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Apple's next MacBook Pro could use a new 3nm manufacturing process
Apple's expected to announce new M3-powered Macs later this year and one of those Macs is thought to be a new 13-inch MacBook Pro. Now, a new report is already pointing to the fact that the new laptop will use an upgraded 3nm manufacturing process from TSMC. That will surely mean that the same process will be used for other M3 chips that will find their way into a new 13-inch MacBook Air and updated iMac.
Those are the Macs that we'd been told to expect from Apple's October event by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman - a man that is normally pretty accurate when it comes to predicting what hardware Apple will announce and when.
The new TSMC report comes via a paywalled DigiTimes report seen by MacRumors. According to that report, Apple's next-generation MacBook Pro will arrive in the third-quarter of the year, just as Gurman also predicted this past weekend. DigiTimes goes on to say that industry sources have said that TSMC's 3nm manufacturing process will be used.
Continue reading: Apple's next MacBook Pro could use a new 3nm manufacturing process (full post)
Corsair acquires Drop to upgrade its keyboard offerings in a personal way
Corsair has announced its acquired Drop in an effort to expand that company's horizons with what it can offer gamers when it comes to personalized peripherals.
The enthusiast gaming community can be broken into two different sectors. One of those sectors is the visual appearance of the PC, and the other is the hardware that runs inside it. Drop, which was formerly Massdrop, has cultivated a community of more than a million members that are visual enthusiasts, with most thoroughly enjoying the company's customizable mechanical keyboards and switches.
Corsair has announced in a press release that "Personalized Keyboards that can be modified by the consumer is one of the fastest growing trends in the gaming peripheral space," said Andy Paul, Founder and CEO of CORSAIR. Corsair added that Drop has proved itself time and time again with the success of its product launches that are voted upon by its community.
This old iPhone sold for more than some houses
If you thought that modern iPhones like the iPhone 14 Pro were getting expensive, you ain't seen nothing yet. Because an iPhone just sold for more than $190,000 at auction.
That particular iPhone comes with just 4GB of storage, but at least it hasn't been opened so it's basically brand new. Oh, and it's one of the very first iPhones to have been made because the 4GB model was soon replaced by the 8GB model, making the 4GB version hard to come by. It also comes with the original box design that featured 12 icons with no App Store in sight.
The iPhone itself was announced by Steve Jobs in 2008 and the rest is of course history. The auctioneers at RR Auctions say that this 4GB model has become the Holy Grail for collectors. Its slow sales make it even rarer, with buyers choosing to spend an extra $100 to upgrade to the 8GB mode. Apple eventually killed the 4GB model off in September 2007, so there aren't all that many still available. And even fewer are sealed in the box like this one.
Continue reading: This old iPhone sold for more than some houses (full post)
CMA's request to adjourn appeal had nothing to do with FTC loss
The CMA's decision to support the joint application to adjourn the appeals litigation was not influenced by the FTC's loss in the United States.
At the Competition Appeal Tribunal, David Bailey, the lawyer representing the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), affirmed that the regulators' decision to motion to stay the appeals litigation was unaffected by the outcome of the Federal Trade Commission's injunction denial in the U.S.
In an attempt to overturn the CMA's original proposed report consideration that called to block and prohibit the Microsoft-Activision merger, Microsoft legal counsel appealed the decision in the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) courts. Now with the merger's deadline approaching, Microsoft wants to halt the appeals litigation. In light of new proposed deals and negotiations, which involve a "small and discreet divestiture," the CMA has agreed that the appeals process should be halted so that it can properly weigh the proposed terms and decided whether or not it should cancel its final order based on the previous structured deal, or fast-track a Phase 1 clearance.
Continue reading: CMA's request to adjourn appeal had nothing to do with FTC loss (full post)
Elon Musk reveals Twitter lost 50% of advertising revenue after he took over
Elon Musk revealed over the weekend that Twitter isn't in a position to perform "luxury" moves as the company is still suffering from a tragic loss in advertising revenue.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk followed through with the acquisition to purchase Twitter in October 2022, and shortly after the Tesla CEO brought in a sink into Twitter HQ in San Francisco to "let that sink in", the platform began losing multiple advertisers, which was the large majority of Twitter's total revenue. This loss in advertising expenditure on Twitter can be attributed to Musk's intention to widen the content guidelines on the platform, pushing for what Musk described as a more freedom-of-speech-centered approach.
These changes, which Musk carried out, ran waves of uncertainty through advertisers as these companies feared their ads would appear alongside inappropriate content. The mass departure of advertisers from the platform resulted in Musk issuing company-wide cost-reduction strategies, which resulted in laying off thousands of employees. Now, many months later, Musk has replied to a Bloomberg finance reporter suggesting that Twitter make some major changes to how it's structured behind the scenes.
New Xbox Game Pass Core has a surprising benefit for classic games
Microsoft officially announces it its retiring Xbox LIVE Gold, and rebranding the service into its new Game Pass Core subscription tier. This move is actually better than we thought.
Xbox LIVE is being renamed Xbox Game Pass Core, and Microsoft has cancelled the free Games With Gold initiative. Looking at the games roster from 2022-2023, gamers note that the titles offered weren't of the highest quality, and that 2021 seems to be the last year where GWG delivered meaningful big-name games. Still, though, this is technically a loss in value.
What makes Xbox Game Pass Core a better comparative value to Xbox LIVE Gold, however, is two things.
Continue reading: New Xbox Game Pass Core has a surprising benefit for classic games (full post)
AMD may launch RX 7800 and 7700 GPUs next month, with an RX 7900 to follow as an afterthought
Want to know what's happening with AMD's RDNA 3 GPUs? If the rumor mill is right, the good news is that we should get an announcement of more than one addition to the RX 7000 range next month.
Moore's Law is Dead (MLID), a regular source of GPU leaks on YouTube, gave us the full details of where AMD is at with its remaining graphics cards for the RDNA 3 generation (add your own skepticism, though, as ever with rumors).
Gamescom 2023 in mid-August will supposedly see AMD announce the RX 7800 and 7700 - although the names of those GPUs could still change (even at this late stage).
Instagram's Threads gains 20% of Twitter's weekly active user base
The launch of Threads has undoubtedly been a success for Meta and its subsidiary company Instagram, as the new text-based platform has attracted millions of users just within the first week of its release.
While we may never see Twitter owner Elon Musk enter an octagon with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the real war is already being fought on the digital playing field, as the release of Threads has shaken up the social networking industry, or at the very least, Musk. Reports now indicate that Zuckerberg's new app has attracted more than 100 million users just within the first 5 days of its being available to download, according to Instagram head Adam Mosseri.
The good news for Threads doesn't stop there, as new data provided by app intelligence firm data.ai reveals that Threads has already reached one-fifth of the weekly active user base of Twitter, or around 93 million active users globally during that first week of availability. Notably, the data firm revealed that 33% of Threads' global downloads came from India, 22% came from Brazil, 16% from the US, 8% from Japan, and 5% from Mexico.
Continue reading: Instagram's Threads gains 20% of Twitter's weekly active user base (full post)
Mysterious unidentified object found on beach, police to stand guard until its removed
A foreign object has washed up on a beach attracting the attention of scientists and local authorities as its origin remains unknown.
The Australian Space Agency, along with Western Australian police, have confirmed that a mysterious object has washed ashore beach at Green Head, 155 miles north of Perth. According to reports the object is believed to be part of a foregin space launch vehicle, but that has yet to be confirmed. Notably, the Department of Fire and Emergency Services and Chemistry Center of Western Australian said in a statement that the object was safe and there is no risk to the local community.
The Australian Space Agency took to Twitter and in a series of tweets confirmed its in contact with international partners to gather information about the possible rocket debris. Additionally, the officials have said that Western Australia Police Force will be standing guard of the object until its removed and that members of the local community are requested to stay away from the area. Reports from ABC state that the object is semi-cylindiracl, made of light carbon fiber material, has a diameter of 8 by 8 feet and a height of nearly 10 feet.
AMD Zen 5 CPUs could be a big leap over Zen 4 - so might they be a killer blow to Arrow Lake?
AMD's Zen 5 processors, which will presumably be the Ryzen 8000 desktop family, are due next year, and a YouTube leaker reckons these chips could be quite something.
This is RedGamingTech (RGT) on YouTube, who has rather revised their expectations around Zen 5 performance in recent times. Previously, the leaker floated the idea of a 25% increase in performance over Zen 4, before dialing that back slightly to a 20% uplift being more likely.
However, the latest spillage from RGT is again optimistic that AMD might achieve more than 20%.
Sealed original iPhone destroys previous auction sale record of $63,000
The original iPhone was showcased by Steve Jobs in 2007 and released with a price tag of $499/$599 - a 4GB model and an 8GB model.
Since then, factory-sealed iPhones have been popping up in auction houses every few years, and every time we see one, the bidding wars have been increasingly fierce. Apple's first iPhone came with a 320x480 resolution screen, a Samsung 32-bit ARM microprocessor that was clocked at 412 MHz, a 2MP camera with no flash, and not even an App Store app as that was released a year later in 2008. It was only in October 2022 that LCG Auctions sold an original, sealed iPhone for $40,000.
Then in February, 2023, another original iPhone popped up again in LCG Auctions, selling for $63,356, which is more than 100x its original retail price. As for the most recently sold original iPhone, LCG Auctions began bidding at $10,000 for an original 4GB model, and by the time the bidding war was completed, Apple's first mobile phone sold for $158,644, or 250% / 318 times more than the previous $63,000 record set in February.
Tesla announces the first Cybertruck has been built after repeated production delays
Tesla announced the Cybertruck in 2019, and after what seems like countless delays and setbacks, the company has built its first vehicle.
The Cybertruck was originally unveiled in 2019 by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and after the hilarious demonstration of the not-so armor glass windows, news began to dwindle about the highly anticipated vehicle. Every now and again, there were murmurings about the Cybertruck, and they typically weren't the most positive ones as it was mostly production delay announcements attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic tying up materials.
Notably, during Tesla's 2023 annual shareholder meeting, Musk said that Tesla expects to deliver between 250,000 and 500,000 units of the Cybertruck per year once production has reached maximum capacity, which it anticipates will occur later this year. Reports from Kelly Blue Book state that while Tesla's original price for the Cybertruck would be $39,900, that price has been jacked up to $50,000. The dual-motor, all-wheel drive model is believed to start around $60,000, and the tri-electric motor model at around $70,000.
Intel leak suggests Arrow Lake CPUs may disappoint compared to previous rumors, but don't panic
Intel's Arrow Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh desktop CPUs are the subject of a new illuminating leak that comes directly from Team Blue.
At least this is what we're told, with Igor's Lab having got hold of Intel's internal performance projections for its incoming next two generations of processors.
Igor observes that these projections can be considered 'realistic' given that this is material for consumption within Intel, and not a PR release, but we should treat this with a lot of caution (and we'll come back to some notable caveats, too).
Extremely rare event: woman gets hit in the rib cage with meteorite during coffee date
A woman has experienced what seems to be one of the rarest events that can take place on Earth - getting hit by a meteorite.
The woman located in France was sitting enjoying a cup of coffee with her friend when they heard a loud noise coming from the roof above them. Immediately following that noise, the woman reported a small object smacking her in the ribs. According to local news reports, the woman initially thought it was an animal of some sort, or a piece of cement that somehow was broken off and become airborne. After identifying the object, the woman noticed it wasn't the right color for any of her previous guesses.
For those that don't know, a meteorite is a space rock that has entered Earth's atmosphere and is on a journey towards its surface. Luckily for us humans, many of these rocks completely burn up in Earth's dense atmosphere, and the meteorites that do make it to the surface are typically smaller than a baseball. However, every now and again, people discover fragments or small pebbles of meteorites, and these discoveries are considered to be very rare.
Russia's banning iPhones over surveillance fears
Russia's Federal Security Service has told thousands of employees that they shouldn't use iPhones or other Apple devices anymore over national security concerns.
The officials appear to be worried that Apple devices could enable US surveillance of the country, with state employees and officials banned from using iPads, iPhones, and other devices starting today. The Financial Times reports that the trade ministry said that it will ban iPhone usage for work purposes starting today with the digital development ministry saying that it will also do the same.
A source told the Financial Times that iPhones and similar Apple devices are no longer considered to be safe for government use and that alternatives should be used instead. That obviously means that iPhones are out and Android phones are in - although it isn't clear whether any particular OEM will be preferred. It's also possible that people will have to switch to using the Russian-developed Aurora operating system may not be popular.
Continue reading: Russia's banning iPhones over surveillance fears (full post)
Don't buy a new Mac! Updated M3 models to launch within months
Apple's M2 Macs are still proving popular among those who buy them but there will soon be a new chip in town. We're waiting for Apple to announce new Macs power by the M3, and now it looks like we could get them as soon as this October.
That's according to the well-connected Mark Gurman, at least. Writing for his weekly Bloomberg Power On newsletter Gurman said that there is likely to be another launch of Apple hardware in October. That launch will come hot on the heels of the iPhone 15 and Apple Watch announcements in September with Macs thought to be the order of the day.
If that's true, it's thought that new M3 versions of Apple's Macs are likely to be the devices announced. Those Macs are unlikely to be flagship 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros, but the spotlight appears to be on a potential M3 iMac, new 13-inch MacBook Air, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Continue reading: Don't buy a new Mac! Updated M3 models to launch within months (full post)
This website is powered by a 39-year-old IBM PCjr DOS Web Server with a 4.77 MHz CPU
It's not every day that you stumble on a website powered by hardware that pre-dates the dial-up modem era of the internet, but that's exactly what's happening over at Brutmans Lab. It's a site dedicated to early 1980s computing and projects, so it's fitting that it's running on a 39-year-old IBM PCjr - a low-cost PC from 1984 designed to compete with the likes of the Apple II and Commodore 64.
Hardware-wise, this custom PCjr features an NEC V20 CPU running at 4.77MHz and a paltry 736KB of RAM. Storage-wise, it's more 2023 than 184, with a jrIDE sidecar (IDE adapter and memory) and a 240GB SATA SSD on a SATA/IDE bridge. This is then paired with IBM PC DOS 5.02 (IBM's version of MS-DOS) and the mTCP HTTPServ web server for DOS. The result is BrutmanLabs.org, a fully functional site that is admittedly a little slow to load up from Australia.
But, as per the main page, the server has been up for over 2,500 hours without any restarts or reboots - an impressive feat. Per the status page, it went live on Friday, March 31, 2023.
NVIDIA dominates the South Korean GPU market, while CPU shares are split between Intel and AMD
A new report covering the DIY custom PC market in South Korea, with data gathered from Danawa Research (via @harukaze5719 on Twitter), shows the division of hardware covering GPUs and CPUs in the region for the first half of 2023. On the GPU front, it's a blowout, with GeForce GPUs taking 94% of the overall market share, followed by AMD Radeon at 5% and Intel Arc at 1%.
On the CPU side, it's a lot closer, with AMD gaining ground with a 43% share compared to Intel's 57% share. The numbers drill down from there, with the AM4 motherboard platform for AMD covering 71.3% of the Ryzen CPU market in South Korea, with the new AM5 platform and Ryzen 7000 Series covering 28.7% of the market.
With the Ryzen 7000 Series getting close to 30%, it's a strong showing for the new CPU series requiring a new motherboard and an upgrade to faster DDR5 memory. For Intel, the new 13th Gen series of CPUs (in particular, the 13th Gen Core i5) is the most popular, highlighting that PC gamers and DIY builders in South Korea like to keep their hardware up to date.
Redditor creates GeForce RTX 4060 Founders Edition with Mini-ITX shroud and single-fan cooler
NVIDIA's Founders Edition models have always been highly sought after as collector's pieces. However, with the release of the GeForce RTX 30 Series, we saw the company debut a stunning new cooler design that has carried through to the GeForce RTX 40 Series. As we saw with the release of the GeForce RTX 3060, NVIDIA again opted out of launching a GeForce RTX 4060 Founders Edition. Leaving all cards released limited to partner models.
With the GeForce RTX 4060's impressive power efficiency and small design, Redditor Clashmains_2 made their own Founders Edition RTX 4060 using the components from a Gainward RTX 3060 Pegasus graphics card. The result is a Mini-ITX form factor design with a single fan, which looks awesome.
It's so good that it looks like the real thing, with Clashmains_2 noting that they recreated the heatsink and PCB in CAD software and modeled the rest around that. From the fins to the metallic finish, it nails the modern GeForce RTX Founders Edition aesthetic while presenting an all-new Mini-ITX version.
Cyberpunk 2077 has a 'Very Positive' user review rating on Steam after two years of updates
Cyberpunk 2077's launch in December 2020 was full of controversy surrounding the state of the game, from bugs to missing or lackluster features to a console port so poor that Sony decided to remove the game from the official PlayStation store during a very busy holiday season.
The PC side fared a lot better, that is, if you had a powerful GeForce RTX 30 Series GPU to enable ray-tracing effects and DLSS rendering for performance. That said, things like broken enemy AI and bugs were prevalent in all game versions, sparking months and years of continual updates to bring the game closer to its original promise.
With the upcoming release of the Phantom Liberty expansion set to overhaul many of the game's core systems and Cyberpunk 2077 being in a state you'd consider very solid and stable on all platforms, the PC release on Steam has finally hit that all-important 'Very Positive' review rating covering 546,967 user reviews in total.






















