• Old Pixel phones are being rebuilt into low-cost computing clusters
• Researchers stripped smartphones down to motherboards and deployed Linux
• Twenty retired phones can support applications used by 75 students

Millions of discarded smartphones are added to the global electronic waste stream every year despite retaining substantial computing capability.

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego, have now partnered with Google to investigate whether retired Pixel devices can be repurposed for practical computing workloads.

Ripple effect: The RAMpocalypse has claimed another victim. Nothing has confirmed that its next budget phone, a follow-up to the CMF Phone 2 Pro, will not launch this year. The company confirmed the cancellation is because of skyrocketing memory prices that are disrupting the tech industry in a way not seen since Covid.

Nothing co-founder Akis Evangelidis, the executive behind the CMF line, said the firm had been working on a successor to the CMF Phone 2 Pro, but current memory costs made the device impossible to release without undermining the point of the brand.

“We were working on a successor but with memory prices where they are right now, we can’t build a phone that feels like a genuine step forward at a price that makes sense for CMF. As a result, we’ve decided not to launch a new CMF phone this year,” Evangelidis wrote in an X post.

– Akis Evangelidis (@AkisEvangelidis) June 19, 2026

The decision doesn’t mean CMF phones are dead forever. Evangelidis added that CMF still has other products coming this year, including devices in entirely new categories, while Nothing’s smartphone launch plans are continuing.

CMF is Nothing’s budget-focused sub-brand. Android Authority notes that the CMF Phone 2 Pro launched in India at Rs. 18,999 (~$200) for the 8GB/128GB model and Rs. 20,999 (~$222) for the 8GB/256GB version, with the latter also reaching the US at $279. Evangelidis said that launching the same hardware today would push the price to around Rs. 30,000 to Rs. 35,000, or roughly $318 to $370.

Nothing CEO Carl Pei warned last week that the memory crisis is spreading quickly across the phone market. He said memory costs for the Phone (4a) doubled between development and launch, then doubled again afterward. He added that RAM is now more expensive than the processor or display and can account for more than half of a smartphone’s hardware bill.

“Phone prices are going up, and they’ll keep going up into next year. Since February, new phones have been launching up to $100 more expensive than their predecessors,” Pei wrote in an X post.

– Carl Pei (@getpeid) June 12, 2026

The CMF cancellation is another sign that RAMageddon continues affecting consumer products beyond PC components. Tim Cook recently confirmed that Apple price hikes are coming as iPhones could jump by $200 or more, MSI blamed memory and storage costs for its $1,800 Claw 8 EX AI+ handheld, and the wider memory crisis resurrecting DDR4 production and older GPUs. When will things get better? Not anytime soon, sadly, according to most estimations.

I quickly found that Siri AI’s bite-sized replies don’t drone on endlessly like many contemporary AI assistants, often sticking to a single paragraph. When I verbally asked for a nice beach hike route to see the sunrise near the Golden Gate Bridge, it succinctly recommended a popular trail in the Presidio neighborhood as well as an option in the Marin Headlands. Siri bolded key words in the text answer that appeared alongside the audible response for easy scanning. Since I wanted more info before heading out, I swiped down on the text answer to read additional details about each option.

Apple’s partnership with Google is a core driver behind this Siri overhaul. Google’s Gemini now helps power the voice assistant’s underlying model, Apple Intelligence. Siri’s output with this new model felt more attuned to what I was looking for, rather than just suggesting a couple of website links for me to dig through. When I asked generic questions, like “What should I do today,” Siri combed through my recent messages and highlighted recent plans I started discussing with friends but never finalized.

Another key aspect of Siri AI is hyper-personalization based on what you have on your device, whether that data is in your photos or messages. It also doesn’t keep you locked into Apple-only services; when I asked Siri to draft a text, the voice assistant confirmed if I wanted to send it through Apple’s Messages or Meta’s Messenger service.

This style of AI search requires Siri to index your phone, which means scanning and cataloging its data for easy reference. When I updated my iPhone to the developer beta for iOS 27, it took a little over a week for the device to fully index.

At WWDC 2026, Apple repeatedly referenced its privacy-preserving approach to Siri AI. As part of the company’s Private Cloud Compute, Apple claims it doesn’t store data from users and only pulls from it when you ask Siri a question. Similar to the previous version of Apple’s assistant, users who aren’t interested can turn off Siri AI in their settings.

I tested Siri AI on an iPhone 16 Pro Max, which will have many but not all of Siri AI’s features. Based on what’s been publicly released, only the iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, and the iPhone 17 Max will have all the fixings, like more varied voice options. As for the rest of the lineup: Every iPhone 16 and iPhone 17 model will be able to run the new Siri, while only the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max will be compatible. Older models will not support this voice assistant.

Siri, Let’s Take a Hike

Like any good tourist, I started my morning off with a visit to the Golden Gate Bridge, where there are plenty of nearby hiking trails to wander around and soak up the views. Since Siri AI is also integrated with the iPhone’s camera app, I decided to open it up and snap a quick photo of the foggy path ahead of me to see how Siri would respond.

I didn’t ask Siri any questions; I just showed it a snapshot of what I saw at the moment, and the AI tool responded with a short history of the Cypress Tree Tunnel located at Point Reyes National Seashore. Siri was right to clock the Monterey cypress trees. But the tunnel it referenced is an hour drive from where I was, potentially confusing for someone not familiar with the area.

Despite this apparent flub, the more I chatted with Siri while walking around, the more impressed I was at other functions, like helping uncover images from past adventures hidden among the thousands of photos in my camera roll.

Anthropic announced a potentially game-changing new feature for users of Claude Code on the Claude Team and Enterprise subscription plans: Artifacts.

This update turns a Claude Code session’s work into a live, interactive, and shareable, custom HTML webpage, allowing a Claude Code user to plug in live code, multiple data sources, and have it surface on an interactive URL that they can send to other teammates — be it a dashboard, an app design, or some other product meant for internal usage.

These teammates and the original user can watch the webpage it update in real-time as Claude Code goes about its work autonomously or under the user’s guidance, and as the connected data sources and codebases change.

While Anthropic first introduced Artifacts to its consumer web chatbot in the summer of 2024—where it evolved from a manual toggle feature to a generally available tool for publishing code snippets and games to the web—integrating this capability directly into the Claude Code command-line interface (CLI) and desktop app bridges the gap between deep, back-end engineering and the non-technical stakeholders who need to understand it.

Product and Technology: The End of the Status Update

At its core, Claude Code Artifacts acts as a dynamic translation layer. Built directly from the unbroken context of a user’s session, the agent uses the local repository codebase, connected monitoring tools, and conversational reasoning to spin up specialized web pages.

Engineers no longer need to wire up external data sources or stand up temporary infrastructure; the AI builds the UI from what already exists.

Crucially, these web pages are not static exports. As the AI works through a terminal session, the open webpage refreshes in-place, updating charts and text instantly at the exact same URL. Every update publishes a new version history, allowing teammates to roll back or track the agent’s progress securely on desktop or mobile.

The Battle of Live, Interactive, Shared AI Work Surfaces: Anthropic’s Claude Code Artifacts vs. OpenAI’s Codex Sites

Anthropic’s update comes more than two weeks after OpenAI released a massive update to its own Codex platform, introducing a strikingly similar enterprise hosting feature called “Sites”.

This tit-for-tat product cadence highlights a rapidly escalating battle over the enterprise workspace across functions and beyond developers themselves, though there are some important technical and philosophical distinctions worth pointing out for enterprises considering either.

As revealed in their respective developer documentation webpages, OpenAI is building a platform-as-a-service; Anthropic is building a stateless canvas.

OpenAI’s Sites is designed to generate durable, full-stack web applications. According to the platform’s documentation, Codex Sites hosts projects that output as Cloudflare Worker-compatible ES modules.

Crucially, Sites supports persistent backend infrastructure: agents can automatically wire up “D1” relational databases for structured data (like user progress or saved records) and “R2” object storage for file uploads. An OpenAI Site can support public sign-ins, integrate with external identity providers, and allows for highly specific access controls tailored to specific workspace groups.

It utilizes a two-stage publishing process—saving a reviewable candidate linked to a Git commit before officially deploying to production. In short, it is a production environment designed to replace functional internal SaaS tools.

Anthropic’s Claude Code Artifacts, by contrast, deliberately avoids the backend. The newly released documentation is blunt about its limitations: “An artifact is a capture of work, not an application”.

Each Artifact is a single, self-contained HTML page capped at a rendered size of 16 MiB. To guarantee organizational security, Claude wraps the published file in a strict Content Security Policy (CSP) that blocks all external network requests. T

his means the page cannot load external scripts, fonts, or stylesheets, and fetch, XHR, and WebSocket calls are completely blocked. All CSS and JavaScript must be inlined, and images must be embedded as data URIs. Artifacts cannot store form input, call an API at view time, or serve multiple routes.

This technical limitation is actually Anthropic’s deliberate philosophical position: While OpenAI wants to spin up persistent software portals for the whole company, Anthropic is keeping Claude Code firmly anchored in ephemeral, highly secure technical workflows. Claude Artifacts are not meant to be software; they are meant to replace whiteboard diagrams, manual bug walkthroughs, and status reports with secure, self-updating visual tools that never leak live data outside the corporate boundary.

Licensing and Enterprise Security: Keeping the Codebase Private

Because these agents sit at the nexus of proprietary company data and live codebases, licensing and access controls are a primary concern.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI have opted for closed, proprietary licensing models for these new visual workspaces. For end users and developers, the distinction is critical. Unlike permissive open-source software (such as MIT or Apache 2.0) or strict copyleft licenses (like GPL)—which grant developers the legal freedom to inspect, modify, and self-host the underlying code—neither Claude Code Artifacts nor Codex Sites can be independently forked or hosted.

Enterprise clients do not maintain code-level ownership over Anthropic’s rendering engine or Codex’s integration nodes; both operate strictly within their respective creators’ managed infrastructures.

To make this vendor-managed approach palatable to enterprise compliance teams, both companies have heavily prioritized organizational security. Anthropic ensures every artifact is private to its author by default and strictly cannot be made public to the broader internet. When an engineer chooses to share a link, it is viewable exclusively by authenticated members of their specific organization. System administrators retain ultimate authority, managing access through org-level toggles, role-based scoping, and explicit retention policies, while maintaining oversight through a centralized compliance API.

OpenAI takes a similarly gated approach with Codex Sites, rolling the feature out primarily for ChatGPT Business and Enterprise workspaces. Like Anthropic, OpenAI relies on system administrators to manage deployment through centralized workspace settings, requiring an admin to explicitly enable Sites via role-based access control (RBAC) for Enterprise tiers.

However, because Codex Sites functions more like a hosted web application, its access controls are slightly more granular. When an engineer prepares to share a deployed URL, they can apply specific access modes: restricting the site to just themselves and workspace admins, opening it to all active users in the workspace, or limiting access to custom user groups.

Furthermore, to prevent sensitive data leaks, OpenAI provides a dedicated Sites panel to manage runtime environment variables and secrets securely, ensuring those keys do not have to be committed to local source files.

Reactions and Reflections

The introduction of visual, self-updating UI layers to command-line agents is fundamentally altering how developers view their own workflows. As AI handles the raw syntax and automates the reporting, the friction of communicating technical work to stakeholders is vanishing.

Boris Cherny, the Lead and creator of Claude Code, highlighted the sheer utility of the update in a post on X earlier today:

“I’ve been using Artifacts in Claude Code for everything: visual explanations of tricky code, system diagrams, quick previews of a few animation options, data analyses and dashboards I share with the team,” Cherny wrote. “They are a game changer for how I work with Claude. Can’t wait to hear what you think!”

This sentiment is practically demonstrated in Anthropic’s launch materials. In one scenario, an engineer prompts Claude Code to investigate user drop-offs since a previous software release.

In a matter of seconds, the agent executes an SQL read, builds an interactive drop-off funnel dashboard, and diagnoses that “Pro accounts stall at the export sheet”. The AI then proposes UI fixes, updates the live charts as the code is refactored, and generates a secure link that a manager can instantly open via mobile.

By turning the terminal into a live, collaborative canvas, Anthropic is proving that the most valuable output of an AI coding assistant isn’t just the code itself—it is the context, the reasoning, and the ability to share that work instantly.

Netherlands vs Sweden is a vital match in Group F at World Cup 2026. A battle between two European sides meeting for the first time in nearly nine years, if either side can pick up the win they’ll be in the box seat for automatic qualification for the knockout phase.

The Dutch arrive after an underwhelming 2-2 draw against Japan, a contest Ronald Koeman will feel his side should have won, having twice led. The Oranje boast plenty of firepower, with Crysencio Summerville in jet-heeled form and Donyell Malen superb since joining Roma in January, but will hope that captain Virgil van Dijk can corral a defense that includes Tottenham’s Micky van de Ven into a more compact display. The three-time runners-up conceded only four times in qualifying, after all.

It’s down to subscriptions, data and new AI-driven infotainment systems.

How Android Auto came to dominate your dash

General Motors

Carmakers want your data

BMW

Potential consumer blowback

WTF?! With the AI boom driving GPU prices to record highs, scammers are capitalizing by flooding the market with counterfeit graphics cards. A new report from China suggests that fraudsters are now gluing fake plastic GPU shells onto PCBs and selling them as genuine RTX 4090 graphics cards to unsuspecting buyers.

In a video posted on the Chinese social media platform Bilibili, well-known PC hardware dealer Brother Zhang claimed that he was recently scammed into buying a counterfeit second-hand RTX 4090 for 1,500 yuan (around $221). According to Zhang, the card appeared to be a normal RTX 4090 at first glance, with the die markings reading “AD102-300-A1,” which refers to the actual GPU used in the 4090.

However, upon further investigation, he found that other markings on the die were inconsistent with original RTX GPUs, such as the font style, which did not match Nvidia’s official design. The die also had “TW 3043E2” engraved on it, suggesting it was manufactured in 2030 – an error Nvidia and its official board partners are unlikely to make.

Zhang immediately suspected that the card was not authentic, or at least that some components may have been swapped out before being sold. Once he disassembled the card for further inspection, his suspicions were confirmed: the GPU die was made of plastic rather than silicon. The memory dies were not real either.

Zhang compared the fake RTX 4090 die with photographs of an original RTX 4090 board, confirming his suspicion that nearly every part of the card was counterfeit and had been glued onto the PCB to fill empty space. Other discrepancies included misplaced capacitors and a missing QR code that would have been etched onto the die had it been authentic.

It is worth noting that this is not the first time reports have surfaced of fake graphics cards being sold to unsuspecting buyers. Earlier this year, a repair shop owner came across a “near-perfect” fake RTX 4090 with laser-etched VRAM and a fake GPU core. Last year, a technician in China found that three out of four RTX 4090 cards he received for repair were fitted with RTX 3090 or RTX 3080 dies.

The first day of the BMPS Grand Finals here at the Jaipur Convention Center has just curtailed, and it was another exhilarating, action-packed scene we’ve all come to expect of BGMI action. Despite securing two chicken dinners, iQOO Reckoning Esports couldn’t hold on to the top spot, with Divine Gaming and Nebula Esports finishing first and second, respectively. Not every fan favorite had a day to remember. Teams like iQOO SouL and TAG barely managed to get going and now find themselves near the bottom of the standings. Here’s what the full standings looked like after day one of the BMPS Grand Finals.

BMPS 2026 Grand Finals Standings Day 1

Day 2 gets underway tomorrow, and if BMPS history is anything to go by, it’s often the day when teams begin mounting comebacks. We hope to see similar top-tier action and maybe a comeback from fan favorites like Soul. If you missed today’s games, check out our highlights of day 1.

Few devices attempt to blend serious outdoor durability with features that feel borrowed from a living room setup. The 8849 Tank 5 does so without apology. This latest entry in the Tank series arrives as a thick, heavy slab of a phone that carries a built-in 2K DLP projector, a 17,600mAh battery, and flagship-grade internals while meeting strict IP68 and IP69K standards for dust and water resistance.

With a weight of 715 grams and a thickness of 33.8mm, the Tank 5 will immediately draw your notice as soon as it leaves your pocket or bag. It measures 33.8mm (1.39 in) thick, giving it a chunky feel, more like a compact portable radio than a typical smartphone. Two physical keys can be programmed to activate the flashlight at the touch of a button or provide rapid access to other essential features. The back features a 1200-lumen camping light with RGB warning functionality. It’s far brighter than a regular LED flash, making it ideal for signaling or lighting up your campground. On the side, a fingerprint sensor allows you to easily unlock the phone.

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When it comes to power delivery, you get a big 17600mAh battery to keep things going. Early testers have reported getting several days out of a single charge, which must be reassuring. Of course, if it does run low, you can plug it in and get back up to speed in approximately 90 minutes using 120W cable charging. The phone may also double as a power bank for smaller gadgets, including reverse wired charging at 25W. Of course, you can continue to use the projector, but excessive use will shorten the life of your battery.

The MediaTek Dimensity 9400e, an octa-core chipset designed on a 4nm technology, delivers performance. It has a primary Cortex-X4 core running at 3.4GHz, as well as certain high-performance and efficiency cores and an Immortalis-G720 GPU. Early testing indicate that it can get AnTuTu scores of over 2.3 million, making it a flagship performer for gaming, multitasking, and demanding programs. Memory options include 18GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB of UFS 4.0 internal memory, with the possibility to add up to 2TB of storage via microSD card. Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, NFC, dual Nano-SIM and eSIM support, as well as USB 3.1 and DisplayPort 1.4 for connected video to external screens, round out the connectivity options.

The phone’s front display is a 6.73-inch AMOLED with a resolution of 3200 by 1440, a refresh rate of 120Hz, and a peak brightness of up to 3000 nits. That high brightness, paired with the AMOLED contrast, makes a significant difference when working or exploring outdoors in direct sunshine, and the punch-hole camera cutout keeps the screen area relatively clear. The Tank 5 stands out from other rugged phones due to its rear-mounted 2K DLP projector with a brightness of 220 lumens. With 2048 by 1080 resolution, laser autofocus, and automated keystone correction, you can see a good-sized image on a nearby wall or portable screen even in low-light or gloomy settings. Ideal for movie nights on a camping trip or quick presentations wherever they are required.

The rear camera setup consists of a 50 megapixel primary sensor, a 50 megapixel telephoto lens, and a 50 megapixel night vision camera equipped with infrared LEDs, allowing you to capture usable images even in complete darkness. In contrast, a 32 megapixel front camera easily handles video calls and selfies. Now, the inclusion of night vision and a telephoto lens opens up new options for users like hikers and security professionals, as well as anyone who needs to see things from a distance or in poor light.

Prices begin at $899 during the initial pre-order period and rise to the regular price of $999 shortly after. What you get is a single configuration option with 18GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, all in black, with no additional options available. By the way, pre-orders commenced in mid-June 2026, and shipping should begin in early July through official channels and the occasional warehouse.

The company’s co-founder says it’s because of increasing memory prices.