism, designed to run Windows games on Windows on Arm. Even Nvidia may have a vested interested as it's rumoured to be close to launching an Arm-based consumer chip, the N1X, with cores to match Intel and AMD's alongside a chunky GPU.

For Microsoft, Nvidia, Qualcomm and others, Apple has proven the formula; how to migrate to an entirely new architecture without much delay or major issue. How to leverage silicon in new and exciting ways, as users look for more powerful devices in form factors usually reserved for lesser mobile chips. Apple silicon covers most bases for performance and affordability; consequently blurring the lines between laptop and mobile. That's especially interesting when Valve is talking about the Steam Frame in similar ways, and, to be honest, we'd be all over an Arm-powered Steam Deck with excellent battery life.

It's certainly convinced me. Not because I want to buy an Apple device for my next gaming machine, far from it, but because I totally would buy an Arm one.

Hello and welcome to another great installment of ‘why would you want to game on that?' where I try to play PC games on something that's not really designed for it. This time, it's the MacBook Neo, Apple's low-cost ($599/£599) laptop that runs on the processor from an iPhone 16 Pro. As such, it has six cores, only two of which are ‘performance' cores, as well as a five-core GPU and just 8 GB of RAM.

All of that sounds like we're going to be in for a poor gaming experience here, and if you're expecting 4K and ray-tracing you're out of luck. However, it's possible to get a lot of games to run on this little machine, and surprisingly successfully too. Not only does it run a selection of titles from Steam, but there are games all over Apple's App Store, and it will run iPad and iPhone games too.

On the outside, the MacBook Neo looks like a standard compact laptop: the one I've got here is bright metallic green—called ‘Citrus'—but there's a nice 'Indigo', a pinky ‘Blush', and plain old silver available too. It has a 60 Hz, LED-backlit, IPS screen and a battery that will last all day.

But the thing that's going to attract most people to the Neo is its price. Apple gear has a reputation for being expensive, and this is just... not. It's true that there aren't a lot of upgrades available: you can double the SSD capacity to 512 GB, which also nets you the fingerprint reader that's missing from the base model, but that's your lot. There's no way you're expanding the RAM capacity on this laptop, and as 8 GB is starting to look tight for dedicated VRAM, having that much as a unified pool is going to be a problem once you want to run more than just a web browser.

Elsewhere, the system's roots in a smartphone make themselves apparent when you look at the ports on the side of the laptop. The iPhone 16 Pro had a single 10 Gbps USB-C port, and that's present here too, joined by a USB 2.0 companion. Both ports can be used for charging, and the USB 3.2 is also a video output, so it's easy to see the Neo spending its life with a charger in the slow port and a USB hub in the faster one. There's no way to tell the ports apart before you've learned which is which, and even after that you'll probably still mix them up, but the OS is clever enough to flash up a warning if you plug a USB 3.2 or Thunderbolt accessory into the wrong port.

The SSD is another obvious bottleneck for the Neo. A 256 GB drive just isn't enough these days, and if you've already got it stuffed with productivity apps and streaming downloads, there's not much room left for games unless you invest in one of the best external SSDs. You're only looking at read speeds of 1,547 MB/s from the drive too, which is PCIe 2.0 speed. The iPhone 16 used a custom NVMe controller rather than UFS for its storage, so the Neo might be running the same thing here. And one final gripe: there's no backlight on the keyboard.

How does it do in benchmarks? It's not great, but it can run them. Wild Life Extreme is 3D Mark's cross-platform graphics workout for phones and notebook PCs, and the Neo ran it at 23.3 fps. Things were looking good for the little laptop until I pulled out Steel Nomad, a much more demanding test. This saw the framerate drop to just 3.7 fps, though the benchmark software still told me this was ‘good'. You can get 90 fps out of Steel Nomad with the right RTX 5080 system, at which point it runs out of superlatives to tell you how amazing your PC is.

On to the games. Cyberpunk 2077 is a great benchmark, and the MacBook Neo can play it at 30 fps! The downside is that to get this, you need to dip below Steam Deck settings, using the Low graphics profile, with the resolution at 720p, and with MetalFX upscaling in performance mode. That's not great, and looks a little soft thanks to all the upscaling going on, but at least it is technically playable.

Over in our old friend, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, medium settings are the order of the day. To get to 30 fps you need to reduce the resolution slider to 75% and turn on FidelityFX CAS, but the game plays in 900p and for a title that's approaching ten years old looks pretty good.

It's then that I hit a little bit of a problem. I really wanted to benchmark a Total War game, and while they install quite happily from Steam, both Warhammer III and Three Kingdoms do the same thing when they launch, which is nothing. The app seems to run, but no actual game appears beyond the launcher window. This is most odd, as the latest MacBook Pro can happily play Warhammer III at 50 fps.

Casting around for something else to test, my eye falls on Civilization VI, another ten-year-old title. At 800p, the Neo can squeeze 50 fps out of this game, which isn't bad but it's hardly a graphical colossus. Just for funsies, I installed the same game on an AMD Ryzen 5 7530U mini-PC that also costs £599 (though you'll have to spring for a monitor and keyboard as well), and ran it using DirectX 12 at 820p, where it produced 34 fps. That's got to be a big win for the Neo.

So is the MacBook Neo a serious gaming device? Hell no. Is it good enough for a few rounds of Civ in between typing sessions and video conferences? Yup. The fact that this 13-incher is built to Apple's usual high standards, provides decent if decidedly low-end performance (its single-core score in Geekbench 6 is higher than that of some Ultra 9 chips, however)—and costs just $599/£599, remember—could well put the wind up some PC manufacturers.

Hopefully we'll see a spate of copycats that use the stronger integrated graphics solutions we're starting to see to make a generation of low-cost laptops that you really can play games on. Wouldn't that be nice?

If you've recently made the switch to Linux with your Arm64-based processor, but miss Chrome, I've got some good news for you. At some point in the next few months (Q2 according to Google), you will finally be getting official Google Chrome support.

As pointed out by Google, this follows Chrome support for Arm-based macOS devices in 2020 and Arm-based Windows devices in 2024. Many Apple devices are Arm-based (though they will naturally use macOS), and Snapdragon chips are Arm-based, too. Most Snapdragon laptops do come with Windows 11 built-in though, so it requires a little work to swap over.

Google says, "This move addresses the growing demand for a browsing experience that combines the benefits of the open-source Chromium project with the Google ecosystem of apps and features."

The mention of the Google ecosystem is a good one here, as it could possibly ease the gap of swapping from Windows to Linux. Given that your Google account keeps your bookmarks and password data, you just have to remember how to get into your account to get access to all of your Google data.

For the likes of Google, it will want to make the swap from one OS to another as seamless as possible, as it will just lose out on any users swapping to unsupported devices. Google argues, "Launching Chrome for ARM64 Linux devices allows more users to enjoy the seamless integration of Google’s most helpful services into their browser."

Many of us here at PC Gamer have made the swap to Linux, too, and Snapdragon chips are getting mighty impressive. Just under two weeks ago, Snapdragon's X2 CPU popped up in Geekbench, and it's a bit of a beast. Notably, Nvidia is working on a chip comparable to Intel and AMD's offerings, which is also Arm-based, so we could see even more Arm machines in the future.

Making it easier to switch over to Linux feels like a smart move for anyone other than Windows right now. Given dissatisfaction with Microsoft as a company, and the potential of even more AI in Windows, neither the company nor the product have the best reputation right now.

Google finishes its announcement, stating, "This launch marks a major milestone in our commitment to the Linux community and the Arm ecosystem." It continues, "We look forward to seeing how developers and power-users leverage Chrome on this next generation of high-performance devices."

Naturally, you don't even need to wait for Google to launch its Linux ARM-compatible browser. Maybe swapping to Linux is a good time to swap to Brave, Zen, or Firefox too.

We've already reported how Apple's new MacBook Neo is putting the frighteners on PC laptop makers. Now comes news that early benchmarks show the chip beating every single x86 CPU currently available when it comes to single-core performance in Cinebench 2024. Yep, that includes desktop monsters like AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X and Intel's Core Ultra 9 285HX.

Notebookcheck ran the new budget laptop, which goes for $599 full retail or $499 with an education discount, through its paces. With a score of 147 points in the Cinebench 2024 rendering test, it beats every x86 out there and is only bested by other Apple CPUs.

For the record, Notebookcheck puts the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X at 139 points and the Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX on 135 points. Incredible for a phone chip? Yup. But arguably not surprising.

That's because the A18 Pro iPhone chip used in the MacBook Neo is closely related to the Apple M4 used in various Mac computers. In short, it has the same Performance and Efficiency cores as the M4, just fewer of them with a lower power budget and clock speeds.

Where the basic M4 has four P and six E cores, the A18 Pro has just two P cores and four E cores. But, again, they're the same cores. So, that iPhone chip has the same single-thread IPC or instructions-per-clock capability as any M4 chip.

Officially, the A18 Pro's P cores max out at 4.04 GHz, while the basic M4 can hit 4.46 GHz on its P cores, the Pro and Max Variants very slightly more. For what it's worth, the newer M5 chip is another animal again, and hits 200 points in Notebookcheck's Cinebench 2024 testing.

While one could dismiss this as just one benchmark, given that the A18 Pro chip is a known quantity and understanding how it relates to Apple's M silicon, the result is highly plausible. Apple makes extremely powerful CPU cores, that's for sure, even if, for pure performance, the one application type where you might still lean towards a high-clocked x86 CPU with a dollop of extra cache, AMD X3D-style, is gaming.

In many ways, perhaps more remarkable than the fact that Apple's newest and cheapest-ever laptop is so competitive with x86 CPUs for single-core performance is the knowledge that you get the same grunt in an iPhone. OK, the thermal realities of an iPhone mean that it won't sustain that performance for very long.

But still, the A18 Pro isn't even Apple's newest iPhone chip. The A19 Pro on the latest iPhone 17 Pro is even faster. Bananas, really.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one a bit shocked by Apple using the worst memory crisis in recent history to put out the most affordable MacBook it has ever launched. The Asus CFO, Nick Wu, seems similarly surprised. In a recent earnings call, he was asked about the MacBook Neo and had quite a bit to share.

As spotted by PCMag, Wu said: "Given Apple's historically very premium pricing, launching such an affordable product is certainly a shock to the entire market."

He does clarify that its rather low 8 GB of un-upgradable memory does limit its applications. He argues that, as a product, it is one more focused on content consumption. Wu clarifies that the Neo is a tad different to standard MacBooks, whose silicon M chips are capable of powerful video/audio/image editing, and even some gaming. "The Neo feels more like a tablet," he says, "because tablets are mostly for content consumption."

The MacBook Neo is an interesting device. Looking like a traditional MacBook (though with a few neat colourways), it's kitted out with the A18 Pro chip that found in the iPhone 16, plus 8 GB of what Apple calls 'unified memory'.

That's to say it's got specifically designed memory that implements software/hardware handshakes to get a little more performance out of the specs. The base model (available for $599) comes with 256 GB of SSD storage, and the 512 GB device costs $100 more.

Though we haven't got our hands on it, our pals over at Tom's Hardware say it's a "budget-priced game changer", praising its design and feel. Despite its relatively low specs, it seems like a bit of a home run for Apple, and it arriving in the middle of the RAMpocalypse must catch the attention of manufacturers. Wu says, "I believe all PC vendors, including upstream vendors like Microsoft, Intel and AMD, they're all taking this very seriously, seriously discussing how to compete with this product in the entire PC ecosystem."

One thing worth noting with the MacBook Neo is the convenience of it all. I think, if I were given $600 and told to pick up a device, I'd likely hold out for a refurbished M chip MacBook, or even a Mac Mini, which I contend is one of the best hardware packages out there for the price right now.

Otherwise, we've seen recent Snapdragon-based laptops come down to similar prices. But the fact that you can buy a pretty, new MacBook directly from the Apple store, without having to shop smart or worry about stock, is certainly part of the charm here.

Wu reckons "the entire PC system will launch corresponding products to compete with Apple", but Apple is a company that gets away with lower specs like no other. The M4 MacBook Air (from March 2025) was the first MacBook to launch with a base 16 GB of memory. Before that, base models of MacBook came with 8 GB.

The M3 MacBook also came with a base storage of 256 GB, which would be almost unheard of for comparably priced devices. It will be interesting to see how companies plan on competing with that price point, and what compromises they will make themselves.

Though it may be a shock, Wu doesn't know if it will be enough to tear people away from their beloved Windows / AMD-based laptops.

"Apple's faction versus the Intel faction have a somewhat segmented customer base due to software differences. It's not as easy for users to switch between these 2 ecosystems," Wu says. "Is the price of that product entering the mainstream sufficient for incentive? That really remains to be seen."

There's a cheeky allure to the whole hackintosh thing. The idea of turning a Mac (a famously unupgradable and walled-off device) into something Frankenstein-esque is a nerdy joy, and this person who fitted their '06 MacBook with Framework embodies that cheekiness.

As they say, it's "a reimagined classic, that's only a little bit janky".

You might be wondering, 'Why an '06 MacBook? Does it have specific dimensions that might work?' The answer is 'just because and no', in that order. It turns out that Edoogg, the person behind the Framebook, just liked this specific model of MacBook as "it was one of the only MacBooks you could get in black besides the PowerBook G3."

The project started with a handful of A1181 first-generation 13.3-inch MacBooks bought on eBay.

"They were all pretty beat up and didn't have their batteries, nor did they power on."

Turns out that they were so busted that "pretty much all of the parts of the Mac I discarded, since they didn't work and even on their own, aren't worth a lot if I did sell them."

So, the final project has a Framework Laptop 13 motherboard with an Intel Core i7 1280P, plus 64 GB of DDR4 RAM, and an MND307DA1-9 CSOT display. They also threw in a USB hub, 8 MP camera, a Framework laptop speaker kit, and a USB 2.0 expansion module.

To get the MacBook's shell working with the internals, they had to solder a USB cable to the keyboard and trackpad, which they did successfully on the first try, until they accidentally yanked the cable and tore the solder pads off the case's PCB. Luckily, a new case and a second solder fixed the issue.

As with any good DIY project, there's a healthy amount of super glue in Edoogg's build, with an old, dead MacBook battery (sans battery cells) stuck in the middle of empty space and an I/O shield being shoved onto the side to accommodate new ports in the shell. Edoogg even stuck that USB hub in the case itself to hook up the motherboard to the rest of the internals.

Impressively, Edoogg even managed to get the Apple light on the back glowing, by ordering a custom-made 7x7x0.28 cm LED which was (you guessed it) super-glued on the back and plugged into the USB hub.

The finished product is a relatively new motherboard inside a two-decade-old machine that took three months to put together, alongside learning how to solder and how to create 3D models.

Edoogg does share how they would have done the project better, "namely making some custom PCBs in place of my USB hubs so I could have any I/O i want, and finding a better way to mount stuff instead of super glue lol."

Personally, I think the super glue adds to the character.

Long-time Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been surprisingly candid in a recent chat with Morgan Stanley, highlighting, in as many words, how much the company has to thank both Intel and Apple for.

This came in response to a question—well, more of a statement than a question—commenting on Nadella "embracing openness". For instance, regarding Microsoft's stance towards Linux on Azure and its relationship with OpenAI.

Nadella responded: "There are very few zero-sum battles, and I think we overstate that a lot… somebody else’s success doesn’t need to be your failure if you can ride it. It’s sort of a thing that needs to be talked about more… Like, without Intel, I don’t know if Windows would have happened, right? Without Mac, I wonder whether Office would have happened."

"I’m always looking for, first, what’s the non-zero sum, where we can add value to our customers? Then, of course, there are zero-sum battles, and we’ll compete."

It's clear that the Microsoft CEO is referring to the origins of Windows and Office rather than any kind of ongoing dependence. In the case of Windows, there's a reason "Wintel" was, for a long time, common techy parlance. MS-DOS was made for the first IBM PCs that were running Intel CPUs, and thereafter for quite some time Microsoft's operating systems were the de-facto for home computing, in Intel machines.

The Mac-and-Office link is a little weaker but still pretty strong, because Excel was originally released for Mac computers, and the first version of Word with a GUI was also released for Mac before Windows. This was most likely because the original graphical Mac OS, System 1, was more user-friendly and popular than Microsoft's first graphical follow-up to MS-DOS, Windows 1.0.

Oh how far we've come... I suppose? Take a Windows 11 room temperature reading, and you'll most likely find it lukewarm at best, thanks in part to the all-out AI PC rebranding and redesigns and seemingly perpetual privacy creep. On the former front, that topic and related ones took up the bulk of the Morgan Stanley discussion—surprise, surprise—with a brief respite for this candid admission.

There have recently been some rumours that an AI-laden and "modular" Windows 12 might land this year, too, but this is heavily disputed. Either way, 2026 is seeming increasingly like the year of Linux, and I'm not sure Nadella will be as thankful for that as he is about yesteryear's Intel and Mac. But that's enough snark from me, let's leave a good comment be.

Even if you've sufficiently managed your expectations and aren't going for the flashiest bit of kit, hardware is still expensive. Full desktop rigs are bad enough, but even mid-range gaming laptops can come at an eye-watering premium—and don't even get me started on just how much an Apple alternative would set you back by.

MacBooks are expensive and their gaming performance still isn't what you'd want, right? Well, for one thing Apple is a better PC gaming platform than people give it credit for, and now the just announced MacBook Neo is presenting an affordable inroad to its very shiny walled garden, for only $599.

Powered by the A18 Pro mobile chip and paired with 8 GB of RAM, the MacBook Neo is still far from the most powerful laptop out there. The A18 Pro chip debuted in the iPhone 16 Pro in 2024, so it's hard not to think of this as an oversized phone with a keyboard and a pretty swish 13-inch Liquid Retina display.

The very competitive phone-like pricing does little to argue against that notion either. For $599, I wouldn't be surprised if this became the student device of choice over, say, an iPad or a similar tablet device—the fun colours certainly help.

That said, someone on a student budget could potentially still net something with a little more grunt. For instance, the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge enjoys the power of the Snapdragon X chip and 16 GB of RAM for close to $700—or you could scoop up the same chip and generous helping of RAM in the Asus Vivobook 14 for only $500. If you're deadset on Apple, there's also the very reasonably priced Mac Mini (the M4 Pro chip inside makes it a decent gaming option).

Apple are pitching the MacBook Neo as 'a powerful platform for AI with Apple Intelligence built right in,' but only 8 GB of RAM is a pretty meagre offering for anyone really wanting to throw down with larger generative models.

It's fair to say Apple has more lightweight AI-use in mind, claiming the Neo is "3x faster when running on-device AI workloads like applying advanced effects to photos, compared to the bestselling PC with the latest shipping Intel Core Ultra 5."

Unfortunately, whatever battery gains Apple could have made with the mobile chip are somewhat squandered by the 36.5 Whr battery on board. Apple claims you'll still get about 16 hours out of it—but I doubt that's 16 hours of playing Kpop Demon Hunters on repeat and at full volume. 'So sweet, so easy on the eye, but hideous on the inside—' What? It's still a banger.

With all indications being that the AI-fuelled memory crisis will get worse before it gets better and will also be upon us until at least 2028, fair to say there's a legitimate concern whether affordable PCs will be viable at all. We may not even get to ask the question about how much memory or storage to expect. But here comes Apple with a new MacBook Air with double the storage of the previous model.

There is a catch. The new MacBook Air M5 base model with 512 GB of storage costs an extra $100 over the outgoing MacBook Air M4 with 256 GB. But then the MSRP of the base MacBook Air was $999 since forever until this M5 model jumped to $1,099. Factor in generally heightened inflation in recent years, and the MacBook Air M5 today with 512 GB is comfortably cheaper in real terms than its equivalent with half the storage from a few years ago.

Of course, you're also getting the new M5 chip and some other upgrades. But in the current context of the memory crisis and the general sense that we're going to have to do more with less when it comes to PC memory and storage, not to mention most PC makers putting prices up, it's a pretty remarkable turn of events.

As to how Apple can seemingly buck the trend, well, there are various candidate explanations. Most obviously, Apple is widely regarded as having some of the best margins in the business. So, it can absorb increased component costs more easily than most.

Apple also operates on a much larger scale than most of the competition. When Apple is buying RAM and storage, it's not just buying it for MacBook Airs. It will have long-term contracts for iPhone, iPads, Watches and more, all of which use both memory types. And that adds up to a lot of memory.

Without being at all privy to any of Apple's commercial deals, it's safe to assume that when Apple comes knocking, even in this crisis, suppliers pay attention. Get on the wrong side of Apple in the hope of some short-term profiteering over the memory crisis, and that could spell long-term pain well after the current AI bubble pops, or at least normalises.

Put another way, if any company making regular old computers for us normies, as opposed to chips for AI servers, is in a position to get a vaguely reasonable deal right now for RAM and storage, it's Apple. It's also true that Apple has always charged absolutely ridiculous amounts of money for memory and SSD upgrades. In that regard, Apple absolutely has plenty of margin to work with.

That obviously doesn't apply quite so directly for base configurations without a premium added for upgrades. But it underlines that earlier point about Apple's fat margins.

Anywho, it will be interesting to see how this develops. If memory prices do generally keep going up with the consequence that even basic PCs become prohibitively expensive, we could end up, at least for a time, in the bizarre situation where the cheapest option is Apple.

The problem with that, unfortunately, is gaming. The one application type for which a MacBook is undeniably suboptimal is gaming, largely due to software compatibility. But heck, maybe if the only reasonably priced computers out there for a while are Macs, the games industry might take a bit more notice. Or not. OK, probably not.

When I got my hands on the Steam Frame last year, I was filled with excitement. The new Valve VR headset promised a fresh take on home VR with a focus on convenience and ease-of-use—in large part led by a technology called foveated streaming. We're yet to see the Steam Frame due to ongoing launch and pricing issues, but foveated streaming is clearly a good idea. Now even Apple wants in.

Foveated streaming works by limiting the bitrate of streamed data based on where a user is looking. The fovea being the part of your eye with the clearest vision—a device requires eye tracking for this to work. It's useful for devices that wirelessly receive data from another source, as wireless connections are more limited than wired in terms of bandwidth and reliability.

It works on a similar principle to foveated rendering, or more generally, variable rate shading. These technologies lower demands on hardware by rendering different parts of the screen at varying rates of detail. Sony's PS VR2 uses foveated rendering.

A good spot by 9to5mac here, Apple's developer documentation now contains an entry for foveated streaming in the visionOS 26.4+ beta for Apple Vision Pro.

It says:

"The Foveated Streaming framework provides a session-based API for establishing connections from Apple Vision Pro to local and cloud streaming endpoints. The endpoint host streams high quality content only where necessary based on information about the approximate region where the person is looking, ensuring performance."

That sounds about the same. A varying level of detail for streamed content based on a user's vision. In Apple's case, either content from a local PC or streamed from the cloud.

Apple makes mention of one peculiar but interesting use case here. The Vision Pro overlays windows on top of the real or virtual worlds, and using both streaming and rendering together could lower demands for the headset.

Here's Apple's example:

"A flight simulator app can render a cockpit using RealityKit, and stream a processor-intensive landscape from a remote computer to the device."

Essentially, using it to stream background content while freeing up the Vision Pro's processor for any windows that are a user's main focus. Another good way to utilise this clever technology, by the sounds of it, and unfortunately, we may see Apple's uber-expensive headset reap the benefits of it before we do.

The Steam Frame is caught up in the memory crisis. Valve has said it is unable to announce the release date or price tag for any of its upcoming products, including the Steam Machine and Steam Controller. It's also recently added a note to the Steam Deck store page that the plucky handheld may be unavailable in some regions due to shortage in memory and storage supply.

For many years, it has been Apple that's been first in line to use TSMC's newest process nodes, as well as taking the lion's share of all those wafers. However, the meteoric rise in the demand for AI chips, backed by hundreds of billions of dollars, would appear to have pushed Apple aside in favour of Nvidia, according to a new report.

This is what is being claimed by Tim Culpan, a technology reporter based in Taiwan. With years of experience at Bloomberg behind him, he is as good a source as you're going to get, unless any of the aforementioned parties decide to spill the beans directly.

It certainly makes sense, though, because while the phone market is dominated by Apple, and is currently enjoying a marked rise in market share, the number of wafers it requires from TSMC will surely be less than what Nvidia is asking for. You only have to compare the physical size of their chips to realise this.

Apple's latest A19 processor, as used in the iPhone 17, is manufactured via TSMC's N3P process node. It has a die area of around 100 square millimetres, which means a standard 300 mm wafer can yield many hundreds of dies. At the moment, Nvidia uses TSMC's N4 node for its current products, but it will switch to N3 for its Rubin-Vera AI behemoths.

The Rubin GPU comprises two dies in its package, with each said to be 'reticle-sized', i.e. as big as TSMC can physically make them. That's around 750 to 800 square millimetres, so one wafer will only be able to churn fewer than 100 dies at best, and not all of those will be fully usable.

While Apple sells hundreds of millions of iPhones every year, the demand for Nvidia's AI chips is so high that it's clear as to which company will be ordering the most wafers. One might think TSMC's long and close relationship with Apple will mean it gets preferential treatment, but money tops them all and AI is backed by a lot of money.

Culpan argues that while Nvidia may indeed be the new Apple…sorry, apple…in TSMC's eye, it might not remain that way indefinitely or possibly even for very long. That's because Apple has huge excesses of cash and, despite all the expectations of the phone market slowing down due to saturation, it consistently sells millions of products every year. In other words, it's a safe bet.

TSMC makes more than just phone chips for Apple, as its Macs, MacBooks, and other devices also sport Taiwan-made dies. Nvidia has consistency in the form of its consumer GPU sales (which are also used in its professional market), but the same can't be said for its AI chips, as there is no evidence to suggest that the rise in AI demand can be sustained. It's riding high right now, but who knows what will happen in the next few years?

What does this mean in the short term, though? Well, TSMC is absolutely going to favour its HPC customers (AMD, Intel, Nvidia, etc) because collectively, they're spending huge sums of money on wafers for chips. They're all being charged more for ordering wafers on the latest nodes, and they can all afford it, too (plus they can always pass those cost increases on to the end user).

But no matter how much they beg for bigger slots in the order books, no matter which customer is the most important, no matter which one is the safest bet, it's TSMC that holds all the cards. Designed an incredible new GPU, with trillions of transistors, but one that has to be made on the very best process node? You'll need to talk to TSMC to make it, and if they can't right now, then you'll just have to wait until they've made a new foundry to do so.

Even if you just so happen to be Nvidia.

If you use Logitech gear on a macOS device—perhaps you got a brand new MX Master 4 over the holidays—and spotted it stopped working, that's because Logitech forgot to update its dev certificate. Whoopsie.

As reported by The Verge, the Logitech Subreddit saw Mac users complaining that their app wasn't working, and one comment showed that Logitech's developer certificate expired on January 6, 2026. Renewed five years previously on January 5, 2021, Logitech will have to stay vigilant at the start of 2031 to catch the same mistake.

Notably, this problem actually led to the resurgence of a two-year-old support Reddit thread of users teaching others how to get out of an Options+ boot loop. This thread was updated, with the original poster saying, "To anyone who is getting this Jan 6th, 2026 issue, the solution I found here 2 years ago will not work". This thread continues to say:

"It's embarrassing that they [Logitech] continue to have these long-standing issues while they continue to iterate on with their later mouse releases. It's not production ready. At this point, I'm considering using BetterMouse or other software, as it destroyed my MacBook Pro's battery life. Or if it comes to it, I'll switch to another mouse brand."

Logitech went into a little more detail on the problem in its most recent blog. In it, Logitech confirms it only affects macOS users and that users should download the patch installer to fix the problem. Both updates can be found on the blog. Options+ and Logitech G Hub both require updates should you use them, and the app version number remains unchanged.

Logi Options+ stuck loading forever from r/logitech

Annoyingly, the app will not automatically update, as the expired certificate issue also hit the updater. That means the only way to solve the issue right now is to download the new version manually. Logitech does say not to uninstall the app, as you can lose progress that way, and it's unnecessary to do so.

Though the fix is now out in the wild, users over on Reddit have used the momentary outage to complain more broadly about Logitech's software. One user, with almost 300 upvotes, says, "What happened in the past 24 hours was unacceptable. I think you know that. I also think you know by now that you made thousands of people waste tens of thousands of hours (and probably millions in lost time) trying to figure out what’s broken this time."

They go on to state that the Logitech app is regularly a problem for them, and they took the outage as a normal part of using the app. Though I wouldn't go quite as far, and I think the app has gotten better over the last year, I have also run into my fair share of problems with it. This has gone from boot loops to needing to reinstall the entire app. One focus of this criticism is the "AI nonsense", and another was a user stuck wasting PC resources on the app due to the updater going wrong.

Though the problem is now fixed, it appears to have signalled a broader annoyance at Logitech's software, something that the company is likely well aware of.

Well, now this is unexpected. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has just revealed that Intel is expected to begin shipping Apple's M-series processors in 2027. This would mark a huge comeback of the partnership between the two companies, which Apple started to move away from in 2020.

Intel used to make chips for Apple, well, Apple used to use Intel CPUs, but those processors were based on x86 architecture—and, I'm sorry to say, were nowhere near as impressive as Apple's own M-series chips.

Apple's move to making its own chips signified an end to its partnership with Intel, but also the beginning of a new era, one where the M-series consistently obliterates its competitors in performance-per-watt.

Apple doesn't seem to be changing its mind where the M-series is concerned, though. This new partnership wouldn't involve switching back to an Intel processor, but rather it'd involve Intel manufacturing Apple M-series chips in its own foundries. Kuo revealed that Apple plans to use Intel's 18AP process node for this.

Ming-Chi Kuo teased that Apple's plan is for Intel to make its lowest-end M-series processor. Kuo didn't reveal whether this means the M7 or the M6, but the timeline points more toward the M7.

These chips would then end up in future MacBook Airs and some iPhones. This is in line with what Apple currently does with them. However, Kuo says that a new, more affordable MacBook might be on the horizon in 2026, one equipped with an iPhone-class CPU.

That sounds like it'd potentially reduce the demand for those Intel-made chips—but Kuo still expects some decent production volume in the 15 to 20 million units range.

We're still in speculation land here, but let's assume that everything Kuo says comes true. TSMC supplies the majority of Apple's M chips, and even if Intel were to take over 20 million units on the budget end of the scale, TSMC would still be the main supplier for Apple. Regardless of the relatively small production volume for Intel, though, this would still be a huge win for Team Blue.

Kuo remarked that the resurrection of the Intel/Apple partnership could be mutually beneficial.

Apple would get some brownie points for investing in chips made in the US and would be slightly less reliant on TSMC. Meanwhile, Intel would get some actual recognition for its foundry business—a much-needed light at the end of the tunnel after some tough times for the chipmaker.

If these rumours turn out to be true, it'll be safe to say that things are finally picking up for Intel. After a disappointing couple of consumer CPU generations, it's said to be working on a mighty comeback against AMD: Nova Lake with up to 52 cores and 288 MB of combined cache.

Getting back in with Apple would be another huge win on a whole other level. We'll have to wait and see if it pans out.

As my muscular colleague Jeremy pointed out already, Apple has been making gains. It's doubled the single-core performance of its in-house chips, the M-series, in five years, and while the predicted single-core score in Geekbench 6 for the new M5 was 4100 (based on the M5 iPad Pro), in my actual testing of a 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro that figure is 4310.

You know what else scores 4310 points in that test? Nothing. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D? 3332. The Core i9 14900KS? 3238. The Core Ultra 9 285K? 3214. When Apple claimed the ARM-based M5 had the best single-core performance in the world, it sure meant it.

But can it game? While you used to be able to buy desktop Macs with Radeon cards in them, we haven't seen that for a while, and no M-series processor has yet been paired with any kind of discrete GPU. Apple instead relies on the integrated graphics cores and, for more powerful desktop machines, its ability to literally glue multiple chips together to increase their number, brute-forcing a solution to the problem by throwing more silicon at it.

I tried it out already with an extraordinarily expensive Mac Studio containing a 16-core M4 Max CPU with a 40-core GPU, but what I'm attempting to play games with here is a standard M5 MacBook Pro. It's got a few upgrades—32 GB of RAM and a 4 TB SSD—but nothing that actually increases its ability to process graphics. It's a lovely laptop to use, with what Apple calls a Liquid Retina XDR screen (something the rest of us would call an IPS with mini-LED backlighting). It has a 120 Hz max refresh rate, a resolution of 3024 x 1964, and can display almost the whole DCI-P3 wide-colour gamut for a vibrant image.

The CPU is a 10-core model with four performance cores and six efficient ones, and the GPU also gets 10 of Apple's self-designed neutron stars of pixel-pushing transistors. It's made by TSMC on a 3 nm process, and if you put it in an iPad Pro (or presumably an upcoming MacBook Air, though that hasn't been announced at the time of writing) it will run perfectly happily just being passively cooled. The MacBook Pro, on the other hand, has a fan (just one, with a heat pipe, and the SoC can reach temperatures of 99 °C under heavy load) which allows its M5 to do a little more work.

The M5 GPU has a new architecture that integrates a neural accelerator inside every core. Apple has gone all-out for unseen levels of AI compute with this, the company claiming four times the AI performance compared to M4. There's a bit more going on too, as Apple has increased the SoC's memory bandwidth for this generation to 153 GB/s, a 30% jump over M4.

And, since the M3, Apple's silicon has had some clever tech called Dynamic Caching that allows the GPU to allocate its memory usage in real time, using only what is needed in that moment. This, the Cupertino phone company claims, increases average GPU utilisation and therefore performance, though it's not clear exactly how beyond just making the best use of the memory available to it and not having gigabytes of the stuff tied up being allocated to things that aren't actively executing, potentially forcing other apps to page to the SSD. Though as the drive is now capable of more than 6,000 MB/s read and write, even that is less of a problem than it used to be.

Apple's Metal graphics API—its equivalent to DirectX or Vulcan—is what M5 really likes, and I can immediately see an example of how much better using Metal for an M chip is when I run the Geekbench test. The GPU workout usually runs in OpenCL, and in that the M5 scores 48,665. For reference, the GeForce GTX 1650 Ti can manage about 45,000. Changing this setting to Metal boosts the score to 76,397 (that becomes GTX 1080Ti or RTX 2060 OpenCL territory). Comparing different chip architectures across different APIs and benchmark tests is the kind of thing that will eventually drive you mad, but any way you care to interpret it, that's a bit of a jump.

When it comes to graphics, Apple is claiming another 30% uplift over M4 in general, and 45% when you look specifically at ray-tracing. In the demanding Cinebench 2024 test, which is based on the Cinema4D 3D animation package, the M5's GPU scores about the same as an RTX 4050.

So, what games can we think of that feature ray-tracing? As it happens, Cyberpunk 2077 is now available on Mac, and Apple has been using it in its product demonstrations to show off its new chips. As an integral part of the PCG benchmark suite, the familiar run through Night City at Ray Tracing Ultra settings is a good place to start.

The M5 can't cope with Ray Tracing Ultra.

It finishes the benchmark run, but with a result of just 11 fps at 1900 x 1200 it's not really satisfactory. Enabling the Metal upscaling (in Performance mode) and AMD FSR features in Cyberpunk, and dropping the graphics quality to Ray Tracing Low, eventually yields an average frame rate of 74 fps, or an average of 58 fps on Ray-Tracing Medium. For a computer more commonly used to design beautiful paper products (like PC Gamer's print edition), edit podcasts or just swank around in coffee shops, it's an excellent result, especially as it's using integrated graphics.

If you look at the 1080p performance of the most powerful integrated graphics on the PC side, either the AMD Z2 Extreme of the ROG Xbox Ally X or the Lunar Lake Arc 140V iGPU, you're looking at either 53 fps or 55 fps respectively in Cyberpunk 2077 with FSR or XeSS on the plain Medium settings. Crucially, that's without the performance-sapping pretties of ray traced lighting.

There's little that can touch the Mac's performance here until you get into discrete GPU territory. But, what else can you play? Well, therein lies the rub, most of the current PCG benchmark suite still won't run on a Mac. Booting up Steam on a MacBook Pro and it's still rather thin gruel when it comes to game support.

So, for further testing, I've had to look back in time a bit.

Total War: Warhammer III has a nice in-game benchmark, and the M5 MacBook Pro can run it at 29 fps at 1920 x 1200, Ultra quality settings and TAA. The game contains a resolution scale, and turning this down to 66% nets you 51 fps. That's not quite what we came here for, however, and to get to 60 fps at that resolution you need to use the ‘recommended' settings, which consist of mostly mediums with a few lows, with FXAA and the resolution scale at 100%.

Up next is Shadow of the Tomb Raider, a prime slice of 2018 benchmarking, which will do 57 fps in 1920 x 1200 at its highest settings, with TAA but no upscaling—a similar result to the GTX 1060 or Radeon RX 590. The Steam Deck needs Low settings to get a similar result. There's also a resolution modifier in this game, and setting it about halfway, with FidelityFX CAS (sharpening) and SMAAT2x (anti-aliasing), you get 74 fps. This result is slightly more than a GTX 1070 will give you at 1080p with SMAAT2x in this game, though without using the res slider.

Then there's our old friend Baldur's Gate 3, a CPU-heavy game. I was able to get an average of 30 fps in 1920 x 1200 using the Ultra preset and TAA. This rises to 38 fps when I add FSR in its Quality mode. Perfectly playable.

So is the Mac now a games machine, thanks to the new M5 processor? The answer to that question in past generations has always been ‘kinda' or ‘if you don't mind spending thousands', but this generation has crossed a rubicon: you're now getting ray-traced experiences at 60 fps, which makes it better than a Steam Deck, or other gaming handheld, or any laptop restricted to integrated graphics.

I mean, it's still three times the price, which surely means no one is going to buy one as a dedicated gaming machine, but it does open up an exciting secret life after hours for this most pro of laptops. Someone just needs to figure out how to expand that game library, maybe there's some sort of abstraction layer that might help run x86 games on an Arm processor…

Sometimes you have to bust out the ol' cork board and red string for a conspiracy theory involving leaked emails, supervillain islands, and heads of state desperate to deny they had anything to do with All That. But other times the conspiracy rabbit hole beckons in other forms. Like, say:

• 📌An emulated Macintosh Classic 2 that unexpectedly crashes on boot, leading to...
• 📌Intense debugging in the emulator and on another old Mac revealing a 34-year-old bug, leading to...
• 📌Buying and repairing a Macintosh Classic 2, leading to...
• 📌Confirmation that it indeed never should've been able to boot in the first place.

But the Apple Macintosh Classic 2 did boot just fine, which is what makes the pay-off of this blog from programmer Doug Brown so great. Through an intense, labyrinthine series of tests using both software and hardware, Brown discovered that the final all-in-one Mac to use a black & white screen shipped with a bug that would have disastrously crashed the computer every single time you turned it on—if not for a miraculous, unknown feature of its Motorola 68030 CPU that hid the problem from Apple's programmers.

Brown discovered the bug when he tried to boot an emulated Macintosh Classic 2 in MAME, an emulator best known for arcade systems that also supports a massive range of classic PCs and obscure systems. For compatibility reasons too complex to get into, the Mac Classic 2 was able to boot into two distinct modes, 24-bit and 32-bit, and the 32-bit mode crashed on startup in MAME.

"Why was this happening? Also, why didn’t this same failure occur on actual hardware?" Brown asks in his blog. "The Classic 2 wasn’t recalled … It would have been all over tech news. Not to mention the fact that the people actually working on the ROM code would have quickly noticed it while they were testing. It’s kind of a glaring issue. So what gives? Was MAME doing something wrong here that didn’t match hardware? … I have the answer to these questions, but as a forewarning, the situation is way more complicated than I expected it to be."

Brown goes into tremendous detail about how he figured out this complicated puzzle, and it's a fascinating read even if you're a non-programmer like me who can only truly grok about 30% of it. But it's still a wild story even if we zoom out from the granular computer instructions that he talks through step-by-step.

The thrust of the problem is that while running through its boot code in MAME, the Classic 2 would perform one instruction that jumped to an invalid address located at 'A1' in memory, and as a result when it tried to execute its next instruction, it was basically in the wrong spot. "And boom, Sad Mac."

When Brown debugged the code on a Macintosh 2ci from the same era (which notably also used a Motorola 68030 CPU), he found it did something a bit differently, transforming that invalid address into a valid one.

"The MAME-emulated Classic 2 was crashing because A1 didn’t change, so it still contained an invalid address," he writes. "On hardware, this weird instruction, which several disassemblers refused to touch, and wasn’t even intended to be jumped to because it starts in the middle of an actual valid instruction, was changing A1 to a new value that was a good address. …

"I was starting to believe something that sounded almost too crazy to be true: Apple had an out-of-bounds jump bug in the Classic 2’s ROM that should have caused a Sad Mac during boot, but they had no idea the bug was there because the 68030 was accidentally fixing the value of A1 by executing an undocumented instruction. How could I prove that my theory was correct?"

By testing on the real thing, naturally.

After coming up with this theory, Brown decided to buy a used Mac Classic 2, pull out its logic board, and clean it up to restore it to working order. I love this photo of his hacked-together Classic 2 that uses a modern ATX power supply and a Raspberry Pi to output the video signal to a capture device so he could take clean screenshots.

After writing some test instructions to see how the startup code would behave using the valid and invalid addresses he'd found in A1 on the Mac 2ci and in MAME, he confirmed what was going on.

"I’ve discovered an undocumented MC68030 instruction that performs a read-modify-write bus cycle and also changes the value of the A1 register," he writes. "This newly-discovered instruction turns out to be the glue that’s accidentally holding the Classic 2 together. Without this instruction modifying A1, the Classic 2 can’t boot. I’m confident that it was a mistake and not something intentional. A totally understandable mistake, at that. If the pesky 68030 hadn’t been hiding the bug from Apple’s ROM developers, there is no doubt they would have caught it before the Classic 2 shipped."

MAME's developers had no idea this instruction existed, so they had never implemented it in the emulator's behavior. That was the key to discovering the secret instruction and its clutch fix for what would've been a boot-breaking bug. A MAME contributor has since patched out the bug so that the Mac Classic 2 can boot in 32-bit mode.

But if not for MAME, Brown points out the bug likely "would have gone undiscovered for all eternity" because there's nothing obviously wrong in the boot up sequence on real hardware. That in itself is kind of amazing, though, because the Motorola 68030 belongs to one of the most-used processor families of all time, powering PCs, Sega consoles, printers, and more. How many more undocumented instructions are out there secretly making old devices work?

The discovery "goes to show you how bugs can be lurking in the background in places where you might think everything is totally polished," he writes. "I think it’s also a good example of how some bugs just aren’t that big of a deal. This bug fits that category pretty well. The machine worked fine and nobody noticed."

Fashion is weird. So is brand loyalty, now I come to think of it, which Apple seems to be testing with its latest creation, the iPhone Pocket. Designed in collaboration with Issey Miyake, a brand based around the works of a late fashion designer of the same name, the iPhone Pocket is, Apple proudly declares, "born from the idea of creating an additional pocket".

Revolutionary stuff. It's also been inspired by the concept of "a piece of cloth", which is fairly obvious to see, as that's exactly what it looks like (via BBC News). The long strap version has also been priced at $230, a figure that has drawn much ire and ridicule from the online community. Quelle surprise, etc, etc.

Some have made the comparison with wearing a sock around your neck, which in and of itself feels like something you might see on a runway near you as a bold new imagining of the paradigm of footwear. Or something.

Of course, Apple and Issey Miyake have been keen to point out that it's not just a piece of cloth. It's made of various colours of textured material that echo "the everyday utility of the brand's iconic pleated clothing", and it's been split open to create that much-needed extra pocket, with a stretchy quality that allows a single iPhone to be nestled inside, as well as "all pocketable items".

It looks a bit like carrying your phone around like a newborn in a sling, which, given some of the rapt praise bestowed upon products like the iPhone 16, feels somewhat appropriate. Many Apple fans love to show off their latest purchases like objects of great importance, and far from tucking the iPhone away, wearing it in a brightly-coloured and bleedingly-obvious carrying case strikes as just another way of declaring to the world that you too are an Apple-enjoyer.

Or perhaps someone who enjoys the films of Sacha Baron Cohen, one of the two. There are also security concerns to think about, as while the iPhone Pocket may well speak to "the bond between [an] iPhone and its user", that bond may soon be broken by an opportunist who spots one of the brighter versions (my favourite is the neon yellow "lemon") as you walk through your local park. Just a thought.

Still, it's said that high fashion is art, and good art provokes conversation. The iPhone Pocket appears to be doing just that, and is already being seen by some as a litmus test towards the brand loyalty of Apple fans. Sure, you may live the Apple aesthetic, but is strapping a mankini-like sock around your neck a step too far? Answers on the back of a postcard, please.

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While this isn't exactly PC gaming news, Apple recently launched a new interface for its app store when viewed in a browser. Specifically, it makes the whole shebang work just like the Apps… err… app. Still, while it looks and works as intended, Apple's web developers forgot to do something important before making it live: disabling the sourcemaps.

This meant that someone was able to archive the source code for the site's entire frontend and stick it on GitHub (via Ruri on X). Now, I can't imagine it won't be long before this all disappears, but like AMD's accidental leak of the source code for FSR 4, once it's out on the Internet, it'll be there for good.

If you're wondering just what a sourcemap is and what the big deal is about disabling them, let me explain: Today's websites and web apps are complex affairs, and professional developers will often use a range of high-level tools to create the code for them. However, browsers work on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.

So, the original code (i.e. the source code) needs to be transpiled for browsers, and for the sake of performance, the various files are often minimised and packed together to make a neat bundle that works super quickly in a browser.

A sourcemap is a file that maps the changes from the source code to the final code, so that when it comes to debugging any problems you've encountered in the end result, it's much easier to find where the issues are in the source.

Once you're happy with everything, you then just disable the sourcemap, so that the final code the browser works with is harder to trace back fully to the original source code. You don't have to do this, of course, but there are some reasons why you would want to, as explained in this blog by security firm Sentry.

In short, sourcemaps can be used to expose potential vulnerabilities, although truth be told, this is only the app store's frontend, so you're almost certainly not going to be able to prise out information about Apple, its customers, or secret hardware details. Plus, you don't really need sourcemaps to figure out the source code if you know your way around web development.

It's not a major faux pas, but you'd think that a company this size wouldn't make such a simple error. Before you rush off and see what else you can discover in Apple's new store frontend, it's worth noting that its devs have now disabled the sourcemaps. However, the full source code is still present on GitHub, so if you're an aspiring web developer, you might want to browse through it all to see how Apple does things.

Apple's relentless in-house silicon release schedule continues this week with the announcement of the new M5 chip. And early leaked benchmarks of the chip suggest the new M5 is about twice as fast as the original M1 for single-thread performance. So, the question is, why can't PC CPUs make those kinds of gains?

The immediate context here is the accuracy of the leaked benchmark and the actual performance gains of PC processors over the same time period. So, first off, the leaked numbers look plausible.

That's because the M4 already had very high single-thread performance and the M5 leaked numbers look to have pushed that on 10% to 15% depending on which precise Apple platforms you are comparing.

Now you might dismiss 10% to 15% as your usual generational gain similar to PC chips. And it is. Except Apple is iterating on a nearly annual basis, with the M1 launching in November 2020 and the M5 now with us in late 2025. Intel and AMD tend to take two years to release major new architectures. That more rapid Apple cadence adds up pretty fast as the years tick by.

How fast? To put numbers onto this, the M1 does about 2,200 points in Geekbench 6 single-thread, the M5 is looking like around 4,100. However, that M5 figure is for the M5 in an iPad. The fastest iPad based on M4 is a little over 200 points behind the fastest Mac with an M4. So, add about 200 points for a Mac with the M5 and you have almost exactly a doubling of the M1's score.

Of course, Geekbench is hardly the sole arbiter of CPU performance. But hold that thought, we'll come back to it. First, how does x86 PC processor performance compare over the same period?

Well, it just so happens that AMD released its then-new Ryzen 5000 CPUs in November 2020, exactly the same time as the M1. So, we have the basis for a perfect comparison, at least in terms of time frames.

So, what do the numbers show? The Ryzen 9 5950X scores 2,200, again, exactly like the M1 chip. And the latest Ryzen 9 9950X3D? Just 3,400 points, and thus roughly 1,000 points behind what the M5 can crank out.

Intel has if anything been falling behind AMD over the same period, so we hardly need to dig into the details, there. Anyway, you can debate the merits of Geekbench, for sure. But I don't think there's any doubt at all that Apple's single-thread performance has scaled massively better than AMD's. If either AMD or Intel had delivered the kind of gains Apple has, we'd all be losing our minds over it, that's for sure.

In a gaming context, the comparison becomes pretty difficult. Apart from anything else, there are ultimately very few games that are optimised to run on Apple Macs. Meanwhile, back on the PC there are so many other factors deciding gaming performance other than single-thread CPU grunt that the best case scenario is that, on average, you'll probably only see a roughly 50% uptick in frame rates going from a 5950X to a 9950X3D, even with the latter's trick 3D V-Cache bumping up gaming performance.

It is absolutely true that those limitations would apply to Apple CPUs, too, were they slotted into gaming rigs and fully supported by software. So, I'm not going to claim that an M5 chip would suddenly double your frame rates in that context. It wouldn't. But the fact remains, Apple is doing a far, far better job at scaling single-core performance than AMD or Intel. And I'd like to know why.

Just last week, we saw the announcement of Snapdragon's next range of chips, and this came with lofty claims. Qualcomm called it "Snapdragon's biggest advance in PC gaming", promising significantly more power per watt than Strix Point and Arrow Lake, as well as better GPU efficiency than Lunar Lake.

Tom's Hardware was invited out to test out both the Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme chips recently, reporting test scores that look fittingly great.

These are early numbers from benchmarks prechosen by Qualcomm, so it won't paint the whole picture, but they're impressive nonetheless.

First off, in single-core CPU loads on Geekbench, the X2 Elite Extreme manages to get a score of 4080, which is 39% faster than the Snapdragon X Elite. Compared to the competition, the Strix Point AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 manages to get 2881, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H gets a score of 3026, and even Apple's M4 only got 3872.

Then in multi-core tests, the X2 Elite Extreme received a score of 23491, which is double that of the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V, which got 11306. The closest score of the suite to the X2 Elite Extreme is the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H, which managed to get 17680.

In 3DMark Solar Bay (a GPU test), the X2 Elite Extreme also manages to come out on top, beating the Strix Point chip by 61%. However, there are a few caveats to these scores. First, it's a specific suite of benchmarks being used in a specific laptop, chosen by Qualcomm.

The chip will be fine-tuned for these specific tests. Secondly, the X2 Elite (the cheaper of the two chips) is not in this set of tests, and the Apple M4 Max chip is not either, which is Apple's best chip right now. Strix Halo, with its large VRAM and impressive capabilities, is also missing.

Should you be interested, it also performs very well in preliminary AI tests, which suggests any laptop it's in will really feel like an 'AI PC'. Both Procyon AI computer vision scores and Geekbench AI 1.5 scores are higher than the competition, with the HX 370 sitting out of the latter test as the chip can't run it.

We don't yet have a price point or battery life tests, but these will be some of the most important when contextualising the figures earned by the X2 Elite Extreme. There's no point shoving a bunch of power into a chip if it becomes unfeasible to buy or use it. Here's looking at you, companies trying to cram Strix Halo into handhelds.

Speaking to Tom's Hardware, a representative of Qualcomm said the X2 Elite Extreme would come in at a higher price point than last year's X chips, which suggests devices with the chip in it will cost more than $1,000. The standard X2 Elite chip will naturally be cheaper, but we know very little about that so far, from price to performance. More competition is always good, and these early tests look very positive, though I don't know if I'm excited by the potential of yet more $1,000+ gaming handhelds.

After receiving a cash injection from SoftBank Group, Nvidia, and even the US government, Intel is now seeking investment from iPhone creator and longtime collaborator Apple.

As reported by Bloomberg, and citing "people familiar with the matter", Apple and Intel are reportedly in the early stages of conversations about "how to work more closely together". No specifics are given on what investments are being asked for or what kinds of conversations are happening, but this is part of a broader comeback attempt from Intel.

Intel has fallen behind in recent times, with the 13th and 14th Gen chip crashes only painting part of the picture. Its recent CPUs haven't been very good for gaming (while AMD has smashed it out of the park in that regard), and Intel admits it "fumbled the football" with Arrow Lake. As a result, a lot is riding on Nova Lake, and increased funding would certainly help it make an impact. More funding would help catch up to supply needs for any deals the company can make, too.

Apple has a bit of a history with Intel. Prior to the swap to its own M-series chips in 2020, Intel was the central CPU supplier for all MacBooks and Macs. Apple also purchased Intel Mobile Communications back in 2019 for $1B.

Apple hasn't really worked with Intel in a public manner in a few years, actively removing all Intel parts from its products and cutting support. But just last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook told Jim Cramer, "You know, competition is very good for the foundry business… we’d love to see Intel come back."

Intel Foundry is Intel's semiconductor fabrication company, and it's been in a bit of a strange spot for some time. Four former Intel board members pushed for a joint venture between Nvidia, Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Broadcom just last year, before "the rust of time makes them worthless". Apple itself has announced renewed investment in American manufacturing in the wake of Trump's tariffs. This is all to say that any investment would likely push towards Intel's manufacturing goals, and not chip design.

As an everyday MacBook user, the switch to in-house silicon chips is one of the best choices Apple has made in the last decade. Working with TSMC on the latest (and tiniest) node technology, and built with its hardware in mind, the M chips represent a big leap forward in computing power and efficiency. The hardware has become more bespoke without the challenge of having to take off-the-shelf Intel parts and put them in its devices.

Capable of running games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Lies of P, MacBooks have even become decent gaming devices. Though more competition is certainly good for the market, I'd hope any potential investment from Apple comes at arm's length, as those M-chips feel like a real wonder for the fruit-titled company.

It's no secret that the process behind the manufacturing of high-end processors is becoming ever more expensive with each advance in technology. The huge outlay in buildings and machinery, as well as years of research and development, runs into tens of billions of dollars. However, one report claims that TMSC plans to raise the price for its next-generation N2 process node so much that processors made on it will have to be a lot more expensive to cover the cost.

That's according to China Times (via Dan Nystedt on X), which claims that industry sources have told them that the price for TSMC's N2 process node will be more than 50% higher than N3. It notes that the Taiwanese firm's current best node, N3P, is around 20% higher than the previous generation N5.

Price increases in semiconductor wafer manufacturing are inevitable, especially when it concerns the very best process nodes. That's because all of the equipment used to make the wafers has to be better than the apparatus used for earlier nodes. For example, Dutch company ASML develops and makes the photolithographic machines used in wafer making, and its latest and greatest system costs a cool $400 million per unit.

While TSMC doesn't use ASML's latest high-NA EUV system, it's still spending billions of dollars a year on research and development, as well as building new fabrication plants for its cutting-edge process nodes, and the costs behind these aren't getting any smaller.

There's also the small matter that TSMC makes everything for the biggest chip companies in the world, with no fear of competition in that field, so it's free to charge almost anything it likes.

However, a 50% price increase over N3, which itself is a 20% over N5, would mean that the likes of Nvidia will be paying 80% more for the wafers it needs for GeForce graphics cards than it currently does. China Times claims that N2 yields have "already reached the standard, so there is no discount or bargaining strategy for the time being (machine translation)."

TSMC's biggest customers are Apple, Nvidia, and AMD, and all three have reportedly placed orders for N2 wafers for their next generation of phone chips, AI GPUs, and processor chiplets. I can't imagine that such important customers wouldn't be able to come to some price agreement with TSMC and thus wouldn't be paying the full increase, but it's clear that anything made on N2 is going to be very expensive.

The question to ask now is whether the big three will pass the price increase on to the end consumer or absorb the cost by using smaller chips than they currently do. In the case of the latter, smaller dies mean each wafer produces more useful processors, so fewer wafers are needed to meet customer demand.

Smaller chips don't necessarily result in weaker products, either. The Navi 48 GPU in AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT is massively better than the Navi 21 in the Radeon RX 6900 XT, and yet it's 31% smaller in size (though it does have far fewer compute units and cache). Better process nodes allow for more transistors to be packed into the same space, and often permit much higher clock speeds too.

I suspect that Apple, Nvidia, and AMD will do something in between the extremes of massively ramping up prices and just using much smaller processors. It wouldn't come as a surprise if the next generation of iPhone, GeForce, Ryzen, and Radeon chips are only fractionally better than what we have right now (perhaps no more than 10% better) but are, say, 30% more expensive, rather than 80%.

Even so, a 30% price hike on your favourite PC processors isn't exactly going to go down well. It could mean a graphics card normally selling for $300 would sport a price tag of just under $400.

Mass production of N2-based chips isn't expected until next year, with AMD most likely being the first chip company to have such products in the consumer market; Nvidia will probably focus on its AI GPUs with this node to begin with. If so, then the next generation of Ryzen processors will give us the biggest clue as to just how expensive TSMC's N2 really is.

An original Apple I computer just hit $475,000 in an auction sale (via Tom's Hardware). The Apple I was conceived as a bare circuit board for which enthusiasts would build their own case, but this unit was one of 50 made for Byte Shop and sold with a natty wooden case. Only nine of the 50 are known to survive today.

Apart from the sheer portent of an original Apple I and the particular rarity of this version (it's thought there were only around 200 Apple I computers ever built, so this machine is in a very rarefied niche, even among Apple I's), the incredible condition of this example and the fact that it's fully functional (as demo'ed in this YouTube video) no doubt contributed to the hefty hammer price.

The Apple I was of course the work of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and these "Byte Shop" machines are regarded as the turning point that made Apple Computer viable as a company.

At the time in 1976, Jobs and Wozniak were selling a small handful of bare boards to enthusiasts. But Jobs approached Paul Terrell at the Byte Shop in Mountain View, California, an early personal computer outlet. Terrell apparently offered to buy 50 Apple I machines, but only if they came fully assembled in cases.

It's said Jobs and Wozniak personally assembled all 200 of the original Apple I, though eventuality the Byte Shop Apple I's were actually delivered as bare boards. Terrell nevertheless accepted them, knocking up wood cases that were a cut above the hobbyist norm.

Whatever, that Byte Shop deal for 50 computers was absolutely critical in getting Apple over the line from being a couple of tinkerers in a garage to something resembling an actual company. "That was the biggest single episode in all of the company's history. Nothing in subsequent years was so great and so unexpected," Steve Wozniak later said of the deal.

And it is a pretty funky thing. It's actually remarkable just how familiar it looks, the case and keyboard being instantly recognisable as a personal computer. Indeed, keyboards have changed remarkably little in the intervening 49 years.

It's also not hard to imagine someone producing a hipster homebrew PC build that looked just like this original Apple I build. That said, today's computing enthusiast might be just a touch disappointed by the specs. A maximum of 8K of onboard memory, as fitted here, and a 1 MHz CPU isn't exactly the stuff of smooth Borderlands 4 frame rates.

Then again, watching ASCII art images of the Woz and Jobs emerge in text characters, line-by-line, on the Apple I's screen is pretty cool and in some ways more impressive than the latest ray-traced pixel fest. At the very least, it's awfully nostalgic, especially for someone who can very dimly remember the day his father brought an Apple II Plus back from the office. Now, whatever did happen to that...?

Apple's new A19 Pro chip for the iPhone 17 was announced yesterday and the first Geekbench scores have been uploaded. To be quite frank, if this was a new x86 CPU for gaming PCs, we'd be losing our minds.

The A19 Pro is scoring nearly 4,000 points in Geekbench 6's single-thread test. That compares with about 3,500 for the best AMD desktop CPU. And may I remind you, that's in a freaking phone. The A19 Pro in a desktop with the power budget and thermals that affords would be higher still, well over 4,000.

If a new AMD or Intel CPU popped up in Geekbench hitting, say, 4,500, the internet would just about break. And to be clear, these Geekbench numbers for the A19 Pro are plausible. The previous-gen A18 Pro scores around 3,500 points in Geekbench 6. So, a 15% boost to 4,000 points for the latest chip fitted to a phone with a new vapor chamber cooling system doesn't seem like a massive stretch.

Of course, Geekbench is hardly the perfect benchmark. And it's demonstrably not a game. But comparative real-world performance in applications doesn't tend to be a million miles away from Geekbench. The bottom line here is that Apple has long had a clear IPC or single-core and per-clock-cycle performance advantage over x86 chips from AMD and Intel, and it looks like the new A19 Pro chip will maintain that lead.

Really roughly, it looks like the A19 Pro has an IPC advantage approaching 30% over the best x86 chips. That's pretty huge. It's also a figure that AMD and Intel are very unlikely to reach in a single generation. So, it's unlikely that AMD's next-gen Zen 6 architecture or Intel's Nova Lake will match the Apple A19 Pro.

But here's the really crazy bit. Even if they did, that probably wouldn't mean they'd match Apple. Because the A19 Pro will be in iPhones you can buy in a few weeks, but Zen 6 and Nova Lake aren't out for a year or more. And by then, there will be another new Apple CPU and that one is expected to be on TSMC's new N2 silicon and will almost certainly be a fair bit faster than the A19 Pro which is on TSMC N3 silicon.

However you slice it, then, Apple looks to have a pretty major architectural advantage with its CPU cores. That's a bit odd when you consider that it's not ostensibly a CPU company. And so it begs the question of why the CPU specialists at AMD and Intel can't match Apple.

Part of the answer is perhaps that Apple has full control of its own hardware and software stack. It designs and engineers both its own CPUs and operating systems and can optimise them to work nicely together to the nth degree.

It also, obviously, has absolutely huge resources and uses the very latest TSMC silicon. By way of example, those Geekbench 6 results show the Apple A19 Pro with 6MB L2 cache per performance core. That's 50% more than Geekbench reports for the previous A18 Pro.

The comparison gets a bit complicated because the A18 Pro actually has 8 MB of L2 cache per performance core. But here's the thing. The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D has just 1MB L2 cache per core. The full cache comparison is complicated and currently unclear, what with the X3D's V-cache and Apple's own last level SoC cache, which was 24MB for the A18 Pro. But it certainly seems like Apple absolutely loads its chips with cache and can probably do so because it uses the most advanced silicon.

Undoubtedly, there's a lot more going on than just Apple throwing a load of cache memory at its processor cores. But however Apple is achieving this performance, it's very impressive. And I kinda wish we had access to it in our PCs.

And lo, on the ninth day of the ninth month in the 2025th year, verily did Apple unveil the 17th coming of the hallowed iPhone. Yup, there's yet another iPhone out, the iPhone 17 Pro, and if the numbering scheme isn't flirting with satire, the extent to which Apple's latest iPhone resembles a gaming PC surely is.

Don't believe me? If I told you there was a new device selling for four figures with a high-Hz, adaptive refresh screen, backed by a sales pitch that name-checks "AAA gaming" and "hardware-accelerated ray tracing" and which introduces tensor cores to its newly upgraded GPU, what would you say it was?

Oh, hang on, it also sports vapor-chamber cooling for its CPU and GPU, the performance upgrades are kind of incremental this time around, but the price has still gone up. See what I mean? That's the pitch for a new gaming PC or laptop.

It's probably that new vapor-chamber cooling that's most eye catching. It's not a first for a smartphone, but when Apple sticks a technology into one of its devices, you know it's gone totally mainstream.

To quote Apple, "deionized water is sealed inside the vapor chamber, which is laser-welded into the aluminum chassis to move heat away from the powerful A19 Pro, allowing it to operate at even higher performance levels. The heat is carried into the forged aluminum unibody, where it is distributed evenly through the system, managing power and surface temperatures to deliver incredible performance while remaining comfortable to hold."

Also according to Apple, the vapor chamber allows the new A19 Pro chip to deliver 40% more sustained performance over the A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 series. Actually, that term "sustained" is crucial.

The A19 Pro looks like an incremental step at best over the A18 chip. That's probably because it's the third Apple smartphone chip to be built on TSMC's N3 node. In other words, it's not on the upcoming N2 node, so there's probably a limit to what Apple could do with the A19 Pro.

That kind of has me wondering if Apple will quietly drop the vapor chamber for the next next-gen iPhone assuming that it has an N2-based chip, but I digress. The point is that the incremental character of the A19 Pro chip is certainly redolent of Nvidia's latest RTX 50-series GPUs, like the RTX 5070, which are manufactured on only a slightly different derivation of the TSMC N5 node that the RTX 40 series was also based on.

Another Nvidia GPU parallel is the introduction of what Apple calls Neural Accelerators to the A19 Pro's GPU. They're equivalent hardware to the Tensor cores in an Nvidia GPU and especially notable when you consider that all iPhone chips since the A11 in 2017 and including the new A19 Pro also have a dedicated NPU or Neural Processing Unit.

Apple doesn't actually get specific about what those "Neural Accelerators" will be used for as distinct from the NPU. But if Apple wanted to support, say, ML-enhanced upscaling, doing that on the GPU rather than NPU has clear advantages when it comes to things like frame-time and latency. Again, that's pretty reminiscent of a gaming PC.

Of course, the PC got there first with all this stuff, be it the vapor chamber, the high-refresh display or the AI GPU cores and support for ray-tracing. But, personally, I don't get most of it on a smartphone.

The 120 Hz display is nice enough and will make the phone feel responsive. But ray tracing and a vapor chamber? Gaming on such a small device is never going to be about high-end visuals. I'd far rather have a bit less performance and a lot more battery life. Does an iPhone really need or benefit from that kind of extreme cooling?

In that regard and many others, too, the more apt comparison is obviously the Steam Deck as opposed to a desktop rig. The Deck, too, isn't about the very latest features or the last word in ray tracing. Actually, the Deck doesn't have vapor chamber cooling. And the iPhone probably shouldn't, either.

Not satisfied with getting OpenAI to say that his dad could beat up Sam Altman's dad, Elon Musk has now filed a lawsuit against Apple and Open AI, accusing them of "joining forces to ensure their continued dominance in a world rapidly driven by the most powerful technology humanity has ever created: artificial intelligence."

"AI is fundamentally reshaping our world," the lawsuit (via The Verge) says, and "the consensus among global business leaders, academics, and scientists is that AI adoption is both unavoidable and transformational."

Companies that miss the boat will find themselves at a major disadvantage: Companies like Apple, for instance, which was so focused "on making iterative changes to its smartphones" that it was "blindsided by major innovations in AI," and is now at risk of becoming another Nokia—a once-dominant force brought low by a rapidly shifting technological landscape.

Thus Apple has teamed up with OpenAI, which the lawsuit claims has established its own monopoly in the field of generative AI chatbots, leaving Musk's xAI unable to gain "more than a few percent of the market despite accolades about its superior features."

"Just like Apple, OpenAI has incentive to protect its monopoly by thwarting competition and innovation in the generative AI chatbot market," the suit states. "And just like Apple, it has done so in violation of the antitrust laws."

The complaint centers on Apple's decision to integrate OpenAI's ChatGPT into iOS, and subsequent "deprioritizing" of other chatbots and "super apps" in App Store rankings. This not only forces iPhone users to use ChatGPT, the lawsuit claims, it also harms the makers of competing chatbots by impairing their ability to train: "As a result of Apple and OpenAI's exclusive arrangement, ChatGPT is the only generative AI chatbot that benefits from billions of user prompts originating from hundreds of millions of iPhones. This makes it hard for competitors of ChatGPT's generative AI chatbot and super apps powered by generative AI chatbots to scale and innovate."

The lawsuit also alleges that the deal between Apple and OpenAI is harming X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk acquired in 2022 and promptly set on fire.

"The harms to xAI and its generative AI chatbot, Grok, also harm X's 'everything app'," the suit states. "Because Grok's functionality is a key feature of the X app, the X app is more attractive the better Grok performs. And because Defendants' conduct makes Grok less able to fairly compete with ChatGPT, X's app (and thus X) suffers in the process. This results in fewer X app customers and subscriptions, and less revenue and profits, ultimately creating a depressed enterprise value for X relative to the but-for world."

This isn't the first time and Musk and Altman have clashed: Musk sued OpenAI and Altman in 2024, claiming that he was "betrayed" by OpenAI's attempted transition into a for-profit company, although OpenAI later published emails and DMs showing that Musk was eager to go for-profit as far back as 2017, but left the company when his demand for "majority equity, absolute control, and to be CEO of the for-profit" was rejected. In February 2025, Musk made noise about buying OpenAI for $97.4 billion—an unsolicited offer that was rejected outright—and then, earlier this month, the CEOs exchanged harsh words on social media in what proved to be a prelude to this action.

Apple Macs and gaming have long been odd bedfellows. Compatibility issues and different hardware designs has often made gaming on these proprietary devices a bit tricky. Thankfully, most of these problems are set to live in the past, and gaming on Mac machines is becoming more commonplace. They're still rather walled off by Apple's ecosystem, and often Apple's pricing, but if rumours are true the new Mac mini could be about to break down that wall.

Techradar spotted rumours stating a new Mac Mini with an M5 chip alongside an M5 Pro Apple Silicon machines are being tested, shared on AppleInsider. They're expecting the new M5 Mac Minis to retain the same form factor that we currently see, but with a spec boost. This could make for a great little gaming PC that sits unassumingly wherever you put it, with the usefulness of an Apple device, you know, if you're into that.

Alex Blake over at Techradar absolutely is. After complimenting their M1's fair price and powerful abilities, Blake is thinking this new machine could be a great device for gamers. The old M1 had served them well, even handling games like Cyberpunk 2077, though admittedly with some toned down specs to run well.

When Blake pitted the M1 against the current M4 chip for Cyberpunk shenanigans, the M1 outperformed the newer tech thanks to higher graphical components. Our reviewer also had fairly good time playing games on the Apple Mac Studio M4 Max. Apple's new M5 chips are said to have additional graphic cores, so there's a good chance these new chips should blow both the old ones out of the water.

The other big boon for gaming on Mac is Apple's MetalFX. This is Apple's upscaling tech that allows low resolution images to be rendered and upscaled much faster than it would take to simply render the high resolution image. All of this could see much better graphical rendering performance than what we've ever seen on a Mac mini, and yeah I think Blake is onto something here.

The tricky part here is pricing. If Apple releases these tiny guys at the expected $600 USD pricepoint, that's a pretty great deal for a mini gaming PC. Plus as an added bonus you get a Mac and can now play with all that Apple stuff that was previously out of reach. I hate to say it, but with all this factored in I'm starting to think my next lounge PC might just be a Mac Mini.

If Steve Wozniak had "only" designed the Apple II, one of the foundational computers of the early PC era, he'd still be a computing legend. But after leaving Apple in the mid-'80s Wozniak went on to help establish the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sponsored the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose, and has spent the last four decades on philanthropy, public speaking and founding a truly wild range of tech companies, like one focused on minimizing orbital debris.

What makes him one of the all-time greats though, at least in my mind, is that despite decades in the tech business and access to fabulous wealth he by all accounts seems to have remained an almost absurdly chill and normal guy.

Or, at least, as normal as you can be while playing in a Segway polo league.

Wozniak has millions of dollars to his name, but clearly chose to walk a different path than his contemporary tech billionaires like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison who accrued billions. And he remains the kind of everyman, old school tech nerd who occasionally reads—and even comments on—Slashdot. A few days ago (on his 75th birthday, no less), Woz popped into a thread about his ongoing lawsuit against YouTube over internet scammers who'd used his likeness, though not to address the topic of the lawsuit.

One commenter had piggybacked on the thread to point out that back in the '80s Wozniak had sold his Apple stock, which would be worth about eleventy trillion dollars today by my quick back-of-the-napkin math. "Smart man. Great engineer. Bad decision. Happens to all of us," that Slashdotter wrote.

Then Woz popped up to reply, as noticed by Bluesky poster Caræsten. And it's definitely him—Wozniak used the same account for a Slashdot Q&A way back in 2012.

"I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for," Wozniak wrote. "I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out."

Smiles minus Frowns, man. Just try to imagine Elon Musk typing that into a computer and meaning it.

Intel CEO Lip Bu Tan's plan to not invest in the upcoming 14A chip manufacturing node until customers sign up is a joke. That's according to Intel's former CEO, Craig Barrett. Oh, and Barrett doesn't much like the idea that Intel's product design business and its chip factories should be split into two companies. Instead, he reckons Nvidia, Apple and Google should stump up the cash to save Intel's fabs.

Barrett explains all this in an extraordinarily to-the-point and bullet-pointed smackdown on the Fortune website. For the record, Barrett was Intel CEO from 1998 to 2005. He was a hard-nosed, no-nonsense, five-blades kind of CEO, but more on that in a moment.

Intel was dominant during that period, first with the Pentium 4 Netburst series of CPUs, before it pivoted to the Pentium M CPU architecture in 2003 that focussed more on IPC than pure clockspeed, and that ultimately underpins Intel processors to this day.

Anyway, to quote Barrett verbatim, "The current Intel CEO’s comments about not investing in new technology (14A) until customers sign up is a joke. To win in this space you need to be the leader in technology not the follower. It takes multiple years to create one of these technologies and no customer wants to sign up for something that is second best."

If that's the detail regarding current CEO Lip Bu Tan and Intel's chip manufacturing, Barrett has a broader point to make. "Yes, the USA NEEDS INTEL, as Intel is the only U.S. company capable of providing state of the art logic manufacturing," he says.

The solution, according to Barrett, is for Intel's customers to pump massive amounts of cash into the company. "U.S. customers like Nvidia, Apple, Google, etc needs and should understand they NEED a second source for their lead product manufacturing due to pricing, geographic stability and supply line security reasons," Barrett explains.

"Intel is cash poor and can’t afford to invest in the capacity needed in the future to replace TSMC or even a reasonable fraction of TSMC capacity. They probably need a cash infusion of $40B or so to be competitive. Realistically that investment is 100% of the Chip Act Capital grants so unlikely the USG is the savior.

"The only place the cash can come from is the customers. They are all cash rich and if eight of them were willing to invest $5B each then Intel would have a chance," he concludes.

He also draws a parallel with government support for other domestic industries, and asks why chip manufacturing shouldn't be the same. "If we can support domestic steel and aluminium, surely we can support domestic semiconductors."

His final broadside is aimed at the quartet of former Intel board members who recently called for Intel's fabs to be spun off, "before the rust of time makes them worthless."

His withering put down for their core position that customers won't like the conflict of interest inherent in Intel both making its own chip and having access to the designs of customers and competitors? "Be serious. There are many company interactions that involve both supply and competition."

Ouch. Anyway, you can read the whole, brutal smackdown here. Whether anyone is listening, we'll have to wait and see. One reason not to listen is that it was only February this year that Barrett claimed that "Intel was back," a comment that hasn't aged terribly well in just five months. There's also more than a whiff of the Onion's seminal "Five Blades" satire from way back in 2004, written when Barrett was indeed atop Intel and CEOs with his brand of swagger were in fashion.

For now, current CEO Lip Bu Tan has just been to see President Trump, and apparently he doesn't need to resign immediately after all. Instead, he's a 'uge success. Whatever.

Apple CEO Tim Cook recently visited the White House, and after committing an additional $100 billion in US investment, Donald Trump held a press conference where he announced an addendum to his new tariff plan.

Last week, Trump announced a whole new set of tariffs, with the likes of Taiwan receiving a 20% tax on its exports, but semiconductors were left in the dark, but no longer. In the conference, Trump states, "A lot of countries, a lot of companies are leaving various other places and they're coming to the United States." He continues, "So, in other words, we'll be putting a tariff of approximately 100% on chips and semiconductors"

"Approximately" is a bit of a troubling word there, but it's effectively just a big number to push companies into continuing production in the US. Tariffs are intended to disincentivise companies from importing items from outside of the country where they are located.

A tariff on the UK, for instance, will hit those in the US as the cost of that tariff is pushed onto the consumer. This is why the original high tariffs were changed, reinstated, and edited. The infrastructure needed to replace the need for importing in the first place can take years, so pushing a high tariff onto companies without giving this leeway doesn't really end up incentivising building chips on a national scale.

He clarifies that "if you're building in the United States of America, there's no charge even though you're building and you're not producing yet in terms of the big number of jobs and all of the things that you're building."

These tariffs don't entirely rely on the honour system, though. Trump does state that tariffs will apply after the fact, so "if for some reason you say you're building and you don't build, then we go back and we add it up."

This means the likes of TSMC and Samsung, both of which produce semiconductors, will not be hit by any tariffs. Both are continuing investments in the US. TSMC is based in Taiwan and is the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world. TSMC and Samsung offer the smallest process nodes at 3 nm, which allows for much greater transistor density, and therefore better efficiency. TSMC's Arizona fab is currently on its 4 nm process, though it is expected to use its 2 nm process in 2028.

As reported by The Guardian, Dan Lachica, president of the Philippine semiconductor industry, says this new rule would be "devastating" as semiconductors account for "around 70% of the country's exports." The Philippines is not expected to be the only country negatively hit by these tariffs. The trade minister of Malaysia, Tegku Zafrul Aziz, said Malaysia "will risk losing a major market in the United States if its products become less competitive as a result of the imposition of these tariffs."

Malaysia is where Intel has a large packaging facility, and AMD operates too, though the former has manufacturing capability in the US, as well as elsewhere around the globe, and AMD uses TSMC to manufacture its chips.

Apple's further investment in the US is paired with the announcement that it would be bringing its glass production line to a factory in Kentucky. A press release says "every iPhone and Apple Watch sold around the world will be built with Kentucky-made cover glass". As pointed out by The Guardian, Tim Cook noted in an earnings call in May that tariffs would cost the company $900 million in that quarter alone.

Though the likes of TSMC (and partners like Nvidia) don't appear to be hit with a major negative impact from this new tariff change, the global effect on semiconductor production and research is bad news for broader competition.

We have a lot to thank security researchers for. Between uncovering yet more vulnerabilities in Google Chrome, and exposing an embarrassing data leak in a popular sex toy app (no, really), these white hat hackers tend to make our digital existence safer in the long run. Surely some compensation from the multi-million dollar corporations caught in a virtually compromising position is the least these techies could ask for?

Security researcher Renwa recently found a number of high severity vulnerabilities affecting Apple's Safari browser and Sequoia OS. This included an absolute doozy that could've allowed bad actors to bypass Same Origin Policy in a UXSS (Universal Cross-site Scripting) style attack. Despite this vulnerability being so severe it enjoyed the dubious honour of a 9.8 (critical) CVSS score, Renwa say they were only paid $1,000 for reporting the issue to Apple.

Apple gave credit where credit is due with regards to their security update for Safari 18.4, crediting Renwa for finding a number of issues and explaining they've since addressed CVE-2025-30466 specifically through "improved state management."

However, the reward feels like a small sum for spotting an issue that could've exposed an untold number of Apple users to hackers, especially when you consider the fact $1,000 doesn't even cover rent in a number of US cities. In their post on X, Renwa quips, "I should quit this bug bounty thing and get a real job."

Rent anxiety aside, $1,000 is especially low considering Apple has placed a bounty of up to $1 million for the finding of other flaws, such as vulnerabilities within its Private Cloud Compute servers. So, it's hardly the case that Apple is stingy overall. Then there's the fact Google recently awarded $1,000 to security researchers uncovering a number of medium and low severity Chrome vulnerabilities, with some even netting upwards of $2,000 for these relatively less critical issues. With this in mind, it's especially baffling that a vulnerability rated as high as 9.8 would be deemed such low value by Apple.

Speaking of, let's take a tour through some of the bug bounties offered by various other major players. For instance back in 2021, Valve awarded one white hat hacker $7,500 for reporting a Steam Wallet infinite funds flaw. Almost a decade earlier the same company had paid another security researcher $20,000 for highlighting an exploit that allowed hackers to generate all the Steam keys they could ever want.

And it's not just Valve with a track record of putting its money where its mouth is: Back in 2022, Rockstar awarded $10,000 to a GTA Online player that helped fix the game's slow loads. And then last year, Riot announced an especially beefy bounty for anyone who could find holes in Valorant's Vanguard anticheat (though admittedly this was intended more as a show of confidence in their own tech than paying security researchers what they're worth).

But Renwa isn't the only one getting undercut as of late. Remember the Lovense leak I mentioned up top? The core issue was reported and partially fixed multiple times over the years, but security researcher @Krissy was only paid $350 when they discovered the issue back in September 2023. According to BobDaHacker, their group of security researchers then saw $3,000 in total for reporting the same core issue years later.

Considering that all it takes to spell disaster for businesses both big and small is one correctly guessed password or a particularly nasty ransomware attack, I for one think it wouldn't hurt to more consistently pay security researchers what they're worth.

Palmer Luckey, the previous founder of Oculus VR and co-founder of defence tech firm Anduril Industries, has a question for you: Would you buy an all-American computer from the latter for 20% more than an equivalent Apple machine?

Luckey took to X to poll the community at large on their opinions of his hypothetical eaglebox (via Tom's Hardware). At the time of writing, the split is currently 63.5% yes and 36.5% no, with nearly 80,000 respondents giving their opinion on Luckey's potential next venture.

It's not the first time Luckey has posited the idea, either, as he mentioned it previously at the Reindustrialise summit earlier this month. Responding to the question of "who is going to make an American computer again," Luckey said:

"This is one of those things where I started talking to companies years ago about this... I think there's a chance that it's going to be Anduril, unless someone else does it first, which I'd be perfectly happy with."

I suppose the follow up question would be, "how do you plan on making one?" The Federal Trade Commission defines the criteria for a product being identified as "Made in USA" as:

"The product must be 'all or virtually all' made in the U.S. [which] means that the final assembly or processing of the product occurs in the United States, all significant processing that goes into the product occurs in the United States, and all or virtually all ingredients or components of the product are made and sourced in the United States. That is, the product should contain no — or negligible — foreign content."

Which strikes as a touch difficult, given that the vast, vast majority of components involved in a something as complicated as a computer are not currently made in America, or at the very least, cost much more to obtain from US manufacturers. A mere 20% premium over a machine manufactured outside of the US strikes as more than a little optimistic to me.

PCMag attempted to catalogue US-based companies making "high-quality tech products" in 2023, and determined that while some computers and components are produced stateside, they're usually assembled in the US, rather than actually manufactured there.

Still, Palmer Luckey has a storied history of making things happen. He began designing his own VR headsets at the age of 16, going on to co-found Oculus VR before selling the company to Facebook for $3 billion, according to now-Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Luckey left Facebook in 2017—before co-founding defence technology company Anduril Industries, which has since provided US Border Patrol with over 300 autonomous surveillance towers.

The company has since taken over Microsoft's previous role of providing augmented reality headsets to the US Army, among other military-related US government contracts, and last year announced a partnership with Palantir Technologies to "ensure that the US government leads the world in artificial intelligence."

Luckey was also the brain behind the NerveGear, a VR headset art project that purported to use three explosive charges to kill the user when they died in a game. He never finished it, you'll be pleased to hear, and left it to remain as "office art."

Anyway, this new potential "Made in America" PC seems like a better use of his talents, but presumably won't make much headway without an appropriate amount of interest. Hence the poll, which you too can now participate in. Or to put it more accurately—do you feel Luckey?