Longtime fans of the cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 know that the series’ one constant is change (well, that and bad movies).

The show’s cast and crew were in a near-constant state of flux, a byproduct of the show's existence as a perennial bubble show produced in the Twin Cities rather than a TV-and-comedy hub like New York or LA. It was rare, especially toward the middle of its 10-season original run on national TV, for the performers in front of the camera (and the writers’ room, since they were all the same people) to stay the same for more than a season or two.

Series creator Joel Hodgson embraced that spirit of change for the show's Kickstarter-funded, Netflix-aired revival in the mid-2010s, featuring a brand-new cast and mostly new writers. And that change only accelerated in the show's brief post-Netflix "Gizmoplex" era, which featured a revolving cast of performers that could change from episode to episode. Hodgson leaned into the idea that as long as there were silhouettes and puppets talking in front of a bad movie, it didn't matter much who was doing the talking.

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AI-driven memory and storage price hikes have been the defining feature of the PC industry in 2026, and hobbyists have been hit the hardest—companies like Apple with lots of buying power have been able to limit the price increases for their PCs, phones, and other gadgets so far, but smaller outfits like Valve and Raspberry Pi haven't been so lucky.

Framework, the company behind repairable and upgradeable computer designs like the Laptop 13, Laptop 16, and Laptop 12, is also taking a hard hit by price increases. The company stopped selling standalone RAM sticks in November 2025 and has increased prices on one or more of its systems every month since then; this week's increases are hitting the Framework Desktop and the DIY Editions of its various laptops particularly hard.

The price increases are affecting both standalone SODIMM memory modules and the soldered-down LPDDR5X memory used in the Framework Desktop. Patel says that standalone RAM sticks are being priced "as close as we can to the weighted average cost of our purchases from suppliers." In September, buying an 8GB stick of RAM with a Framework Laptop 13 cost $40; it currently costs $130. A 96GB DDR5 kit of two 48GB sticks costs $1,340, up from $480 in September.

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Since its release in the fall of 2021, Microsoft's Windows 11 has received an "annual feature update" in the second half of every year. These feature updates sometimes include new Windows features and other changes that are too large to roll out in a typical monthly Windows Update, and users need to upgrade to new ones to keep getting security patches and other features. The currently supported versions are Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, released in the fall of 2024 and 2025, respectively.

This week, Microsoft disrupted that update cadence by announcing more information on Windows 11 26H1, which is best described not as an update to Windows 11 but as another version of the operating system entirely. That's because 26H1 is a "scoped" release intended exclusively for new PCs, starting with those based on Qualcomm's recently announced Snapdragon X2 Elite chips.

Microsoft's support page explains why this release is strange: It won't be released broadly to other Windows 11 PCs, which should continue to use either 24H2 or 25H2. PCs running 24H2 or 25H2 will never be offered an update to version 26H1, though testers in the Windows Insider Program's early access Canary channel are able to install it to other PCs if they want. (Build numbers for Windows 11 26H1 start with 28000, compared to 26100 for 24H2 and 26200 for 25H2.)

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Apple has just released the latest major updates for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26 Tahoe, and all the other operating systems it released back in September of 2025. The 26.3 updates for these operating systems are fairly mild, focusing mostly on bug fixes and security patches, but Apple is adding a handful of iPhone features designed to make it easier to use third-party devices in Apple's ecosystem.

The first is a "transfer to Android" feature that will facilitate switching away from Apple's phones into the Android ecosystem. Apple offers to transfer "photos, messages, notes, apps, and more," as well as the user's phone number, but won't transfer things like Bluetooth pairing information or sensitive data from the Health app.

Whether third-party apps can have their data transferred is likely tied to the AppMigrationKit developer framework that Apple added in iOS 26.1. Apps using this framework can import and export data to and from other devices and also access and download content the app has stored in the cloud. Apple notes that AppMigrationKit only functions for transfers from an Apple device to a non-Apple device; Apple already has several systems in place for preserving and transferring data and settings when upgrading from one iPhone to another.

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In 2022, Apple announced it was adopting a "new Home architecture" for its smart home ecosystem to improve its performance and reliability and make it possible to support different kinds of accessories. Although it was mostly an invisible update when it worked properly, some users who attempted to switch to the new architecture when it first rolled out in iOS 16.2 ran into slow or unresponsive devices and other problems, prompting Apple to pause the rollout and re-release it as part of iOS 16.4.

If you put off transitioning to the new architecture because of those early teething problems or for some other reason, Apple is forcing the issue starting today: You'll need to update to the new Home architecture if you want to continue using the Home app, and older iOS and macOS versions that don't support the new architecture will no longer be able to control your smart home devices. The old version of the Home app and the old Home/HomeKit architecture are no longer supported.

If you're like me, you hit an "upgrade" button in your Home app years ago and then mostly forgot about it—if you open the Home app on a modern iPhone, iPad, or Mac and don't see an update prompt, it means you're already using the updated architecture and don't need to worry about it.

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Windows 8 is remembered most for its oddball touchscreen-focused full-screen Start menu, but it also introduced a number of under-the-hood enhancements to Windows. One of those was UEFI Secure Boot, a mechanism for verifying PC bootloaders to ensure that unverified software can't be loaded at startup. Secure Boot was enabled but technically optional for Windows 8 and Windows 10, but it became a formal system requirement for installing Windows starting with Windows 11 in 2021.

Secure Boot has relied on the same security certificates to verify bootloaders since 2011, during the development cycle for Windows 8. But those original certificates are set to expire in June and October of this year, something Microsoft is highlighting in a post today.

This certificate expiration date isn't news—Microsoft and most major PC makers have been talking about it for months or years, and behind-the-scenes work to get the Windows ecosystem ready has been happening for some time. And renewing security certificates is a routine occurrence that most users only notice when something goes wrong.

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Apple's 2026 has already brought us the AirTag 2 and a new Creator Studio app subscription aimed at independent content creators, but nothing so far for the company's main product families.

That could change soon, according to reporting from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. New versions of Apple's low-end iPhone, the basic iPad and iPad Air, and the higher-end MacBook Pros are said to be coming "imminently," "soon," and "shortly," respectively, ahead of planned updates later in the year for the iPad mini, Studio Display, and other Mac models.

Here's what we think we know about the hardware that's coming.

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When Valve announced its Steam Machine desktop PC and Steam Frame VR headset in mid-November of last year, it declined to announce pricing or availability information for either device. That was partly because RAM and storage prices had already begun to climb due to shortages caused by the AI industry's insatiable need for memory. Those price spikes have only gotten worse since then, and they're beginning to trickle down to GPUs and other devices that use memory chips.

This week, Valve has officially announced that it's still not ready to make an official announcement about when the Machine or Frame will be available or what they'll cost.

Valve says it still plans to launch both devices (as well as the new Steam Controller) "in the first half of the year," but that uncertainty around RAM and storage prices mean that Valve "[has] work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of these things can change."

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Although it was finally replaced last year by the new Switch 2, the orginal switch isn't done just yet. Many recent Switch games (and a handful of major updates, like the one for Animal Crossing) have been released in both Switch and Switch 2 editions, and Nintendo continues to sell all editions of the original console as entry-level systems for those who can't pay $450 for a Switch 2.

The 9-year-old Switch's continued availability has helped it clear a milestone, according to the company's third-quarter financial results (PDF). As of December 31, 2025, Nintendo says the Switch "has reached the highest sales volume of any Nintendo hardware" with a total of 155.37 million units sold, surpassing the original DS's lifetime total of 154.02 million units. The console has sold 3.25 million units in Nintendo's fiscal 2026 so far, including 1.36 million units over the holidays. Those consoles have sold despite price hikes that Nintendo introduced in August of 2025, citing "market conditions."

That makes the Switch the second-bestselling game console of all time, just three years after it became the third-bestselling game console of all time. The only frontier left for the Switch to conquer is Sony's PlayStation 2, which Sony says sold "over 160 million units" over its long life. At its current sales rate (Nintendo predicts it will sell roughly 750,000 Switches in the next quarter), it would take the Switch another couple of years to cross that line, but those numbers are likely to taper off as we get deeper into the Switch 2 era.

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The ongoing AI-fueled shortages of memory and storage chips has hit RAM kits and SSDs for PC builders the fastest and hardest, meaning it's likely that, for other products that use these chips, we'll be seeing price hikes for the entire rest of the year, if not for longer.

The latest price hike news comes courtesy of Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton, who announced today that the company would be raising prices on most of its single-board computers for the second time in two months.

Prices are going up for all Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 boards with 2GB of more of LPDDR4 RAM, including the Compute Module 4 and 5 and the Raspberry Pi 500 computer-inside-a-keyboard. The 2GB boards' pricing will go up by $10, 4GB boards will go up by $15, 8GB boards will go up by $30, and 16GB boards will increase by a whopping $60.

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Intel's Core Ultra lineup of desktop and laptop processors has been frustrating to review. None of them has been across-the-board awful or totally without redeeming qualities. But Intel has struggled mightily this decade to produce new processors that are straightforward, easy-to-recommend improvements over their predecessors.

The company's 12th- and 13th-generation Core chips offered big boosts to CPU performance over the 11th-generation CPUs, for example, but they also usually came with a significant hit to battery life, and they only minimally improved the GPU. The first-generation Core Ultra chips, codenamed Meteor Lake, improved the GPU but couldn't beat the CPU performance of older chips. Last year's Core Ultra 200V series, codenamed Lunar Lake, boasted good battery life and solid graphics performance but weaker CPU performance; better-performing Core Ultra 200H chips (codenamed Arrow Lake) improved CPU performance but came with lesser GPUs and some other missing features.

The Core Ultra Series 3 processors, codenamed Panther Lake, finally put an end to the years of uneven zig-zagging advancement we've seen in the last half-decade.

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Complaining about Windows 11 is a popular sport among tech enthusiasts on the Internet, whether you're publicly switching to Linux, publishing guides about the dozens of things you need to do to make the OS less annoying, or getting upset because you were asked to sign in to an app after clicking a sign-in button.

Despite the negativity surrounding the current version of Windows, it remains the most widely used operating system on the world's desktop and laptop computers, and people usually prefer to stick to what they're used to. As a result, Windows 11 has just cleared a big milestone—Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the company's most recent earnings call (via The Verge) that Windows 11 now has over 1 billion users worldwide.

Windows 11 also reached that milestone just a few months quicker than Windows 10 did—1,576 days after its initial public launch on October 5, 2021. Windows 10 took 1,692 days to reach the same milestone, based on its July 29, 2015, general availability date and Microsoft's announcement on March 16, 2020.

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Apple's new Creator Studio subscription bundle officially launches today, offering access to a wide range of updated professional apps for an all-or-nothing price of $12.99 a month or $129 a year. Teachers and students can get the same apps for $2.99 a month, or $29.99 a year.

The bundle includes either access to or enhanced features for a total of 10 Apple apps, though the base versions of several of these are available for free to all Mac and iPad owners:

• Final Cut Pro
• Logic Pro
• Pixelmator Pro
• Keynote, Pages, and Numbers
• Freeform
• Motion, Compressor, and MainStage (Mac only)

When companies introduce a subscription-based model for long-standing apps with an established user base, they often shift exclusively to a subscription model, offering continuous updates in return for a more consistent revenue stream. But these aren't always popular with subscription-fatigued users, who have seen virtually all major paid software shift to a subscription model in the last 10 or 15 years, and who in recent years have had to deal with prices that are continuously being ratcheted upward.

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AMD has released three distinct generations of its 3D V-Cache technology, which initially appeared in the Ryzen 7 5800X3D in 2022. The kernel of the idea has remained the same throughout AMD's efforts: take an existing desktop processor design and graft 64MB of additional L3 cache onto it.

This approach disproportionately helps apps that benefit from more cache, particularly games, and the size of the boost that 3D V-Cache gives to game performance has always been enough to offset any downsides these chips have come with. In the four years since the 5800X3D was released, AMD also has steadily chipped away at those disadvantages, adding more CPU cores, improving power consumption and temperatures, and re-adding the typical Ryzen range of overclocking controls.

AMD's new Ryzen 7 9850X3D, which launches for $499 starting tomorrow, is the very definition of a mild upgrade. It's the year-old Ryzen 7 9800X3D but with an extra 400 MHz of turbo boost speed. That's it. That's the chip.

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When Apple stops supporting older iPhones and iPads with the latest version of iOS or iPadOS, it usually isn't the end of the line—Apple keeps releasing new security-only patches for those devices for another year or two, keeping them usable while their hardware is still reasonably capable.

Once those updates dry up, it's rare for Apple to revisit those older operating systems, but the company does sometimes make exceptions. That was the case yesterday, when the company released a batch of updates for long-retired iOS and iPadOS versions that otherwise hadn't seen a new patch in months or years. Those updates include iOS 12.5.8, available for devices as old as 2013's iPhone 5S and 2014's iPhone 6; iOS 15.8.6, available for devices like the iPhone 6S, iPhone 7, and iPad Air 2; and iOS 16.7.13, available for devices like the iPhone 8 and iPhone X.

Both iOS 15 and iOS 16 were last patched in mid-2025, but iOS 12's last patch was released in January 2023.

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