FiiO has announced a round of price increases across several of its most popular portable audio products, effective April 1, 2026, and while the official explanation points to rising semiconductor and memory chip costs, that’s only part of the story.

According to the company, ongoing supply chain instability and sharply higher component pricing, particularly for memory, have pushed costs beyond what it can absorb. The result: higher retail pricing for models like the DISC, JM21, M21, and M33. But let’s not pretend this exists in a vacuum. Tariffs continue to cast a long shadow over Chinese audio brands selling into the U.S., and the broader personal audio market is starting to feel…crowded. Very crowded. CanJam NYC was absolutely mobbed with consumers and the FiiO table was one of the busiest at the weekend event, but the shotgun approach may not be the best course of action right now.

FiiO, for its part, hasn’t exactly been sitting still. If anything, the brand has been flooding the zone. It’s rolling out new DACs, DAPs, dongles, and IEMs at a pace that feels less like product strategy and more like a high-speed chase. That kind of release cadence keeps the brand top of mind, but it also creates internal pressure: inventory, positioning, and the very real risk of cannibalizing your own lineup.

Layer in intensifying competition from equally aggressive Chinese rivals and increasingly capable budget gear and you start to see the bigger picture. This isn’t just about chip prices going up. It’s about a brand navigating tariffs, margin pressure, and a market that may finally be hitting the brakes after years of runaway growth.

Which FiiO Models Are Getting More Expensive and By How Much?

FiiO has confirmed price increases across four products, covering both its entry and mid tier lineup. Effective April 1, 2026, the DISC will retail for $89.99, the JM21 for $259.99, the M21 for $369.99, and the M33 for $699.99. The changes are not extreme on an individual level, but they are consistent across multiple categories and price points.

The M21 moves up from its original $329 launch price to $369, a noticeable but measured increase for a mid tier digital audio player. The JM21 is a more meaningful shift. Previously positioned closer to the $200 range depending on market and configuration, it now sits just under $260, which places it in a more competitive segment with fewer clear advantages. The M33 approaches $700, moving further into territory where buyers may start comparing it more directly with higher end alternatives. Even the DISC increases from roughly $79 to $89.99, indicating that lower cost products are not exempt from these adjustments.

Taken together, these changes reflect more than a simple update tied to component costs. They suggest a broader shift in pricing across FiiO’s lineup at a time when competition is increasing and buyers have more options at nearly every level.

The Bottom Line

FiiO is being transparent about why prices are going up, and that counts for something. Rising component costs and ongoing tariff pressure are real issues that every manufacturer in this category is dealing with, not just one brand. The lineup itself remains competitive from a feature and performance standpoint, and FiiO still offers a wide range of options that cover everything from entry level to more advanced portable systems.

The downside is timing and positioning. Several of these products were defined by their value, and those margins are now tighter. As prices climb, buyers are more likely to compare across brands, and that is where the pressure builds. HiBy, Shanling, Astell and Kern, and iBasso are all delivering strong alternatives at similar price points, often with distinct strengths in software, design, or tuning.

These increases will likely impact first time buyers and value focused users the most, while existing FiiO customers may be more willing to absorb the changes. The bigger question is whether the market will continue to accept higher pricing as competition intensifies and product cycles continue to accelerate.

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Bluesky is the latest social media platform to throw its hat into the AI chatbot ring. Bluesky, but specifically its chief innovation officer Jay Graber and her new Exploration team, built a new AI assistant called Attie that’s designed to help users create custom feeds. Graber called Attie an “agentic social app” that’s built on its its open-source framework called the AT Protocol.

To use Attie, users can punch in prompts in natural language to generate social feeds without having to know how to code. On the Attie website, examples include prompts like, “Show me electronic music and experimental sound from people in my network” or “Builders working on agent infrastructure and open protocol design.”

“It feels more like having a conversation than configuring software,” Graber described Attie in a blog post. “You describe the sort of posts you want to see, and the coding agent builds the feed you described.”

Graber added that Attie is a separate app from Bluesky and users don’t have to use the new AI assistant if they don’t want to. However, since Attie and Bluesky were built on the same framework, it could mean there will be some cross-app implementation between the two or any other app built on the AT Protocol. Attie is currently available on an invite-only closed beta, but anyone interested can sign up for the waitlist on its website in the meantime.

It’s a sad day for the dozens of players still grinding The Elder Scrolls: Blades. Bethesda announced that it’s permanently shutting down the servers for its free-to-play mobile spinoff on June 30. First spotted on Reddit, The Elder Scrolls: Blades has already been delisted from the App Store and Google Play store, and is currently unavailable on the Nintendo Store.

In the meantime, players will receive a free bundle of Gems and Sigils, while all items in the in-game store are available for just one Gem or Sigil each. With a server shutdown imminent, The Elder Scrolls: Blades‘ will at least cross its six-year mark since its official release was in 2020 for Android, iOS and Nintendo Switch. The dungeon-crawling spinoff did see early success when more than one million iOS users downloaded the game during the first week of its early access period, but it never amounted to the commercial success of Bethesda’s mainline titles.

In the end, The Elder Scrolls: Blades ended up with a “Generally Unfavorable” score on Metacritic, with critics calling it “repetitive” and filled with microtransactions. The shutdown doesn’t come as a total surprise, since Bethesda also killed off its other spinoff, The Elder Scrolls: Legends, by halting development in 2019 and ultimately taking the game’s servers offline in January 2025. For anyone who still wants to play a mobile spinoff of Bethesda’s fantasy world, there’s still The Elder Scrolls: Castles.

BGIS Grand Finals just wrapped up, and we’ve had a nail-biting competition that went down to the wire. In the end, there were just two rivals, Soul and Genesis. Soul had a horrible last match, which meant all hopes rested on Genesis, and, as you may have guessed from the title, they messed up. Soul ended the day by being crowned BGMIS Grand Finals champions, with Genesis and OG completing the podium. Here’s what the standings look like after day three of BGIS Grand Finals.

BGIS Grand Finals Standings After Day 3

The action, the thrill, and the fun were all just amazing in the day of action. Lots of tournaments await us in the next couple of months, but Soul does look like the team to beat if anyone else wants to clinch the title. If you missed the games, check out our highlights for both the first and second day.

“What happens when you can describe the social experience you want and have it built for you…?” asks Bluesky? “We’ve just started experimenting, but we’re sharing it now because we want you to build alongside us.”

Called “Attie” — because it’s built with Bluesky’s decentralized publishing framework, AT Protocol (which is open source) — the new assistant turns natural language prompts into social feeds, without users having to know how to code. (It’s part of Bluesky’s mission to “develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.”)

Engadget reports:

On the Attie website, examples include prompts like, “Show me electronic music and experimental sound from people in my network” or “Builders working on agent infrastructure and open protocol design.”

“It feels more like having a conversation than configuring software,” [writes Bluesky’s former CEO/current chief innovation officer, Jay Graber, in a blog post]. “You describe the sort of posts you want to see, and the coding agent builds the feed you described.”

Graber added that Attie is a separate app from Bluesky and users don’t have to use the new AI assistant if they don’t want to. However, since Attie and Bluesky were built on the same framework, it could mean there will be some cross-app implementation between the two or any other app built on the AT Protocol.
“Attie is open for beta signups today, and we’ll be sharing what we learn along the way,” Graber writes in the blog post. “To learn more about Attie, visit: Attie.AI. Come help us find out what this can be.”

The blog post warns that “Right now, AI is undermining human agency at the same time it’s enhancing it,” since “The proliferation of low-quality AI-generated content is making public social networks noisier and less trustworthy…” And in a world where “signal is getting harder to find… The major platforms aren’t trying to fix this problem.”

They’re using AI to increase the time users spend on-platform, to harvest training data, and to shape what users see and believe through systems they can’t inspect and didn’t choose. We think AI should serve people, not platforms…

An open protocol puts this power directly in users’ hands. You can use it to build your own feeds, create software that works the way you want it to, and find signal in the noise. We built the AT Protocol so anyone could build any app they imagine on top of it, but until recently “anyone” really meant “anyone who can code.” Agentic coding tools change that. For the first time, an open protocol can be genuinely open to everyone…

The Atmosphere [Bluesky’s interoperable ecosystem] is an open data layer with a clearly defined schema for applications, which makes it uniquely well-suited for coding agents to build on… Bluesky will continue to evolve as a social app millions of people rely on. Attie will be where we experiment with agentic social.

AI is an accelerant on whatever it’s applied to. I want it to accelerate decentralizing social and putting power back in users’ hands. But I don’t think the most interesting things built on AT Protocol will come from us. They’re going to come from everyone who picks up these tools and starts building.