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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/desktop-cpu-shipments-crater-20-percent-amid-high-component-costs-but-amd-gains-record-share-despite-ugly-desktop-processor-market-intel-floods-laptop-market-with-millions-of-cpus-but-amd-still-sets-all-time-share-records

Desktop CPU Shipments Crater 20% Amid High Component Costs, But AMD Gains Record Share Despite 'Ugly' Desktop Processor Market — Intel Floods Laptop Market With Millions Of CPUs

Excluding IoT, SoC, and embedded products, both AMD and Intel substantially increased CPU shipments sequentially, but AMD grew faster and gained unit share in every major segment, so the company now controls 30.7% of the overall x86 processor market, its highest share ever, according to Mercury Research. With IoT, console SoCs, and embedded CPUs included, AMD now controls 34.1% of the x86 processor market. Intel continues to lead, but AMD's growth is impressive.

"AMD's total unit shipments and total market share reached new record highs in the second quarter of 2026, with a sequential share gain of 0.7% and an on-year gain of 6.5%," McCarron said.

In general, the results for the quarter suggest that Intel's improved client CPU supply helped to meet demand from PC makers and led to a client PC market rebound, the company could not stop AMD's share gains.

During the quarter, AMD gained 1.8% QoQ and 2.7% YoY in unit share because declines in its shipments were considerably smaller than Intel's. So, while normally we say that AMD is gaining desktop share because of strong sales of its latest Ryzen CPUs, in this case AMD's success was driven by slower declines than rapid gains.

Mercury Research notes that its broad server share calculation somewhat disadvantages AMD because Intel's edge and networking processors are now reported within its Data Center and AI (DCAI) business, so in reality, AMD's unit share should be higher. If the comparison is narrowed to EPYC versus Xeon processors for servers, AMD's unit share reaches 46.4%, up a substantial 2.9% QoQ and 9.2% YoY, which puts AMD very close to Intel in the core data center CPU market. Meanwhile, if CPUs for edge and networking applications are ignored in Mercury's analysis, Intel's dollar share would increase considerably.

Mercury Research indicates that server CPU supply constraints could limit gains in Q3, but in Q4 sales of data center-grade processors will increase noticeably both compared to Q2 and Q3.

AMD's performance was stellar as it gained ground in every major segment even as Intel substantially improved processor availability. Despite improved availability of Intel client and data center processors, AMD still outgrew Intel and reached record overall and client CPU unit shares.

Desktop remained the major weak spot due to high component costs and generally lower demand as enthusiasts pulled in their purchases to 2025, greatly lowering sales of high-end hardware in 2026. Shipments of desktop x86 CPUs fell more than 20% YoY, whereas mobile and server volumes increased.

In core data center processors, AMD's EPYC share approached Intel’s Xeon share, which highlights how dramatically the competitive balance in the server market has shifted.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In 2026, scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider ran experiments colliding lighter atomic nuclei—oxygen-16 with oxygen-16, and neon-20 with neon-20—at energies of 5.36 TeV per nucleon pair. The four main LHC experiments confirmed these lighter ions can produce quark-gluon plasma, the super-dense, ultra-hot state of matter that existed microseconds after the Big Bang.

What made this notable was what the collision debris revealed about nuclear structure. By analyzing how particles flowed outward after impact, physicists mapped patterns tied directly to the shapes of the incoming nuclei:

        Oxygen-oxygen collisions produced radially symmetric particle flow, suggesting a more spherical, tetrahedral-like nucleus structure
        Neon-neon collisions generated asymmetric, elongated flow patterns—indicating a bowling pin-shaped nucleus

"It is a bit like shining light on an object and seeing its shadow," explains researcher Emil Gorm Dahlbæk Nielsen from the Niels Bohr Institute. "You cannot see the object directly, but its shadow reveals its shape."

This work, published in Physical Review Letters, represents the first clear evidence that nuclear geometry drives anisotropic flow in light-ion collisions. Storage costs for this kind of data are massive—a single year of LHC collision data generates petabytes, which would run into millions of dollars in enterprise cloud storage alone. Every terabyte matters when you're paying for retention and redundancy across multiple backup systems.

"We have pushed the boundary for how small the atomic nuclei can be while still recreating this primordial matter," says You Zhou, who led the experiment at the Niels Bohr Institute. The team plans to test even lighter nuclei like helium-4 next, trying to pinpoint where the threshold drops too low to form quark-gluon plasma.

Sources:

        https://phys.org/news/2026-08-big-bowling-pin-nuclei-universe.html
        https://home.cern (CERN official coverage)
        I.J. Abualrob et al, Physical Review Letters (2026)

Original Submission

Dolly Parton has passed away.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2026/08/25/dolly-parton-death-cause-country-music-legend-singer/89232175007/

Dolly Parton, the "Queen of Country" singing icon with a personality as bold as her signature blond coif and rhinestone-encrusted outfits, has died. She was 80 years old.

Parton's death was announced in a video message from her family on her social media pages and confirmed to USA TODAY.

[...] Her nephew Bryan Seaver announced the death of his aunt [...]

[...] My family and I have shared a lifetime of beautiful memories with Dolly, but so have you. She has always been on your television, your record player, your CD, and on your phone playlist becoming an extended part of your family, whether you liked it or not. Our family and the team she has entrusted with her legacy will work diligently to ensure her spirit will live with us for ever.

Dolly was a farmer, just like her daddy. He farmed the soil; she farmed songs and happiness. Dolly called me and said she wants to rest in a beautiful bed of plush cotton because after a life wearing heavy rhinestones, she finally deserves to be comfortable and have some rest.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/framework-responds-to-complaints-that-bios-update-bricked-ryzen-7040-laptops/

Framework says it's replacing some out-of-warranty AMD mainboards.

A BIOS update for the Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Ryzen 7040-series processors is bricking the systems, multiple users have reported online.

Framework started shipping pre-built Ryzen 7040-based Framework Laptop 13 computers and compatible motherboards in 2023. In June 2026, Framework released BIOS 3.20 for the devices. The update adds mainboard support for features, including a haptic touchpad and new speakers, for the higher-end Framework Laptop 13 Pro and fixes issues, including one "where the Battery Extender status was reported incorrectly following a reboot, hibernation, or shutdown after the timer had expired," per a post on Framework's forum from an employee.

Some users say that they installed the update successfully.

Numerous others, however, claim that the installation stalls, bricking the laptop.

"[T]he update process seems to have stalled," a Framework forum user named Sven posted in July. "What I see is a black screen and a progress bar with 2 dots and then the Framework logo. The progress bar is not moving for about 3 hours now. Also, I can't turn off the Framework using the power button, no matter how long I hold it down. Now the BIOS update is stuck, and I can not power down or reboot the machine."

Ars Technica contacted Framework, asking how many customers are affected. In a company statement, Framework said it has "received reports of a small percentage of Framework Laptop 13 7040 Series BIOS updates resulting in non-bootable boards." Framework is investigating the root cause of the issue, the statement said.

There are reports of users having problems with BIOS upgrades on Ryzen 7040-based Framework Laptop 13 devices going back to at least March 2025.

After the most recent BIOS update, some users reported that Framework support told them they needed a new motherboard, but Framework wouldn't provide it for free because the customer was past warranty.

Framework's statement to Ars says:

        ... in addition to replacing in-warranty Mainboards, we are making exceptions for out-of-warranty replacements where we can confirm a stable-release BIOS update caused the board to become non-bootable.

Framework is also introducing a "Crisis Recovery Mode" BIOS functionality to enable a path for failed updates to be directly recoverable.

"Our latest Framework Desktop BIOS release includes this functionality, and we are actively bringing it to Framework Laptop 12, 13, and 16 in our upcoming BIOS release cycles for each," Framework said.

We won't be sure of the source of the problems until Framework provides more information. Blogger Guanzhong Chen, however, wrote a detailed blog post this week about their purported experience with their motherboard breaking and suggested the problem stems from "some bug with the software that caused it to display what appears to be random memory on the screen, especially when this has happened before to other people for other BIOS versions."

The software developer, who was ultimately able to flash the firmware onto their motherboard after a support representative reportedly told him to buy a new one, added:

"At the same time, it somehow flashes the BIOS slower in regular operation than a cheap 15 MHz programmer over pogo pins, which really makes you wonder what it's doing under the hood."

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/24/ancient-who-owns-linux-case-now-has-one-foot-very-deep-in-the-grave/5291513

The long legal battle over ownership of Linux is closer than ever to ending, after a panel of three judges ruled a claim against IBM and Red Hat isn't valid, and that time has expired for further action.

This story starts in 1998 when IBM decided the world needed a single version of UNIX capable of running on multiple processor architectures. To make that happen, Big Blue allied with a company called the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) which made a version of UNIX for x86 CPUs. Intel and Sequent also signed up for the multi-architecture effort, called "Project Monterey."

The alliance didn't work, largely because Linux came along and delivered a *Nix that ran on multiple processors (and introduced a new way to develop software).

IBM decided to add some of the code developed during Project Monterey to Linux, leading SCO and its legal successors to claim they owned that code and therefore had some sort of legal claim over Linux.

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/columnists/2026/08/24/software-should-work-and-talking-about-it-neednt-be-boring/5290862

OPINION: DVD is one of those technologies that dominated for barely a generation yet left a permanent cultural mark. It made high-quality video cheap enough for mass distribution, popularized the TV series boxed set, and encouraged its gluttonous consequence: binge viewing. Streaming and capacious storage have since pushed optical media toward irrelevance. There may no longer be a box, but the boxed-set mentality remains, and we still binge like Roman emperors. It is a genuinely new way of absorbing large quantities of information.

Now it is time to recognize a further evolution: the bingeable tech conference. Streamed conferences are nothing new, but few reward being watched from beginning to end. They offer too many talks on too narrow a subject, too much marketing flimflam, or too much variation in quality. The Goldilocks zone of quality, range, relevance, and intelligence is rare, but worth seeking out. This July delivered a near-perfect example: Software Should Work 2026.

The name supplies the plot arc. Software Should Work is about reliability in its broadest sense, because reliable software requires much more than making code that runs. It encompasses abstraction and formal methods, managing complexity, making the most of tools and processes, individual innovation, team culture, and the nuts and bolts of telling computers what to do. In just 13 videos, SSW creates a widescreen, high-definition, thought-provoking picture of the field today. You can watch them in a day, and once you start, you may not want to stop.

It would be unseemly to give too many spoilers. In such a concise treatment of a multifaceted subject, the talks that grab you will depend on your own interests and experiences. Consider dependencies, part of the calculus of reliability. So far, so dry. But Richard Feldman's talk compares web stacks from 1996, 2006, and 2026, revealing what looks like an inexorable multiplication of abstractions and dependencies. He then compares eight contemporary language and runtime websites: TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Rust, Zig, Go, and Roc. The result is one of the more illuminating graphs you'll see this year.

Another thought-provoking contribution comes from Richard Hipp, creator of SQLite, one of the corest of the core technologies in everyday use. On its face, his account of how a codebase evolves in response to changing test methods sounds dry. It is also a personal journey, full of highs and lows, illustrating how reliability depends not only on the interplay between code and test design, but also on human motivation, creativity, flexibility, and doggedness. There is no shortage of technical detail either.

This is why SSW 2026 works so well. Its speakers have deep experience of software reliability, but were free to choose their subjects. The resulting mix of opinions, experiences, and approaches ranges from the mathematics of formal analysis to the importance of daydreaming and the dangerous myth of the superhero engineer. Reports from the language wars, AI WTFery, and arguments over whether Nix partisanship is justified are all present, delivered by people working on the front lines.

Most importantly, the conference explores the culture of reliability and what it means to say that software works. It feels like a proper symposium: an exchange of ideas about something that touches every part of the digital world yet is rarely considered as a whole. Commercial pressures can work against practitioners and customers alike, while the lack of a common language and agreed standards makes good practice harder to defend. Without reliability, everything falls apart. How to teach it, and where the discipline goes next, remain stubbornly difficult questions.

SSW 2026 provides a splendid and much-needed focus on all of this. Its blend of narratives and subjects means there is always something you did not know you needed to see, accompanied by the pleasurable sense of time well spent. Curiosity is richly rewarded. If you see software reliability as an ongoing drama – and if you don't, how are you still here? – block out a bingeing window. Software should work, but so should conferences, and this one is well worth the popcorn.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

The Dead Internet Theory May Be Coming True, Pew Research Findings Show

Are you reading more text written by an AI bot? A Pew Research study published this week says it’s very likely.

That’s not breaking news if you’re aware of the Dead Internet Theory that dates back to 2021. CNET writer Trisha Jandoc dove into that theory last year, which basically says people believe the internet died 10 years ago in 2016 and that much of what we see online now is AI-generated.

There is some truth to that. Pew researchers scanned nearly half a million English webpages from the past five years using Common Crawl, a web archive. That dates back to before ChatGPT was made publicly available in November 2022. Researchers ran those pages through Open Pangram, an AI detection tool, to see if it was written or edited by AI. Then the researchers looked at a sample of 10,000 pages from last month to spot signs of AI-written content. They looked for phrases, words and language that are more common among AI bots than humans. 

Researchers made it clear that AI detection models don’t always get it right. Sometimes they flag text written by humans as AI authorship and AI-written text as being written by a human.

Nonetheless, the study found that 10% of the samples “show significant signs of AI authorship.” 

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

As Wisconsin cities flee Flock, its shared camera network loses value

[...] Over the past few months, a spate of Wisconsin towns and cities have withdrawn from Flock deals over privacy and trust concerns. As they did so, another issue revealed itself: With each city that leaves, the Flock network becomes less useful to the cities that remain. And cities are starting to notice.

Consider Dane County, which includes the city of Madison. It's one of the most populous counties in Wisconsin. It was also a significant Flock user, with a contract for 24 license plate cameras. But after complaints from citizens and privacy experts, the Dane County Board of Supervisors on April 16 voted to cut the $80,000 in county funding for Flock cameras and banned "further expenditures on the system."

"There are well-documented concerns about how this company operates and uses its technology to violate people's Fourth Amendment rights [against unreasonable searches]," said County Board Chair Patrick Miles. "The board's action supports protecting our community from a proven bad actor. We have full confidence in our Sheriff and deputies, and we are open to considering other companies that have stronger safeguards in place."

[...] Because much of Flock's value comes from access to cameras in other jurisdictions, the loss of Dane County and Monona meant Flock was suddenly less useful to nearby police departments. The town of McFarland, which neighbors Monona, announced on May 15 that it would not move forward with its plan to deploy Flock cameras "in light of a shrinking database in Dane County and input from residents."

"Once Dane County lost their funding for Flock, we lost about half of the potential camera network within Dane County," said McFarland Chief of Police Brian Redman in a statement. "I had to ask, 'Were we still going to get the return on our investment with that loss?' With the network being chipped away, that wasn't going to be the case."

[...] Public resistance was crucial to many of these decisions to de-Flock. Indeed, the broad backlash against Flock has grown so strong that the surveillance company last week announced mandatory new audit controls and lower default data retention periods for US users.

Flock now knows what Kaukauna and McFarland realized: The same "network effect" that helps build a business can also work in the other direction once customers start to flee.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Malicious updates turned routine builds into a delivery system for infostealer malware:

Hackers slipped malware into several popular Rust packages this week, turning routine software builds into a route onto developers' machines.

The Rust Security Response Team disclosed the supply chain attack on Thursday after receiving a tip about a crate called proc-macro1. An investigation found that its build script fetched malware from a remote server.

The attack extended beyond a single dodgy crate. Someone had published a new version of arrayref, a legitimate and widely used Rust package, with proc-macro1 added as a dependency. The attacker had also yanked recent legitimate releases of arrayref, helping steer users toward the poisoned release.

The Rust team does not believe arrayref's maintainer was responsible. It suspects the developer's computer or credentials were compromised and locked the account while attempting to contact them. The attacker also published malicious versions of two other crates maintained by the same developer, internment and append-only-vec.

The poisoned releases weren't around for long. Arrayref 0.3.10 was available on crates.io for 86 minutes, internment 0.8.7 for 90 minutes, and append-only-vec 0.1.9 for 107 minutes before they were removed.

That's a narrow window, but arrayref is hardly some forgotten package gathering dust in the registry. Security firm Aikido, which separately analyzed the attack, puts arrayref at roughly 245 million lifetime downloads and append-only-vec at more than 4 million. However, those figures don't tell us how many developers pulled the malicious versions during the brief period they were live.

Aikido found that the attacker largely left the legitimate source code untouched, adding only a dependency on proc-macro1, a typosquat of the legitimate proc-macro2 package. The malicious code was tucked inside proc-macro1's build.rs file.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Chinese safety regulators have cracked down on doors that don't open in a crash:

Tesla is facing a massive recall in China today. Chinese regulators are taking a stricter approach to safety, and the automaker now has to add warning labels to 2.98 million Model 3 and Model Y electric vehicles in China that make it clearer how to open the rear doors in the case of an emergency that causes the car to lose power.

As we learned earlier this year, Chinese regulators are getting more serious about the recent trend of electronically controlled car doors; a growing number of crashes have had fatal consequences when the occupants have been trapped in burning cars. Starting next year, new rules give specific dimensions for handles that must be followed by all newly approved vehicles. But cars that have already been on sale for some time, like the Models 3 and Y, are grandfathered in, at least until the end of 2028.

But China wants Tesla to do something about the nearly 3 million cars already on its roads. It is requiring the automaker to add warning labels to the car interiors—something that will require physical access to the car. Additionally, Tesla will push out a software update that automatically lowers all the cars’ windows in the event of a collision.

Tesla is also facing a second Chinese recall, this one only affecting 2.74 million cars. These require new software for their driver monitoring system, which currently only uses a torque sensor on the steering wheel to determine if the driver is holding the wheel and remaining engaged in the task of driving. Now, the update will leverage the interior camera in the Models 3 and Y to track the driver’s gaze instead.

However, Electrek has previously reported that Chinese Tesla owners have been able to defeat the cabin driver monitoring system—which it has rolled out to customers with its more advanced partially automated driving system—by mounting a doll’s head in front of the camera.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Nv's new chips need new datacenters, but you can't have bit barns without power:

Nvidia has made its fortune on the AI boom, but the company has a problem. It faces a growing number of roadblocks which, if left unchecked, could pop the bubble. 

Thus, the AI arms dealer has been forced to play a game of Whac-a-Mole, shoring up the foundations of its empire by investing its spoils into ensuring its customers don't stop buying.

The latest example of this came Friday, when Nvidia announced it'd become a minority investor in Cloverleaf. 

Founded in 2024, Cloverleaf specializes in laying the literal foundations – by which we mean the land and power – necessary to build bit barns so they can be leased by the cloud providers and model devs that actually pay the bills for Nvidia's hardware.

Nvidia can only sell as many GPUs as there are datacenters to put them, and those datacenters can only be deployed where there's adequate power to support them. And since its latest round of GPUs can't just be dropped into any old bit barn, Nvidia is going to need a lot more datacenter capacity, and by extension a lot more power.

[...] So, to sell its next-generation GPUs, Nvidia not only needs its customers to have adequate capacity, but also needs those facilities to offer the right mix of power and cooling.

VLM writes:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18214

Here's a strange, light space story. Obviously, everyone knows ionizing radiation damages silicon. Anyone have good stories from the old days of marginal ram detecting cosmic rays? That meme seemed to die out around the dram kilo to mega transition, certainly forgotten by giga sized dram, which you'd think would be more severely impacted from being smaller... Anyway, surprisingly, a data analysis comparing known HST silicon damage to known solar radiation levels shows it's out of phase by some years.

1) Is it new physics? Either the radiation or silicon damage?

2) Is it P-Hacking in STEM where it's just numerology, abuse R and numpy.py until you get clickbait? The authors admit "We obtain remarkably accurate fits to Hubble data but with physically absurd parameter values."

3) Some of both or maybe none of either? Some other cause?

Any fun P-hacking stories from the world of STEM?

Just a fun light news story, but there's also some depth to think about.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

If you have a dispute with the e-commerce giant, you'll have to hash it out through an individual claim with a third-party arbitrator:

Amazon's updated terms of service now contain a clause that may take many subscribers by surprise. The online giant is revoking your right to file a class-action lawsuit against it if a dispute arises, according to its Conditions of Use page.

On Friday, Amazon sent an email to subscribers explaining that it will now settle any disputes via arbitration. Customers who have continued to use the corporation’s services after Aug. 14 implicitly waived their rights to bring new class-action suits against the online retail giant.

The language used in the Conditions of Use page states this new legal limitation outright.

"You and we agree that any dispute or claim relating in any way to your use of any Amazon service, or to any products or services sold or distributed by Amazon or through amazon.com, will be resolved by binding arbitration rather than in court," the document reads. "There is no judge or jury in arbitration, and court review of an arbitration award is limited. A neutral arbitrator will resolve the dispute or claim and must follow the terms of this agreement as a court would."

A class-action waiver is also included, which prevents customers from filing requests for arbitration together. Although Amazon is allowed to resolve batches of arbitration proceedings under detailed mass arbitration rules, each dispute must be filed individually.

Amazon’s language frames the change as a positive for its customers, since the company pledges to "pay most of the cost" for customers who choose to arbitrate disputes.

A representative for Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A company spokesperson told CNET’s sibling site PCMag over email that Amazon has and will continue to "continually update our Conditions of Use to better serve our customers."

"We determined that reinstating the arbitration clause will offer customers a fast, cost-effective way to resolve disputes while still giving them the option of going to small claims court," the spokesperson wrote.

But at the end of the day, that arbitration clause may serve to stifle customer disputes by making it more difficult to seek financial restitution.

There are very few exceptions to Amazon's new arbitration clause, and none of them are particularly great for customers. You can still take the company to small claims court, but the compensation you can receive is extremely limited.

Before the terms of service update, it only took one motivated individual to perform research, consult legal professionals and get the ball rolling on a class-action lawsuit. From there, other affected parties were able to sign on and receive compensation with comparatively little effort.

That's not the case with an arbitration policy, which has a higher bar for individual effort and personal costs that may dissuade many customers from hashing out their financial disputes.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/planned-us-data-centers-set-to-produce-24m-cars-worth-of-co2/

A new analysis of the 60 largest data centers under construction in the US by Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft estimates the sites could produce a cumulative 101.5 million tons of carbon dioxide annually once they’re fully up and running, Financial Times reports [Paywalled]. That’s about 7% of all 2025 US power-sector emissions. Put another way, it’s the equivalent of running 27 coal power plants or putting 24 million more gas-powered cars on the road.

The backlash against America’s data center and artificial intelligence boom has been building for a while now, reaching a fever pitch over water use, land grabs and noise complaints. Recently, environmental activist Erin Brockovich has been mapping out communities affected by data center construction and operations, and polling shows that most Americans don’t want AI factories anywhere near them.

Now, it appears there’s a looming carbon problem to add to the pile.

Big Tech companies appeared publicly committed to cutting emissions just five years ago, making the new findings feel like a notable about-face. Financial Times found that Amazon’s emissions climbed 16% from 2024 to 2025, driven by data center construction and a 34% jump in electricity purchases. Microsoft reported a 25% increase in estimated emissions during the same period, while Google's parent company, Alphabet, reported an 18% year-over-year increase in its emissions figure according to its own adjusted metric.

Researchers point to a mix of causes, from the sheer scale of demand for AI infrastructure to a political environment under the Trump administration that dramatically rolled back climate rules and clean energy tax credits in favor of fossil fuels.

Data center construction has revitalized local activism. In May, Albany, New York, residents gathered at a rally for the AI data center moratorium.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Fairphone 6 Plus is a refreshed version of the 6, with more RAM and a faster chipset:

The Fairphone 6 Plus is a minor hardware refresh, but a major launch for the company: It's the first phone that Fairphone is selling directly in the US. It's on sale now for $649.99, available through Fairphone's website and Amazon, and is sold unlocked with support for both T-Mobile and AT&T. In Europe, it costs €649, a €50 increase on last year's phone.

Fairphones from the 4 onwards have been available to buy in the US, but never from Fairphone itself. They were exclusively sold through a partnership with Murena, the developer of /e/OS, a "de-Googled" version of Android. That meant buyers were forced to use Murena's software — which is capable, but certainly an acquired taste — and paid a significant premium for the phone. Last year's Fairphone 6 sold for $899.

[...] Fairphone has been building up to the US launch of the 6 Plus, bringing audio products to Amazon US starting with the Fairbuds XL over-ear headphones last November. Alongside the announcement of the 6 Plus, the company has confirmed that a new pair of earbuds, the Fairbuds 2, will launch in Q4 this year, and "will set a new bar for repairability and performance." The company says it will reveal more in October.

Any Soylentils familiar with these phones, or Murena Android, or installing something else like LineageOS or GrapheneOS for the discerning person wanting a bit more control in their phones? Asking for a friend. --hubie

Original Submission