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Tech News
iFixIt disassembled four units of the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max and found that the plastic frame behind the display broke on three of them during removal. Since Apple doesn't sell that frame as a standalone part, a cracked one means replacing the entire display module. Separately, YouTuber Zach Nelson's own teardown didn't encounter the same issue and he rated the phone favorably for repairability.
Satechi has released a Thunderbolt 5 dock called CubeDock, styled to match Apple's newly launched Mac mini with M6 and M5 Pro chips. The dock adds eight ports, an internal M.2 NVMe SSD bay supporting drives up to 8TB, and can deliver up to 140W of charging power to a connected laptop.
OpenAI has fully unveiled Jalapeño, its first AI accelerator chip, boasting up to 13.4 petaflops of 4-bit compute and 232GB of high-speed memory. The company says benchmarks show up to 3.6x lower latency than Nvidia's GB300 at lower power, and that the chip went from concept to silicon in under 20 months using its own large language models to accelerate design work with a team of fewer than 100 engineers.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and TrendForce report that legacy memory types like NOR flash and SLC NAND are facing severe supply shortages as manufacturers redirect production capacity toward more profitable HBM and DRAM chips driven by AI demand. Contract prices for both chip types have already more than doubled in the first half of 2026, with SLC NAND expected to rise another 120-170% in the second half.
Texas Republican Chip Roy said on CNBC's Squawk Box that while he opposes government regulation of AI as a free-market conservative, he believes Congress should hold hearings where AI company executives explain their safety practices. Roy, who is leaving the House after losing his bid for Texas attorney general, recently joined an unusual bipartisan coalition including Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon at a Future of Life Institute event focused on AI risks.
A report from McKinsey and the SEMI Foundation, cited by CNBC, projects that US semiconductor fabs could face up to 157,000 unfilled jobs by 2030. Only 3% of American engineering graduates currently enter the chip industry, and 73% of chip companies say they struggle to fill engineering positions, even as firms like TSMC, Intel, Samsung, Micron, and SK hynix expand US manufacturing capacity.
Apple's Series 12 smartwatch introduces a single-tap hand gesture for navigating Smart Stack widgets alongside existing double-tap and wrist-flick controls. It also debuts a new Health Sensing System with 32 ECG electrodes, ring-arranged photodiodes, and larger LEDs, enabling heart rate readings every five seconds and HRV readings every five minutes, up from every five minutes and two hours respectively on Series 11. The new S11 chip also improves step-tracking accuracy and adds a real-time Steps complication to the watch face.
A report from nonprofit watchdog C4ADS outlines three main routes Chinese buyers use to obtain export-restricted Nvidia AI chips like the H100, A100 and Blackwell models: direct purchases through research institutions, rerouting shipments through third countries in Southeast Asia, and layered shell-company transactions. The group notes its findings only cover documented cases, so the real volume of smuggled hardware is likely much larger.
A new McKinsey and SEMI Foundation report projects the United States could be short by as many as 157,000 semiconductor workers by 2030, even as companies like Samsung, TSMC and Intel race to build new fabrication plants domestically. Samsung executive Jon Taylor told CNBC he's worried there simply aren't enough technically trained people entering the field to staff these facilities, including Samsung's $35 billion Taylor, Texas complex set to begin production this year.
Arm Holdings CEO Rene Haas told CNBC's Jim Cramer that his confidence in reaching $2 billion in revenue for the company's new AGI CPU has increased since the July earnings call. Arm first flagged $2 billion in demand visibility in May, double its earlier $1 billion estimate, but had held off raising guidance while working to secure sufficient manufacturing capacity.
Apple Watch Series 12 keeps the same 42mm and 46mm display sizes as Series 10 and 11, but its case width has grown by about 1mm, which Apple did not mention at launch. That extra case size without a corresponding display increase means the new watch has noticeably thicker bezels than its predecessors.
According to The Information, Apple is developing enterprise-grade AI servers built around its future M8 Ultra chip, intended for sale to AI developers, businesses and governments rather than just internal use. Two configurations are reportedly planned, one linking two M8 Ultra chips and another linking four, with Apple weighing Nvidia's NVLink Fusion networking tools to connect them. The project has been underway for about a year with CEO John Ternus reportedly supportive, though nothing is finalized and launch isn't expected before 2029.