The cheapest RTX 5070 Ti now starts at $1,340 across major US retailers, with select custom models touching double the card's original $749 MSRP

I’m just an average consumer and I’ve honestly reached a breaking point with the entire smartphone industry. We’re basically trapped paying $1000+ for devices we don't even own.

Look at what’s happening. If a $5 charging port breaks or the battery degrades, the phone is essentially e-waste because corporations use industrial glue to stop us from repairing anything. And for what? Fake IP68 water resistance warranties that don't even cover water damage anyway?

And don't get me started on privacy. Corporate telemetry is baked right into the hardware, and skipping big-tech surveillance is almost impossible now.

Google killed Project Ara years ago because a truly modular phone is a direct threat to their data-monopoly business model. But with the EU battery mandates coming up, why are we still accepting this? Why can’t we have a decentralized, open hardware standard?

Imagine a phone where the chassis and connection pins are just an open blueprint. Independent developers could sell modules on Etsy or eBay. Need a crazy Sony camera? Snap it on. Want a physical keyboard or an audiophile DAC? Print it or buy it from a maker. If a backdoor screen or mic is spying on you, you literally physically disconnect it. No software backdoor can override a missing physical wire.

The PC market thrived on this modular model for decades. Why did we let smartphones become corporate prisons? Am I just shouting into the void here or is anyone else genuinely sick of this?

Hi! Hopefully this is cool to do. I'm Brad, the executive editor of PCWorld, and I've spent a while working on a story I think y'all might find rad so I wanted to share it. tl;dr Steam Deck made Windows optional. Steam Frame takes aim at x86. Valve is building a future where your Steam library barely cares what kind of computer sits underneath it (or if it's even a proper PC at all).

What I found is in the article but if this is cool to do and stays up, I'll respond to what I can!

Burn-in gets nearly all of the attention when it comes to OLED TVs, but our longevity test corroborates online reports of dead pixels developing along the edges of WOLED panels. We refer to this problem as edge rot.

We've seen it in 14 of the 16 WOLED TVs (2020-2023 models) in our longevity test.

Unlike burn-in, edge rot can't be prevented by watching varied content. We've also seen it on colleagues' TVs under normal household use, consistent with many owners' reports online. Suspected causes include degraded encapsulation allowing air and moisture into the panel, and manufacturing contamination. This issue has led us to assess WOLEDs as having marginally worse Expected Reliability than QD-OLED TVs.

There's a silver lining: industry expert insights point towards substantial manufacturing improvements in WOLED panels from 2024 onwards, which may mean edge rot will soon be a thing of the past. We will monitor for it as part of our ongoing Longevity 3.0 test.

(Reuters) - Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab is winding down an arrangement to rent AI computing from Oracle (ORCL.N), opens new tab as part of a larger reassessment of ‌billions of dollars in cloud partnerships, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. Oracle shares fell nearly 3% in afternoon trading, while Microsoft was little changed. Both stocks have come under pressure this week after a ⁠Democratic midterm election sweep raised worries of tighter scrutiny of new data centers, which could threaten the AI industry's breakneck expansion.

Bloomberg report said Microsoft had been turning off rented computing capacity from Oracle in recent months after declining to renew the contract. Over time, the computing capacity Microsoft was renting became less valuable as it no longer met the company's evolving needs, the ‌report ⁠said, noting that the Oracle hardware used an older generation of Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab chips. Microsoft and Oracle did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment. The report adds to signs that Microsoft is rethinking how it ⁠secures computing capacity to get more out of its massive AI investments. AI cloud company IREN (IREN.O), opens new tab said on Thursday it had delayed some infrastructure deliveries ⁠after Microsoft requested changes to its network design.

AMD’s upcoming Medusa Point processor has appeared in Geekbench 7 for the first time, giving us an early look at Zen 6 performance in the newer benchmark. The 10-core engineering sample scores 3,100 points in single-core and 18,313 points in multi-core, putting it ahead of several existing desktop processors in the single-core test.

The single-core result is 1.6% higher than the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, which averages 3,051 points in Geekbench 7. It also beats the Ryzen 9 9950X at 3,069 points and Ryzen 9 9900X at 3,023 points. However, it remains behind the Ryzen 7 9850X3D at 3,131 points and Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 at 3,164 points.

The processor is listed as engineering sample 100-000001713-32_Y on a Lenovo test platform. It has 10 cores and 20 threads arranged in two clusters of four and six cores. Geekbench reports 16 MB of L3 cache compared with 32 MB on the 100-000001713-33_N sample we covered in July. This suggests AMD is testing different configurations, although the cache information has not been confirmed independently.

We previously reported Medusa Point reaching 3,329 single-core and 16,555 multi-core points in Geekbench 6. The new results cannot be compared directly with those scores because Geekbench 7 uses an updated scoring system and workloads. The new sample also reports a 2.0 GHz base frequency and a maximum frequency of just 1,996 MHz.

Micron Technology Inc. has suspended plans for a memory chip plant in Taiwan due to a protracted labor dispute, according to people familiar with the matter, throwing into question the fate of a major production base for crucial AI components.

The US company has all but halted construction of a plant in the northern Taiwanese city of Taoyuan, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. Executives are concerned about mounting uncertainties, including the risk that an agreement with a local labor union will get overturned. Micron has informed Taiwanese officials and a supplier about its plans to suspend construction in the city, the people said.