In this episode, Ray Cochrane breaks down Hot Chips 2026, the engineering conference where IBM, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Arm, and Fujitsu all showed how their next processors actually work. The headline disclosure is a mainframe core that runs Arm natively. Ray also covers Apple's odd M6 Mac mini naming, London's first autonomous Uber rides, Amazon's purchase of the company behind DuckDB, GitHub's HydraFusion, the best of IFA 2026, and new USDA research on farmed salmon.
In this episode, Ray Cochrane breaks down AI distillation, the teacher-student technique frontier labs now lean on to train smaller, cheaper models. He also covers GPT-5.6's government-vetted rollout, Claude Sonnet 5 landing on AWS, Maryland's two-year data center pause, and Microsoft's climbing carbon numbers. Finally, he wraps with Apple's $30 billion Broadcom deal, Meta's tamper-proof recording light, Michigan's parasite outbreak, and a simulation that erased a super El Niño.
In this episode, Ray Cochrane breaks down a reversible conductive glue from Newcastle University that could replace solder and finally make electronics recycling work. Additional stories cover China widening its clean energy lead, DeepMind's AlphaEvolve scoring wins from genomics to Google's database, Anthropic's $200 million partnership with the Gates Foundation, Intel teaming up with McLaren Racing, and end-to-end encrypted RCS rolling out in beta.
In this episode, Ray Cochrane leads with GitHub's worst reliability month on record and the AI infrastructure pressure behind it. He also covers Warp going open source, Apple's Mac supply crunch, OpenAI's goblin tic, the first 1X humanoid factory in the US, Tesla's Semi finally hitting mass production, Chinese EVs with movie-projecting headlights, the final GPS III satellite, and a quantum researcher who won 1 Bitcoin.
In this episode, Ray Cochrane unpacks Anthropic's Mythos model and the Treasury's emergency meetings with Wall Street, then digs into Apple's vibe-coding crackdown and a gaming-anxiety study that hit way too close to home. Also covered: Verge's solid-state motorcycle, UBTech humanoid robot sales jumping 23-fold, Japan's first osmotic power plant, Finland's permanent nuclear waste vault, Ghostty landing in Ubuntu, Cloudflare's EmDash CMS, and a Claude Code skill that talks like a caveman.
PCs and Laptops
As with mobile devices, unless you are in the Apple camp, there are plenty of manufacturers outside of the USA to choose from. Both Acer and Asus are Taiwanese firms and from Japan there's Sony and Fujitsu. Most countries seem to have specialist PC assemblers like FiercePC in UK who tend to cater to the gamers rather than office buyers. Support a local supplier if you can.
When it comes to the desktop OS, there's limited choice as Microsoft Windows is dominant. However, there are Linux variants such as SUSE which is headquartered in Luxembourg. If you are feeling brave (or mad), there's Huawei's HarmonyOS for PCs or the FreeBSD-based Kylin from China. I'll pass, thanks.
There's no doubt that USB C is the new standard for smartphones, tablets and laptops and it replaces a plethora of legacy ports, including all the annoying variants of USB. In addition, USB C supports digital audio and several device manufacturers have decided to remove 3.5 mm audio sockets from their phones and tablets. Google, OnePlus, Samsung, Huawei and LG