News, analysis, and insights on tech companies, devices, software, and emerging technologies.
Starlink has renamed its dishes twice, shipped a V5, and sells a Mini X that is the same Mini in a bigger box. Here is which Starlink you own, which four you can actually buy in the US today, what each one draws and costs, and which one fits a home, a camper, or a boat.
A watt-hour sizing guide that works from appliance spec sheets instead of a vendor's shopping page. One formula, real numbers for a fridge, CPAP, Starlink, laptop, and sump pump, and an honest answer on what it takes for a whole house. Most people need a far smaller battery than the marketing suggests, and one popular purchase makes no sense at all.
On September 14 the Air Force Secretary said the United States has "on-orbit space control weapons," the first time Washington has admitted to weapons stationed in orbit. He would not say what they are. Here is what the phrase means, why a president said something close to it in 1964, what the treaty actually bans, and what it means for the 11,000 Starlink satellites sharing that sky.
Every Starlink dish sold today heats itself to melt snow, from the Mini's 1 inch an hour to the Performance kit's 3.5. Here is what the Snow Melt setting actually does, what it costs in watts on a battery, why the Mini really does have it, and the fix ladder for a dish that is buried anyway.
Apple announced the iPhone Duo on September 9: a foldable with a 5.4-inch outer screen and a 7.6-inch inner one, the A20 Pro chip and a $1,999 starting price. Pre-orders open October 16 and phones arrive October 23, five weeks after the iPhone 18 Pro.
The iPhone 18 Pro can sign every pixel its main camera captures and keep an unalterable reference copy beside the photo. It is a real advance in proving a photo was not edited, and it still proves less than the word "authenticity" suggests. It is opt-in, cannot be captured in the EU at launch, and sits outside the open standard Google, Samsung and Leica chose.
Apple announced the iPhone 18 Pro at $1,199 and the iPhone 18 Pro Max at $1,299 on September 9, a $100 increase on both models. Then its store came back with the year-old iPhone 17, 17e and Air each $100 higher too. Pre-orders open Saturday, phones arrive September 18.
A gasoline inverter generator delivers electricity at roughly 67 cents to just over a dollar per kilowatt-hour at September 2026 pump prices, from its own spec sheet. A battery power station delivers grid electricity at about 22 cents, plus a hardware cost that ranges from 20 cents to eight dollars per kilowatt-hour depending on how often you actually use it. Here is that math, a three-day outage runtime table, the noise and carbon monoxide numbers from the makers and the CPSC, what each one needs in maintenance, when the generator still wins, and how many miles either one can put into an EV.
Dyson just launched the CameraJet, a $499 toothbrush with a built-in camera and an AI jet that flosses while you brush. Here is what it does, what it costs, and what the fine print says.
A compatibility guide that works from spec sheets instead of vendor bundles. The three lines that decide whether a panel and a power station can work together, a connector decoder for MC4, XT60, and 8mm plugs, the voltage rule that protects your charge port, and why two panels with the same wattage can get opposite answers from the same machine.
A watt-hour sizing guide that works from appliance spec sheets instead of a vendor's shopping page. One formula, real numbers for a fridge, CPAP, Starlink, laptop, and sump pump, and an honest answer on what it takes for a whole house. Most people need a far smaller battery than the marketing suggests, and one popular purchase makes no sense at all.
Apple announced the Mac mini with M6 on August 25, 2026, starting at $899 for 16GB of memory and 256GB of storage. The same base configuration launched at $599 in November 2024. Here is the full price ladder, what the new chip actually changes, what every upgrade costs, and whether a discounted M4 is the smarter buy.
Starlink has renamed its dishes twice, shipped a V5, and sells a Mini X that is the same Mini in a bigger box. Here is which Starlink you own, which four you can actually buy in the US today, what each one draws and costs, and which one fits a home, a camper, or a boat.
A Starlink Mini kit costs $199, Roam service is $55 a month, and Standby Mode keeps it alive for $10 a month between trips. Here is the real yearly cost of owning one for camping, road trips, and home outages, compared with renting, plus the routers, cables, mounts, and batteries that make it work inside a cabin.
Smartwatch pros and cons, answered with numbers instead of vibes. The three-year cost table (including the subscriptions nobody prices in), what peer-reviewed accuracy studies actually found, where a smart ring beats a watch, and a $40 Casio control group that outlives them all.
Smartphone shipments just hit their lowest second quarter since 2013 while the average phone price jumps 21% to an all-time high. The damage lands hardest at the bottom: the cheap phone is being hollowed out to feed the AI memory boom, and the industry is getting richer as it happens.
Apple raised US prices on every Mac, iPad, and home device on June 25, 2026, eight days after Tim Cook admitted absorbing memory costs had become unsustainable. Micron's 84.9 percent gross margin explains who has the power now, and Apple's escape plan runs through a blacklisted Chinese chipmaker.
Dell raised commercial PC prices 15 to 20 percent in mid-December. Lenovo and ASUS followed in early January. IDC now reports all five major OEMs are signaling another 15 to 20 percent hike for the second half of 2026. DDR5 spot prices are up roughly 70 percent year-over-year, and memory makers are reallocating capacity to AI data centers. The buyer pays the difference.
AI servers are being redesigned around a component smaller than a grain of rice. One AMD board went from 1,440 of them to 10,544. Murata is running its lines near 95% and booking MLCC orders at 1.47x shipments - and yet its own president says parts are not what is holding the build-out back.
Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview escaped its sandbox, emailed a researcher, and found thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities including a 27-year-old OpenBSD bug. Then Anthropic gave it to 12 companies and called it defense. The rest of the internet gets a 90-day head start.
The Strait of Hormuz carries 20% of the world's oil. The cables running through it and the Red Sea carry over 90% of Europe-Asia data capacity. For the first time in telecommunications history, both chokepoints are closed simultaneously. AWS data centers have been hit by drones. Meta's undersea cable is stranded. Qatar's helium exports — essential for chip fabrication — are offline. The $650 billion AI buildout just hit a wall made of physics.
Neodymium magnet prices doubled to $120,000/kg in seven months. Building 10 billion humanoid robots requires 100x current global magnet production. The real bottleneck for the robot revolution isn't AI. It's a rock mined in Inner Mongolia.
SpaceX recently proposed a 1-million satellite orbital data center network to bypass Earth's grid problems. But the vacuum of space is a perfect insulator, making extreme AI cooling mathematically impossible.
While Wall Street cheers Nvidia's record supply chain numbers, a catastrophic DRAM and NAND shortage is quietly pushing consumer tech companies toward bankruptcy - ushering in a new era of forced regression for your next laptop and smartphone.
The FDA's refusal to review Moderna's flu vaccine isn't about safety. It is about a retroactive change in math that protects incumbents and drives innovation offshore.
DRAM contract prices just surged 95% in Q1 2026. The cause isn't a supply chain glitch, it's a permanent physical reallocation of the world's silicon to AI.
