Supply shortages and big price increases for RAM and storage have been a major drag for enthusiasts and PC builders in recent months. And while we haven’t yet seen large, widespread price increases for memory-dependent products like pre-built laptop PCs, smartphones, and graphics cards, most companies expect that to change this year if shortages continue. In the meantime, memory manufacturers are riding high demand and high prices to record profits….

On Wednesday, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Health, a dedicated section of the AI chatbot designed for “health and wellness conversations” intended to connect a user’s health and medical records to the chatbot in a secure way. But mixing generative AI technology like ChatGPT with health advice or analysis of any kind has been a controversial idea since the launch of the service in late 2022. Just days ago, SFGate published an…

Nintendo’s Switch 2 was an unmitigated market success for Nintendo following its launch last June, selling a record-setting 3.5 million units worldwide in its first four days and reaching over 10 million shipments in just under four months. But a new report from The Game Business suggests that frenzied initial sales pace may have slowed significantly in many markets during the system’s crucial first holiday season. The report suggests that…

There’s a well-worn pattern in the development of AI chatbots. Researchers discover a vulnerability and exploit it to do something bad. The platform introduces a guardrail that stops the attack from working. Then, researchers devise a simple tweak that once again imperils chatbot users. The reason more often than not is that AI is so inherently designed to comply with user requests that the guardrails are reactive and ad hoc,…

Since 2020, Samsung has been dangling a yellow ball in front of us. That sphere is a robot named Ballie that Samsung has teased and demoed for home use, including serving as a smart speaker. Today, Ballie is confirmed to be facing an eternity as vaporware. At CES 2020, Ars Technica reported that Ballie was “the furthest-along concept” that Samsung demonstrated. At the time, we saw Ballie use facial recognition…

Bose released the Application Programming Interface (API) documentation for its SoundTouch speakers today, putting a silver lining around the impending end-of-life (EoL) of the expensive home theater devices. In October, Bose announced that its SoundTouch Wi-Fi speakers and soundbars would become dumb speakers on February 18. At the time, Bose said that the speakers would only work if a device was connected via AUX, HDMI, or Bluetooth (which has higher…

Motorola is no stranger to foldables, having revived the Razr as a flip-style foldable phone in 2020. Now that it has a few iterations of modern flip phones under its belt, Moto is embarking on a new challenge: big foldables. The new (and thoroughly leaked) Motorola Razr Fold is a book-style foldable like Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold and Google’s Pixel Fold lines, offering a smartphone-sized external display with a big…

Californians are getting a new, supercharged way to stop data brokers from hoarding and selling their personal information, as a recently enacted law that’s among the strictest in the nation took effect at the beginning of the year. According to the California Privacy Protection Agency, more than 500 companies actively scour all sorts of sources for scraps of information about individuals, then package and store it to sell to marketers,…

Stewart Cheifet, the television producer and host who documented the personal computer revolution for nearly two decades on PBS, died on December 28, 2025, at age 87 in Philadelphia. Cheifet created and hosted Computer Chronicles, which ran on the public television network from 1983 to 2002 and helped demystify a new tech medium for millions of American viewers. Computer Chronicles covered everything from the earliest IBM PCs and Apple Macintosh…