Apple’s 1TB M5 13-inch MacBook Air is down to $1,399 at Amazon thanks to a $200 month-end discount.

The lowest price since Prime Day is available now on Apple’s M5 13-inch MacBook Air with an upgrade to a 1TB SSD. The $200 discount is hosted by Amazon, bringing the cost of the Sky Blue model with a 10-core GPU and 16GB of unified RAM down from $1,599 to $1,399.

Buy 1TB MacBook Air for $1,399

According to our 13-inch MacBook Air M5 Price Guide, this is the steepest discount across the entire product line.

Prime members can get delivery as soon as tomorrow, so you won’t have to wait long to use your new laptop.

Lake Ontario is no more on Google Maps in the US. Google changed the name of easternmost of the Great Lakes to “Lake America” late Saturday, days after President Donald Trump ordered its rebranding in official government databases.

Trump issued the executive order on Thursday as part of an ongoing feud over tariffs with Canada, whose capital province is called Ontario. It followed a similar order he issued in January 2025 to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America as part of a fight with the US trading partner to the south.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, and other maps providers adopted the Gulf of America naming as soon as the US Department of the Interior updated its records, which came a couple of weeks after Trump’s order. So it was no surprise that when those records—which are used to determine names on roadway signs and in government literature—reflected Lake America, digital maps from Google also quickly took on the new name.

Apple Maps and Bing Maps have not yet reflected the change but are expected to. In fact, the map for the federal government’s Geographic Names Information System database, which informs these changes, still showed Lake Ontario as of Sunday morning, with a note that the maps are “in the process of being updated to reflect this name change.”

While Google and other private organizations that provide maps are not bound by law to use official names, they generally follow government databases like GNIS. The location names a user sees depends on their own geography.

“People using Maps in the US will see ‘Lake America,’ those in Canada will continue to see ‘Lake Ontario,’ and those outside of the US and Canada will see both names,” Google said in an unsigned statement. “These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country, and are starting to roll out now.”

Trump’s efforts to rewrite maps have generated considerable public debate in open-source mapping communities such as OpenStreetMap, whose technology is used by companies such as Uber and Lyft. Ultimately, OpenStreetMap recognizes both the US and foreign names and gives organizations using its maps the choice over which to show.

One map provider has said it would decline to make the change is MapQuest, which said in a social media post in response to Trump’s order that “we’re not changing it.”

What free gifts does Xbox give for birthdays?

Screenshot by Dave Meikleham (Microsoft)

How to get free gifts from Xbox Rewards on your birthday

Microsoft

As RAM prices surge and RAMageddon headlines multiply, Google posted new requirements for Android app developers earlier this week. Starting in 2027, apps distributed via Google Play must work within strict memory thresholds to “help protect the overall user experience from applications using excess memory and causing system-wide slowdowns.” 

The idea is to prevent a single misbehaving app from glitching the device, hogging RAM and degrading your entire smartphone experience. Not surprisingly, Google explicitly cited the supply shortage in memory — now a scarce, expensive resource amid booming AI demand — as one of the motivations behind the new rules. 

And these are rules, not just suggestions. Google threatens that apps that don’t comply “will be slowed down and may be terminated.” Compared with a lot of past updates, it also seems a pretty tight time frame for compliance. 

Far from punishing innovation, these rules codify what responsible development should look like — efficient memory use, faster launches and smoother multitasking experiences — and once they’re in the codebase, they might hang around for years. That means our phones may no longer slow down with every OS update. 

So, for everyday Android users, that’s a win: Not only could everything run better on today’s lower-end phones and computers, but it might also, hopefully, prolong the life of older hardware by slowing the upward climb in system requirements for upgraded software. And anything that runs well on low-end hardware generally runs faster and more smoothly on the best devices.

Who has the headache now?

Operating system and application developers have gotten accustomed to prioritizing what I think of as the most expensive common denominator — showy, resource-hogging features that highlight the high-margin devices manufacturers most want to sell, with lots of memory, storage and powerful processors. 

But the component supply crunch and skyrocketing prices have suddenly made low-end configurations of phones and computers critical to sustaining sales in those contracting device categories. 

The crunch is really for anything created in a semiconductor fab, though the effects are most visible in memory supplies and prices. Fab resources have been, or are expected to be, reallocated toward whatever’s ultimately most profitable. 

Right now, that means anything critical to AI, especially data centers. Memory producers and packagers can make a lot more money from high-bandwidth memory and SRAM for advanced processing rather than from the DDR incorporated into consumer devices. 

So there’s a lot more incentive for developers to optimize operating systems and application performance for less memory and lower-power hardware. Even if the memory shortage eases in 2027 (though that’s unlikely), the benefits of making our smartphones less sluggish should continue for some time.

RAM shortages affect Windows, too

Then there’s Windows. 

I can’t remember when it last ran decently with 8GB of RAM (and I’d love to know in what universe it can run on 4GB, the minimum requirement on paper). In March 2026, Microsoft finally announced it was taking Windows 11’s poor memory management seriously, “lowering the baseline memory footprint for Windows.” 

The company’s June update on its progress implied that part of the problem is the current interface framework applications are built with (WinUI 3), which rolled out in 2021, as well as the web components integrated into the OS (that’s why Edge is everywhere). 

After five years, shortages finally made it a Microsoft problem, not just a “you need to upgrade” solution.

It’s not completely fair to accuse the operating systems of resource bloat. MacOS and iOS only have to run on Apple hardware and have a far smaller application ecosystem to worry about, but systems like Android and Windows have to support a wide variety of hardware and an anarchic ecosystem of apps and games. 

That means a lot more overhead, including resources that must remain in memory to keep everything communicating. And to date, they’ve had the luxury of being able to back-burner, or at least deprioritize, efforts to make the OSes run more efficiently with less memory. 

Hopefully, no longer. When platforms start treating memory as a scarce resource and push developers to respect that scarcity, the result could be fewer surprise slowdowns and longer lifespans for existing devices. 

The AI irony

One of the reasons for the increase in memory requirements over the past few years has been the AI push. On-device AI features, such as local LLMs, image generation and advanced photo editing, require bursts of memory to run smoothly or to complete tasks with fewer errors. If ordinary apps are maxing out RAM, there’s no room for these features without constant throttling or crashing. 

Another irony? As demand for AI server memory pushes DRAM prices higher, we can’t afford or get the devices that companies have been pushing, and the models have been getting smaller as well.

Manufacturers have responded by incorporating less RAM or even cutting it in new phones. Google’s own Pixel 11 Pro base models, for example, drop from 16GB to 12GB compared to prior generations

Hardware prices might never return to pre-RAMageddon levels. But by squeezing waste out of everyday apps now, Google is carving out space needed for next-generation AI experiences on the same hardware. 

Lori Grunin

Senior Editor / Computers and Gaming Hardware

I’ve been reviewing hardware and software, devising testing methodology and handing out buying advice for more than 25 years.

See full bio

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The $69bn company expects further disruption while it works to restore affected systems.

Boston Scientific’s global operations have been disrupted in a cyberattack on its IT systems.

The medtech giant said it discovered the breach on 25 August. “The incident has impacted access to certain operating systems and business applications, including the ability to process and ship customer orders,” it said in a statement published yesterday (26 August).

The $69bn company expects further disruption while it works to restore affected systems. A probe into the attack is ongoing, but no concrete timeline has emerged yet, it added.

The company said that it is unaware, as of yet, whether this incident might have any material impact on its business. Shares fell more than 3pc at market close yesterday and gained marginally in after-hours trading.

Boston Scientific employs around 7,000 across its three sites in Galway, Cork and Clonmel. The company’s Cork-based workers were asked to work from home yesterday, several news publications confirmed. SiliconRepublic.com has reached out to Boston Scientific for further information.

Boston Scientific is the latest target in a series of cyberattacks affecting pharmaceutical and medical technology companies.

Medical equipment manufacturing giant Stryker was hit by a cyberattack earlier this year that caused a global network disruption. Reports at the time suggested that the company’s Cork plant, which employs more than 4,000, was affected.

In April, Dublin recruitment platform Healthdaq – which is used by Northern Ireland’s health trusts – reportedly suffered a cyberattack from the relatively new hacker group XP95, which claimed to have accessed hundreds of thousands of files.

Several other medtech businesses, including Medtronic, West Pharmaceutical, Novo Nordisk, Amgen and Abbott Laboratories, have also reported cyberattacks in recent months.

A RunSafe report earlier this year discovered a marginal rise in cyberattacks on medical devices, with 80pc of those attacked reporting a moderate or significant impact on patient care.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

An overblown new report claims that Apple has been carefully orchestrating executive retirements for years to not spook shareholders. There is absolutely nothing to support the premise.

According to Bloomberg, Cook’s retirement is one of very many exits that are being scheduled to avoid the appearance of a mass exodus that Ternus will have to deal with.

This is similar to Bloomberg‘s previous reporting of multiple people quitting Apple and how the company will struggle without them. So the new report is predicting that Apple will soon be unrecognizable, but of the 11 people on Apple’s leadership page, it only actually expects two more to go.

The two said to be focusing on their 401k are retail head Deirdre O’Brien, who is only 60, and chief hardware officer Johny Srouji, 61.

The argument for O’Brien going is just that she’s rumored to want to.

The argument for Srouji leaving is that Bloomberg once reported he had tried to quit for another role. To be generous, that report was unlikely. As well as relying on that report as established fact, the new report is using it to argue a different case.

Bloomberg originally said that Srouji was quitting to join some other company. Now it’s saying this is evidence that actually he wants to retire.

There were others

The report is specifically about who will be leaving Apple soon, and therefore who John Ternus will have to rush to replace. But it actually makes a stronger case for how Cook’s retirement is practically the end of the changes for now.

There is still Jennifer Bailey, head of Apple Pay, who is retiring in October. But her retirement has already been announced.

Otherwise, it’s claimed that since 2024, Tim Cook has been timing the retirements of key figures so that shareholders were never spooked by mass departures. The claim is that this is why long-standing Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri stepped down in October 2024, although Maestri didn’t retire and still hasn’t.

Then Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams did retire, although it was more than a year later in November 2025. Retirement was then announced for both environment head Lisa Jackson and general counsel Kate Adams in December 2025.

Finally, Tim Cook announced in April 2026 that he was stepping down as CEO. Although he also isn’t retiring.

So that’s three people who did retire in the last two years, and a claim that two more will in something like the next few years.

Of the others, it’s presumed that Eddy Cue will be thinking of his succession plan. There is no mention at all of Craig Federighi.

It’s true that there are more Apple executives reaching retirement age now than when Cook became CEO. But the report admits that during Cook’s time, chief designer Jony Ive, hardware head Bob Mansfield, iOS lead Scott Forstall, and not one but two retail chiefs left.

It is also true that Apple is changing and it’s fair to say that the current changes are because of executives reaching retirement age. But the company has always been changing and it has always been replacing key people.

The pace of retirements and departures hasn’t really changed. What has, is the visibility.

Like Tim Cook retiring.