Nvidia’s announcement that it’s getting into the consumer laptop chip space with RTX Spark is huge. Apple has proved for years that Arm-based chips can perform incredibly well while also delivering great battery life — at least on the Mac. In the Windows world, performance hasn’t fully matched up under Qualcomm chips, mostly in the graphics department. There’s clearly still untapped potential, and Nvidia seems to be promising to deliver it.

This could be Windows’ moment to blow us away with a new generation of supremely capable chips, much like Apple’s back in 2020, with the introduction of the M1. But why does this launch feel simultaneously exciting and fraught in 2026?

The Nvidia RTX Spark sounds like a monster of a laptop chip: 20 CPU cores, 6,144 GPU CUDA cores, and 128GB of unified LPDDR5X memory. Its integrated graphics are said to be equivalent to an RTX 5070 Laptop GPU — though Nvidia notably has shown nothing of performance metrics or actual benchmarks. As my colleague Sean Hollister pointed out, it’s basically a GB10 chip from Nvidia’s DGX Spark mini-PC. Nvidia calls it a “superchip” and “the most efficient PC chip ever built,” while Microsoft is billing its Spark-equipped Surface Laptop Ultra as “the most powerful thing we’ve ever made.”

The initial batch of RTX Spark laptops expected for the fall.

Image: Nvidia

 

It should surprise no one that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spent most of his time introducing RTX Spark laptops talking about AI and agents. The majority of the two-hour Nvidia keynote was about agents and “CPUs for agents,” which Huang said is Nvidia’s “new major growth driver.” But beyond the local AI compute that RTX Spark laptops will be capable of, they’re also being aimed at creators. Adobe is even onboard with optimized versions of Photoshop and Premiere.

This is Nvidia, Microsoft, and Windows laptop makers aiming squarely at Apple’s MacBook Pros. It’s not clear yet which MacBook Pro (the M5, M5 Pro, or M5 Max), but these laptops are looking like they’re going to be expensive. The lineups announced so far for the fall includes the Surface Laptop Ultra, Dell XPS 16, Asus ProArt P14 and P16, Lenovo Yoga Pro 9n, MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI Plus, HP OmniBook Ultra and OmniBook X 14, and unnamed models from Acer and Gigabyte. Existing or similar models from this lineup typically start at $2,000 to $2,500 and up (aside from some more modest configs of the OmniBook X).

This isn’t surprising considering the RTX Spark’s 128GB of RAM. If you look at AMD’s Strix Halo APU with 128GB of RAM — the closest analog to the RTX Spark but built on x86 — you have options like Asus’ ROG Flow Z13 for an MSRP of $3,300 and ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition for $3,000. That Nvidia DGX Spark desktop with the GB10 chip the RTX Spark is based on? One of those costs about $4,700. So how much do you think a Spark laptop with 128GB of memory will cost when you also add things like a keyboard, trackpad, battery, and a 15-inch Mini LED touchscreen?

How much do you think Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra will cost with 128GB of unified memory? For reference,

a fully-loaded 15-inch Surface Laptop for Business with Intel Panther Lake and 64GB of RAM costs $4,500.

Image: Microsoft

Nvidia said there will be RTX Spark chips with lower amounts of RAM, but thanks to RAMageddon many laptops with 16GB or 32GB of memory are getting pricier, too — especially as new models come out.

Nvidia could blow the doors off everything else in the performance department when these laptops hit in the fall, but the difference between this and Apple’s M1 moment was that Apple started with the more affordable Mac Mini and MacBook Air, along with the cheapest MacBook Pro. That meant the average buyer was able to feel the benefits right away, and a lot of early sales also meant a lot of early incentive for developers to prioritize adding support for the new chips. It took nearly another year for Apple to scale things up to the M1 Pro and M1 Max with revitalized MacBook Pros.

Nvidia isn’t aiming for an M1 moment as much as it’s trying to skip to an M1 Max or even M1 Ultra moment. And it’s doing so while computers are getting increasingly costly and consumer spending power takes a nosedive. There’s a reason the MacBook Neo rocked the tech world at $599. Does the same happen at $2,499?

Let’s keep in mind which feature Nvidia lists first on its website for the RTX Spark, and which is last.

Image: Nvidia

When these new laptops come out in the fall, there will be four viable chip options across a range of Windows laptops: Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Nvidia. It’s already been nice having three choices: AMD options typically offer great performance at the cost of some battery life, Qualcomm offers the absolute best battery life and standby time but sadly poor games support, and Intel is often a balanced option that maintains full x86 compatibility.

With Nvidia in the mix on Arm, we could get another option with strong battery life and much more graphics power. There’s also at least a chance that gaming on Arm will grow closer to parity with the wide compatibility that x86 Windows gamers are accustomed to. Microsoft and Nvidia getting Riot Games to port their anti-cheat software to Arm for games like Valorant and League of Legends and working with other developers using Easy Anti-Cheat, BattlEye, and Denuvo is a big win for Windows on Arm.

I love seeing more competition, as it’s nice to have all this choice. The latest chips from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm are each great in their own ways. I welcome an Nvidia option that performs well and has exceptional battery life but doesn’t lack games like Macs do. But even if the RTX Spark ushers in sea change, the rising tide of prices is bound to leave many adrift.

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Posted Tuesday 2 June 2026 at 7:30 am AEST (my time).

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On the back of NVIDIA's groundbreaking RTX Spark announcement, Qualcomm SVP of Computing Kedar Kondap has shared his thoughts on the Windows on Arm space heating up in a Q&A session with media hosted at Computex 2026 in Taipei earlier today.

When asked directly what Qualcomm thinks of NVIDIA entering the PC space, Kondap said the following:

"Welcome to the family. We are, you know, we're excited. When you think about the investments that we've made over the last several years, it's a good endorsement of the fact that there is an ecosystem that's growing outside of x86. We invested many years ago, driving the ecosystem and driving the entire platform story, whether it is getting the printers to work, whether it's getting the software apps to be compatible, whether it is getting the docks and peripherals to work, whether it's getting more than 2,500 games to be compatible with Snapdragon. We led the way in driving that ecosystem, and I think this is positive tailwinds for the entire ecosystem. It will tell us how we're all taking the ball forward in the trajectory that we started."

It's clear that Qualcomm views NVIDIA's entry into the PC space as good for the entire industry. While the company is eager to remind people that Snapdragon is the reason Windows on Arm is in a good place today, it's clear that both companies will benefit from each other pushing the Windows on Arm platform forward.

If anything, it's the x86 chipmakers that should be the most concerned. Windows on Arm is no longer an afterthought for the Windows ecosystem, with hundreds of devices now shipping with an Arm SoC thanks to Snapdragon, and with more on the way from NVIDIA, the platform is only getting stronger with each year.

Kondap was also asked about NVIDIA's claims that their Arm SoC won't have any Windows app compatibility concerns, but it's obvious that Qualcomm was caught off guard by this announcement. "Our partnership with Microsoft has gone on for several years. We launched the first Copilot+ PCs together. We launched the first platforms where the Microsoft OS supported the NPU and supported how this distributed computing work across the different cores ... I'm sure the engagement with Microsoft is strong enough where we've worked with them to build this entire ecosystem to make sure that it's compatible with Snapdragon and the architecture."

It's currently unclear how NVIDIA has solved this app compatibility problem. Windows on Arm PCs powered by Snapdragon chips have been relied on Windows 11's Prism emulation layer to run x86 apps, which works most of the time, except for in a few instances where an older app or newer game may be too complex to run optimally. Time will tell if NVIDIA's chips really are immune to x86 app compatibility issues, or if Qualcomm has some catching up to do.

We're back with another issue of our "Apple Rewind" monthly roundup series on Apple Inc., talking about new launches, speculations, and cool rumors you are waiting to hear. In May, Apple improved security in RCS, announced finalists for Apple Design Awards 2026, and shot an entire live sports event on an iPhone 17 Pro. Let's get started.

You can check out our previous issues of the 'Apple Rewind' monthly roundup.

Designed by former Apple designers

The dream of the Apple Car may have faded, but its soul still exists in some form. Ferrari unveiled its first electric vehicle, Luce, whose interior and exterior were designed by LoveFrom. It's a firm founded by former Apple design chief Sir Jony Ive and Marc Newson. Ive reportedly played a major role in Apple Car development before it was scrapped.

Control a wheelchair with Vision Pro

One way Apple is making Vision Pro useful is by enabling users to control power wheelchairs with their eyes. The feature will launch with Tolt and LUCI alternative drive systems in the U.S. and will later expand to additional wheelchair drive systems. It's part of the newly announced accessibility features, including detailed descriptions and natural-language navigation, coming to VoiceOver, Magnifier, Voice Control, and Accessibility Reader.

Intel x Apple

Apple may have abandoned Intel for its chips, but things are turning around in a different way. It was reported early last month that Apple is planning to diversify its manufacturing and is knocking on the doors of Intel and Samsung. It was later reported that Apple's talks with Intel had reached a "preliminary chio-making agreement." It's also said that Intel could start its journey with "base A21 for base iPhone 19/19e or M7/M8 base chip."

Super secure RCS

Apple's latest perk for RCS on iPhone is end-to-end encryption, which arrived in beta in iOS 26.5. A new lock icon will appear on encrypted RCS chats when using supported carriers and Android users on the latest version of Google Messages.

Apple Design Awards 2026

Every year, Apple recognizes apps and games that stand out from the crowd for their design. The company released a list of 36 apps and games it picked as finalists for 2026, and the winners will be announced soon, around the WWDC. Speaking of which, Apple shared the official lineup for WWDC 2026 and said the keynote will stream on June 8 at 10 am PT.

Shot on iPhone

If clicking photos in the space wasn't enough, the iPhone hit a new production milestone. Apple TV streamed the first major live sporting event shot entirely on iPhone 17 Pro. It was an MLS match featuring the LA Galaxy vs. the Houston Dynamo FC. Apple previously used the iPhone 17 Pro to capture select moments from the game and cinematic in-stadium footage during a September 2025 “Friday Night Baseball” matchup.

iPhone rumors

Same Same but different: There are multiple arrows pointing towards the possibility that the upcoming iPhone 18 and iPhone 18e will be similar in multiple ways. The two devices are expected to share several components to reduce manufacturing costs, including the display and processor.

Bigger hole in your pocket: iPhone 18 Pro is expected to arrive in September with an inflated price tag. Part of the blame falls on the variable aperture lens, which reportedly costs 50% more than the lens currently used in the iPhone 17 Pro.

New standout color: For 2026, Dark Cherry is expected to become the flagship color for the Pro models, alongside Black, Silver, and Light Blue.

iPhone Fold can't fold: Apple's first foldable was expected to launch this year, but it seems to have hit a roadblock. A leaker with a reliable past record said that Apple is still struggling with the iPhone Fold’s hinge design. The device reportedly entered trial production, but its reliability and long-term durability consistently fail to meet Apple’s quality control standards.

Vocal for local: Apple wants to run its AI locally on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or even Apple Watch. And for that purpose, a report said the company is using a large version of Google's Gemini model to train a smaller, distilled version that can run locally. While it could help Apple save on data center bills, it remains to be seen how a capacity-constrained model will actually perform in the real world.

OpenAI is exploring legal options

It's widely known that Apple has been struggling to make a mark in the AI world. It partnered with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT with Siri, but things didn't go as planned. It was reported that OpenAI expected the integration to drive subscriptions and profits, but now believes that Apple’s implementation of ChatGPT in Siri confused users and made the features harder to use. OpenAI is reportedly exploring legal options against the iPhone-maker.

Cheaper Apple Music

Apple doesn't offer a free version of Apple Music. However, evidence suggests it might relax things a bit. Several strings (such as "Can't skip any more tracks" and "Premium access required") found in the Apple Music Android beta code hint that Apple is working on a low-cost tier for Apple Music.

Touch ID on Apple Watch

If you're waiting to get Touch ID support on your Apple Watch, you may have to wait longer. A Chinese leaker stated that biometric authentication is not a priority for Apple at the moment because the limited space can be used for other things. The company is focusing on improving battery life and adding more advanced health sensors to upcoming models.

Trip to China

Apple CEO Tim Cook was amongst a large group of businessmen and executives who accompanied President Donald Trump on his visit to China. Apple has a strong presence in China but has recently faced increasing competition from local companies, and it is managing its manufacturing relationships in both countries.

Cool app ideas

Apple showcased the app playgrounds made by four winners at this year's Swift Students Challenge. These Distinguished Winners tried to solve real-world problems while keeping accessibility in mind. Apple previously said it would invite 50 Distinguished Winners to a three-day in-person experience at Apple Park during WWDC 2026.

Billions saved

Apple shared its annual report on App Store safety data, stating that it helped prevent over $2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2025, bringing the total over the last six years to $11.2 billion. Among other numbers, it also prevented the misuse of over 5.4 million stolen credit cards and banned nearly 2 million user accounts from future transactions.

You aren't a robot, but are you a student?

You might have proved that you're not a robot, but Apple now wants you to prove whether you're a student or educator if you want to claim discounts through the Education Store online. Already available for in-store verifications, Apple has expanded its partnership with Unidays to process the documents. Most verification requests will be approved instantly, while manual reviews may take up to 24 hours.

Massive Bluey crossover

The Emmy-winning series Bluey (which your furry friends can also watch) had a massive crossover on Apple Arcade, which was spread across five games: Crossy Road Castle, stitch., puffies., Suika Game+, and Disney Coloring World+. Apple also announced that several new titles are coming to Apple Arcade on June 4.

PowerShell for macOS

Microsoft is finally fixing several longstanding issues with PowerShell on macOS. It will say goodbye to the unidentified developer notifications by getting the PowerShell package and tarball for macOS properly notarized by Apple. Microsoft admitted that it has been sitting on user feedback for a long time.

Catch the game

Apple Sports got a massive expansion last when 90 new countries were added to its supported markets list, bringing the total to 170 countries. The updated app now comes with a clean, scrollable view of matchups and results for each round, allowing fans to easily track a team’s progression. There are improved game cards with visual formations for each team’s starting lineup.

So, these were some of the biggest updates around Apple from the month of May. There will be more issues of the Apple Rewind series in the following months. You can check out other tech updates in our 7 Days and Microsoft Weekly roundups.

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Posted Tuesday 2 June 2026 at 7:28 am AEST (my time).

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We're at the start of a major week for Windows and PCs that will shape the rest of the year and echo into 2027 and beyond. Computex is in full swing and Microsoft Build is about to start.

Microsoft Build may be for developers, but it will showcase some of the most exciting advances of the year for Windows and AI. Microsoft and NVIDIA just unveiled the NVIDIA RTX Spark platform, which centers around the N1x chip and promises to usher in "a new era of PC."

RTX Spark will bring workstation-class performance to Windows on ARM. Creators, gamers, and developers will all benefit from the new platform. At Build 2026, Microsoft will discuss Windows agents (AI assistants that can perform actions on your behalf).

Microsoft will also demonstrate how agents can be used to build modern Windows applications and how AI can help port Windows apps to run natively on ARM. Microsoft is in the middle of a push to make more native applications and to swap several parts of Windows 11 to native code. The tech giant will share lessons learned from that process during Build.

You can watch Nadella's keynote live without having to signing up anywhere. If you want to see more of Microsoft Build, you'll need to register through Microsoft's website.

Tickets to Microsoft Build 2026 are sold out, and they cost $1,099 when they were available. While you can no longer get tickets to attend in person, you can watch the event's keynote and several sessions online.

The session catalog for this year's Build conference includes hundreds of sessions, but many of those are limited to in-person attendees.

Luckily for you, we'll cover all the biggest stories from Build. So make sure to check in throughout the week.

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Posted Tuesday 2 June 2026 at 7:26 am AEST (my time).

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Nvidia already had a big announcement at Computex 2026, revealing its new RTX Spark ARM processors alongside Microsoft. However, it also had something new for gamers that are using its RTX hardware and DLSS tech, and it's spelling good news for those enjoying raytracing in games.

Today, the company unveiled DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, bringing an updated version of its transformer model that promises to deliver even better image quality than before in ray-traced and path-traced games.

"Replacing traditional hand-tuned denoisers, it uses an NVIDIA supercomputer-trained AI network to generate higher-quality pixels in the noisy parts of a ray traced frame where rays were not sampled," says Nvidia about this Ray Reconstruction implementation. "The model unifies denoising and Super Resolution into a single model, intelligently analyzing temporal and spatial engine data to reconstruct sharper, more stable, and higher-fidelity high-resolution images."

While touting a 35% and 20% better compute capability and parameters, respectively, Nvidia says the new tech will have similar performance to the last-generation model. Players should see better lighting and stability in their ray-traced games using this model without using the detail from the original image.

DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction will be available sometime in August 2026. The update will be available across all RTX hardware generations, including the 20, 30, 40, and the latest 50-series Nvidia RTX graphics cards. It's unclear if the performance claims will apply to previous-generation cards too, however.

As for supported titles, at launch, 27 games, including Alan Wake 2, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Cyberpunk 2077, DOOM: The Dark Ages, and PRAGMATA, will be available for using the new Ray Reconstruction model. Outside of games, Nvidia announced that Blender Cycles will be integrating Ray Reconstruction as a new denoiser too, which should improve the interactive viewport's functionality. As Nvidia expands its DLSS tech further at Computex, at the same event, AMD also showed off how far its own upscaling solution, FSR, has come in recent months.

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Posted Tuesday 2 June 2026 at 7:25 am AEST (my time).

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Fourteen years after launching its first Windows on ARM Surface with an NVIDIA chip, a device that quickly turned out to be a big failure, Microsoft is trying once again. Today, at Computex 2026, Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop Ultra, its most powerful Surface to date, powered by NVIDIA's new RTX Spark, the newly announced ARM processor for Windows on ARM.

Microsoft is still keeping the full details under wraps. Still, it says that the Surface Laptop Ultra is the most powerful laptop with an NVIDIA Blackwell RTX graphics and up to 128GB of unified memory, similar to modern MacBooks with their M Series processors. Performance-wise, Microsoft promises up to 1 petaflop of AI performance and RTX 5070-level of GPU performance with up to 20 CPU cores and 6,144 GPU cores. Additionally, Microsoft and NVIDIA boast high CPU efficiency for all-day battery life.

We designed Surface Laptop Ultra from the inside out. Mechanical, electrical, thermal, acoustic, materials, industrial design and software engineers at the table from day one. The internal architecture and the external form built as one system. Our engineers designed it with the same discipline we know you bring to your craft, where every micron matters and every choice is deliberate.

Specs also include a 15-inch mini-LED display with a pixel density of 262 ppi and a maximum brightness of 2,000 nits. You also get a decent set of ports, including one HDMI, USB Type-C, USB Type-A, an SD card reader, a headphone jack, and a big haptic trackpad similar to the recently announced Surface Laptop for Business with Intel's Core Ultra 300 processors. Finally, you will get to choose from two color options: Platinum and Nightfall.

Microsoft is not revealing the Surface Laptop Ultra price or the rest of the specs, including available configurations, storage, and more. The device is launching later this year, alongside other RTX Spark-powered computers from ASUS, Dell, Lenovo, HP, and MSI.

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Posted Monday 1 June 2026 at 5:07 pm AEST (my time).

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This fall, Nvidia will officially become a consumer PC chipmaker like Intel, AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm, putting a complete computing chip — not just graphics — into the very heart of laptops and mini-PCs. After many months of leaks, it’s finally announcing the RTX Spark, the first in a family of chips that will meet or beat the most powerful thin-and-light Windows machines ever, it claims.

Nvidia’s CEO holds up two RTX Spark laptops at Computex.

Image: Nvidia

 

“This is the most efficient PC chip ever built,” says Nvidia senior director of product management Mark Aevermann — without sharing so much as a single statistic or chart to back that up.

The RTX Spark is effectively the same GB10 chip that’s in the DGX Spark, the tiny “personal AI supercomputer” that Nvidia released last year, only now it’s a family of chips instead of just one. The flagship version appears to be spec-to-spec identical with 20 CPU cores, 6,144 GPU cores and 128GB of LPDDR5X memory.

If these specs sound familiar, it’s because they’re the same as the DGX Spark AI mini-PC.

Image: Nvidia

 

But Nvidia says there’ll be lesser versions later, targeting lower prices, and with as little as 16GB of RAM.

Like Apple and Qualcomm’s chips, this Nvidia chip is Arm-based silicon, meaning legacy Windows software made for Intel and AMD’s x86 processors needs to run through an emulation layer to work. That can mean lower performance. But Microsoft has now spent years getting Windows and its Prism emulator ready for Qualcomm and now Nvidia chips, and Nvidia claims its own graphics and AI chops will take the idea further than ever before.

With the power of the RTX Spark, Nvidia boasts, you can render a 90GB 3D scene, edit 12K resolution video, or play the graphically intensive Indiana Jones and the Great Circle at a smooth 100fps at 1440p resolution — all in a 14mm thick laptop without a power cord plugged in.

Nvidia says RTX Spark laptops should have these features.

Image: Nvidia

 

And with up to 128GB of unified memory, tied with AMD’s previous gen Strix Halo parts, an RTX Spark laptop or desktop can also host 120-billion-parameter AI agents, something that Microsoft is seemingly excited about for Windows. At Microsoft’s Build conference this week, it’ll be showing off “new Windows security and containment primitives” that, along with Nvidia’s OpenShell runtime, “allows personal agents to run safely and under full user control.”

Nvidia claims this adds up to “a new personal computing paradigm where AI is the UX” and “users no longer need to master complicated app UIs” because you’ll just talk to your PC instead of needing to use mouse and keyboard.

“Personal AI” for Windows.

Image: Nvidia

 

Nvidia suggested that, for example, a esports streamer could get their PC to automatically turn off their lights, mute their microphone, and change their broadcasting mode when they want to step away and grab dinner. A designer could use Adobe to automatically turn a sketch into a full image, render a 3D model of it, then create a AI video just by asking. A software developer can automatically monitor their GitHub project and autonomously fix QA issues, with the AI agent taking over the laptop’s keyboard and mouse cursor to do “repetitive and boring” tasks.

Nvidia says that with the RTX Spark’s local AI chops, your data stays private and you won’t be burning through tokens to do AI things.

I’m not convinced Nvidia has pieced together the Star Trek computer just yet, but it does seem like the company has a lot of partners on board. Almost every major laptop vendor is accounted for, with eight specific laptops already confirmed for this fall:

Asus ProArt P14 and P16, Dell XPS 16, HP OmniBook X14 and Ultra 16, Lenovo Yoga Pro 9N, Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra, MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI.

Image: Nvidia

 

One of those is from Microsoft, which is putting the Nvidia RTX Spark in a new laptop that Surface boss Andrew Hill tells us is “the most powerful thing we’ve ever made.” It’s called the Surface Laptop Ultra:

Image: Microsoft

 

Those machines are apparently just the start. Aevermann says Nvidia’s partners are already working on over 30 laptops and over 10 desktops, with Acer, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, MSI, and Lenovo all on board for the latter.

“RTX Spark is going to be a family of products that are going to attack a lot of different price points,” Aevermann promises. “The overall market opportunity that we see is quite large.”

Image: Nvidia

 

And between Microsoft and Nvidia’s wrangling efforts, lots of Windows developers are also on board with Arm.

The company points out that “Blender, DaVinci Resolve, Maxon Cinema4D, Maxon Redshift, Topaz Photo, CapCut, Cubase, Bitwig Studio, Affinity by Canva and more all run natively on Arm today, as do the audio, video, MIDI, and control peripherals they require.“

Adobe is on board, with special optimizations for Premiere and Photoshop that take advantage of Nvidia’s new chip.

Even games with anti-cheat that thumbed their nose at Linux and the Steam Deck are now supporting Windows on Arm, too. Microsoft writes that Riot Games is now bringing both League of Legends and Valorant to Windows on Arm. Krafton is bringing PUBG, and Nvidia tells us it’s working with more developers who use Easy Anti-Cheat, BattlEye and Denuvo. (Epic’s Fortnite already came to Windows on Arm last November after an announcement last March.)

Aevermann says “all the top games will run on RTX Spark and provide a great experience.” That’s a pretty high bar to meet!

Here are some more developers Nvidia says it’s working with:

Image: Nvidia

 

There are still many open questions, of course. Neither Nvidia nor Microsoft gave us a clear idea of how much these computers might cost, save that the first batch this fall is “targeting the more premium price points in the market.”

On “all-day battery life,” Aevermann would only say that we should “expect it to be much better than anything you’ve seen before on RTX laptops” and that “you won’t need a charger” if you’re not pushing heavy workloads. The chip scales down to “low, low single-digit” wattage and goes as high as 80 watts, he says. The latter means they could theoretically drain bigger laptop batteries in around an hour at full bore.

On performance, Nvidia didn’t have a single statistic or chart to share, and Aevermann wouldn’t answer questions about how the RTX Spark family stacks up to chips from Intel, AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm, saying Nvidia will have more to share closer to launch. But he does say that depending on the application, it has roughly the graphical power of an RTX 5070 mobile GPU, and that we should expect the CPU portion to be “competitive with anything else out there in the Windows space.”

Nvidia also wouldn’t say whether these chips, made on the TSMC 3 process in partnership with MediaTek, are being manufactured in the US or abroad. That got a no comment.

Nvidia also wouldn’t comment on whether it plans to offer Linux driver support for the RTX Spark, as it’s currently focused on Windows. It wouldn’t comment on putting the Spark in gaming handhelds, like AMD did with its powerful Strix Halo.

But it did answer a question that no, the RTX Spark won’t be paired with additional discrete GPUs — which may limit its potential in desktops beyond the miniature ones, the same way Apple’s Mac Pro became limited when its Arm-based chips broke compatibility with discrete GPUs.

Maybe it doesn’t matter that Nvidia isn’t sharing proof to back up its claims. Back in 2020, Apple didn’t share any proof when it announced Apple Silicon. But when the M1 arrived, it upended our concept of laptop performance overnight.

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Posted Monday 1 June 2026 at 5:06 pm AEST (my time).

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Video length: 10m 41s

AMD warmed us up some leftovers - Computex 2026

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Posted Monday 1 June 2026 at 12:31 pm AEST (my time).

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The MacBook Neo was like throwing a giant boulder into a still, peaceful pond—and we’re still feeling the ripple effects. Thanks to its dramatic $599 price, it tossed Apple into a brand-new laptop demographic. The response from the Windows side has been soft—until now.

Cheaper laptops with only 8 GB of RAM are coming—most notably, the new Dell XPS 13 and Microsoft Surface Laptop 8. Following suit with the MacBook Neo, Dell is making its brand more accessible than ever, using many of the same tricks as Apple. Microsoft? Not so much.

Going Backward

The MacBook Neo was rightly criticized for having only 8 GB of RAM in the base model, as it limits what this otherwise great laptop could do. Then again, this is a $599 laptop. It’s not meant for demanding workloads, and even though I think 16 GB should be the new established baseline, I don’t want laptops to get more expensive than they already are. The memory shortage that’s swept through the entire industry’s supply chain is taking effect—and not even Apple has been able to move forward without making some necessary changes.

Either way, there should be room in the market for a device for people who don’t have heavy computing needs but want something that looks and feels premium. That’s the MacBook Neo to a T. The new Dell XPS 13 takes a nearly identical approach. It's made entirely of aluminum; it's half an inch thick and every bit as premium-looking as XPS laptops always have. It even uses a high-end IPS screen with a higher resolution (2560 x 1600) and refresh rate (120 Hz). Dell even says it goes up to 500 nits of brightness. This is deliberate. It matches the Neo's sharpness and max brightness exactly, and has a faster refresh rate to boot.

Yet it's only $699 (or $599 for students). The XPS 13 makes similar trade-offs as the MacBook Neo. First, it starts with only 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. It also starts with a slower Intel Core 5 processor (note: not Intel Core Ultra). I'll be interested to find how the performance and battery life stack up against the MacBook Neo, but Dell is clearly taking notes from Apple, which used a slower iPhone chip in the Neo instead of an M-series laptop-grade processor.

What's nice about the Dell XPS 13, though, is that you can scale it up appropriately. The MacBook Neo is capped in both storage and memory, but the XPS 13 can be configured up to 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage.

I've been testing a lot of $500 to $600 laptops recently from companies like Acer, Lenovo, and HP, many of which take a more conventional Windows approach to rivaling the MacBook Neo by offering better specs at lower prices. They all have 16 GB of RAM and use more powerful chips, too. But none challenge the MacBook Neo in display quality and chassis materials. That doesn't mean there isn't a place for something like the HP OmniBook 3, but it doesn't play for the same audience as the Dell XPS 13 and MacBook Neo.

The Wrong Direction

Inevitably there would be a company that thinks it can ride on the success of the MacBook Neo without understanding what makes it tick. Last week, Microsoft announced two versions of its Surface Laptop for Business PCs: a higher-end 13.8-inch model and a cheaper 13-inch device. The 13.8-inch model is a more standard refresh, implementing Intel’s new Core Ultra X7 368H Panther Lake chip—and most notably, it still starts with 16 GB of RAM.

The smaller 13-inch model is where things get problematic. Despite its starting price of $1,200, that configuration only comes with 8 GB of RAM. Don’t get too caught up in the price, since business PCs always come with an up charge. The starting RAM is the eyebrow-raising spec. Unlike the new Dell XPS 13, Microsoft isn't tricking this out with a thinner chassis and an upgraded screen—it's just giving you less computing power and calling it good.

And to be fair, this “optional” 8 GB model is coming later this year, separate from the 16 GB and 24 GB versions. But it's hard to imagine Microsoft being willing to sell an 8 GB laptop in 2026 if Apple hadn't paved the way. While there’s no 2025 Surface Laptop 13 for Business for direct comparison, the consumer version of the Surface Laptop 13 started with 16 GB of RAM. This feels like a straight generational downgrade.

We’ll know for sure once Microsoft announces its new consumer Surface Laptop 8th Edition—possibly sometime in June, around its Build developers conference. If the company announces a Surface Laptop 13 with only 8 GB of RAM, that’ll be the final proof that Microsoft is taking the wrong cues from Apple. Even if Microsoft lowers the price to $600 to match Apple, it will be gleefully taking the bait of dropping to 8 GB without realizing what makes the MacBook Neo work.

You can still buy the 2024 Surface Laptop 7th Edition with 16 GB of RAM for under $800, and that remains a really good deal. I really like this laptop and still find myself recommending it. Unfortunately, Microsoft will almost certainly not be selling its next-gen refresh at prices that low. We've already seen many Snapdragon X2 laptops being sold at a premium, while keeping the previous-gen model available at retailers on discount, such as the Asus Zenbook A16.

All of these companies will have to deal with the memory shortage and the challenge of Apple's attack in their own ways. Some companies will be forced to pivot and follow Apple's lead, like the Dell XPS 13, while others will be able to slash prices and stick to their guns. Either way, diversity is one of the greatest strengths of the Windows ecosystem, and the range of responses will give laptop buyers lots more options at this price. And this is only the beginning. On Thursday, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon C, an even lower-priced chip designed for Windows laptops starting at $300. Strap in, because the competition is really about to heat up.

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Posted Monday 1 June 2026 at 12:29 pm AEST (my time).

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Following years of algorithmic processing-based upscaling, AMD's FSR technology graduated to the machine learning (ML) phase in January 2025. Using ML-trained AMD EPYC and Instinct accelerators, this version, dubbed FSR 4, launched with support for just 30 games in the beginning.

Today, AMD revealed during Computex 2026 that this latest generation of FSR tech has now reached over 300 officially supported games, marking a significant growth trajectory since its initial launch. Titles like Cyberpunk 2077, GTA V, Mafia: The Old Country, Black Myth: Wukong, and many more have received updates with support for FSR 4 during that time.

AMD has been delivering major upgrades for FSR 4 in recent months too. The March-released FSR 4.1 update brought along Ray Regeneration for upgrading raytraced effects, as well as sharper upscaling, better Ultra Performance FPS boosts, and more.

However, one downside of the fourth-generation FSR release has been its exclusivity for AMD's latest Radeon hardware, the RX 9000 series. While this is useful for anyone jumping into AMD's Radeon camp to use its latest and greatest hardware, like the newly announced RX 9070 GRE global launch, AMD leaving behind previous-generation graphics cards hasn't been a very popular decision among fans.

However, AMD recently announced this is soon changing. AMD's RDNA 3 Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards are getting the FSR 4.1 tech later this year, followed by RDNA 2 RX 6000-series cards in 2027.

With FSR 4's growth accelerating amongst gamers, AMD is now looking into implementing it into its professional-focused hardware too. At Computex, the company also announced today that a version of the tech dubbed Radeon AI FSR PRO is incoming. Not many details about this venture have been revealed yet. AMD has only said that it will arrive with a driver update for professional applications with Ray Regeneration and Radeon AI Pro R97000 certifications.

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Posted Monday 1 June 2026 at 11:58 am AEST (my time).

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At Computex 2026 today, alongside new X3D desktop processors and Radeon RX 9070 GRE, AMD has introduced a new memory overclocking tech as it is expanding its EXPO feature. For those who may not be familiar, EXPO (short for EXtended Profiles for Overclocking) is essentially AMD's version of Intel XMP which allows easier memory overclocking by loading pre-set stable overclocking profiles. Previously Team Red relied on tweaked XMP versions called AMP or A-XMP, but in 2022, EXPO made an entry.

The new EXPO technology is called EXPO ULL, which stands for "Ultra Low Latency." As the name suggests, this new feature will enable support for even lower CL (CAS Latency) DDR5. Obviously there will be some performance benefits, and AMD suggests it is going to be significant. Compared to a stock (JEDEC spec) speed module (DDR5-5600 CL40), the company claims a 13% average FPS improvement with the new EXPO ULL 6000 MT/s kit running at CL28, which is an additional 4 percentage point gain over normal EXPO.

The 1% lows or the 99%-ile frame rate, which is often a more crucial metric that's meant to capture smoothness of gameplay, is said to see an even bigger improvement of 15% over JEDEC speed using ULL, which is again a 4 percentage point advantage over EXPO alone.

These tests were done on AMD's Zen 5-based octa-core Ryzen 9700X. Speaking of the CPU, perhaps a bit ironically, the new 7700X3D, which AMD today launched alongside EXPO ULL, won't really benefit much from this, as 3D V-cache CPUs already have an on-board low-latency chunk of L3 cache.

This is also something AMD highlighted as one of the two major benefits for purchasing X3D SKUs, considering the high RAM prices in the current market.

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Posted Monday 1 June 2026 at 11:56 am AEST (my time).

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Last year, mid-2025, AMD expanded its desktop RX 9000 series graphics card lineup with the launch of the 9060 series with Radeon RX 9060 XT 8GB and 16GB. However, this meant there was a gap in its lineup wherein the Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti could squeeze in between the 9060 series and the higher 9070 series. Interestingly, AMD already had an answer for this in the form of the 9070 GRE, at least in some parts of the world like China.

In terms of how it stacked up, we had estimated that the RX 9070 GRE would land somewhere between the 9060 XT and the 9070, leaning more so towards the latter. As such, it would have been able to easily take on the GeForce 5060 Ti and could have been especially dominant in rasterization scenarios and would be trading blows during ray tracing.

Today at Computex 2026, alongside new X3D processors, AMD has finally brought the 9070 GRE to the USA as well as several other parts of the world. The company has shared performance numbers for it versus the Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti. In normal rasterization, which AMD has labeled simply as gaming, at 1440p, the company claims up to 40% better showing. Big advantages are expected in titles like Monster Hunter Wilds and Resident Evil Requiem. The closest results are in games like Arc Raiders and Overwatch 2. These are relatively lighter compared to other AAA titles.

In ray-tracing next, AMD actually touts close to similar gains as it promises up to 30% better performance. This is in Assassins' Creed Shadows. Other titles like Marvel's Spider-Man 2 could also see an impressive split between the Red team and the Green team's cards.

Overall, AMD says the new RX 9070 GRE delivers 22% better performance on average against the 5060 Ti, and aside from that, the company is also promising 26% better value than Nvidia's GPU. In order to calculate this value, AMD considered a $569 price point for the 5060 Ti 16GB, whereas it has priced its own 9070 GRE at $549. The company has used the lowest available pricing data based on Newegg.

Here are the specifications of the new AMD RX 9070 GRE compared to the other 9000 series cards

To know how it stacks up against the competition as well as the other AMD cards, check out our full review that comes out tomorrow.

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Posted Monday 1 June 2026 at 11:53 am AEST (my time).

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Following the release of its 3D V-cache CPUs for professional users in the form of the new 9965X3D and 9755X3D, AMD is once again back to releasing X3D chips for gamers. At its Computex 2026 keynote today alongside the Radeon RX 9070 GRE, Team Red also unveiled a couple of desktop processors for both sockets AM4 and AM5.

First up, we have the Ryzen 7 7700X3D for socket AM5. This is part of the Ryzen 7000 series (Raphael) lineup that's based on the Zen 4 microarchitecture. This part slots under the already popular Ryzen 7 7800X3D, known for its gaming prowess despite not belonging to the latest 9000 series.

As expected, spec-wise it is quite similar to the 7800X3D barring the core clocks. While the 7800X3D can boost up to 5 GHz from its nominal base of 4.2 GHz, the 7700X3D can reach 4.5 GHz from its base clock of 4 GHz. In the real world though, this may not mean much unless you set out to track FPS or data using performance tools.

If you notice in the above spec table, we have also listed the default memory speeds supported by the chips across various DIMM configurations. While fast, low-latency memory is generally recommended for AMD's CPUs, which is also why the company unveiled the new EXPO ULL feature, it's not a necessity in the case of X3D processors, thanks to the blob of L3 that's already on board.

Aside from the 7700X3D, AMD also unveiled the new Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition. While the 5800X3D itself is not a decade old (it was launched back in 2022), the company is celebrating 10 years of AM4 socket life with this new chip. Whether you like AMD or not, this is a very impressive feat, considering its main rival Intel has typically only stuck to one socket for just a couple of generations (around two to four years).

As such, from time to time, AMD has released new chips like the Ryzen 7 5700X3D and the Ryzen 5 5500X3D. Perhaps a little surprisingly, the specifications of this new 5800X3D have remained unaltered from the original SKU. As such, performance should match it.

Regardless, AMD has provided numbers against the Ryzen 7 2700X (Zen+), 3700X (Zen 2), and 5800X (Zen 3 without 3D V-cache). Data versus Intel's 14900K has also been provided with both running DDR4-3600. It has to be said here that the Intel 14900K Raptor Lake chips also support faster DDR5 memory.

A rather interesting bit here is the pricing, as the more capable and newer 7700X3D AM5 part has been pegged lower than the 5800X3D, with the former coming in with an SEP (suggested etail price) of $329, while the latter carries a price tag of $349. While the AM4 part will be available from June 25, 2026, the AM5 CPU will be on shelves from July 16, 2026.

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Posted Monday 1 June 2026 at 11:50 am AEST (my time).

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Earlier this week Microsoft teased that a "new era of PC" was going to be upon us very soon. The company quickly ended any speculation regarding a possible next gen OS like "Windows 12" though we soon started to get an idea of what it was when Nvidia also put up the same teaser post on its social media handles.

Following this, we began getting more concrete evidence of new Windows on Arm laptops that would be powered by Nvidia CPU, specifically the company's new N1X and N1 processors. These would include new Surface devices as well as traditional Windows laptops from the likes of OEMs like Dell, Lenovo and more.

Although we had a rough idea about the might of the Nvidia N1X series, a new report from VideoCardz has revealed the purported detailed specifications of the SKUs right ahead of the launch.

According to the leak, the flagship N1X configuration will feature a 10+10 core CPU setup based on Arm's Cortex-X925 and Cortex-A725 designs, paired with a 48 SM (Steaming Multiprocessor) Blackwell GPU packing 6144 CUDA cores. Nvidia is also said to be preparing a slightly cut-down 9+9 core variant with 40 SMs, bringing the CUDA core count down to 5120.

Simply by SM/CUDA core count, the full N1X is about equivalent to the RTX 5070 while the cut-down SKU is faster than the 5060 Ti. What could be the limiting factor though is the memory bandwidth.

Interestingly, both N1X models are reportedly designed for a 45W to 80W power envelope, putting them firmly in premium performance laptop territory. The chips are also said to support up to 128GB of LPDDR5X memory through a 16-channel memory interface, alongside 12 PCIe 5.0 lanes and five PCIe 4.0 lanes for storage and expansion.

The standard N1 lineup appears to be aimed at more mainstream devices. One variant is tipped to feature a 12-core CPU paired with a 20 SM GPU containing 2560 CUDA cores, while another could ship with a 10-core CPU and a 16 SM graphics configuration for 2048 CUDA cores. These chips are reportedly configured for lower power operation between 18W and 45W, while supporting between 8GB and 64GB of LPDDR5X memory.

Storage support is also said to differ between the two families. While N1X systems are expected to accommodate up to three M.2 SSDs, the more affordable N1 platform may be limited to two drives. If accurate, the specifications suggest Nvidia is targeting everything from thin-and-light AI PCs to high-performance creator and gaming laptops with its first major Windows-on-Arm push.

The report further claims that the full-fat N1X configuration mirrors the GB10 Superchip found inside Nvidia's DGX Spark platform, something that aligns with previous rumors surrounding the company's Arm-based PC ambitions. With the official announcement expected imminently, it remains to be seen which of these configurations will actually make it to retail devices and how they will stack up against offerings from Qualcomm, AMD and Intel.

Source: VideoCardz

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Posted Monday 1 June 2026 at 7:38 am AEST (my time).

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JayzTwoCents (4.32m subscribers)

June 1, 2026

Video length: 29m 15s

This week in news we cover more AI but this time, large corporations say its too expensive to buy the Tokens! NVIDIA's Jensen Huang finally acknowledges that GPU smuggling is real and it should be stopped.... You seriously cant make this up!

00:00 News Show Episode 2!

01:27 NVIDIA Doesn't Need Gamers Anymore

09:27 Chinese RAM and GPUs

14:29 AI Too Expensive for MSFT and Uber

21:27 Unreal Engine 6 Revealed With Rocket League Update

22:30 Witcher 3 Gets New Expansion After 12 Years

23:12 Destiny 2 Updates End In June

26:06 007 Last-Minute Denuvo Drop

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Posted Monday 1 June 2026 at 7:33 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of May) 2,092

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7 Days is a weekly roundup of picks of what's been happening in the world of technology - written with a dash of humor, a hint of exasperation, and an endless supply of (black) coffee.

This week's highlights include new Ferrari car designed by former Apple designers, $300 Windows laptops could get a major boost, more planes to get Starlink internet, and Samsung getting into trouble. Let's get started.

You can check out the recent issues of the 7 Days weekly roundup here.

NVIDIA-powered Windows laptops

NVIDIA is widely known for its GPUs for gaming or productivity, including AI. However, the company has been planning to enter the desktop PC processor market. The first-ever Windows laptops fitted with an NVIDIA chip could arrive as soon as next week, including those from Microsoft Surface and Dell. Details around a new XPS laptop powered by the NVIDIA N1X chip were also leaked.

Paid WhatsApp is here

Meta launched paid subscription tiers for WhatsApp ($2.99/mo), Instagram ($3.99/mo), and Facebook ($3.99/mo), which are sold separately. WhatsApp Plus lets you set custom app themes and ringtones, install premium stickers, pin more chats, and customize additional options. However, none of these plans affect the apps' core functionality, making them optional purchases. Moreover, these plans are setting the stage for a unified subscription brand called Meta One, which will bring AI features and other offerings.

$300 Windows laptops

Apple took the PC industry by storm earlier this year by launching the $599 MacBook Neo. Microsoft and Qualcomm have teamed up now to make a new chip, called Snapdragon C, for ultra-cheap Windows on ARM laptops priced as low as $300. While the market already has Windows laptops in this price range, Qualcomm promises quieter operations at low temperatures, all-day battery life, and "responsive performance." There are tradeoffs, and it remains to be seen whether these devices can match up to Apple.

ChatGPT used by hackers

Security researchers found a new campaign that delivers infostealer malware through legitimate domains, tagged "LLMShare." They use ChatGPT to quickly generate convincing fake download pages and then share a link that tricks people into downloading malware.

Car designed by former Apple designers

The dream of the Apple Car faded in the past, but a new car may have got its essence. Ferrari unveiled its first electric car and its first five-seater, which it calls Luce. It was designed in collaboration with LoveFrom, a design firm led by former Apple design chief Johny Ive. Ferrari Luce will arrive in Europe later this year, with a starting price of 550,000 euros (roughly $640,000), followed by a US launch in Q2 2027.

Samsung opened a Pandora's box

Some drama unfolded under Samsung's roof recently. The South Korean giant finally decided to pay nearly $26.6 billion in bonuses to chip workers following a strike and negotiation. Much to the company's surprise, its angered non-chip employees have filed an injunction to stop the vote on the agreement.

500 aircraft are getting Starlink

American Airlines is the latest carrier to bring Elon Musk's satellite internet onboard across more than 500 aircraft, including the new Airbus A321XLR and A321neo. Starting from Q1 2027, people traveling on domestic and short-haul international routes will be able to avail the high-speed Wi-Fi service to have seamless video streaming, online gaming, and other high-bandwidth activities.

Don't call it AI slop

Spotify is expanding into AI-generated music, and its co-CEO Alex Norström defended the move by pitching the upcoming features as "legal" and "controlled" alternatives to unregulated music. The music industry is not particularly happy with generative AI right now, with many calling it "slop." Spotify is also taking action to remove content that mimics artists without permission.

In other news, Spotify is expanding its catalog of spoken-word audio with a new "Narrated Articles" feature. It has curated a collection of over 650 long-form magazine articles sourced from Rolling Stone, Vogue, WIRED, GQ, Variety, Pitchfork, and, of course, its own in-house team.

Dropbox CEO steps down

Drew Houston has run Dropbox for over 19 years as the co-founder and CEO before announcing this week that he will step down from his position. Ashraf Alkarmi is now the co-CEO of Dropbox, who will work alongside Houston during the transition period.

Waiver for open-source

Lawmakers in California exempted open-source projects (such as including Linux distros like Debian, Arch, Ubuntu, and Mint) from its age verification law that mandates OS-level checks. This happened after a massive backlash from open-source advocates, who warned that the original language would ruin decentralized developer infrastructure and community-driven platforms can't track user ages without violating basic privacy values.

Our Features

Our coffee-powered team published a platter of editorials, opinion posts, and guides. Check them out:

• Big Tech is turning you into a digital tenant, but there is a way to evict them

• AI is causing a massive headache for Linux and laying the groundwork for legal issues

This week in software news

Catch up on some of the latest software news updates that arrived throughout the week:

NVIDIA Control Panel discontinued: The company is moving features over to the NVIDIA app, and good old Control Panel has finally retired after 20 years of service. You can continue using it if you still have it on your device; however, a fresh driver installation will remove it.

Fedora 42 is no more: The major release from April 2025 reached its end of life after a slight delay, meaning it will no longer get any new features or security updates. It's now recommended that you upgrade to Fedora 43, which will get updates for one month after the release of Fedora 45.

Discord for Windows on ARM: The instant messaging platform set its foot on Windows on ARM as a native app. While the app wasn't officially announced by the time of writing, it was available for download on the company's website.

AlmaLinux 10.2: The latest version is called "Lavender Lion," which brings Btrfs boot support, x86-64-v2 architecture options, re-enabled frame pointers, and native SPICE support for client applications alongside i686.

NVIDIA driver 610.47: The freshly-baked NVIDIA driver for desktop and laptop GPUs introduced Game-Ready optimizations for several new titles, including 007 First Light, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, EA SPORTS F1 25: 2026 Season Pack, and World of Tanks: HEAT.

Intel Arc graphics driver: The latest version 32.0.101.8824 also added support for 007: First Light and addressed issues across multiple Call of Duty titles and Resident Evil: Requiem.

COSMIC Desktop 1.0.14: The latest release includes support for non-Latin keyboards, text previews in Files, IME support in Terminal, and dozens of bug fixes across the desktop.

Samsung ships HBM4E: It has begun shipping HBM4E samples to global customers running massive AI networks. The new 12-layer chips achieve speeds of up to 16Gbps with "improved energy efficiency and thermal performance."

Euro-Office is going stable: The stable release of Nextcloud's "European sovereign alternative" is set to arrive on desktop on June 9, with mobile apps planned for later.

Firefox 151.0.2: It's the latest big-fix update for Firefox 151 to resolve issues with Split View unexpectedly closing tabs, crashes on Windows with certain input methods, and more.

This week in hardware news

Catch up on some of the latest software news updates that arrived throughout the week:

Sound Blaster AE-X: Creative launched a new internal sound card for audiophiles, priced at around $211. It comes with 32-bit audio, an ESS SABRE DAC, and dedicated headphone amplification to eliminate desktop clutter.

Steam price hike: Having dreams of the Steam Deck OLED will burn a bigger hole in your pocket when you buy it. While new units are back in stock, you'll have to pay up to $300 extra depending on the model.

$6,880 smartphone: Vertu ALPHAFOLD is a new foldable smartphone that can make even the maxed out iPhone 17 Pro Max look cheap. Powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, it comes with a massive 6,500 mAh battery, 65W fast charging, triple camera setup, and a built-in AI agent.

New Intel Arc G3 chips: The silicon giant unveiled two new models, Intel Arc G3 and Arc G3 Extreme. These handheld gaming chips feature Xe3 graphics, AI upscaling, efficiency, and advanced connectivity support.

Acer Swift Air 14: It's a new budget Windows laptop that wants to compete with the MacBook Neo. Priced at $699, it features a premium build, a 120Hz Full HD display, and weighs 1.25 kg, which is nearly identical to the Neo.

This week in Google News

Catch up on some of the latest Google news updates that arrived throughout the week:

Record fine in EU: Google could end up paying hundreds of millions of dollars if it fails to implement European Commission's demands following an antitrust case that started last year. However, EU regulators are more interested in making Google comply than in imposing fines.

Share stuff from Gemini: Google is bringing Gemini and Drive closer by adding new sharing and collaboration features. Workspace users will be able to share chats, canvases, and generated media from the Gemini app securely via Google Drive.

New features in Search: The search giant announced that Preferred Sources are now available in AI Overviews and AI Mode. AI responses will display carousels for developing topics, along with a small text summary, and more web article links will get the "Highly Cited" label.

YouTube on AI videos: YouTube is already getting flooded with AI-generated content. That's why it has decided to automatically detect content and slap an AI-generated label. YouTube creators already have a manual option to label their AI-generated content.

This week in Apple News

Catch up on some of the latest Apple news updates that arrived throughout the week:

Vocal for local: A new report suggests Apple is using a large version of Google Gemini to train a distilled, smaller version that can run locally on iPhones, Macs, and even Apple Watches. Some official details are expected at WWDC 2026, and it remains to be seen how capable the on-device model would be, given the current state of open-source local models.

iPhone 18 colors: Four new iPhone 18 dummies surfaced online, featuring the rumored colors Apple might choose this time. Dark Cherry is said to be the flagship iPhone color, alongside Black, Silver, and Light Blue.

Expensive iPhone: Apple could increase the starting price of its Pro iPhones this year due to rising component costs. It's said that the variable aperture lens Apple has planned for iPhone 18 Pro could cost 50% more.

Low-cost Apple Music: You might not believe your ears, but Apple seems to be working on an alternative, lower-cost tier for its music streaming service, possibly to attract more users. As of now, Apple doesn't offer a free tier for users, unlike Spotify.

This week in AI news

Catch up on the latest artificial intelligence news updates that arrived throughout the week:

Anthropic beats OpenAI: Anthropic surpassed the ChatGPT maker in both revenue and valuation. Thanks to a surge in Claude usage and a new $65 billion Series H funding round, Anthropic reached a $965 billion post-money valuation and $47 billion in revenue.

Claude Opus 4.8: Anthropic announced its new flagship model across Claude endpoints and the Claude API for developers. Featuring improvements across coding, agentic tasks, reasoning, and knowledge work, Claude Opus 4.8 offers a price cut for the Fast mode.

Massive Codex update: OpenAI pushed a major update to the Codex app on Windows (version 26.527), bringing two features previously available on Mac: computer use and remote access via mobile devices.

Linus Torvalds loses patience: The drama around AI-generated Linux code continues. It appears that Linus Torvalds is losing patience with AI-generated code fixes bloating the Linux kernel. He complained again that many of the "fixes" being submitted don't really address regressions and shouldn't be submitted late in the kernel cycle.

This week in Microsoft News

A new Windows 11 experimental build introduced a modular Start menu design with the ability to resize it and toggle specific parts on or off. HP revealed that around 30% of its PC customers still run Windows 10 months after support ended. Paint.NET will soon be accessible from the "right" place, which is the pain.net domain.

You can check out Taras's freshly baked Microsoft Weekly roundup to catch up on all the interesting stories this week.

This week in science news

Catch up on some of the science and out-of-this-world updates that we covered throughout the week:

Human extinction warning: A new study warns humans could face extinction within a few centuries. This internal collapse could be fueled by falling birth rates, high costs of raising children, and rising infertility.

Spacetime Whirlpool found: Scientists finally captured the first clear evidence of a swirling vortex in spacetime that Albert Einstein predicted almost 100 years ago. A spinning black hole was caught twisting space and time around itself like a whirlpool.

Neutrino mystery deepens: The mystery of the elusive neutrino finally has an answer. By tracking its bizarre behavior, researchers discovered a surprising answer about how these particles gain mass and shape our universe.

Super material torture tested: Strontium Ruthenate has puzzled scientists for decades regarding its superconducting properties. They put the material to a torture test again, but major quantum mysteries and contradictions remain unsolved.

This week in gaming news

Catch up on some of the latest gaming and virtual world updates that arrived throughout the week:

Unreal Engine 6 is real: Epic Games surprised fans by unveiling the next generation engine. However, it skipped the Unreal Engine 5, which people were waiting for. An upcoming Rocket League upgrade teases the engine's powers in a short clip.

$1 billion funding: Cloud Imperium Games' Star Citizen crossed the billion-dollar mark on its funding tracker. This happened just six months after the game breezed past the $900 million mark.

Xbox personalization: Microsoft is rolling out personalization-focused changes, such as displaying the exact model name when a controller is configured, customizing console color scheme in detail, staying updated on outage notifications directly from the console.

What else in gaming?

The latest issue of Pulasthi's Weekend PC Game Deals curates several exciting games on sale this week. On the Epic Games Store this week, you can grab copies of Lonestar and Calico for free until June 4.

The latest Xbox Free Play Days bring Gears of War: Reloaded, Dying Light, Formula Legends, and High On Life 2. Meanwhile, NVIDIA's cloud gaming service got support for 007 First Light, World of Tanks: HEAT, Starminer, and other titles.

That said, here are some more stories from the gaming world:

• Over a decade after launch, The Witcher 3 is getting a new story expansion
• Infinity Ward aims to "go back to the roots of Call of Duty" for Modern Warfare 4
• Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition is now available on macOS
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 announced, ditches last-gen consoles and expands to Switch 2
• No Man's Sky gets alien Death Stars for players to defeat together

So, these were some of the biggest tech news and other updates from this week. There will be more issues of our 7 Days series in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned. You can also support Neowin by registering for a free member account or subscribing to extra member benefits, along with an ad-free tier option.

Have a great weekend!

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Posted Monday 1 June 2026 at 7:30 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of May) 2,092

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This week's news recap is here, with Microsoft teasing a new era of PCs, Qualcomm announcing new chips for $300 Windows laptops, Windows 11 getting a big Start menu upgrade, gaming news, and a lot more.

Quick links:

1. Windows 10 and 11
2. Windows Insider Program
3. Updates are available
4. Reviews are in
5. Gaming news

Windows 11 and Windows 10

Here, we talk about everything happening around Microsoft's latest operating system in the Stable channel and preview builds: new features, removed features, controversies, bugs, interesting findings, and more. And, of course, you may find a word or two about older versions.

Microsoft released the May 2026 non-security update for Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2. KB5089573 was released with the promising low-latency mode to improve performance, shared audio support, multi-app camera support, and other feature upgrades and quality improvements. The update is optional, and everything it has to offer will be bundled in the June 2026 Patch Tuesday update. By the way, Microsoft resolved installation issues with this month's Patch Tuesday update, so you should be able to install KB5089549 successfully.

Microsoft and Qualcomm are making Windows laptops more affordable. This week, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon C, a low-end processor for Windows on ARM devices targeting the $300 price range. Laptops and tablets with this processor promise quiet operation at low temperatures, all-day battery life, and "responsive performance." In addition, these chips feature built-in Neural Processing Units (NPUs) for on-device AI. However, it seems that potential buyers will have to accept plenty of compromises, as one of the first laptops with the Snapdragon C has "up to 8GB of RAM" in its spec sheet, potentially hinting at a 4GB or 6GB RAM configuration.

Qualcomm is not the only one launching new chips. Microsoft published a teaser of "a new era of PC," with NVIDIA doing the same on X. Next week, at Computex 2026, we should see the debut of NVIDIA's N1 processors for desktop computers. Build 2026 is also kicking off, but do not expect to see Windows 12 there. And while Microsoft promises a new era, according to HP, plenty of users still enjoy the good old Windows 10.

Did you know that Windows 11 and 10 have a unified folder with all the tools available out of the box? This week, Usama Jawad shared his joy of discovering the Windows Tools folder, which lists every single tool for customizing and adjusting settings in Windows. I will chip in with a tip: do not go there during the night. This folder remains hideously unoptimized when Windows is in dark mode. Another useful tool for a Windows PC is a TaskSlinger, a third-party replacement for the stock Task Manager.

Finally, check out this neat File Explorer concept designed by Zee-Al-Eid Ahman, who suggests a few interesting upgrades for the stock file manager in Windows 11.

Windows Insider Program

Here is what Microsoft released for Windows Insiders this week:

Updates are available

This section covers software, firmware, and other notable updates (released and coming soon) delivering new features, security fixes, improvements, patches, and more from Microsoft and third parties.

This week, Mozilla released Firefox 151.0.2, another bug-fixing update for the recently launched version 151. The update packs ten important fixes and patches to address Split View issues, crashes on Windows with certain input methods, and other bugs.

Microsoft had a bunch of big Copilot updates this week. For one, the company revealed a major Microsoft 365 Copilot redesign with performance improvements. Also, Copilot Health, a wellness-focused flavor of Microsoft's AI, is now available in the United States.

May 2026 is now over, which means it is time to recap the new features and changes in Microsoft's apps and services, including Excel, Teams, and more. Speaking of Teams, the service is getting a new efficiency mode, and a couple of updates in the Admin Center revealed more details about it.

Here are other updates and releases you may find interesting:

• Microsoft 365 Copilot Notebooks gets new tools to turn documents into mind maps and more

• Microsoft's MAI-Image-2.5 enters Arena's top 3 with better image generation

• Microsoft is finally bringing the All Accounts view to Outlook on Windows

• Microsoft confirms Domain Controller bug in Windows Server 2016

• Microsoft 365 Copilot clears AI security audit once again

• Microsoft just made it possible to use VS Code completely offline with local AI

• OneDrive is getting a powerful file rename feature soon

   

Here are the latest drivers and firmware updates released this week:

• Intel 32.0.101.8824 with optimizations for 007 First Light and all sorts of crashes and corruption fixes.
• NVIDIA 610.47 with optimizations for 007 First Light, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, and more. With the release of this driver, NVIDIA has officially retired the legacy Control Panel. The company claims that the new NVIDIA App now has every feature and setting from its old-school counterpart, and future drivers will no longer include it.

Reviews are in

Here is the hardware and software we reviewed this week

This week, Steven Parker reviewed the GEEKOM A9 Max 2026 mini PC with a dual-channel RAM setup. The device is not new to Neowin, as we have already reviewed it, but the thing is that our initial review was done with a PC running in a single-channel mode. The latest review shows how an incorrect memory setup leads to massive performance losses, crippling the processor and its potential.

Pulasthi Ariyasinghe published his Corsair Cove preview. This pirate city builder has impressive scale and logistics. Check out his early impressions here, and stand by for a future release with more details and additional content, such as a full campaign, multiple base island options, a massive map to explore, dozens more buildings and ships, and more.

On the gaming side

Learn about upcoming game releases, Xbox rumors, new hardware, software updates, freebies, deals, discounts, and more.

CD Projekt RED dropped some great news for fans of The Witcher 3. A decade after the initial launch, the studio dropped a new story expansion called Songs of the Past. It offers a new adventure, but the exact details remain unknown. What is known is that CD Projekt RED is increasing the game's hardware requirements, so check them out here.

Activision and Microsoft announced the next installment of Call of Duty. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 has been announced with a trailer, campaign, and multiplayer details. There is also a release date and some bad news for those still playing games on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Unfortunately, the next Call of Duty is not going to previous-gen consoles, even though the studio promises to "go back to the roots."

The Epic Games Store is giving away two games this week. One is Lonestar, a sci-fi roguelike where you hunt criminals across the universe. The second is Calico, a community simulator where you rebuild and manage a cat cafe. As usual, you can find more deals and specials in our weekly Weekend PC Game Deals series.

Bad news for those who want to purchase the Steam Deck: Valve restocked its supply and announced a major price increase for the handheld console. Now, depending on the configuration, the Steam Deck is up to $300 more expensive, casting major doubts on the upcoming Steam Machine's affordability.

NVIDIA GeForce NOW is getting new games, as usual. This week's update includes 007 First Light, World of Tanks: HEAT, Romestead, Starminer, BeamNG.drive, Alchemy Factory, and more.

Other gaming news includes the following:

• Star Citizen crowdfunding reaches $1 billion, gaining the last $100 million in six months

• No Man's Sky gets alien Death Stars for players to defeat together

• Epic Games unveiled Unreal Engine 6

• Microsoft delays Fable out of 2026 to give it a dedicated "moment to shine" and avoid GTA VI

• More Xbox console personalization options and an outage notification are now in testing

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Posted Sunday 31 May 2026 at 7:22 am AEST (my time).

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Gamers Nexus (2.61m subscribers)

May 30, 2026

Video length: 46m 58s

In this hardware news recap, we talk plans for Computex, AI companies getting booed at commencement speeches, NVIDIA's vibecoded drivers striking again with security vulnerabilities (but at least they're patched), RAM companies taking on debt to buy supply, and more. The memory situation in particular is concerning, as RAM module makers taking debt means consumers will pay for that debt and interest in retail prices, driving them up further.

00:00 - Recap for the Week

01:59 - GN at Computex

07:39 - Keep Booing These Parasites

14:17 - NVIDIA's Vibecoded Drivers Fail Again

17:42 - RAM Companies Take Debt to Buy RAM

23:11 - US Security Agency Leaks Passwords

28:53 - ASUS Starts Selling RAM

30:39 - PlayStation Increases Plus Pricing

33:50 - Government Proposes EV Fee

40:17 - China Constructs Data Center Under the Sea

44:41 - Steam Controller Has Wilhelm Scream

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Posted Sunday 31 May 2026 at 7:19 am AEST (my time).

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The patch makes several changes, including reducing the starting workers from 12 to 8, and introduces a range of balance adjustments and quality of life improvements across all three races. It also includes a number of bug fixes.

According to Blizzard, the focus of the update is to extend the early and mid-game experience, allowing players to remain competitive on one to three bases for a longer period.

The goal is to make non-warped Gateway play more practical and to increase strategic options for Zerg, Terran, and Protoss.

Economic Changes in StarCraft 2 Patch 5.0.16

The most noticeable change affects the beginning of each match:

• Starting workers have been reduced from 12 to 8.
• The default resources on large mineral patches are now 1,600, down from 1,800, while small patches have increased from 900 to 1,200.
• The total default minerals per base have gone up from 10,800 to 11,200.
• Vespene Geysers now provide 2,500 resources instead of 2,250, raising the overall gas per base from 4,500 to 5,000.
• Additionally, the harvest return for rich Vespene gas has decreased from 8 to 6.

These changes mean that players need to make more cautious build decisions early in the game, which emphasizes scouting and extends the time before armies reach their maximum size.

Race-Specific Balance Changes for Zerg, Terran, and Protoss

Each race has received significant adjustments. Zerg changes include reduced supply from Hatchery, Lair, and Hive, from six to four; slower creep spread; increased damage from Spore Crawlers against biological units; cheaper Carapace upgrades; an auto-attack weapon for Infestors; and extended Microbial Shroud range from nine to twelve. The Viper's Abduct ability can now target sieged Siege Tanks.

Terran changes involve lowering Command Center supply from 15 to 13; redesigning the Ghost to use three supply, have 100 health, deliver 20 base damage, and a range of seven, with revised Steady Targeting that no longer cancels on damage; and updating subgroup priorities in the Medivac.

Protoss adjustments include moving Warpgate Research from the Cybernetics Core to the Gateway, reducing warp-in time to three seconds, introducing a fifty-fifty transform cost for Warpgate conversion, and updating cooldowns for Gateway and Warpgate units. The damage of High Templar Psi Storm has been reduced from 110 to 100.

Bug Fixes, PTR Status, and How to Try StarCraft 2 Patch 5.0.16

The patch includes a comprehensive list of bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements that address visual indicators, animation timing, unit selection behavior, and audio cues.

Key updates include:

• Active Creep Tumors now take precedence over inactive ones during selection, Mule Repair being set to auto-cast by default
• Xel'naga towers are now selectable through the Fog of War.
• Additionally, there are multiple visual and audio improvements for spell effects across all races, as well as enhancements to worker gather order behavior when refinery structures are constructed.

Patch 5.0.16 is now live on the public test realm. Blizzard has noted that the changes may be adjusted based on feedback from testers before a full release. Players can opt into the test realm via Battle.net to share their feedback.

StarCraft 2 was released in 2010. Although Blizzard ended new content development in 2020, the company has continued to release balance updates as needed.

The 5.0.16 patch is the most significant balance and quality-of-life update in several years.

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Posted Sunday 31 May 2026 at 7:19 am AEST (my time).

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Rumors about NVIDIA’s plans to enter the PC processor market have been circulating for years, but the latest reports suggest the launch of its first chip could be imminent. The world’s most valuable company, known for its GPUs and AI chips, is reportedly preparing to unveil its first PC processor as soon as next week.

According to a report by Axios, the first Windows laptops powered by NVIDIA chips as their main processors are set to debut next week. Developed in collaboration with Microsoft, the chips are expected to be unveiled at the Computex trade show in Taiwan and Microsoft’s Build developer conference in San Francisco.

Axios reports that some Microsoft Surface devices, along with PCs from brands such as Dell, are expected to launch with NVIDIA processors. In a post on X, NVIDIA shared the coordinates of a location that appears to be Taiwan’s capital while teasing “A new era of PC.” Meanwhile, Windows chief Pavan Davuluri also posted on X: “Something new is coming for developers. And no, it’s not a new OS version. See you at Build next week!”

NVIDIA is best known for its GeForce graphics cards for PCs and its AI chips for data centers. Focusing on these markets has helped the company surpass a $5 trillion valuation and become a dominant force in the tech industry. However, it remains to be seen how NVIDIA's first PC processors will compare with rival offerings from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm in terms of performance, efficiency, and pricing.

The PC processor market is currently dominated by Intel and AMD, while Qualcomm has also been working to strengthen its position by launching more efficient chips and enabling affordable Windows laptops with capable performance. NVIDIA's entry into the PC chip business could further intensify competition in the market and give consumers more choices.

Update: A leaker on X has shared a link to Dell media materials referencing a new XPS laptop powered by the NVIDIA N1X chip. The NVIDIA-powered Dell laptop is reportedly set to be announced on May 31 at Computex.

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Posted Sunday 31 May 2026 at 7:17 am AEST (my time).

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It’s the world’s worst kept secret that Nvidia is about to announce its own Arm-powered laptop chips at Computex this weekend, and now Microsoft, Nvidia, and Arm are all openly teasing the announcement. The Windows and Nvidia GeForce accounts on X both posted “A new era of PC” earlier today, and now Arm has followed up with an identical post.

All three posts include coordinates pointing to where Computex is hosted in Taipei. Nvidia is holding a Computex keynote in Taipei at 8PM PT / 11PM ET on Sunday night, where it’s rumored to be announcing its new N1 and N1x laptop chips.

These Arm-powered Nvidia processors have been long-rumored, with reports earlier this year suggesting that both Lenovo and Dell have been preparing new laptops with the N1X chips. We first heard rumors about Nvidia’s laptop processors in 2023, and Dell CEO Michael Dell hinted at the possibility of an AI PC with Nvidia during an interview in 2024.

Nvidia’s entry into Windows on Arm will mean Qualcomm will no longer have an exclusive license for Microsoft’s Windows 11 Arm variant of its operating system. That’s good news for laptop competition, even if Qualcomm is trying to keep entry-level laptops affordable with its new Snapdragon C platform.

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Posted Saturday 30 May 2026 at 3:04 pm AEST (my time).

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Fable fans have been looking forward to the new reboot from Playground Games since its original announcement in 2020. However, that wait has just gotten longer, as another delay has now hit the long-awaited fantasy RPG. Microsoft said that this is because it wants to give the game's launch more breathing room, which is becoming difficult in 2026 with all the upcoming major releases, including Grand Theft Auto VI.

Following previous delays, Fable's most recent release window had it landing in autumn 2026. Today, Microsoft attached a different release window to the game. The Forza studio will now be releasing Fable in February 2027, getting out of the way of some of the biggest games this year.

"In order to plan our game launches through the holidays, in a way that works best for players, we’re moving Fable to February 2027 so it can have the dedicated moment it deserves," said the company in a social media post. It name-dropped titles like Halo Campaign Evolved, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4, and Grand Theft Auto VI as just some of the releases players will still be able to enjoy on Xbox consoles this year.

At the same time, Xbox's chief content officer, Matt Booty, added some extra information about the game's status in the new Xbox Podcast today as well. He said Fable is currently in great shape and that the Playground development team and Microsoft are feeling good about it. He also reiterated the original message, adding that the goal is to give the highly-anticipated RPG its "own moment to shine."

We will be seeing more of it in Showcase," says Booty, confirming a new Xbox Games Showcase appearance for Fable. "So we're going to have plenty for people to see. It really is coming together well, exciting stuff."

The Xbox Games Showcase 2026 and the Gears of War E-Day deep dive events are slated to kick off on Sunday, June 7.

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Posted Saturday 30 May 2026 at 7:51 am AEST (my time).

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Just a week after an AI disproved an 80-year-old conjecture and astonished mathematicians, another conjecture that had stood for half a century has fallen, inspired by the same techniques, but this time written entirely by humans.

Last week, an unreleased AI model from OpenAI disproved an important conjecture first posed by Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, called the unit distance problem. The puzzle, which Erdős considered his “most striking contribution to geometry” and which many mathematicians had failed to unravel, concerns the number of similar-sized connections you can make between dots arranged on a flat surface.

Erdős had set an upper ceiling on this number, which many experts had assumed was correct. But the AI model showed that this number could in fact be much larger, using an obscure trick from algebraic number theory to make complex structures with extremely high dimensions, which could then be used to arrange the dots in a very different arrangement than humans had considered. The result took mathematicians by surprise, with some not expecting to see Erdős’s conjecture disproved in their lifetimes.

Now, less than a week later, Thomas Bloom at the University of Manchester in the UK and his colleagues have used a similar argument to disprove another famous claim, which Erdős had first posed in 1976, called the sum-product conjecture.

“It was a surprise because I had thought about the problem quite a bit,” says Bloom. After seeing the trick used by OpenAI’s AI, which used number theory to solve a geometric problem, Bloom and his team realised that they could try the same thing for the sum-product conjecture. “Once you know that something might be possible, you’re willing to try a bit harder to actually get it to work,” he says.

Erdős’s sum-product conjecture concerns collections of numbers, or sets. It says that if you either add or multiply all the numbers together in this set, one pair at a time, to create a further two sets, then at least one of these sets must be much larger than the original set – you can’t have both sets similarly small. For instance, if you multiply all the numbers from 1 through 5, you will have a larger set than if you add them all, because there will be duplicate results, such as 2+3 and 1+4. Considering a different set, such as 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16, the added set will instead be larger, because the multiplied set just contains various powers of two.

Erdős set a bar for how small the larger of the two added and multiplied sets could be, and conjectured this should hold for any set of numbers. But Bloom and his colleagues used the same high-dimensional trick to find a set where both its sum and product are smaller than Erdős thought possible. Instead of using a geometric progression of numbers, like powers of two, you can create a progression of numbers in many different dimensions at the same time, which they found produces a set where the number of different sums you can make is much smaller.

“The real surprise for me was that it was so simple,” says Bloom. “The construction is so simple to describe and we do genuinely understand now why [Erdős’s conjecture] fails, which should help us with lots of other related problems as well.”

“This is typical for maths as a competitive sport,” says Misha Rudnev at the University of Bristol, UK. “As soon as a new idea kicks in, some people are ready to work twenty-four hours to find more applications to it, and these people are usually very good and quick.”

Rudnev says that Erdős’s original intuition was that this conjecture should mainly be true for integers, or whole numbers, and that still appears to be true, because the set found by Bloom and his team used exotic number systems that get ever more complicated as their sets grow larger. Bloom agrees that the conjecture still holds for integers, and that “there’s still a huge amount of work to be done; we don’t really understand what’s going on.”

The main insight from the proof is that problems that seem geometric, such as sets of square powers of two, can actually be tackled with tools from number theory, says Bloom. “It really opens these problems to a whole new community as well. People in algebraic number theory weren’t really engaging with these questions.”

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Under that premise, Amazon is redesigning a core piece of its cloud infrastructure. On Thursday, AWS launched its next generation of OpenSearch Serverless, a fully managed search and vector database — essentially a system for storing and retrieving information at scale — that’s designed specifically for agentic workloads. AWS says the new system can instantly scale up when agents trigger tasks and scale back down to zero when idle.

The launch reflects a growing realization across the tech industry: Infrastructure originally designed for a human-driven internet doesn’t work as well in a world increasingly populated by agents.

While AI agents still represent a relatively small portion of internet activity, machine-generated traffic is already significant, and poised to grow. Cloudflare says bots accounted for 31% of overall HTTP traffic over the last six months. AI crawlers, search engines, and assistants made up roughly a quarter of all bot requests during that period. 

“Non-human traffic will exceed human traffic sometime in the first half of 2027,” said Lai Yi Ohlsen, senior product manager at Cloudflare, to TechCrunch.

At Google’s I/O developer conference last week, the company said users will be able to start delegating tasks to AI systems, like researching purchases, booking travel, browsing the web, and interacting with apps. But the buck doesn’t stop at consumer-focused AI agents. Enterprises are increasingly deploying agents internally and for their customers, creating new kinds of machine-generated traffic behind the scenes. 

As a result, cloud providers and infrastructure companies have been reckoning with how to adapt systems built for humans to a world of agents that are constantly and autonomously retrieving information, invoking tools, and generating machine-to-machine traffic. 

That’s where AWS’s new OpenSearch Serverless comes in. 

“The timing is straightforward. Agents are moving from experimentation into production, and they create traffic patterns that previous infrastructure simply wasn’t designed for,” Tia White, general manager for Amazon OpenSearch Service, told TechCrunch. “They spike without warning, they go idle without notice, and enterprise needs search that keeps up without paying for empty or idle compute.”

The key technical change with this new generation is that it decouples compute from storage, allowing compute to scale up in seconds to accommodate agent traffic bursts and to scale down to zero, so customers pay $0 when agents are idle.

“Previously, even in our prior Serverless version, you had to have at least one instance operational and running because storage and compute were coupled,” White said. “You couldn’t just automatically spin up [compute] at the rate you needed to, so you always had idle compute reserved for your workload, whether you were using it or not.”

Think of it like always paying for a parking space, even when you’re not using it. With AWS’s upgraded Serverless, it’s more like paying for a metered parking spot.

At launch, OpenSearch Serverless will integrate natively with AI development platforms like Vercel and Kiro, so developers can deploy production-ready search and vector backends for agents without managing infrastructure. 

The shift is emerging across the cloud industry. Databricks and Snowflake are repositioning themselves as AI memory and retrieval systems for enterprise data. Microsoft has rolled out updates to Azure designed to handle AI agent bursts and share memory between agents. Cloudflare, in a similar vein to Amazon, last month introduced infrastructure aimed at giving agents persistent environments and instant scalability. 

The more companies deploy AI agents, the more pressure there will be to redesign infrastructure around machine-generated workloads, which in turn could make agents cheaper and easier to deploy at larger scales.

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As Danielle settled into the rhythms of new motherhood, her profession underwent a drastic reinvention.

Danielle, who asked to use her first name to avoid damaging her job prospects, worked as a software developer at a car company in Portland, Oregon. Before she left the workforce in mid-2024, barely anybody used AI to write code; by the time she was ready to return, a year later, it had become the expectation. Once upon a time, she had been drawn to coding for the job security it offered, but AI was threatening to upend that. “The skills that I had learned—rote development skills—we are now expected to outsource to AI,” Danielle says.

The world’s largest AI companies anticipate a future where pretty much everything is “vibe-coded.” In April, Mark Zuckerberg predicted that AI will write most of Meta’s code within the next 18 months. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently told WIRED he expects AI coding to become “one of these rare multitrillion-dollar markets.”

The dizzying pace of change has touched software engineers across the industry. But the effects are particularly acute for new mothers who, by a fluke of timing, happened to be away from their desks when the shift was taking place.

“The kind of work I was doing before, I would like to do again. I think I was good at it,” says Danielle. “But I recognize that job will never exist again.”

The executives in charge of the largest AI labs have warned that the technology could wipe out white-collar jobs, from law to finance to consulting to sales. But few industries have been carved up in the same way as software development.

With the release of coding automation tools by Anthropic and OpenAI in May 2025, the field became less about composition and more about babysitting. Learning this new way of working isn’t overly complicated, but new mothers face falling behind colleagues who have benefited from a headstart.

A UK project manager currently on maternity leave tells WIRED her manager suggested that she brush up on AI while she’s out. “It made me feel very vulnerable,” says the woman, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation by her employer, a development agency. Before she left, staff used AI on an ad hoc basis, typically for small tasks like auto-completing lines of human-written code. But the agency is eager for AI to play a larger role, she says.

“The likelihood of me spending my statutory maternity pay on an AI course … is slim to none,” she says. “This is not something I should be spending my maternity leave doing.” But she worries that falling behind might make her a target for layoffs.

Mary McCreary, a data engineer working at a US-based health tech company, says her employer helped her acclimate to new AI tools when she returned to work. Initially skeptical of AI, McCreary came to appreciate its ability to explain the function of her coworkers’ code. “The thing that I hate most about being an engineer is having to review other people’s code,” she says.

But the technology has nonetheless changed the nature of the work. “The downside is that I don’t get any time to do tedious tasks that would be not a lot of effort for my brain,” says McCreary. “I’m always looking at hard problems, because I’ve offloaded all of the tedium.”

Another software engineer, who lives in Minnesota and works at a marketing software company, tells WIRED that AI coding tools helped her to keep pace with colleagues in the face of fatigue and other postpartum symptoms. “I definitely was not ready to return,” says the engineer, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about her company’s use of AI. “Your body is filled with all these hormones and your brain changes to the point that all you can fixate on is that child.” The ability to offload tasks that require deep and sustained concentration—like debugging code—to AI “was incredibly helpful,” she says.

When she initially returned from maternity leave, in September 2024, her company was mostly using AI tools as a sort of glorified version of the code troubleshooting forum Stack Overflow. But a year later, all code changes were being fed through AI models to check for errors. Then AI began to take up the bulk of the coding work; the company started to keep a leaderboard that ranked engineers by how much they used it. “It’s like, instead of being a software engineer, I’m more like a puppet master,” she says.

By November 2025—with the release of Claude Opus 4.5, a recent iteration of Anthropic’s flagship AI model—coding tools had advanced even further. “Opus was, like, holy shit,” she says. “I did a quarter’s worth of work [for a team of developers] just by myself. It was quick and dirty, but it got the job done.” She began to worry that her role could soon be automated out of existence.

Software engineers looking for a new job, meanwhile, are finding that AI has reconfigured the job market.

Three months before she gave birth to her daughter, Danielle was laid off. When she began to apply for new software roles last year, she found that most postings required candidates to have some degree of AI knowledge, but rarely specified how they would be expected to use it. “The ambiguity was nerve-wracking,” she says. “I didn’t know how to investigate what skill I was missing.”

Women looking for a new job after an extended maternity can come up against an unwillingness among employers to accommodate caring responsibilities, misconceptions about their commitment to their jobs, and other structural issues, experts say. “The system treats it as an exit, not a pause. It’s a design failure,” says Daniela Gulie, who leads the German arm of the nonprofit Bring Women Back to Work. But in software, AI has compounded those problems, creating an AI-literacy gap between mothers and their colleagues, and warping the labor market to their detriment. “It’s yet another way in which women are being screwed over,” says Rachel Grocott, CEO at UK-based think tank Pregnant Then Screwed. “You’re layering disadvantage on inequality.”

Danielle hasn’t come close to finding a new job; only one of the 40 applications she sent out progressed to an interview. Others shared similar impressions of a cutthroat job market, in which a glut of overqualified candidates are competing for junior and mid-level software engineering jobs. “There’s this huge, huge pool of incredibly smart and talented people that you don’t want to be a part of,” says the Minnesota engineer.

To try to bring herself up to speed, Danielle plans to start coding up small hobby projects alongside AI. But the rate of change has left her wondering whether it’s worth investing in learning the technology. “Every day, I am getting even further removed,” she says. “It’s really a terrifying moment to feel like I don’t understand the future of this industry.”

The perceived risk of being left behind during a maternity absence, or being displaced by AI, is also coloring career and family planning decisions.

The Minnesota engineer says she is torn between a desire to fight to keep her hard-won career and the pull of motherhood. “I’m trying to figure out, do I want to be a mother to a second child?” she says. “I want to be a present parent and actually be there for my child. But I’m scared to have one. It’s very complicated.”

Initially attracted to the software industry for its job security, some women are considering looking for a different career entirely—one less immediately vulnerable to automation. Danielle wonders what it might be like to spend less time behind a computer; she is considering pursuing a qualification in landscape architecture. “I don’t derive meaning from training artificial intelligence, or just fixing code generated by artificial intelligence,” she says. “If that is the future of this industry, is that a job I want?”

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