The specter of price hikes caused by the current AI-driven demand for memory and storage appears to have convinced a fair share of people to buy a new computer. According to data analyzed by Counterpoint Research, global PC shipments grew around 3.2 percent year-over-year in Q1 2026, “driven by pre-emptive buying before memory-led price increases hit the retail level” and Microsoft forcing some customers to upgrade by ending support for Windows 10 last year.

Sales hit 63.3 million units during the first quarter, Counterpoint says, and were particularly concentrated in five high-end PC makers: Lenovo, ASUS, Apple, HP and Dell. Of the five, Lenovo commands the most PC market share at 26 percent, but sales increased for almost all of the companies, save for HP, whose year-over-year sales technically declined by 5 percent. Of particular note, Apple’s PC sales grew by 11 percent, likely on the strength of the M5 updates it made to the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, and the introduction of the affordable $600 MacBook Neo. Counterpoint suggests the updates could drive even further sales growth next quarter.

Even with positive sales, the PC industry as a whole is by no means out of the woods. “The aggressive expansion in AI infrastructure investment is driving up overall component costs, which will likely impact the pricing of CPUs and other key components in [PCs],” Counterpoint Senior Analyst Minsoo Kang says. “Ultimately, the sustained upward pressure on costs and the resulting hike in retail prices are expected to have a significant negative impact on the PC market’s growth in 2026.”

A general sense that the worst is yet to come is consistent with what other analysts have warned about the current shortages of RAM and storage. In December 2025, IDC predicted that PC shipments could drop as much as 8.9 percent in 2026 in response to the price of RAM, and later revised its prediction to 11.6 percent this past March. Even if consumers aren’t feeling the worst of these price hikes just yet, new announcements of price increases seem to arrive like clockwork every few weeks — for example, this week, Meta raised the price of its Quest headsets — which means if they aren’t feeling them now, they will soon.

• China successfully demonstrates geosynchronous satellite tracking of moving maritime targets
• Persistent surveillance from orbit reduces reliance on low Earth satellite constellations
• Three satellites could provide continuous global monitoring of high-value naval assets

China has released radar images showing a geosynchronous orbit satellite successfully tracking a moving maritime target for the first time.

The satellite locked onto the Towa Maru, a 340 meter Japanese tanker traversing rough seas near the Spratly Islands, from an altitude of 35,800 kilometers above Earth.

The James Bond franchise has a long history of getting pop stars to record its theme songs (perhaps most memorably with Live and Let Die), and it looks like that tradition will now extend to video game adaptations about the fictional spy. IO Interactive has announced that Lana Del Rey co-wrote and performed the theme for 007 First Light, the developer’s playable James Bond origin story.

“First Light” is written and performed by Lana Del Rey and composer David Arnold, and like the moody and abstract opening credits released alongside the song, could vaguely gesture at the themes of the game. IO Interactive has previously said that its game focuses on a young, inexperienced and more reckless Bond, before he developed his trademark cool. The developer is also integrating the stealth mechanics it perfected in Hitman into the upcoming game.

Del Rey’s personal gaming experience may begin and end with her hit “Video Games,” which was apparently written about a former boyfriend’s love of World of Warcraft, but the artist does know how to write a song with Bond in mind. Lana Del Rey shared in 2024 that her song “24” from the album Honeymoon was originally written for 2017’s Spectre, one of several songs that were cast aside in favor of Sam Smith’s “Writing’s on the Wall.”

007 First Light is coming to Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC on May 27, 2026. A Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game is now coming out this summer.

Apple TV+ has quietly built one of the more interesting libraries among the popular streaming platforms. Somewhere between the buzzy dramas and the shows that everyone seems to be talking about, there are a handful of genuinely great series just sitting there, unwatched.

So let’s fix that this weekend. Whether you are in the mood for a thriller that messes with your grip on reality or something that will haunt you using nothing but sound, there is something here for you. Here are three underrated Apple TV+ shows worth your time.

We also have guides to the best new movies to stream, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best free movies, and the best movies on Amazon Prime Video.

Counterpart (2017)

Howard Silk has spent 30 years doing a quiet, unremarkable job at a Berlin-based UN agency, shuffling papers and exchanging coded messages he does not understand. One day, he is told the truth: there is a crossing beneath the building to a parallel Earth, one that split from ours in 1987 and has since gone in a very different direction. To make things worse, his counterpart from that other world, also called Howard Silk, is nothing like him. Same face, same history, but entirely different man.

J.K. Simmons plays both versions with such complete distinction that you never lose track of which Howard you are watching. It is one of the best dual performances I have seen in recent TV shows. The show wraps its parallel world concept in the thick atmosphere of Cold War espionage: Berlin backstreets, dead drops, sleeper agents, and the paranoia of never knowing whose side anyone is really on.

You can watch Counterpart on Apple TV.

Calls (2021)

There are no visuals here in this underrated Apple TV show. What you get instead is a series of phone calls between strangers, laid over abstract, shifting patterns of light and sound, as something catastrophic and inexplicable begins to unravel the world around them. Each of the nine short episodes drops you into a different conversation, most of them terrifying in the quietest possible way.

The cast is stacked: Pedro Pascal, Aubrey Plaza, Lily Collins, Rosario Dawson, and others, none of whom you ever see. You just hear them, and that turns out to be the point. Directed by Fede Álvarez, the filmmaker behind Don’t Breathe, the show understands that what your imagination fills in is always scarier than what any screen can show you.

You can watch Calls on Apple TV.

Shining Girls (2022)

Kirby Mazrachi is a newspaper archivist at the Chicago Sun-Times trying to hold her life together after surviving a brutal assault. The problem is that her reality keeps changing around her. She comes home and suddenly owns a dog instead of a cat. She discovers she is married to a man she only remembers as a colleague. Her desk at work keeps moving. No one else notices except for Kirby.

Elisabeth Moss carries the whole thing on her back, and she is extraordinary, calibrating Kirby’s confidence and anxiety differently across each shifting version of reality. Jamie Bell is quietly terrifying as the villain. The show uses time travel not as a gimmick but as a way of showing how one person’s violence can create ripples, trapping its victims in a reality they cannot fully trust. It is slow to start and deliberately disorienting, which is entirely the point.

You can watch Shining Girls on Apple TV.

Microsoft’s next wave of Surface devices may have just leaked, and it looks like it is doubling down on choice.

Early retailer listings suggest the upcoming Surface Pro and Surface Laptop will once again be split between ARM and Intel models. There will also be more configurations than before.

On the consumer side, both devices are expected to run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 chips. These include the X2 Plus and X2 Elite. For the Surface Laptop, that reportedly means sticking with the 13.8-inch model. It also involves dropping the larger 15-inch ARM variant altogether. Memory options are said to range from 16GB to 24GB RAM. These will be paired with 512GB to 1TB SSD storage.

Google Gemini is the most trusted AI platform among its competition, but many people still have concerns about the technology, according to an American Customer Satisfaction Index poll released Thursday.

In ACSI’s results, AI scored an overall customer satisfaction score of 73 on a scale of 0 to 100, which the authors noted was slightly below social media (74), airlines and mortgage lenders, but in line with energy utilities. 

Of the five platforms mentioned in the survey, Google Gemini led with 76, followed by Microsoft Copilot (74), Claude and ChatGPT (both 73), and Grok and Perplexity (both 71). Meanwhile, TikTok (77) and YouTube (78) both scored better than the AI platforms.

Gemini is one of the most prolific AI services, with access via smart speakers, TVs, phones and computers, while most ChatGPT users access the AI tool via the ChatGPT website or mobile app, and Grok via social media platform X.

The ACSI poll found that 43% of respondents said reduced human-to-human interaction is their main concern, followed by job loss for future generations (37%) and their own job risk (31%), based on interviews with 2,711 US adults.

Baby Boomers were the most skeptical generation in the poll, with 35% saying they are very concerned about AI’s effects, compared to just 6% who view it extremely favorably.

Disconnect between AI adoption and perception

While platforms such as ChatGPT have up to 1 billion weekly users, there is still a disconnect between AI’s adoption and public perception of it, which is driven by concerns over privacy, the spread of misinformation and the loss of jobs. 

“Consumers spent the last decade learning to distrust how social media platforms handle their data, and AI’s privacy scores suggest they’re carrying that skepticism forward,” said Forrest Morgeson, associate professor of marketing at Michigan State University and director of research emeritus at the ACSI.

21% reported an “extremely favorable” outlook toward AI, while an equal 21% said they are “very concerned about the consequences.” 

These results were in line with another poll published by YouGov this week, which found that only 29% think the positive effects of AI outweigh the negative ones, while 36% think its net effects are negative.

It’s worth noting that more than half of the people interviewed (56%) had no recent experience with AI, but of the 44% who did, half of them use AI at least once a day, and the usage went up with people who earned over $100,000 a year.

Last month, an NBC poll suggested that AI was one of the least-liked things in America, but it was still more popular than the Democratic Party.