If you’ve been holding off on picking up a PlayStation 5 in hopes of a price cut, bad news: the cost of every model of Sony’s all-conquering console has instead just gone up considerably.

It’s a move that breaks with decades of tradition (or at least consumer expectations) and is undoubtedly a blow for anyone hoping for a discount, five years into the current console generation. However, it’s also a sign that the current generation is likely to stick around for a while yet—and that may be a good thing, for the industry and players alike.

Historically, at this point in a console generation, incumbent hardware sees steep discounts. For example, the PS4, which launched for $400 in 2013, was retailing for $300 by 2018, a 25 percent decrease. Even if hardware is loss-leading, it’s a pricing trajectory that’s usually win-win for manufacturers and customers alike. Production and component costs will typically have dropped over that half-decade, allowing companies to drop the retail price, often alongside slimmed-down hardware revisions. At the same time, players who weren’t won over at a console’s launch have a cheaper entry point and years of games to catch up on. But this generation has been anything but typical.

Generational Abnormalities

The AI bubble has seen RAM and SSD storage prices skyrocket in the last few months, impacting the entire global tech sector. Sony as a whole has been hit hard by this, with the recent announcement that it was suspending its memory card business, while the PlayStation corner of the fiefdom just confirmed long-standing rumors of price increases for its console family.

The new MSRPs went into effect on April 2, and there’s no sugarcoating that they mark significant increases. The “entry-level” digital edition PS5 console—the one without a disc drive—is the worst hit, leaping to $600. That’s $100 higher than its previous US retail price (which was already up following an earlier hike back in August 2025, driven by Trump’s tariffs) and a staggering 50 percent higher than its $400 launch price back in 2020.

The base PS5 with a disc drive is up 30 percent on its original $500 price, now costing $650, while the PS5 Pro “only” goes up around 29 percent from its $700 launch price, setting buyers back $900—though it also doesn’t come with a disc drive, so prepare to shell out another $80 to play physical games or Blu-ray movies. Elsewhere, the PlayStation Portal, Sony’s handheld that allows users to stream games from their PS5 or the cloud, has also increased by $50, from $200 to $250.

PlayStation is far from alone in increasing its prices. Xbox increased its hardware and GamePass subscription costs multiple times in 2025, eventually bringing the MSRP of the top-end 2-TB Xbox Series X to its current $800, and is rumored to be considering another hike. The Switch 2 dodged tariff-induced price hikes at launch but is also reportedly “contemplating raising the price of that device in 2026,” per Bloomberg—and the same report suggests Sony may be delaying the inevitable PlayStation 6 to as far off as 2029, all due to the AI-induced parts crisis.

Even Valve’s handheld Steam Deck isn’t immune—while prices have so far only risen in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, the manufacturer has announced that the original 256 GB, LCD-screen model (the cheapest) “is no longer in production, and once sold out will no longer be available” while the newer OLED models, available with either 512 GB or 1 TB of storage “may be out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages.”

Meet the “journalist” who “uploads press releases or analyst notes into AI tools and prompts them to spit out articles that he can edit and publish quickly,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

“AI-assisted stories accounted for nearly 20% of Fortune‘s web traffic in the second half of 2025.” And most were written by 42-year-old Nick Lichtenberg, who has now written over 600 AI-assisted stories, producing “more stories in six months than any of his colleagues at Fortune delivered in a year.”

One Wednesday in February, he cranked out seven. “I’m a bit of a freak,” Lichtenberg said… A story by Lichtenberg sometimes starts with a prompt entered into Perplexity or Google’s NotebookLM, asking it to write something based on a headline he comes up with. He moves the AI tools’ initial drafts into a content-management system and edits the stories before publishing them for Fortune’s readers… A piece from earlier that morning about Josh D’Amaro being named Disney CEO took 10 minutes to get online, he said…

Like other journalists, Lichtenberg vets his stories. He refers back to the original documents to confirm the information he’s reporting is correct. He reaches out to companies for comment. But he admits his process isn’t as thorough as that of magazine fact-checkers.

While Lichtenberg started out saying his stories were co-authored with “Fortune Intelligence”, he now typically signs his own name, according to the article, “because he feels the work is mostly his own.” (Though his stories “sometimes” disclose generative AI was used as a research tool…) The article asks with he could be “a bellwether for where much of the media business is headed…”

“Much of the content people now consume online is generated by artificial intelligence, with some 9% of newly published newspaper articles either partially or fully AI-generated, according to a 2025 study led by the University of Maryland. The number of AI-generated articles on the web surpassed human-written ones in late 2024, according to research and marketing agency Graphite.”

Some executives have made full-throated declarations about the threat posed by AI. New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said AI “is almost certainly going to usher in an unprecedented torrent of crap,” referencing deepfakes as an example. The NewsGuild of New York, the union representing Fortune employees and journalists at other media outlets, said the people are what makes journalism so powerful. “You simply can’t replicate lived experiences, human judgment and expertise,” said president Susan DeCarava.

For Chris Quinn, the editor of local publications Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer, AI tools have helped tame other torrents facing the industry. AI has allowed the outlets to cover counties in Ohio that otherwise might go ignored by scraping information from local websites and sending “tips” to reporters, he said. It has also edited stories and written first drafts so the newsrooms’ journalists can focus on the calls, research and reporting needed for their stories…. Newsrooms from the New York Times to The Wall Street Journal are deploying AI in various ways to help reporters and editors work more efficiently….

Not all newsrooms disclose their use of AI, and in some cases have rolled out new tools that resulted in errors or PR gaffes. An October study from the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC, which relied on professional journalists to evaluate the news integrity of more than 3,000 AI responses, found that almost half of all AI responses had at least one significant issue.
Last week the New York Times even issued a correction when a freelance book reviewer using an AI tool unknowingly included “language and details similar to those in a review of the same book published in The Guardian.” But it was actually “the second time in a few days that the Times was called out for potential AI plagiarism,” according to the American journalist writing The Handbasket newsletter.
We must stem the idea being pushed by tech companies and their billionaire funders who’ve sunk too much into their products to admit defeat that the infiltration of AI into journalism is inevitable; because from my perch as an independent journalist, it simply is not…

Some AI-loving journalists appear to believe that if they’re clear enough with the AI program they’re using, it will truly understand what they’re seeking and not just do what it’s made to do: steal shit… If you want to work with machines, get a job that requires it. There are a whole lot more of those than there are writing jobs, so free up space for people who actually want to do the work. You’re not doing the world a favor by gifting it your human/AI hybrid. Journalism will not miss you if you leave…

But meanwhile, USA Today recently tried hiring for a new position: AI-Assisted reporter. (The lucky reporter will “support the launch and scaling of AI-assisted local journalism in a major U.S. metro,” working with tools including Copilot and Perplexity, pioneering possible future expansions and “AI-enabled newsroom operations that support and augment human-led journalism.”) And Google is already sponsoring a “publishing innovation award“…

Camille Bouget discusses how artificial intelligence is impacting innovation in the treatment of diseases affecting the immune system.

“Immuno-inflammatory diseases are often described as niche. They are not,” Camille Bouget, the CEO and co-founder of healthcare start-up Scienta Lab, explained to SiliconRepublic.com.  

With as many as one out of every 10 people in Western countries potentially impacted by an immuno-inflammatory condition, she noted, symptoms are often debilitating and the available therapeutic options frequently deeply inadequate for a significant proportion of patients. 

This is why, in 2021, Bouget co-founded Scienta Lab, a biotechnology company that aims to advance research within immunology via modern technologies such as artificial intelligence and EVA, the organisation’s multimodal AI model purpose-built for translational research in immunology and inflammation. 

“It was designed to answer the concrete questions that R&D teams face throughout drug development: which therapeutic targets are worth pursuing, which preclinical biological signals are robust enough to carry forward into clinical trials, and which patients are most likely to respond to a given candidate drug,” said Bouget. 

Applied across multiple stages of the pipeline, she explained, early on EVA can estimate therapeutic efficacy prior to a patient beginning treatment. As the programme advances, EVA can evaluate whether molecular signals observed in animal subjects are likely to translate to humans. And at the clinical stage, it can support the identification of patient subgroups for more precisely designed trials.

“The primary beneficiaries are biopharmaceutical and biotech companies working in immunology and inflammation,” she said.

“Ultimately, however, the downstream beneficiary is the patient: better-designed trials, fewer failed programmes and faster access to treatments that genuinely address unmet needs in diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and inflammatory bowel disease.”

Why AI?

A persistent challenge for Bouget and the industry she operates within has been in properly communicating the complexity of what they do in a manner that is accessible for all of the major stakeholders, be they investors, partners or the broader public.

“Immune diseases are notoriously difficult to characterise”, she noted, as often even the experts don’t always know how to measure them, what might prompt a flare-up, or why a treatment is effective for one patient but fails to work for another. 

“Convincing people that AI can meaningfully navigate that complexity without overpromising requires constant effort,” she said, especially as a young deep-tech company in an industry that is currently dominated by what she referred to as larger key players. 

She is of the opinion that the implication of AI for patients is significant, not least because the immunology drug development pipeline has historically suffered from high late-stage attrition, with programmes failing at phase II or phase III after years of investment and work. 

“Each of those failures represents not only a financial cost, but delayed or denied access to potentially effective therapies,” said Bouget. 

“AI that genuinely improves the translational accuracy of preclinical decision-making can meaningfully shorten that timeline and shift more resources toward candidates that are more likely to succeed.”

Sturdy foundations

But it isn’t simply a matter of having access to advanced technologies. For Bouget, multidisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers are critical to the overall success of any organisation attempting to transform immunology research and development.  

She said: “Multidisciplinary teams are the entire foundation of doing this well. The failure mode we see most often in the application of AI to drug development is a disconnect between the computational sophistication of a model and its biological relevance. 

“A model trained without deep immunological understanding may optimise for the wrong signal. Conversely, a team with outstanding biological expertise but limited machine learning capability will struggle to extract meaningful structure from the scale of data that modern multiomics generates.”

At Scienta Lab, the co-founding team consists of a pharmacist and former industry strategist, a biomedical engineer, and a mathematician with deep AI expertise.

“Day-to-day, our team spans immunology, bioinformatics, machine learning and clinical pharmacology,” Bouget explained.

“The ability to build bridges between those disciplines, to have a conversation where a wet-lab immunologist and a transformer architect are genuinely learning from each other, is what allows us to build models that are both technically rigorous and biologically meaningful.”

She added: “Organisations that try to solve this problem with either pure data science or pure biology will hit a ceiling. The translational gap in drug development is not fundamentally a data problem or a computing problem alone, but one of understanding that requires genuinely integrated teams.”

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Samsung is putting the final nail in the coffin for its own messaging app. The smartphone maker posted an “End of Service Announcement” on its website, revealing that the Samsung Messages app will no longer be available by July of this year. Samsung also recommended that anyone still using Samsung Messages switch over to Google Messages as the default messaging app.

For Samsung Messages users in the US, the switch to Google offers RCS messaging that lets you send high-quality media, join group chats and get real-time typing indicators no matter the smartphone’s OS. Galaxy smartphone owners may lose out on some of the Samsung Messages customization options, but Google Messages will make up for it generative AI from Gemini that can remix your photos in chats. On top of those features, Google Messages makes it easier for Samsung users to switch chats between a smartphone, tablet or smartwatch.

It’s no surprise that Samsung is only using Google Messages from now on, since it has been phasing out Samsung Messages for a few years now. Dating back to the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Flip 6, and then followed by the Galaxy S25 series, Samsung stopped preloading the Samsung Messages app and instead pre-installed the Google Messages app. The Samsung Messages app is still available on the Galaxy Store, but Samsung said the exact final date will eventually be announced on the app itself.

In short: Monzo announced on 1 April 2026 that it is closing its US operations, stopping new American sign-ups immediately and shutting existing accounts by June, and cutting approximately 50 roles. The decision comes three months after the UK challenger bank received a full banking licence from the European Central Bank and the Central Bank of Ireland, opening up expansion across the EU. It also arrives as Monzo prepares for a London IPO that Morgan Stanley is advising on, with a target valuation of between £6 billion and £7 billion.

Monzo is leaving the United States. The UK challenger bank announced on 1 April 2026 that it would cease accepting new American customers immediately, cut approximately 50 US-based roles, and close all existing American accounts by June. In a statement, the company framed the decision as a deliberate reorientation rather than a retreat: “With a fast-growing customer base of 15 million in the UK and the growth opportunity our European banking licence creates, we’re making a deliberate, strategic decision to focus on scaling in our home market and Europe and to step away from the US.” The announcement ends a seven-year experiment that never fully resolved its central structural problem, Monzo could not get a banking licence in the US, and without one, it could not compete.

Seven years, no charter

Monzo announced its American expansion in June 2019, rolling out a simplified version of its app to US customers and partnering with Sutton Bank, an Ohio-based FDIC-insured institution, to hold customer deposits and issue debit cards. The arrangement was always a workaround: without its own banking charter, Monzo could not originate loans, access core payment infrastructure directly, or compete in the lending and interchange revenue streams that define US retail banking profitability. It filed an application with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national bank charter in April 2020, but withdrew the application in late 2021 after regulators signalled it would not be approved. The company faced opposition from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, among others, which argued that Monzo had not demonstrated sufficient commitment to serving local community needs. After withdrawing the OCC application, Monzo continued operating in the US through partner institutions, but it never secured the infrastructure that would have made its American business structurally viable.

The result, after seven years, was a product that offered a digital current account but not the full-service banking relationship that Monzo had built in the UK. US customers could not access mortgages, personal loans, or the premium credit products that generate meaningful revenue. They had a sophisticated spending tracker and a card linked to a partner bank’s balance sheet. That is a reasonable travel companion. It is not a challenger bank.

The European licence that changed the calculation

On 17 December 2025, the European Central Bank and the Central Bank of Ireland granted Monzo a full banking licence, making it the first digital bank to be fully regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland and establishing Dublin as its European headquarters. The licence unlocks what the OCC application never delivered: the right to hold customer deposits directly, originate loans, and operate as a full bank across the 27-member EU single market under the EU’s passporting regime. Europe’s appetite for homegrown technology champions in financial services has grown considerably in recent years, and Monzo’s Irish licence positions it to compete for that opportunity on equal terms with incumbent banks for the first time. The three months between the Dublin licence and the US exit announcement are not coincidental. The company now has a credible path to scaled profitability in a market where it is already the dominant challenger; the US, by contrast, remained a market where it was permanently constrained.

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An IPO in the background

The withdrawal also has a more immediate audience: the investors Monzo is courting ahead of a public listing. The company has appointed Morgan Stanley to advise on a London Stock Exchange IPO that is expected in 2026, with a target valuation of between £6 billion and £7 billion — compared with the $5.9 billion implied by a secondary share sale in October 2024. Companies preparing for public listings in 2026 have generally found that a clean, focused growth story commands a higher multiple than a sprawling international footprint with mixed results, and a US operation that could not clear its structural barriers was a complication the IPO story did not need.

The listing has already generated internal turbulence. TS Anil, who served as Monzo’s CEO for five years, stepped down in February 2026 following a reported dispute with the board over the timing and location of the IPO. Anil is understood to have favoured an earlier listing and had expressed interest in a New York venue; the board opted for London and more time. Diana Layfield, who spent nearly a decade at Google and more than a decade at Standard Chartered, was named his successor in October 2025 and took the role subject to regulatory approvals. Her mandate is the European expansion and the public listing. The US exit is the first visible act of that mandate.

The numbers behind the decision

Monzo’s financial trajectory gives the pivot a logic that is easier to explain to prospective public market investors than to American customers receiving account-closure notices. For the financial year ending March 2025, the bank reported revenue of £1.24 billion, up 48% year on year. Adjusted pre-tax profit reached £113.9 million, an eightfold increase on the prior year. Customer deposits grew 48% to £16.6 billion. A year that saw digital banking’s growth trajectory sharpen considerably across European markets validated the core bet: that a mobile-first bank with no branch network could generate the kind of revenue and profit that commands a credible IPO valuation. The US, in that context, was consuming resources that could instead be deployed against a market where the regulatory framework and customer base are already in place.

The subscription and premium-tier model that has driven platform revenue growth across technology is central to how Monzo has reached profitability in the UK: Monzo Plus and Monzo Premium accounts charge monthly fees and bundle benefits including travel insurance, higher interest rates on savings, and cashback. Replicating that model in the US required a depth of product, overdrafts, credit, savings, that a partner-bank structure made impossible. In the UK and, increasingly, in Europe, Monzo can offer all of it.

The broader picture

The move leaves the US challenger banking market increasingly to domestic incumbents and to a handful of well-capitalised European fintechs that have managed to secure their own charters. Revolut, Monzo’s nearest European rival, has been pursuing a US banking licence since 2021 and has yet to obtain one. The structural barriers that defeated Monzo’s OCC application remain in place. The lesson emerging from several high-profile European technology companies is that the conviction to double down on home-market strength, rather than spreading capital across geographies where the terms are unfavourable, is increasingly what investors reward. Monzo’s board, in pushing for a London listing and a European expansion over an American one, appears to have reached the same conclusion.

For American customers, the practical consequence is a June 2026 account closure. Monzo said it would provide guidance in the coming days on how to transfer funds, redirect direct deposits, and access statements after the accounts are closed. For Monzo itself, the US chapter closes with a banking licence in Dublin, a public listing in preparation, and 15 million customers in the UK who collectively generated more than a billion pounds in revenue in a single year. The experiment in America is over. The business case for ending it is not difficult to read.