The memory shortage has become a political problem in Washington. Now the chip industry has a message for the Trump administration: leave the market alone, or the squeeze gets worse.
The warning came in a letter from SEMI, a semiconductor industry group, to senior US officials. Any attempt to fix the shortage by steering prices or production would deepen it, the group said, as Bloomberg reported.
The crunch traces back to the AI boom, which is swallowing memory chips faster than makers can produce them.
Hands off the market
SEMI’s argument is blunt. “Interventions that distort pricing or capacity decisions risk prolonging the demand downturn,” the group wrote, in a copy seen by Bloomberg. It wants the opposite approach. Let companies keep signing long-term supply deals with customers, and extend tax breaks that lift US output.
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The 💜 of EU tech
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The stakes are high for its members. The three big memory makers all belong to SEMI: Micron in Idaho, plus SK Hynix and Samsung of South Korea. Their shares have soared as AI demand outstrips supply.
A pocketbook problem
The politics are shifting because the shortage now reaches ordinary shoppers. Memory sits in everything from cars to laptops, and prices are climbing across the board. Even decades-old memory standards have jumped. Apple and Microsoft have both raised prices on popular gadgets, which is exactly what worries politicians eyeing voters’ wallets.
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SEMI has a fix for that too. Rather than capping prices, it wants Congress to soften the blow with consumer tax breaks on phones and laptops. The group was careful to thank the administration for its support of the chip sector.
The China question
The letter lands in the middle of a louder fight. Apple is lobbying the same officials for permission to buy memory from two Chinese firms on a Pentagon blacklist. SEMI’s letter names no Chinese suppliers. But it went to the very people Apple has been pressing: the Treasury, Defence, Commerce and State secretaries.
Not everyone in Washington wants a light touch. One Republican senator, Bernie Moreno of Ohio, has urged the Commerce Secretary to put American buyers first. He warned of a car-industry hit like the one seen during the pandemic.
Years, not months
The hard truth is time. SEMI says memory capacity should grow about 19 per cent a year, yet AI demand will still eclipse it. New factories take years to build. Until they arrive, the mismatch keeps pushing prices up. For European shoppers, the warning rhymes with one already made in Britain.
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Currys expects phones, laptops and TVs to cost more later this year. The industry’s message to politicians is simple. You cannot regulate more chips into existence.
Renders of Samsung’s long-rumoured Galaxy Glasses have appeared in a short video that gives us an interesting look at the company’s first Android XR smart glasses.
Shared by SamMobile, the 27-second clip focuses on the glasses’ design rather than their software. Nevertheless, it shows hardware details that previous leaks haven’t shown this clearly before. This doesn’t look like an official video, more likely a generated video based on leaks.
The video shows a fairly understated design with square lenses and slim arms. This look is closer to a regular pair of glasses than many existing smart glasses.
A touch-sensitive area appears on the right temple, alongside a dedicated power button, while an LED indicator is also visible.
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On the opposite side sits what appears to be a built-in camera. Consequently, this suggests Samsung is leaning into both mixed reality and everyday photography features.
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While the leaked video doesn’t reveal any new specifications, it lines up with previous reports about what will power the wearable. The Galaxy Glasses are expected to use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR1 platform and pair with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity to link with compatible devices.
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The timing of the leak is also notable. Samsung will likely unveil – or at least tease – the Galaxy Glasses during its next Galaxy Unpacked event in London on July 22, alongside its latest foldable phones and wearables. This will also see the launch of the much-rumoured wide Galaxy Fold.
Although Samsung has yet to officially confirm the smart glasses, the appearance of this video suggests the launch isn’t far away. If the leaks are accurate, the Galaxy Glasses could become one of the first mainstream devices to showcase Google’s Android XR platform.
This would give Samsung a direct competitor to the growing number of AI-powered smart glasses entering the market.
KPMG finds nearly a third of execs struggle to understand costs as companies rethink deployments
Nearly a third of corporate leaders report difficulty understanding and controlling operating costs when implementing business AI at scale, according to a survey from KPMG.
In recent months, Anthropic, OpenAI, and GitHub have shifted some services away from flat-rate subscriptions toward usage-based billing.
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“As usage-based pricing models become more common, many organizations are still building the capabilities required to forecast, monitor, and manage AI spending effectively,” KPMG said.
The survey of 2,145 senior leaders across 20 countries found that 29 percent struggle to understand their operating costs as they scale their enterprise AI deployments.
A third of senior corporate leaders also identified limited understanding of AI costs and economics as a challenge to deploying AI agents.
Businesses are rethinking their AI plans in the face of changing cost structures and rising fees. The research also found nearly half of organizations have rephased AI deployments when costs have outweighed the expected value. Lower-cost, high-fidelity models are the fastest-growing influence on AI strategy, up 7 percentage points from Q1.
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“These actions do not signal reduced confidence in AI. Rather, they suggest a growing willingness to evaluate where AI creates meaningful value and where it does not. Organizations appear increasingly focused on concentrating investment where expected returns are strongest,” the report said.
Amazon plans capital expenditure of around $200 billion this year, largely to provide capacity for AI in its AWS datacenters, an increase of 50 percent on a year earlier. Microsoft’s total capex is expected to reach $190 billion, up 61 percent from the previous year.
Both companies are now investing significantly in forward-deployed engineering to help customers develop AI applications that will generate demand for the capacity being built.
Microsoft is providing $2.5 billion in funding for a new operating entity called Microsoft Frontier Company, “enabling customers to amplify their IQ with AI while refining their differentiated value in the markets that they serve.”
In the KPMG report, challenges remain around AI governance: the question of who takes responsibility for decisions made by statistical models prone to erroneous outputs – or “hallucinate,” as tech vendors would prefer.
KPMG said executive accountability is important, but “governance ultimately succeeds or fails through day-to-day operating practices.”
“Organizations need clear rules for when employees can intervene, who owns AI-related costs, how AI outputs are reviewed and what happens when systems fail. While most organizations report having at least some governance mechanisms in place, relatively few describe these practices as fully embedded,” the report said.
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Perhaps the tech consultancy and services giant speaks from experience. Last month, research outfit GPTZero claimed a forensic review of KPMG’s October 2025 report, “Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI,” found that only five of its 45 citations pointed accurately to the cited source. The rest contained errors ranging from misleading or invented details to references that were too vague to verify.
KPMG later removed the report from some of its websites and issued a statement.
“KPMG International takes the accuracy and integrity of its published content seriously. The report has been removed and we are reviewing the circumstances surrounding its publication. We expect all our people to follow our guidelines on the responsible use of AI, including human oversight to validate content and verify independent sources,” a spokesperson said. ®
Barragán, a journalist and researcher at The New York Times, flew to Lagos to embed himself with a group of young, desperate grifters. The account he brings back is a funny, sad, enraging read about how the internet can fuel heartbreak.
On the Panel
Kate Knibbs: senior writer at WIRED, covering prediction markets, the future of media, and how AI is changing the internet. She also leads WIRED Book Club.
Carlos Barragán: reporter and researcher for The New York Times based in Madrid. He was formerly a reporter at El Confidencial before receiving his MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. The Yahoo Boys is his first book.
Ask a Question
Submit your burning questions about the book in the comments section below. The event will be streamed right here, so bookmark this page and mark your calendar to return on July 16 at 12pm ET / 9am PT.
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How to Watch
This livestream is reserved as a subscriber benefit. For subscribers who are not able to join, a replay of the livestream will be available after the event. Not a subscriber yet?Subscribe now to get access to this livestream, plus full access to WIRED.
South Carolina’s pine forests “have spent centuries hiding a secret as old as America itself,” reports CBS News:
In August 1780, British and American soldiers clashed there, leading to a terrible defeat for the Continental army [fighting for the 13 colonies rebelling against England]. Battlefield archaeologists Jim Legg and Steve Smith have been studying the site for decades, but recently, they made a shocking discovery: The sandy soil was home to several sets of remains buried in shallow graves. Metal buttons suggested the men had been Continental soldiers, but there was no other identification… About 2,000 Continental soldiers were killed, wounded or captured, and some men never returned home.
Their families could only guess at their fates. But Legg and Smith’s discovery, paired with an explosion in DNA technology, is changing what’s possible. A set of remains, previously known only as 9B, has been identified as John Pumphrey, a young man from Maryland who enlisted in the Continental Army’s 7th Maryland Regiment as young as 13… Pumphrey likely marched more than a thousand miles with the regiment. The unit fought in battles with then-Gen. George Washington in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
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Pumphrey likely marched more than a thousand miles with the regiment. The unit fought in battles with then-Gen. George Washington in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In late June, members of the extended Pumphrey family came together to hear his story and say his name for the first time in centuries. His remains are interred in South Carolina, where he and the other soldiers were discovered, but the tombstone, once marked “Unknown,” will soon have his name carved on it.
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence infrastructure is typically framed as an energy problem. Data centers are projected to consume a growing share of global electricity demand: The International Energy Agency estimates they could account for 3 to 4 percent of total global consumption within this decade.
Utilities are already adjusting long-term forecasts to accommodate anticipated growth from hyperscale facilities and high-density compute clusters.
This framing captures scale. It misses behavior.
The emerging issue is not simply how much power large-scale compute systems consume, but how increasingly dense and synchronized computational workloads are beginning to alter the operating characteristics of the electrical grid itself through increasingly unpredictable demand that varies rapidly in both time and location, creating new operational challenges for grid operators.
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AI’s capricious energy needs
Traditional grid planning assumes relatively predictable demand behavior. Industrial, commercial, and residential loads generally follow established profiles that can be forecast with reasonable accuracy. Even substantial demand growth has historically been manageable through reserve planning, transmission upgrades, and demand management programs.
Large-scale compute infrastructure introduces a different class of electrical load. Training—the computational task of making AI models—tends to be highly synchronized across clusters of GPUs, TPUs, and specialized accelerators operating in parallel, computationally dense, and relatively scheduled. Inference—the process of actually using those models—is generally more distributed and user-driven, making demand less predictable both in time and location. Both differ materially from traditional industrial demand profiles, though for different reasons. Unlike many conventional industrial processes, these workloads can ramp rapidly depending on model training cycles, distributed compute coordination, and workload scheduling strategies.
From the perspective of the grid, this is not simply higher demand. It is more abrupt demand. High-density compute workloads can produce substantial step-changes in electricity consumption over extremely short intervals, including rapid fluctuations occurring within milliseconds. Data center operators are already deploying mitigation technologies, including batteries, power-conditioning systems, and supercapacitors. Collectively, however, data centers’ rapid load changes can place additional stress on backup generation reserves, systems that adjust supply as demand changes, frequency-control mechanisms that maintain grid stability, and local transmission infrastructure.
Compute-related variability differs from the intermittency introduced through renewable energy integration. Wind and solar variability originate primarily on the supply side and is tied to environmental conditions. Compute-related variability emerges on the demand side, driven by workload synchronization, scheduling behavior, and computational intensity. The interaction between increasingly dynamic supply and demand conditions introduces additional uncertainty into forecasting, reserve management, congestion planning, and balancing operations.
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Research organizations including the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have emphasized the growing complexity associated with integrating highly dynamic resources into modern grid operations.
Location, location, location
The issue becomes more significant when compute activity is geographically concentrated. Large-scale data centers tend to cluster in regions with favorable conditions such as fiber connectivity, access to markets, tax incentives, and historically low electricity costs. Northern Virginia, often referred to as “Data Center Alley,” remains the most prominent example. The region hosts the world’s largest concentration of data centers and carries a substantial share of global internet traffic.
Utilities operating in these regions have already identified data center growth as a primary driver of future load expansion. Virginia-based electricity supplier Dominion Energy, for example, has repeatedly highlighted hyperscale demand growth in its integrated resource planning documents.
Virginia has seen one of the largest data center buildouts worldwide. Here, Amazon Web Services and iron mountain data centers dominate the landscape in Manassas, Virginia. Nathan Howard/Bloomberg/Getty Images
A sudden increase in electricity consumption within a constrained geographic area can stress substations, transmission corridors, and local balancing operations even if the broader grid maintains sufficient aggregate capacity. This creates localized reliability challenges that are not always visible through system-wide demand metrics alone.
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Thermal management systems further intensify these effects. Cooling infrastructure in high-density compute facilities must respond dynamically to changing workloads. As processing intensity rises, cooling demand rises with it, often nonlinearly. This coupling between compute and thermal systems means that fluctuations in workload can propagate through multiple layers of facility power consumption simultaneously.
High-density compute clusters may also introduce power quality concerns at the local level. Large concentrations of accelerators, switching power supplies, and high-frequency compute equipment can generate harmonics and nonlinear load behavior that place additional stress on distribution infrastructure. While modern facilities incorporate mitigation technologies, the scale and concentration of next-generation compute facilities may require utilities and operators to revisit assumptions surrounding localized power conditioning, harmonics management, and infrastructure resilience. These conditions can also contribute to short-duration electrical transients that place additional stress on localized infrastructure and power-conditioning systems.
Regulations need updating
Part of the challenge is that many existing regulatory and operational frameworks were designed around relatively stable industrial demand profiles. Large rapidly fluctuating loads have historically been constrained because abrupt cycling can complicate balancing operations, increase stress on transmission equipment, and reduce predictability in system operations. High-density compute clusters do not fit neatly within those assumptions.
This creates pressure for both operational adaptation and regulatory reassessment.
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Demand response mechanisms may allow certain compute workloads to be shifted or curtailed during periods of system stress. Data-center operators are exploring flexible scheduling, battery storage, and behind-the-meter generation. Grid operators, meanwhile, are evaluating planning frameworks and interconnection approaches for increasingly large flexible loads.
The Electric Reliability Counsil of Texas (ERCOT), for example, has publicly acknowledged the growing implications of large flexible loads, including data centers, for long-term grid planning and operational stability. Interconnection queues across the United States continue to expand significantly, reflecting mounting pressure on both generation and transmission infrastructure. Grid expansion timelines, however, are measured in years rather than quarters.
This creates a structural mismatch. Compute infrastructure can scale rapidly. Electrical infrastructure generally cannot.
The broader implication is that large-scale compute infrastructure is not simply another industrial load category. It represents a shift in the temporal and spatial characteristics of electricity demand itself.
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Framing the issue solely in terms of aggregate energy consumption risks overlooking these second-order operational effects. Capacity expansion alone does not fully address rapid ramping behavior, synchronization, localized congestion, transient instability, reserve compression, or increasingly demanding load-following requirements.
The challenge is not just how much electricity these systems consume. It is how they are beginning to change the operating conditions of the grid itself. The call is not to slow AI development but to recognize that hyperscale computing represents a new category of electrical demand. As AI infrastructure continues to scale, planning frameworks may need to account not only for total energy consumption but also for demand volatility, synchronization effects, and geographic concentration. Grid resilience will increasingly depend on understanding how these facilities consume power, not simply how much power they consume.
This week marked the beginning of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time, a massive effort to observe the sky that comes more than two decades in the making. It could help us to better understand our own solar system and the mysteries of the cosmos, from dark energy and dark matter to the expansion of the universe. Read on to learn more about that, plus other science news that grabbed our attention this week.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory gets to work
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which contains the largest digital camera in the world at 3,200 megapixels, has begun its 10-year survey of the universe. Its campaign kicked off on June 30, and for the next decade it will capture a new image roughly every 40 seconds, observing the entire southern sky every few nights. A press release announcing its commencement said its observations will “create an ultrawide, ultrahigh-definition time-lapse record of the universe.”
“Today, we begin filming the greatest cosmic movie ever made,” Brian Stone of the National Science Foundation said in the announcement. The observatory captured its first images last summer in a test run of its capabilities, producing a remarkable look at millions of galaxies and stars, along with thousands of previously unseen asteroids. Over the course of its decade-long survey, called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), it will revisit each point in the sky roughly 800 times, allowing it to record changes and cosmic events. Rubin will take about a thousand images per night, amounting to about ten terabytes of data daily.
RubinObs/NSF/DOE/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA/T. Lange
“It is embarking on a mission that will redefine modern cosmology and astrophysics,” said Darío Gil, Under Secretary for Science at the US Department of Energy. Gil added, “By seeking to understand the enigmatic phenomena of dark energy and dark matter, we are not just observing the stars; we are striving to grasp the fundamental laws that govern our existence.”
Diving suits for swimming cyborg cockroaches
This week in Research That Makes My Skin Crawl, scientists from Nanyang Technological University Singapore and Waseda University announced that they’ve developed a tiny diving suit that allows cyborg cockroaches to survive swimming underwater for hours at a time. If you’re wondering why, exactly, roaches need to be borg-ified and forced to swim underwater at all, I’m right there with you.
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According to the team, cyborg insects have potential for use in search and rescue operations, as they can access spaces that would be inaccessible to humans, animals and larger robots. Cyborg roaches were recently deployed in the field for the first time to assist with search and rescue efforts after a devastating earthquake in Myanmar this spring.
NTU Singapore/Waseda University
A flooded environment would normally prove a no-go for the cyborg roaches, which are living Madagascar hissing cockroaches fitted with electronic controllers. The flexible diving suit consists of an oxygen-generation tank, a flexible shell and four silicone supply tubes that are attached to the roaches’ spiracles, or the openings that they breathe through. The team says these tubes can be removed painlessly afterward without harming the roach. In a paper published this week in Nature Communications, the researchers report that the cyborg robots were able to swim underwater for up to 3 hours with this setup in tests.
NASA picks three companies for 2028 Moon Base deliveries
Earlier this year, NASA overhauled its plans for lunar exploration, announcing that it was hitting pause on building an orbiting Lunar Gateway space station and would instead build a $20 billion Moon Base. The first three missions to deliver payloads to the lunar surface for the eventual Moon Base are scheduled to happen before the end of 2026. This week, NASA announced four more missions heading to the moon, these ones scheduled for late 2028. The space agency says it’s awarded contracts totaling nearly $600 million to Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines to deliver science payloads for the Moon Base.
Astrobotic will make two trips to the moon, while the other two companies will each make one. All of these deliveries will rely on updated versions of each company’s lander designs, building on insights from previous missions under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. The payloads will be the same for each delivery: a Stereo Camera for Lunar Plume Surface Studies (SCALPSS) to collect landing data, a Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA) for precision in determining the location of spacecraft in lunar orbit or landing on the surface, and a Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer (LETS) for measuring the energy of incoming space radiation. If it seems redundant, well, that’s the point.
NASA/Astrobotic/Intuitive Machines/Firefly
“By flying the same science instruments on multiple landers, we will better understand potential hazards during landing and build out a global network of environmental data and location markers on the Moon,” said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration, Science Mission Directorate, at NASA Headquarters. “It’s akin to having weather stations in different locations on Earth. These three payloads are flight-proven and their data is critical to supporting safe human exploration of the lunar surface.”
Before you go, be sure to check out these stories too:
Optical media is great — it’s pretty high density, relatively durable, and decently long-lasting if
“That’ll buff out” is very often true when it comes to disks.
well cared for. If not well cared for, well, it’s only relatively durable, and we’ve probably all picked up a second-hand disk that’s too scratched to use. The X-Box 360 is notorious for causing circular damage, and while decent disk cleaners were easy to get in the 90s, we’re not sure how far we trust what’s on offer at retailers today. Hence [Dennis], aka [RetroGameRevival]’s RGR ezBuff polishing machine, which does exactly what it says on the tin: buffs disks to a polish, easily.
We’d say the whole thing is 3D printed, but of course you still need a motor and controller — if you had to turn a crank, that would just be a Buff polishing machine, no ez — and we’ve yet to see a printer poop out polishing compound. If you build it, keep in mind that you’re taking the top layer of material off the disk to polish scratches away, so don’t overdo it. It’s entirely possible to ruin a disk beyond repair with too-aggressive buffing; it’s also possible for disks to be scratched too deeply to save. Polishing can’t save genuine disk rot, though in our experience you’re more likely to find scratched disks than rotten ones. Still, [Dennis]’s birthday gift to the community — it was apparently released on his birthday — should keep more than a few disks out of the trash.
With Sony getting out of the disk game, physical media is becoming more precious than ever, so it’s good to see what looks like a quality polishing option for those of us who either never had a polisher or didn’t save theirs. If you really want your disks to last, maybe we should bring back CD caddies.
For many years now, I’ve been a growing fan of legendary New York percussionist, composer, and bandleader Ray Barretto, one of the arguable architects of modern Latin-infused music. After Barretto scored his first big hit with the pachanga-styled “El Watusi” in 1962, he found his next groove in the emerging boogaloo movement. His first album for Fania Records, 1968’s Acid, is widely considered a classic of the form.
Finding early editions of Barretto albums on vinyl can be a challenge, as original pressings are scarce. Like vintage soul and jazz records, these dance records were often played hard back in the day, frequently and on low quality stacking automatic record players. Surviving “OG” copies are therefore usually pretty well trashed when you do find them, while clean examples typically command hefty collector prices. At the time of this writing, Discogs had just two 1968 editions of Acid listed at $300 in only VG/VG+ condition, while a poor copy on eBay was asking $150.
In that light, obtaining a lovingly produced, all analog AAA 180-gram vinyl reissue cut from the original master tapes for about $30 is super appealing. This new edition comes from Craft Recordings, the respected boutique arm of Concord Music, which owns the Fania catalog.
I am especially pleased that Craft uses the original mono mix, which is likely what most people were hearing back in the day, replete with all of its effectively indie produced imperfections. The quiet, well-centered vinyl was manufactured at Well Made Music in Virginia, and Craft has even recreated the highly sought after first Fania Records gold label design. The high quality tip on style cover features the trippy original art.
Playing Acid, I did not even look at the song titles initially, but immediately recognized the boogaloo sound in full flower. This album rocks from start to finish, and along the way you will hear influences both past and future. The title track boasts a super slinky groove, while the funky, improvisational “Espiritu Libre” feels as though Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis were sitting in.
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But it was the end of side one that made my head spin, when I realized that 1990 rock-rap one hit wonders Urban Dance Squad had lifted its title and sampled the hook directly from Barretto’s “A Deeper Shade of Soul.” Fortunately, they gave him writer credit, which was something of a miracle in those early sampling days.
While I do not own one of the rare original pressings, this new edition of Acid sounds wonderful in all of its groovy monophonic glory. I recommend it without reservation. You can get it at Amazon for just $31 which is a steal when you consider what rare originals cost.
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Our Ratings
★★★★★★★★★★ Album
★★★★★★★★★★ Sound Quality
★★★★★★★★★★ Press Quality
Where to buy
Mark Smotroff is a deep music enthusiast / collector who has also worked in entertainment oriented marketing communications for decades supporting the likes of DTS, Sega and many others. He reviews vinyl for Analog Planet and has written for Audiophile Review, Sound+Vision, Mix, EQ, etc. You can learn more about him at LinkedIn.
For students who need an affordable tablet that includes a stylus and offers great side-by-side multitasking for productivity on the go, the Lenovo Idea Tab Plus is an easy option to recommend.
Stylus included
A great screen and software for multitasking
256GB as standard
Limited software updates
MediaTek chipset has its limits
Not the best stylus experience from Lenovo
Squirrel Widget
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Key Features
Review Price:
£299.99
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PC Mode:
Resize and minimise apps like on your desktop
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12.1-inch 2.5K 90Hz display:
ideal for multitasking and entertainment
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Lenovo Tab Pen included:
Indulge in digital drawing and note-taking
Introduction
Need an inexpensive yet work-capable tablet for your time at college or university? The Lenovo Idea Tab Plus might be exactly what you’re after.
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As an iPad obsessive for the better part of two decades and as someone who got through the majority of their studies using an iPad Mini as opposed to a dedicated laptop, I’ve always preferred the simplicity of tablet computers, not to mention the portability they bring to the table.
Although I’m fairly knee-deep in the iPadOS ecosystem at this point, I am constantly amazed by the value that Apple’s more affordable Android competitors provide.
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The OnePlus Pad Go 2 was easily my favourite budget tablet of last year, and I’ve been continually impressed by others including the even cheaper OnePlus Pad Lite, not to mention more expensive but brilliantly compact Lenovo Yoga Tab.
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At £299.99/$259.99, the Lenovo Idea Tab Plus slots itself snugly at the higher end of the budget range, but that’s crucially a lower price than the entry-level iPad A16. The question is, does the Idea Tab Plus do enough to tempt potential buyers away from team Apple (and competing Android tablets)? After testing the tablet myself, here’s what I have to say on the matter.
Design
Sleek aluminium build
Slim at just 6.29mm
No magnetic housing for the stylus
One of the first things I noticed about the Lenovo Idea Tab Plus is that, when picked up, it’s a great example of just how far the market surrounding the best cheap tablets has come. With a smooth aluminium backing and frame, particularly when paired with the Luna Grey colourway of my review unit, Lenovo has done all that it can here to convince you that the Idea Tab Plus is anything but cheap.
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
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It just feels wonderfully smooth in the hand (or both hands as it’s too large for one-handed use), and the fact that it’s just 6.29mm thick makes it easy enough to fling in a backpack or messenger bag and never feel that it’s taking up more space than it should.
The total weight of 530g is also just at the right level where you can hold the tablet for quite some time without any sense of fatigue, although Lenovo does expect you to bring a keyboard case into the mix to have the tablet propped up on a table, owing to the three-point connector at the base of the device.
The only area where the Idea Tab Plus does lose out to the entry-level iPad A16 is in the variety of colourways available. For Lenovo’s tablet, you can choose between the Luna Grey model featured here, and a slightly more eye-catching Sand Rose alternative, but that’s it. Compared to the four vibrant colours that Apple’s contender offers, there isn’t quite as much freedom for expression here, but you can always mitigate that with a case.
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Arguably more detrimental is the complete lack of any housing for the included Lenovo Tab Pen. On the Lenovo Yoga Tab, there’s a magnetic strip along the top of the device so the included Pen Pro can sit there securely when it’s not in use, but there’s no equivalent here, meaning that the stylus sits around awkwardly on your desk.
Even though the Tab Pen doesn’t operate via wireless charging and instead uses a AAA battery, it would still have been nice to have a dedicated spot to keep it out of the way when you don’t need it.
Screen
12.1-inch 2.5K IPS LCD
90Hz refresh rate for smooth scrolling
Plenty of space for multitasking
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Even though the Idea Tab Plus is aimed at the budget market, I think Lenovo understands very well that if you have a great screen to go with your tablet, much of the user experience naturally falls into place. That’s certainly the case here.
You’re getting a large 12.1-inch 2.5K IPS LCD panel that gets fairly bright, with a peak of 800 nits, along with a smooth 90Hz refresh rate that immediately gives the device an edge over the now-ancient-feeling 60Hz cap of the standard iPad.
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Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
What I like about the display is its wide 16:10 ratio, which makes it feel brilliantly suited not just to streaming (films feel wonderfully cinematic here), but also multitasking, as there’s plenty of space to have multiple apps take up the screen and never feel as if you’re squinting at any of them. This is handy too, as the tablet has fairly robust multitasking software built in, so it all works in tandem to make this a solid buy for light productivity tasks.
When streaming a bit of Disney Plus and my go-to film of Avengers: Infinity War for testing tablet displays, the climactic battle in Wakanda did wow me with the colours on display. I’ve been a bit spoiled as of late, having moved over to using the uber premium Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra in between reviews, but even with that knowledge of how good the high-end can be, I still had a very enjoyable experience watching the film on the Idea Tab Plus.
While I do appreciate the 90Hz refresh rate, especially as it makes simple things like web browsing or scrolling through social media feel nice and smooth, it is worth mentioning that the OnePlus Pad Go 2 does have it beat with a 120Hz refresh rate for not that much more at the checkout. That tablet uses an alternative 7:5 aspect ratio, which I do prefer for work, although it isn’t quite as well-suited for entertainment.
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Cameras
13MP rear-facing camera
8MP 1080P selfie camera
Gets the job done for scanning and Zoom calls
For the cameras on the Lenovo Idea Tab Plus, you’re looking at a single 13MP rear-facing sensor, along with an 8MP 1080p front camera for work calls and chatting with friends or family. It’s the standard setup you’d expect for a tablet at this price, which is to say it’s functional but should never be used instead of your phone if you can help it.
The back camera can pick up a decent bit of colour with the right amount of light involved, but if you get too close then the colour reproduction can look a bit off, as I soon discovered when taking pictures of my Matcha Green Kindle. It’s best used for scanning documents that can then be interacted with via the Lenovo Tab Pen.
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It’s a similar situation with the front-facing camera – other people on a call will be able to see your face well enough, but don’t expect them to pick up on the finer details of your complexion.
Performance
MediaTek Dimensity 6400 chipset
Works well with everyday activities
Struggles with high-end games
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Much like the design of the Lenovo Idea Tab Plus, the other aspect that showed me just how far the budget market has come was the tablet’s performance.
Unlike super-cheap tablets such as the OnePlus Pad Lite or the Oppo Pad SE, which are best designed for light entertainment and web browsing only, the Idea Tab Plus can work as a genuine productivity device, so long as your workload includes less intensive apps like Chrome, Google Docs and Canva.
Powering the show is the MediaTek Dimensity 6400 chipset, and in everyday use, it’s a fine CPU that delivers the right level of performance for most people, especially students. Moving through the app tray is smooth, as is jumping from one app to another, and you can delve into a bit of side-by-side multitasking without issue.
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I had Lenovo’s Notepad app open on one side, letting me doodle away, whilst watching YouTube on the other to catch up on the recent glut of trailers for the latest video games. For when you’re studying in the library and need to have Google Docs open alongside a browser for research, the Idea Tab Plus works exactly as you’d hope.
You can have three apps open at one time, wherein two of them are split into quarter blockers on one side of the screen, but this is where I did notice a bit of slowdown, as the tablet didn’t register my drawings at quite the same speed as before, so I don’t recommend it.
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An area that left me feeling disappointed was the stylus itself. I’ve been spoiled by years of using Remarkable tablets to know how good the digital writing experience can be, and although I’m not usually a fan of using a stylus on a glass display, the Lenovo Yoga Tab won me over with the Lenovo Pen Pro’s haptic feedback, which recreated the feeling of moving a pencil across a piece of paper.
It’s a great bit of tech, but one that’s unfortunately missing on the standard Lenovo Tab Pen, so although the tablet can respond quickly to your inputs, the whole experience just doesn’t feel as fun or as intuitive as what you’ll find elsewhere.
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When diving into a bit of gaming, a quick round of Call of Duty: Mobile was a fun and engaging experience with no visible lag and a fast pace, bolstered by the 90Hz refresh rate.
Much like with multitasking, however, if you push the Dimensity 6400 chipset even further with a game like Honkai: Star Rail, that’s where you’ll see the limits pretty quickly. By default, Star Rail sets its graphical quality to Low, where the title runs well enough, but change the settings to anything higher than that, and you’ll see the whole thing turn into a slideshow.
Regardless of whether you’re gaming or simply streaming a bit of Netflix, the tablet’s quad-speaker setup does a great job of enveloping you in its soundscape. When cranking the volume up on Avengers: Infinity War, I was able to pick up on a few layers of the overall track that I’d forgotten were there as they can get lost in the overall mix.
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The fact that you’re getting 256GB storage as standard, plus the ability to expand that with a Micro SD card slot, means that you won’t have to worry when it comes to downloading tons of films and TV shows for a long journey.
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For those who prefer to be untethered from a Wi-Fi signal when they work, there is a 5G-compatible model of the Idea Tab Plus available to buy.
Software
Lenovo ZUI overlay
PC Mode is great for productivity
A bit of bloatware to contend with
Just like other tablets from the brand, the Idea Tab Plus runs the Lenovo ZUI Android overlay. It’s easily one of the least offensive of its kind, but equally, it’s not enough to stand out as a selling point in itself.
The aforementioned multitasking software feels very much like it’s taken a leaf from OnePlus’ Open Canvas feature, which is exactly why this tablet is such a good fit for students who want to have more than one app open at a time during lectures or while studying at the library.
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If you want to take the productivity experience even further, you can delve into the surprisingly efficient PC mode, which replicates the look of a typical desktop and lets you resize apps at your leisure and minimise them for quick access later.
It all works with a higher level of performance than my ageing iPad 10th Gen, and the fact that this is a tablet with a £299.99/$299.99 RRP but can often be found for less, just makes this a bit of a bargain compared to Windows laptops. If you throw in a wireless keyboard like the Logitech Keys-to-Go 2 into the mix then the whole experience feels even more intuitive.
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There is a fair bit of bloatware to deal with once you boot up the Idea Tab Plus for the first time. Not only are there Lenovo’s own-brand apps, but there are third-party apps like Opera, WPS Office and Candy Crush Saga. It’s not quite as abrasive or in your face as what I’ve seen with MagicOS on Honor brand tablets, but it doesn’t surpass the relatively bloat-free look of OxygenOS on OnePlus devices.
The Idea Tab Plus’ biggest hang-up is that Lenovo is only promising a total of two OS upgrades from launch. That is bolstered somewhat by four years of security patches, but it’s a long way from the support provided by the likes of Apple and Samsung.
With that in mind, it’s just enough of an update cycle to get you through your studies, but I’d hesitate to recommend the Idea Tab Plus to an adult who might be looking for a tablet they can use long-term.
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Battery life
10,200mAh capacity
45W charging speed
Plenty of juice for all-day working
One of the more eye-catching specs of the Lenovo Idea Tab Plus is that it carries a massive 10,200mAh battery, which is quite a rarity even amongst the more premium crowd. The only other tablets I’m aware of that come close at this end of the market are the OnePlus Pad Go 2 (10,050mAh) and the Honor Pad 10 (10,100mAh).
What you get with that cell, according to Lenovo, is the ability to stream up to 13 hours of YouTube, which I think is more than enough to keep most people satisfied over the course of a day. This means that if you have a long-haul flight ahead of you and you’d rather tune into your own curated library of entertainment, then you’ll have more than enough juice to see you through to your destination.
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Seen another way, if you decide to venture away from the library for a few hours and study with friends at a cafe, then you won’t have to worry about making sure that you’re seated next to a charging outlet.
When it comes time to top up the battery, however, you can rely on 45W speeds over a wired connection, which is faster than the 33W cap of the OnePlus Pad Go 2, so you won’t have to wait long before the battery is full once more.
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Squirrel Widget
Should you buy it?
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You’re a student in need of a solid productivity tablet on a budget
With a price that undercuts the entry-level iPad, not to mention having a larger display and slick multitasking software, the Lenovo Idea Tab Plus is great for all-day studying.
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You want a long-term Android tablet
With a fairly limited cycle of support, the Idea Tab Plus is immediately bettered by the likes of Apple and Samsung for anyone who wants a long-term upgrade.
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Final Thoughts
If I were just about to head into university and had about £300/$300 to spend on a new tablet to see me through my studies, then the Lenovo Idea Tab Plus is exactly the option that I’d want to buy. The fact that you’re getting a larger (and faster) 12.1-inch 90Hz display over the iPad A16, and a stylus included, is just too good a package to overlook from a pure value standpoint.
For those who do want a slightly more compact tablet, the Lenovo Yoga Tab is available. Although I also love that tablet for its superior processor and writing experience, when it comes to side-by-side multitasking, I do prefer the Idea Tab Plus because you have more room for apps to spread out.
I do think that you get a better screen and software experience with the OnePlus Pad Go 2, but the Idea Tab Plus still comes out on top for battery life and charging speed.
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If Lenovo were to support the Idea Tab Plus beyond the promised two-year OS update cycle, I would just as easily recommend it to adults as well, but for now, it’s just a great buy for students on a budget.
How We Test
We test every mobile phone we review thoroughly. We use industry-standard tests to compare features properly and we use the phone as our main device over the review period. We’ll always tell you what we find and we never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Used as a main tablet for over a week
Tested and benchmarked using respected industry tests and real-world data
FAQs
Does the Lenovo Idea Tab Plus come with a stylus?
Yes, the Lenovo Tab Pen is included with the tablet.
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Does the Lenovo Tab Pen have wireless charging?
No, unlike the Tab Pen Pro, the standard Lenovo Tab Pen requires a AAA battery to run.
Miles Davis’ 1956 Prestige sessions are 70 years old, which feels mildly absurd considering how alive this music still sounds. Craft Recordings is marking the anniversary with Miles ’56: The Prestige Recordings, a new 4-LP box set that gathers the material behind Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’, and Steamin’, along with an earlier session from the same year featuring Sonny Rollins and Tommy Flanagan.
This is not unexplored territory. These recordings have been reissued on vinyl, CD, SACD, and digital more times than most jazz catalogs can claim. Nobody needs to be convinced that the music matters. The question for collectors is more practical: does this version bring something meaningful to a shelf already crowded with Miles Davis reissues?
Craft is certainly treating it like a major archival release. The audio was transferred from the original analog tapes, restored by Plangent Processes, remastered by Paul Blakemore, and cut for vinyl by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio. The 180-gram 4-LP edition is joined by 3-CD and hi-res digital versions, while both physical formats include a new essay by Ashley Kahn and track notes by the late Dan Morgenstern.
Craft’s previous Miles ’55 box set created a high bar for both presentation and sound. Miles ’56 has a tougher assignment. These are arguably the most familiar recordings in the Davis catalog outside of Kind of Blue, and there are already excellent versions of much of this material in circulation.
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The Sessions That Made the First Great Quintet Permanent
1956 was not the year Miles Davis suddenly became Miles Davis. That work had already been done. What changed was the level of execution.
By then, the working quintet of John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones had become a real band rather than a promising collection of young musicians. They had recorded Miles: The New Miles Davis Quintet in late 1955, spent months on the road, and built a repertoire around standards, blues, bebop burners, and Davis originals.
The material was not especially exotic. “My Funny Valentine,” “Surrey With the Fringe on Top,” “Salt Peanuts,” “Well, You Needn’t,” “Oleo,” “Four,” and “Half Nelson” were all part of the book. What made the group different was how naturally everyone fit together. Garland’s elegant, blues-informed piano gave the band space. Chambers kept the floor moving. Philly Joe Jones pushed from underneath without ever turning the rhythm section into a demolition project. Coltrane was still developing, but his intensity and restless lines gave Davis a productive counterweight.
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Davis had signed with Columbia while still contractually tied to Prestige. With Bob Weinstock’s blessing, he returned to Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack studio on May 11 and October 26, 1956, to fulfill his obligations to the label. The plan was bluntly efficient: record the music the band already knew, move quickly, and let Prestige spread the results across multiple albums.
That is exactly what happened.
The two marathon dates were closer to live sets than traditional studio productions. Most of the performances were first takes, with the band relying on familiarity, instinct, and the kind of communication that comes from actually playing night after night. There was no elaborate production concept and very little polishing. They walked in, played the tunes, and got out of the way.
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Nobody appears to have documented whether the band stopped at Hiram’s in Fort Lee after those long Hackensack sessions, but it would have been geographically sensible. Anyone who did not appreciate the local hot dog situation could have continued on to Rutt’s Hutt in Clifton. New Jersey has always taken its priorities seriously.
The resulting music was eventually divided among Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’, and Steamin’. The albums were released separately over several years, but they were never conceived as isolated studio statements. They are chapters from the same extended performance, captured while one of jazz’s most important groups was operating at full strength.
The Earlier Session Matters More Than You Might Expect
Miles ’56 also includes a March 16 session that sits slightly outside the core First Great Quintet narrative. Sonny Rollins joins Davis on tenor saxophone, with Tommy Flanagan on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Art Taylor on drums.
It was Davis’ final studio date with Rollins and his only recorded session with Flanagan, which gives the material real historical value beyond its inclusion as bonus content. “Vierd Blues,” “No Line,” and the earlier version of Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way” provide a different view of Davis in 1956: less settled, perhaps, but no less compelling.
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That session also helps make Miles ’56 feel like a true document of the year rather than a repackaging of four albums everyone already owns in some form. The May and October recordings remain the main event, but the March material broadens the story.
And that story is the reason this box deserves attention.
These recordings are not buried treasure. They have been revisited endlessly because they are foundational: the sound of Miles Davis building a path toward Columbia, John Coltrane beginning to separate himself from the pack, and a rhythm section establishing a vocabulary that still defines small-group jazz.
For newcomers, Miles ’56 offers a remarkably complete entry point into the Prestige era. For collectors with several versions already on the shelf, the question is tougher. This is not a purchase driven by rarity. It comes down to the mastering, the pressing quality, the presentation, and whether Craft has found more life in music that has already been given the audiophile treatment repeatedly.
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That is where this box set will earn its keep, or become another handsome reminder that Miles Davis collectors are an easily tempted bunch.
Worth the Money?
I own the original OJC versions of all four albums, which remain very good and considerably more attainable than clean Prestige originals. But they predate the Plangent Process used for Miles ’56, so they were never subject to the same tape-speed correction and restoration work. I cannot compare this box to the 1996 Analogue Productions set, but against my OJCs, Miles ’56 sounds cleaner, fuller, and more relaxed up top. There is better instrumental decay, more tonal weight through piano, bass, and trumpet, and a deeper, more convincing soundstage.
The presentation is not bright or aggressively detailed; it is simply very clean, with more space around the players and a greater sense of the room. The 180-gram pressings are flat, perfectly centered, and impressively quiet after a cleaning.
For the money, Craft has delivered a handsome and serious physical package. The four LPs come in black paper, plastic-lined audiophile inner sleeves, while the sturdy outer shell uses a modern silver design that looks far more stylish than another stack of generic reproductions. The box set was manufactured in Germany, likely at Optimal, though Craft does not appear to name the plant directly.
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This is not the box for collectors who insist on the original jackets or want to hear the albums in their original running order. But for listeners who want these landmark 1956 sessions presented as one cohesive archival project, with excellent pressing quality and meaningful sonic improvements over more affordable older editions, Miles ’56 is a very worthwhile package.
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