Oh boy. I’m betting this wasn’t on AMD’s bingo card for 2025, especially now that their Ryzen AI Max APUs are making a splash with things like the Framework Desktop and because the “Intel x86 RTX SoCs” really sound like a direct challenge to AMD’s APU line.

If you had any doubts about where the PC market is going, this should put them to rest. Apple’s M-series chips may have changed the game, but the rest of the industry is clearly doubling down on catching up, even if they have to do chiplet/SoC-style integration (even if via NVLink) instead of entirely new unified memory designs.

Of course the AI datacenter angle is interesting as well, but I am much more invested in seeing how edge and client devices evolve in the next few years than in watching people burn money on massive server farms because of something that still doesn’t really work that well outside of very specific use cases.

These are probably Meta’s worst kept secret, since everyone was expecting them to put something like this together for a while now.

The glasses are prohibitively expensive (let alone with prescription lenses), but I would love to try these out as I think the myoelectric band is a genius input method.

I’ve also been looking at the Even Realities models and they are both hackable and actually available where I live, so these are exciting times…

A great visual walkthrough that reminds me I still don’t get how Apple can ship it looking like this. Like I said earlier:

If “design is how it works”, then Apple hasn’t really tested any of their upcoming releases.

I want the improved Quicksilver-like Spotlight, but I don’t want my desktop to look this bad—-even if they’ve toned down Liquid Glass to be a set of incoherent visual sprinkles, the overall design is just bad.

It’s also worth noting that Tahoe is the last version to support Intel Macs. Not that I’ve dabbled in hackintoshes in the past few years, but it’s still remarkable they supported Intel this long.

The way Apple has pretty much set the Watch Series apart from the SE is by shipping more health features, and this is a nice one for them to target, especially considering they bothered to make it available to older devices as well and are targeting to ship it pretty much worldwide.

I think a lot of people are going to be interested in this (I’m lucky enough to be reasonably sure I don’t have hypertension, but most people my age have some sort of concern around it).

Of course, like all things in this space, a lot of the actual measuements need to be taken with a grain of salt (HR and Afib have been spot on over the years, but sleep tracking and other things that, like this feature, rely on indirect inference from sensors designed to do other things naturally have difference confidence intervals).

I trust Apple more than anyone else to handle the data for this (given that processing will happen on-device), but I wonder how far we are from the dystopia where insurance companies are going to start asking for access to this kind of data when negotiating policies…

(I don’t like linking to The Verge ever since they went full-on paywall+subscriptions, but the gist of the matter is still readable and it was the first place I saw this.)

The 3D printing world has been abuzz over the past couple of weeks with this, and after watching pretty much all the (p)reviews I could find on YouTube, I’m very curious to see what the final product will perform like, and how reliable it’s going to be.

Their Kickstarter has pretty much gone through the roof (I find it quite tempting myself), and multi-material printing without the piles of waste associated with single-nozzle devices is clearly something people want–plus the price point is way more accessible than, say, Prusa (ok, fine, that’s a low ball).

I’m going to be watching this carefully over the next few months. The U1 isn’t a perfect fit for me as is since I’ve started using “harder” materials, but I do need something that can handle at least two materials for some of my projects, and on paper, this would be almost perfect with a top lid.

Late to the party on this, but still…

The new Android security measures are an interesting piece of revisionist thinking—“developer verification” is now set as the gatekeeper for sideloaded apps in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand by September 2026, with what looks like full side-loading lockdown coming 2027.

Regardless of the malware angle, this seems to effectively kill side-loading on Android in the near future, making it as hobbyist-hostile as iOS and very likely spelling doom for open ecosystems like F-Droid (which I rely upon to customize every Android device I get my hands on).

As someone who’s been doing Android development on the side for decades because Apple still doesn’t allow you to run your own software on the devices you own without stupid restrictions, this is very annoying, and a good reminder that regulators like the EU have been focusing on entirely the wrong things.

I wasn’t going to go anywhere near this because it is too close to actual politics for my taste, but Ben Thompson’s take on the U.S. government’s 10% stake in Intel is a great read.

A heady mix of long-term manufacturing woes and geopolitics, it still manages to raise a few skeptical eyebrows as it lays out how decades of strategic missteps have left Intel trailing behind rivals like TSMC, while also highlighting how chip production isn’t something you can fix overnight.

Nor, should I add, the actual success of their products—their top consumer CPUs have been plagued with issues over the last couple of years, and, rather ironically, their most successful products (by volume) are the new low-end Alder Lake chips that have been quietly flooding the Mini-PC market, even as AMD take the most profitable niches.

There’s a dry wit to Ben’s critique—government intervention might be the “least bad” option, but it’s hardly a cure, especially when national security and commercial realities clash and government itself is going through a credibility crisis.

I don’t think Apple understands how badly they’re messing up in regards to visual design in their latest crop of operating systems.

There’s a degree of nostalgia, sure, but nobody on the planet can disagree that Apple’s current design team seems to have completely lost the plot where it regards both respecting the history of their operating systems and… well, just doing something that doesn’t look like it was phoned in.

I just don’t feel like Apple actually cares about the quality of their software experience any more, and am happier and happier that I’ve been running GNOME alongside as my possible future desktop. And let me tell you, a world where Linux is at least as good as polished as macOS is not science fiction anymore.

I always loved Pez, and this seems like a wonderfully well crafted game. There’s a resurgence of interest in retro computing, yes, but what I like the most are “backports” and entirely original software created for 80s hardware…

Josef Prusa dissects the current state of open hardware in desktop 3D printing in blunt terms (and yes, the headline really tells you everything). As someone who got into it back in the early, heady days of Maker Faires, this was a sobering read.

He walks through how a once-vibrant scene has been stifled by a flood of patent filings since 2020, and it’s rather ironic (even if you have been in the tech game long enough) that an industry built on sharing ideas is now toothlessly battling a patent minefield.

Pragmatically, and although there will likely always be a post-market or DIY angle, I think the mainstream of 3D printing is now squarely about selling semi-closed appliances–and I might be getting one myself.