• Logitech unveils $99 MX Keypad accessory
• Sitting alongside your keyboard, it offers nine customizable keys to give access to AI tools and agents
• Users can even create and share their own integrations

Logitech has launched a new $99 accessory it says will help programmers and coders work faster and more effectively than ever before.

The new MX Keypad offers nine customizable full-color LCD keys which can be assigned to launching commands, running macros, and accessing AI tools.

Amazon’s $1,349 15-inch MacBook Air deal delivers the lowest price of the season. Upgraded models are $150 off as well.

Save $150 on Apple’s 2026 15-inch MacBook Air, bringing the price of the M5 model with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage down to $1,349.

Buy M5 15″ MacBook Air for $1,349

The limited-time deal is available in the Midnight finish only, and units are shipping within 1-2 days, suggesting stock may be limited.

Amazon’s $150 discount extends to several upgraded configurations as well, with the M5/16GB/1TB model also marked down to $1,649 in the Midnight finish.

Our M5 MacBook Air Price Guide offers easy price comparison across popular retailers on dozens of configurations. Here are today’s highlights from the guide:

13-inch MacBook Air deals

• 13″ M5, 8C GPU, 16GB, 512GB: $1,239 ($60 off)
• 13″ M5, 10C GPU, 16GB, 1TB: $1,449 ($150 off)
• 13″ M5, 10C GPU, 24GB, 1TB: $1,699 ($100 off)

15-inch MacBook Air discounts

• 15″ M5, 10C GPU, 16GB, 512GB: $1,349 ($150 off)
• 15″ M5, 10C GPU, 16GB, 1TB: $1,649 ($150 off)
• 15″ M5, 10C GPU, 24GB, 1TB: $1,899 ($100 off)

You can also browse the best MacBook Air deals throughout the week in our dedicated roundup.

Memory prices are finally slowing down, and the reason is not that supply improved. It is that buyers ran out of money.

TrendForce expects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise 13% to 18% quarter on quarter in Q3. Dan Robinson reported the forecast for The Register. He paired it with separate European shipment numbers that show what the squeeze has done to the market.

The Taiwanese analyst calls that growth rate a moderation, and by recent standards it is. Rising contract prices drove a 59.5% quarter-on-quarter jump in DRAM industry revenue in Q2, to $154.73bn.

Why it is slowing

TrendForce gives two reasons, and the second is the interesting one.

Demand is shifting away from high-capacity RDIMMs towards lower-capacity parts. And then there is what the analyst calls “the limited ability of PC and smartphone customers to absorb further price increases”.

That is a market hitting a ceiling rather than finding a balance. Supplier inventories are still at historic lows and bit shipments are expected to grow only modestly. Nothing about the supply side has eased. Prices are rising more slowly because the people at the end of the chain cannot pay any more.

Note who TrendForce names as the constraint: PC and smartphone customers. Phones use the same memory and face the same maths, and the handset market has spent a decade training buyers to expect more storage each year for roughly the same money. That expectation is now colliding with the price of the parts.

And 13% to 18% in a single quarter is not relief. It is a smaller increase on top of a year of increases.

Europe is where the bill lands

The market intelligence firm Context expects European PC shipments to fall hard as component costs push system prices up.

Laptop shipments are forecast to drop 6.4% year on year in Q3, then 20% in Q4. Desktops look worse: down around 20% in Q3 and almost 30% in Q4.

Those are severe numbers for a mature market, and they describe a straightforward mechanism. Memory got more expensive, so machines got more expensive, so European buyers stopped replacing them.

Corporate buyers are stretching refresh cycles and buying only when they have no choice, according to Context. “The PC refresh cycle has not disappeared, but the economics around it have changed,” said senior analyst Marie-Christine Pygott.

Stretching a refresh cycle is not free, though it looks free on a budget line. Older machines run slower, fail more often, and eventually fall off support, which is a security problem rather than a productivity one. European IT departments are taking that risk because the alternative costs more today.

Falling volumes, rising profits

PC makers are not suffering, which is the part that explains why nothing corrects.

Higher prices have more than covered the lost volume so far. The Register reported in May that Lenovo had dodged the worst of the memory crisis by pushing customers towards premium devices. The strategy worked.

That is a rational response to scarcity and it also removes the pressure to fix it. If selling fewer, dearer machines makes more money than selling more cheap ones, a manufacturer has no reason to fight for volume.

The same logic has been visible up and down the market for months. AMD raised Radeon prices in August, days after Nvidia did the same. Nvidia is putting up AI server prices by more than 15% from next year, citing memory costs. Everyone passes it on.

The AI PC did not save anyone

Manufacturers spent two years promising that AI-capable PCs would trigger a mass upgrade. Context says that is not what happened.

The end of Windows 10 support drove recent buying, not artificial intelligence. AI PCs are taking a growing share of machines entering the European supply chain. That is mostly because the capability is becoming standard, though, rather than because anyone is choosing it.

So the upgrade wave came from a support deadline, and it has now largely passed. What is left is a market with higher prices, no compelling reason to buy, and a stack of machines that will stay in service longer.

Who the memory is going to instead

None of this is happening to the AI industry. It is happening because of it.

The three big memory makers are concentrating on high-end products for AI buyers. Samsung has benefited from moving early into HBM4 mass production. SK hynix had the highest proportion of HBM in its bit shipments of the three. Micron is prioritising higher-priced server DRAM.

That leaves the mature-process business to second-tier manufacturers such as Nanya, Winbond and PSMC, who are supplying DDR4 and DDR3. The squeeze has already reached parts nobody expected, including DDR2, a standard from 2003, and the capacitors that carmakers need.

Europe watches most of this from the outside. SK hynix chose Indiana for its $4bn memory packaging hub after a Polish plant fell through, which means the continent absorbs the price rises without hosting much of the capacity.

What would actually change it

Two things, and neither is close.

The first is supply. Inventories are at historic lows and bit shipments are growing modestly, so relief needs new capacity, which takes years to build and is currently being pointed at HBM rather than at the parts in a laptop.

The second is AI demand cooling, which nobody in the industry expects and which would bring its own problems.

Until one of those happens, the pattern holds. AI buyers pay a premium for the memory they want. Everyone else pays a premium for the memory that is left. And the moderation TrendForce is forecasting is a description of European buyers reaching their limit, not of the shortage ending.

The fuel for a fully reusable rocket that can unlock truly low-cost access to space isn’t methane or liquid oxygen. It’s cash, and Stoke Space Technologies is tanking up. The company has now “completed the initial closing” of a $1 billion Series E round intended to help it reach orbit and prepare a new, larger rocket for operations.

“This round is really to scale,” CEO Andy Lapsa told TechCrunch. “To lay the infrastructure, to scale in production and flight frequency, and importantly to fund the development of the second generation vehicle.”

The round was led by Point72 Ventures (hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen’s tech investment vehicle), and Spark Capital, and included investment from General Innovation, Glade Brook Capital, US Innovation Technology, Washington Harbour Partners, Woven Capital and Y Combinator, among others.

Stoke is one of a handful of startups attempting to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the low-cost rocket launch space. SpaceX was built around the Falcon 9, which has a reusable booster stage, and now Musk and company are trying to field a huge, fully-reusable rocket, Starship.

But unlike its rivals Rocket Lab, Relativity Space or Firefly Aerospace, Lapsa’s company is aiming straight at that holy grail: A rocket where both the booster stage and the payload-carrying second stage come back to Earth so they can be reused cheaply. It’s never been done before.

Such ambition and technical feats require capital. SpaceX has spent well over $10 billion on Starship over the last decade, and the vehicle still hasn’t yet reached orbit, although that may change on its next flight. Now, Stoke has raised $2.3 billion in total.

In particular, SpaceX has struggled to identify the right materials and configuration for the components that shield the second stage of the rocket from the extreme heat caused when it is reentering the atmosphere. Stoke instead flows super-cooled liquid hydrogen through its thermal shielding, a unique active cooling solution that Lapsa says has been tested exhaustively on the ground and will be deployed on the first flight.

“We can flow excess coolant — more than we think we need in order to overcool the surface of the vehicle — and take a conservative stance from that perspective in early flights,” he said.

Lapsa said that he expects Stoke’s first vehicle, the Nova Pathfinder, to take flight in early 2027. In a business known for delays, he’s confident sharing that target following a series of structural and operational tests on the rocket’s first stage at the company’s Moses Lake facility. Next up is test-firing each stage of the rocket on the ground to ensure they are ready for flight.

“The ground system is checked out to the extent that we can do it without the rocket, and the rocket’s checked out to the extent that we can do it without the launch pad,” Lapsa said. “So the next step is to do them together.”

The startup has already sold launch contracts on the vehicle, which can carry three metric tons to low-Earth orbit — that will be, Lapsa believes, the largest debut vehicle of any U.S. rocket maker. That said, few rockets get off the ground on time or with total success, and simply getting to orbit would be an achievement.

“We have multiple Pathfinder vehicles in production, and we have confidence that we will bring Pathfinder to market and into orbit regardless of this round,” Lapsa said.

Stoke also revealed plans for an even bigger rocket, the Nova Block 2, that has been under development for the past few years. Based on the same technologies as the Pathfinder, including the engines and the company’s novel heat shield, that vehicle will be able to bring 15 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, slightly more than the Falcon 9.

The goal is to deploy it in 2029, right when, according to Musk, the Falcon 9 will be phased out. Is Lapsa drooling at the possibility of picking up increasingly desperate launch customers just as SpaceX pulls back?

“It amplifies the mismatch between launch supply and demand for launch, there’s no question about that,” he admits. “Regardless of Falcon 9 retiring or not retiring, the space industry and the space economy scales exactly as fast as rockets get off the ground, particularly rockets that serve third-party customers.”

That last remark is a dog whistle that satellite operators will surely hear: When SpaceX’s Starship takes flight, companies and government agencies looking to buy tickets will be competing with the space company’s internal projects, and might have to pay a premium to use the big rocket. Stoke, on the other hand, has not revealed plans to operate its own space assets.

“Now is the time to get moving […] so that we can finally start deploying a lot of the constellations and applications that we aspire to as an industry but have been stuck on the ground,” Lapsa said.

Appeals Centre Europe began providing dispute resolution services in Ireland in 2024.

UK-based independent press regulator Impress is launching a new service in Ireland to help take down illegal content, such as AI-generated deepfakes, from social media.

Impress Dispute Resolutions Services – Impress’ Dublin subsidiary – is an out-of-court dispute settlement (ODS) body certified by Ireland’s media regulator Coimisiún na Meán.

Launching today (8 September), it is offering a free of charge, independent mechanism for EU citizens to contest harmful content and platform decisions under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). IDR’s scheme is available to users in Ireland and the EU and covers major platforms including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube.

The DSA mandates that online platforms must provide a clear and accessible means to lodge complaints against illegal content. They must also allow users to request a review if they disagree with a platform’s decision.

In addition, the law also provides users the ability to turn to ODS bodies, which offer a faster and more cost-effective way to settle disputes with social media platforms when compared to the much more tedious judicial routes. These bodies are generally provide services at a low or no cost.

While ODS bodies cannot impose a binding settlement, platforms and users are required to engage with them in good faith.

“Over the past decade, we’ve supported thousands of people harmed in the media – and demand has never been higher,” said Impress Dispute Resolutions co-founder Gia Thom. “We’re non-profit by design, which keeps IDR independent, credible and focused on strengthening the information ecosystem.”

The EU has 11 listed ODS services spread across the bloc, including the Appeals Centre Europe, which began providing ODS services in Ireland in 2024.

Safety on social media has come to a head in recent years, with parents and lawmakers moving to shield children from the provable harms posed online by banning popular platforms.

Meanwhile, the proliferation of illegal content is getting compounded by AI, which enables bad actors to generate realistic-looking (often non-consensual and sexual) images and videos in seconds.

IDR, in addition to dealing with AI deepfakes, can also help users navigate disputes around illegal or harmful speech, the negative impacts on civic discourse or elections, and data protection, among other areas.

“Impress has delivered independent and effective redress for the public harmed by the media for over a decade, and we are very pleased to extend our proven service to those harmed by decisions of tech platforms,” said Impress CEO Lexie Kirkconnell Kawana.

“We know intimately and rise to the challenge of balancing the rights of individuals, groups and organisations while upholding the law and protecting free speech. Impress represents integrity in all that we do, and we will continue to embody this principle in providing fair outcomes for all participants to our scheme.”

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A rumored “Silo” spinoff could keep Apple TV’s dystopian franchise alive beyond its planned finale, but the books’ author is pushing back on the claim.

“Silo” is a dystopian science-fiction drama about a society living underground after humanity has been driven from the surface. The Apple TV series is based on the bestselling “Silo” trilogy, “Wool,” “Shift,” and “Dust,” by Hugh Howey.

While it was well liked, Apple TV had told the creators that the series would end after the fourth season. The third season just returned to the small screen in July, with the fourth season anticipated to release in Summer 2027.

Even though the series is facing down its inevitable end, it may not be time to say goodbye just yet.

Allegedly, there’s a chance “Silo” may be getting its own spinoff, set to begin pre-production in late 2026. It is expected to tie into Hugh Howey’s upcoming “Silo 40” trilogy, which is set to release in 2027.

This tantalizing tidbit was shared by Apple TV enthusiast Sigmund Judge on Threads.

One minute later, however, a very significant figure refuted the claim. Speaking up was the “Silo” author, Hugh Howey.

“Yo, this is news to me,” Howey says in the replies. “So probably not true.”

“I appreciate you wanting to keep a surprise,” Judge says in response. “Love everything you do.”

Judge says that he’s got some further evidence in response to “a denial,” presumably Howey’s. Judge says that hires for the upcoming project have begun, and that the main sets used for “Silo” have remained, even after production on the fourth season wrapped in March.