hardware

Roli, the maker of the Seaboard and Blocks expressive music devices, has collapsed and entered UK administration for the second time, leaving customers who paid for orders without refunds and fearing their hardware will be bricked without software support.

Bambu Lab announced the $2,499 H3C, its most advanced 3D printer yet, featuring nine nozzles that can swap materials, mix colors, combine soft and hard filaments, and change nozzle sizes mid-print.

A biographical retrospective on Charles Tandy, the entrepreneur who grew a family leathercraft business into Tandy Corporation and expanded it with Radio Shack and Pier 1 Imports through mergers, leveraged buyouts, and a proxy battle.

A US-based GPU repair technician claims that NVIDIA RTX 5090 variants with 64GB and 96GB of VRAM exist, suggesting potential pro-grade or workstation versions of the Blackwell consumer card.

Nicholas Carlini demonstrates that a modern Stockfish port running on a 1996-era 200 MHz Pentium Pro achieves ~3300 Elo, far surpassing Kasparov's ~2800, showing that most of the +1335 Elo gain since 1996 comes from better programming (+720) rather than faster hardware — meaning Deep Blue's custom supercomputer was never necessary.

Blogger vanillaCitron shares their initial impressions after spending 30 minutes with the iPhone Duo, along with a link to the full write-up.

Brink is a tool that turns the edges of your MacBook trackpad into additional controls for more efficient input.

The author reports that RTX 8000 48GB prices have fallen to around $2100 while RTX 3090 prices have roughly doubled, arguing the RTX 8000 may now be the best value 'do everything' option for running large local models in VRAM for home-lab setups.

Google revealed that one of its Android manufacturing partners, Shenzhen-based Videostrong Technology, secretly built a backdoor into 1.3 million set-top boxes and other Android devices, turning them into a botnet used for ad fraud and malware distribution. Google has dismantled the backdoor, cut ties with the manufacturer, and updated its device review process.

The Apple Watch Ultra 4 is on sale for $699.99 ($100 off) on Amazon, matching its all-time low price. The watch features the new S11 chip, Apple Intelligence features like Sound Recognition and Live Rewind, improved health sensors, and up to 50 hours of battery life.

The PyTorch Foundation project Ray announced a Special Interest Group (SIG) for Ray on Accelerators, uniting hardware vendors, cloud providers, and the Ray community around a vendor-neutral roadmap covering hardware-aware testing, topology-aware scheduling, and Ray Direct Transport.

The author used an ESP32-S3 and a PN532 to read and decode the NFC microchip inside a Philips Sonicare toothbrush head, verified the pressure multiplier mechanism, rewrote the brush head data using community GitHub tools, and even used an old brush head to unlock a computer.

Polyend is releasing the firmware source code for its Tracker, Tracker+ and Tracker Mini grooveboxes on GitHub, alongside Tracker Community Edition 1.0 with new features like SD card sample streaming, a plugin/synth SDK, and two new synth engines (CHIP and DIRT).

Show HN: Subvocal (YC F26) presents smart glasses that decode silently mouthed or internal speech into text using RF sensing through the face, replacing their earlier EMG prototype with antenna-embedded frames and foundation models trained on scaled pretraining data.

Apple's rumored smart home robot, codenamed J595 and possibly called the 'HomeView Ultra,' has reportedly been delayed to 2026 or even 2028 as its software remains unfinished despite completed hardware. The device is expected to cost around $1,000 and feature a 9-inch swiveling display focused on FaceTime and home automation.

A personal blog post praising a second-hand 2015 ThinkPad X250 as the author's favourite laptop, highlighting its size, battery life, repairability, keyboard, and low cost as a Linux daily driver.

A review of the Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro, the first Wi-Fi 8 router, highlighting its quad-band design, 10Gbps ports, strong real-world speeds, and improved MLO stability over Wi-Fi 7.

Polyend has released the source code for its Tracker firmware, making its music hardware device's embedded software available to the public.

The 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 price rose by $80 to $385 due to an ongoing RAM shortage and lack of alternative 16GB DRAM supply, with CEO Eben Upton calling the increases unavoidable and promising rollbacks once memory costs fall.

SpeakON introduces a physical button that snaps onto the back of an iPhone, turning voice input into text, notes, and meeting follow-ups, with features like voice typing, translation, offline recording, and agent workflows.