The RAM crunch is crunching.
As we were warned, that pesky AI boom and the resulting demand for memory-hungry data centers are hitting consumer tech. And it's hitting it hard.
Microsoft and Apple were the bringers of ill tidings and price rises. First up, Xbox Series X and S price jumps – one editor noted that his Series X and Series S, bought together, now cost $100 less than a Series X console. Also, this wasn't the first price increase, or even the second, for a gaming company struggling against PlayStation.
Microsoft also announced its new Surface laptops cost between $500 and $600 more than the models they're meant to replace. It's all a bit rich coming from Microsoft, too, one of the major investors in AI.
Then there's Apple, which has claimed it absorbed the costs of rising memory prices in recent years, but that's no longer the case. Punishingly, that includes a $100 bump to its new low-cost MacBook Neo. The increase scales with the machine's power, with the M3 Ultra Mac Studio going up by $1,300.
So far, there are no changes to iPhone prices, but the Apple TV 4K is now $199, up from $129, and the HomePod is $50 more expensive at $349. The Vision Pro headset now costs $3,699, up from $3,499.
If you were looking to get a new laptop, it might be wise to take another look at Prime Day deals. Or take a closer look at the refurb and pre-owned market. — Mat Smith
All the big reviews you might have missed this week #
The most popular Grok feature is, apparently, exactly what you think #
xAI has long promoted Grok as a racier chatbot with fewer guardrails than other AI companies. We've seen that play out in some disastrous ways over the last year. It might just be a numbers game: NSFW activities account for "well over half" of Grok's traffic, according to a new report in The Information that cites two former employees of the SpaceX-owned company. That includes using Grok to generate actual porn, as well as "adult role-play chats" and "huge volumes of requests for erotica."
The report added that an internal analysis found that a "significant proportion of requests" to its coding model were for "porn or nude images", simply because it's cheaper to utilize that model than base Grok.
YouTube doubles the speed of Shorts #
YouTube has announced that it's making Shorts more "intuitive" with several key changes, including the removal of dislikes, a clear screen mode (à la TikTok), and double-speed playback.
A new Clear Screen mode scrubs the interface away and can be toggled on in the three-dot settings menu. It has also replaced the "like" button with a heart to provide a "more meaningful way" to interact with content. I can't think of anything more meaningless.
IBM says it has created the world's first sub-nanometer chip #
Building on the "nanosheet" architecture IBM used in 2021 to create a 2nm chip, the company says its new "nanostack" design allowed it to go even further, producing a functioning 7-angstrom (0.7nm) chip. The result is a piece of silicon packing nearly 100 billion transistors into a chip the size of a human fingernail. In practical terms, IBM says those additional transistors translate to a chip that offers either "up to 50 percent more performance, or 70 percent greater energy efficiency than IBM's 2nm node chips."