Browsing: Chips
Semiconductor news on chips, RAM and memory prices, supply shortages and new fabs, with how the chip market affects the price of phones and PCs.
Nikkei Asia reports Apple has told suppliers to cut iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max component orders by 15 to 20% for October, weeks after launch. The simple reading is that the phones are not selling. The more interesting reading involves a memory shortage, a $100 price rise and a launch calendar Apple deliberately split in two.
Samsung raised US list prices across the Galaxy S26 line on October 1, roughly seven months after the phones went on sale, with the 1TB Ultra jumping $200. South Korea got the same increase on the same day. Nothing about the hardware changed, and the widely reported Galaxy S27 price leak turns out to describe today’s numbers rather than next year’s.
Georgetown and University of Washington researchers had 331 people watch a car accident, then read an AI summary of it a day or two later. One altered detail dropped accurate recall from 83.6% to 44.8%, and being told the summary was AI written made no difference at all.
AMD will acquire Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs for $8.2 billion and make her its chief scientist. Here is what world models mean for the chip race with Nvidia.
A leak of the full Galaxy S27 memory and storage lineup shows every model matching its Galaxy S26 equivalent, with the 128GB tier removed entirely. The cause is the memory shortage driven by AI data centers, which now absorb an estimated 70 percent of global output. The one genuine upgrade is LPDDR6 and UFS 5.1, and it may be limited to the top tiers.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 can run a 30-billion-parameter AI model entirely on-device, no cloud needed, but it launches as memory costs push flagship Android prices past $1,000.
The Kirin 9050 Pro is the first commercial chip built on Huawei’s LogicFolding architecture, and the company says it contains no American technology. The design stack really is Chinese. The machines in the fab are not. Here is where the line actually falls.
Apple raised the iPhone 18 Pro by $100, and raised four year-old iPhones by $100 on the same day with no hardware changes at all. The 1TB tiers went up $300. Here is what memory contract prices did to the entire lineup, and why analysts think 2027 is worse.
The Justice Department is investigating whether Nvidia structured its Groq deal specifically to avoid antitrust review. It is the first real legal test of a loophole Big Tech has used to spend more than $20 billion without filing a single merger notice.