Apple quietly killed the ceramic Apple Watch in 2020, and for the fans of the fancy material, it has been an inexplicable absence ever since. For those catching up, ceramic was the lineup’s most premium material option. 

It was smooth to touch, scratch-resistant, and had that distinct non-metallic appearance, a characteristic of all titanium and aluminum frames. Now, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is actively planning its return.

Why does the ceramic case’s return actually matter?

While it isn’t mentioned clearly in the report, Apple could re-introduce a ceramic version of the Apple Watch with either the Series 12 in September or in 2027. “It will also offer new colors and bands, and a series of new health and fitness-related upgrades,” the report mentions.

For those catching up, ceramic is harder than stainless steel and retains its polish far longer. Basically, it’s the perfect blend of a luxury and a sporty finish. It’s the kind of materials upgrade that could serve as a major marketing campaign for the lineup without changing a single feature. 

For anyone who missed it the first time, or who has been wearing a titanium Ultra and doesn’t like the finish, the ceramic version could be the way to go. Fair warning: the Apple Watch could get fairly expensive with the ceramic case.

What else is Apple changing with the Series 12 and Ultra 4?

Bringing back ceramic is a smart way to restock the premium end of the Apple Watch lineup, but in my opinion, it will buy the company some time to figure out what the smartwatch will look like over the next decade: Apple’s yearning for a major Watch overhaul. 

Quite a bit, actually. Beyond the ceramic case option, both the Series 12 and the Ultra 4 are getting their first meaningful performance bump in years. The performance upgrade could be accompanied by new colors, updated band options, and a bunch of new health and fitness-related features.

Together, the performance upgrade on the Series 12 and Ultra 4 and the potential arrival of a ceramic case version suggest Apple wants to ship a comprehensive Watch lineup this year.

The takeaway: Memory prices have been trending upward for more than a year, with many analysts predicting further increases in the near future. A prominent GitHub developer has now published a series of graphs and charts showing just how quickly prices have surged to 2007 levels on a per-unit basis, effectively undoing two decades of progress in making PC hardware more affordable for consumers.

According to computer science researcher and software performance expert Daniel Lemire, skyrocketing memory prices are a “historical anomaly,” with the unprecedented increases effectively erasing decades of steady, exponential cost reductions.

He believes that for prices to normalize, either software developers will have to find ways to build AI systems that require less memory, or the hardware industry will need to increase production capacity.

Driven largely by rising demand from the AI sector, global memory prices have surged dramatically over the last two years, with a recent J.P. Morgan report estimating an increase of more than 400% since the start of 2024. Unfortunately for consumers, the surge isn’t limited to DRAM chips, as an acute manufacturing shortage in flash memory has also pushed up prices for SSDs, flash drives, memory cards, and external storage.

– Daniel Lemire (@lemire) August 5, 2026

According to industry reports, contract and retail prices for NAND flash have risen between 50% and 100% since the start of the crisis, triggering price increases across a broad spectrum of consumer electronics, including laptops, desktops, graphics cards, smartphones, and video game consoles. While brands such as HP, Dell, and Apple have raised prices for their laptops and MacBooks, Sony and Nintendo have also raised prices for the PS5 and Switch 2, respectively.

Ominously for consumers, South Korean semiconductor giant SK Hynix has predicted that the global memory crisis is far from over. According to CEO Kwak Noh-Jung, 2027 will be the worst year ever for the industry, with demand continuing to outstrip supply even beyond 2030.

However, whether these predictions materialize will depend in part on the health of the AI industry, amid growing fears that speculative investment in the sector is creating a bubble that could burst at any time.

This spring, my wife and I moved from the Denver suburbs into the Colorado Rockies. The high-altitude retreat presented a welcome reprieve from our otherwise tech-dominated lives. As remote workers, however, we faced certain challenges, and technology was the only reason our move was possible in the first place.

Prior to my time at El Reg, I, among other things, breathlessly covered a subset of the networking industry, which as it happens had become big business following the COVID-19 outbreak and the pandemic that followed. I’m speaking, of course, about software defined wide-area-networking (SD-WAN).

Little did I know, a mere six years later, this technology would become essential to my wife and me.

Had it not been for 5G and Starlink, the move might as well have been time travel. To put it into perspective just how far into the foothills we’d ventured, the fastest wired connection at our disposal was DSL. CenturyLink promised, but notably did not guarantee, up to 20 Mbps down and a staggering 1.5 Mbps up.

Compared to the symmetrical gigabit fiber line we’d enjoyed in the Denver suburbs for the past six years, relying on DSL alone felt positively medieval. To those, including many of my neighbors, living this reality, you have my sympathies.

Thankfully, DSL wasn’t our only option. For better or worse, 5G and Starlink are helping to close the digital divide in a meaningful way — but individually they’re still far from perfect. 

Where we live, T-Mobile’s 5G internet service delivers near-gigabit download speeds and uplink speeds ranging from 30–40 Mbps. Meanwhile, Starlink promised between 100 and 400 Mbps downlink depending on the plan, with uplinks that, at least for us, capped out at around 30 Mbps.

Either would be fast enough for our needs, but reliable? Turns out there’s still some room for improvement. In the past two months we’ve experienced no fewer than a dozen dropped connections lasting anywhere from a minute all the way to five. Making matters worse, the majority of these drops took place during working hours.

With a relatively clear view of the sky, we’ve found Starlink to be more reliable, but even SpaceX isn’t immune to the occasional outage. That’s not to mention the threat of space junk kicking off a Kessler syndrome-like event.

SD-WAN to the rescue

The easy way to approach multi-WAN would have been to set up two networks, each with its own SSID. In the event one went down, we’d switch to the other. 

While simple, it’s far from perfect, and does nothing to mitigate disruptions to the voice and video calls on which my wife and I spend a considerable amount of our week. With two WiFi access points, we’d also have to contend with interference from overlapping channels.

Wrangling multiple LANs, wireless SSIDs, and firewall rules isn’t exactly ideal. Thankfully, there’s a better way, and we just so happened to have all the equipment we needed.

SD-WAN was developed in the early 2010s to solve a very specific problem: as SaaS apps like Office 365, Salesforce, and Google Apps took off, more and more enterprise traffic was going out to the internet. 

This was a problem for a lot of enterprise WANs, which often relied on expensive MPLS links designed to connect satellite offices to servers running back at headquarters or regional datacenters. In many cases, these WANs were built to prioritize reliability over bandwidth, and due to their topology required backhauling traffic tens or hundreds of miles just to access the internet.

SD-WAN gateways offered an alternative. These devices could route internal traffic over the private WAN while SaaS and other internet-bound traffic could be piped over whatever local ISP served businesses in that area.

SD-WAN is an entire can of worms in itself, but for my purposes two key capabilities stood out: multi-WAN and policy-based routing support. Our router, a Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine SE (UDM-SE), already supported both.

The hardware

The UDM-SE is not Ubiquiti’s newest nor even its most capable gateway. Introduced in 2022, the all-in-one appliance combines a 3.5 Gbps router (with IPS/IDS enabled) with an 8-port gigabit PoE switch, an integrated network video recorder, and critically two WAN ports, one good for 2.5 Gbps and another capable of 10 Gbps. 

Ubiquiti’s SD-WAN implementation is somewhat basic compared to gateways from HPE, Cisco, or Extreme. However, of the bevy of networking and security features SD-WAN encompasses, we only really needed a handful – multi-WAN and policy-based routing were the main ones – and Ubiquiti is kind enough not to gate this functionality behind an enterprise license.

The setup itself was about as simple as it gets: plug each ISP-provided gateway into one of UDM-SE’s WAN ports and tell it whether you want to load-balance traffic across the two, or failover in the event of an outage or dropped connection.

In practice there were a few extra steps, including disabling the 5G and Starlink gateways’ onboard routing and WiFi functionality. Starlink supports a bypass mode, but the T-Mobile modem+router combo didn’t. We were able to disable the onboard WiFi, but only using an onboard utility.

Putting it to the test

With everything connected, we opted to configure the UDM-SE for WAN failover with T-Mobile as the primary and Starlink as the backup, rather than load-balancing traffic across the two, in part because the 5G link was so much faster.

The first few days after setting everything up, my wife and I were questioning whether we even needed Starlink. But then we saw the notification: “Internet connection WAN1 (T-Mobile USA) on port 9 is down and WAN2 (Starlink) is now active,” and then a few minutes later, “Internet connection WAN1 (T-Mobile USA) on port 9 is restored after failing over to WAN2 (Starlink).”

Both notifications were dated two hours earlier. We just hadn’t noticed. In fact, despite at least a dozen dropped connections over the past two months, the UDM-SE failed over fast enough that it was never an issue. No dropped calls, no buffering video, no timed-out web pages.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery was that while Starlink didn’t offer the fastest or lowest-latency connectivity, it was remarkably reliable. Despite less than perfect alignment and view of the sky, the logs show just two dropped connections in the past month, one of which happened in the middle of the night when no one was awake to notice.

While WAN failover kept us online, it didn’t do anything to guard against network congestion. The UDM-SE offers a preconfigured quality-of-service (QoS) policy that in theory should detect Zoom or MS Teams traffic and prioritize it over something like Windows Update or YouTube.

But since we had two WANs, we could go one better and take advantage of another SD-WAN favorite: policy-based routing. This allowed us to force certain devices or services to prioritize one ISP over the other. For example, because Starlink had proven to be the more reliable of the two links, I wrote a policy to route traffic from my wife’s work laptop over the satellite link first and fail over to T-Mobile in the event of an outage. This also had the benefit of ensuring that if I happened to kick off a large game or AI model download while she was in the middle of a meeting, I wouldn’t get myself in trouble for turning her Zoom call into a pixelated mess.

The digital divide is narrowing, not closed

In the more rural parts of the US where wired connectivity isn’t a given, cellular home internet and low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications, like Starlink, have gone a long way toward closing the digital divide — particularly for those working from home.

However, individually they’re still far from perfect. Dropped connections weren’t a daily occurrence, but they still occurred more frequently and for longer than we would have liked. Five minutes is a long time to wait wondering whether the person on the other end of the Zoom call will be there when you eventually get back online.

Technologies like SD-WAN can help to mitigate the problem by allowing multi-WAN failover, load balancing, and policy based routing, but to take advantage of them also requires paying for two ISPs and hundreds of dollars of equipment, which may or may not require monthly subscriptions or annual licenses.

We were fortunate that the hardware we already owned supported these features and didn’t lock them behind a pricy enterprise license. Even still, we’re paying more for internet than we’d like. Between T-Mobile and Starlink, we’re spending around $125 a month to get online.

Along with the higher price, network latency is also a lot higher than we’d like. Compared to our old fiber line, which routinely achieved latencies under 5 ms, T-Mobile and Starlink ranged from 15 ms at best to as much as 80 ms at worst.

The only online game I play regularly is a real-time strategy that’s old enough to drink. I’m not playing CS:GO or whatever twitch shooter is popular these days, so the higher latency wasn’t that big of a deal, but if you’re a competitive gamer, a wired connection is still a must.

The good news is T-Mobile and Starlink may not be our only options for high-speed internet for much longer. There are numerous ongoing efforts across the US and other nations to improve access to fiber connectivity, including one slowly working its way down the highway in our general direction.

On a personal note, while it’s neat to experience a technology firsthand that I dedicated years of my life to writing about, the moment fiber-to-the-home comes, both our Starlink and 5G home internet subscriptions are getting the boot. ®

There are a few different ways to keep apps under the radar.

The primary method for hiding iPhone apps

Mr.Mikla/Shutterstock

Hidden apps aren’t totally invisible

Cheng Xin/Getty Images

Other methods to keep apps under control

Tada Images/Shutterstock

The Apple Watch will see a revamp in the coming years, as Apple is reportedly in the middle of a shake up its wearables formula to meet an ever-changing market.

The Apple Watch has retained the same core design of a square display on a watch band, but it has evolved over time. While it has become thinner, larger, and more rugged in the Apple Watch Ultra, it can potentially do more.

In Sunday’s “Power On” newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman writes that the Apple Watch is ready to get overhauled into something new. The company’s industrial design team has been rethinking smartwatches in general over the last year, and it’s considering new directions to go in.

The team hasn’t quite decided what to actually do with the Apple Watch yet, but it is mulling the problem over.

These changes apparently include switching the square display for a circular version of various sizes. There’s also the possibility of removing the display altogether, to match the growing market for wearables without screens.

Smart rings are also seeing a rise in adoption, which gives Apple another wearable avenue to explore. It has repeatedly filed patents in the field, but an Apple Ring release continues to elude the company.

Sooner changes

Whatever new direction the Apple Watch takes, it won’t be anytime soon. The expected Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 will be largely performance-based updates.

Health and fitness changes are said to be included. Despite previous rumors, there are no major design changes in 2026 for the main Apple Watch body.

There is, however, a rumor that Apple will be introducing a new band attachment method for the 2026 model. If correct, it’s a change that will probably make earlier Apple Watch bands incompatible with the new model.

That said, it’s a rumor that we have heard on and off since 2022. It may happen, but it could be better suited as part of a larger overhaul.

I was fourteen or so when I went to the Gadget Show Live (once a big tech event in the UK which showed off the latest technology) in 2016 as a punter and overheard someone on a stand I’d visited mention they’d spent £1,000 on a custom gaming PC.

A thousand pounds. On a computer. I remember turning that figure over in my head (it’s roughly $1,400) and not quite being able to make sense of it, not necessarily because I couldn’t fathom how much money that was, but because at the time, it seemed like a lot of money to spend on a PC without any frame of reference as to what that price got you.

When a loved one dies, who downloads their important files from their cloud storage account? Who monitors their email inbox? Who decides what happens to the photos and videos on their social media accounts? And what if those tasks fall to you?

Everyone will die, but not everyone has planned what they want to happen with their digital assets after they’re gone. Even when someone makes a plan, survivors might still be limited in what they can do.

Tying up loose ends can become a nightmare for the living, especially when the volume of digital assets is enormous. Still, the more you know, the better you can plan for your own digital estate, and the easier it will be to manage someone else’s.

Take Inventory

The biggest determining factor in how much work it’s going to be to manage the online accounts and digital assets of someone who is incapacitated or deceased is whether they did any estate planning. If a person doesn’t write down what digital assets they have and what they want done with them, it’s impossible for anyone to know.

It’s not always a simple matter of memorializing a Facebook account or downloading photos from iCloud either. Digital assets can have as much monetary value as sentimental value. Say a person’s social media accounts earn dividends. How will a beneficiary collect future proceeds? And should they keep the account alive?

What about cryptocurrency? If it’s stored in a private wallet and no one has the key, the money is lost forever. It’s a different story, however, if a third party, like Coinbase or PayPal, holds the crypto. At present, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are considered “digital assets” and thus need to be treated that way when doing any estate planning.

Navigating the Law

In the US, digital inheritance is overseen by state law, the same as traditional probate and estate matters, according to Benjamin Orzeske, chief counsel at the Uniform Law Commission. He and his organization developed a state law known as the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), which has been enacted in 48 states, Washington, DC, and the US Virgin Islands. The missing two states are Massachusetts, where RUFADAA has been adopted but not yet enacted as of this writing, and Louisiana, which went its own way with a similar but different law.

“At the heart of RUFADAA is this recognition that digital property is in some ways different from traditional, tangible property,” Orzeske says. He gives the example of mail versus email. When a person dies, their mail gets forwarded to a dedicated person, the fiduciary, who then receives incoming communication, bills, and payments. If they get a bill in the mail for a magazine subscription, they know to cancel it. Receiving the mail effectively gives the person appropriate information and access to manage the deceased’s accounts and estate going forward. Email is different. The fiduciary doesn’t just get new incoming mail. They might also have access to a searchable history of communication, which the deceased person might have expected to be kept private.

The real point of conflict, according to Orzeske, lies in the Stored Communications Act, a federal law that says companies that handle our online assets can’t release them without our permission. So RUFADAA gives survivors some rights while retaining the original asset holder’s privacy.

Under RUFADAA, a named trusted person can close accounts, but they can only get the contents—meaning the bodies of emails, private messages, videos, photos, attachments, and so forth—if the decedent specifically “grants the authority to the personal representative fiduciary,” according to Catherine Hodder, a senior attorney editor at FindLaw. FindLaw is an informational website that breaks down legal issues for a general audience.

Vinyl has survived cassettes, CDs, Napster, the iPod, Spotify and several decades of people confidently predicting its imminent death because records continue to provide something streaming cannot: ownership, permanence, large artwork, ritual and a physical connection to music that someone presumably cared enough to write, perform, record and master. Artificial intelligence has apparently looked at all of that and decided it needed a piece of the action.

Suno is preparing to launch Suno Vinyl, a service that will turn music generated through its AI platform into personalized 12 inch records. Users will be able to select up to 46 minutes of music, create custom artwork and labels, and have the finished record pressed and shipped to their door for an estimated $45 plus shipping. The service is not yet live, although Suno is accepting users for its waitlist, which raises the fairly obvious question of who exactly has been sitting around waiting for this particular collision between generative AI and physical media.

That does not make Suno Vinyl an irrelevant story. Quite the opposite. Suno has become one of the largest generative music platforms in the world, raised hundreds of millions of dollars and is now operating at a scale where its decisions can influence how AI generated music is created, distributed and monetized. What makes this announcement interesting is not that somebody can turn an AI song into a record; it is that AI generated music is rapidly acquiring the same commercial infrastructure as conventional recorded music, including licensing, distribution, royalty policies, copyright disputes and now physical products.

Whether it deserves all of that is another question.

Calling It “Vinyl” Requires an Asterisk

There is one detail getting somewhat lost in the excitement: Suno calls the service Suno Vinyl, but the actual 12 inch record is manufactured from black PETG rather than conventional PVC vinyl. Suno describes the material as environmentally friendly and says the records are genuinely pressed rather than novelty lathe cuts, with full color printed sleeves, custom labels and audio taken from the user’s final mix.

That is fine as far as it goes, but if you are charging roughly $45 for something intended to spend its life on a turntable, we would like considerably more information. Suno currently says nothing meaningful about the pressing plant, mastering process, record weight, manufacturing tolerances or whether the supplied file receives any additional preparation before being committed to the physical format. The company promises “high quality audio,” but without any technical context that phrase carries about as much useful information as “premium sound” on the side of a Bluetooth speaker box.

Those omissions would be troubling if Suno were positioning this as an audiophile product, although there is little indication that it is. The target customer is not likely to be comparing cutter heads, lacquer sources or different pressings of A Love Supreme before deciding whether a PETG copy of an AI generated ska song about the family Labradoodle deserves shelf space.

$45 Buys a Lot of Actual Music

The pricing becomes more amusing when placed beside what traditional record buyers can purchase for the same money. We recently reviewed Rhino High Fidelity’s new edition of Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly, an all analog release cut by Kevin Gray and produced specifically for listeners who care about sound quality, and that record sells for $39.98.

Suno estimates about $45 plus shipping for a personalized PETG pressing of whatever its software generated after somebody typed a sufficiently elaborate prompt. The comparison is not entirely fair because Rhino can manufacture an established title in quantity while Suno is offering personalized, low volume production with custom artwork and packaging, but consumers do not make purchasing decisions inside an accounting seminar. They have $45, and that amount buys excellent new releases, several used records, a stack of inexpensive CDs or, depending on your level of restraint inside a record shop, the first twelve minutes of what eventually becomes a $140 purchase.

That is why Suno Vinyl makes almost no sense as a value proposition for conventional music collectors. It is not really competing with Rhino, Blue Note, Craft Recordings, Analogue Productions or any of the labels serving the vinyl enthusiast market. It is competing with personalized gifts, novelty merchandise and the emotional satisfaction of taking something that existed only on a screen and turning it into an object.

What Problem Is Suno Vinyl Solving?

Generative AI has removed almost every traditional obstacle involved in creating something resembling a finished song. You do not necessarily need musicians, a recording studio, microphones, instruments, engineers or enough musical ability to survive “Hot Cross Buns” on a recorder because software can produce something in seconds that has vocals, instrumentation, structure and a finished mix.

If the result is terrible, you generate another one. If that is terrible, you generate ten more. Deezer recently reported receiving tens of thousands of fully AI generated tracks every day, which underscores one of the central contradictions of this entire market: we can now create music much faster than anybody can realistically consume it.

Against that backdrop, Suno’s decision to turn one of those infinitely reproducible digital files into a scarce physical object is almost comically logical. The technology creates abundance, while the record creates the appearance of permanence and scarcity. You have to admire the capitalism involved because Suno has effectively identified a way to assign physical and emotional weight to a product whose defining advantage is that it can be generated endlessly and almost instantly.

That may ultimately be the real appeal.

Vinyl Means Something AI Music Does Not

The resilience of physical music has very little to do with consumers suddenly forgetting how convenient streaming is. Hundreds of millions of people pay for streaming subscriptions precisely because instant access to almost everything is useful, yet vinyl and CDs continue selling because ownership still means something when the rest of our media lives increasingly exist behind subscriptions, licensing agreements and corporate servers.

People stream because it is convenient; they buy records because some music matters enough to own. A copy of Kind of Blue, London Calling, Super Fly or Songs in the Key of Life does not become meaningful because somebody pressed it onto plastic. The record exists because the music already demonstrated enough cultural or personal value that listeners wanted to keep it, display it and return to it.

Suno reverses that relationship. Pressing the music onto a record can become part of the process of convincing ourselves that the thing mattered in the first place, which is a considerably stranger proposition. Someone may create a song about a deceased parent, a wedding, a child’s birth or another deeply personal experience and treasure the resulting object, and there is nothing artificial about that emotional reaction. But Suno also promotes birthday songs, anniversary tracks and inside jokes as likely applications, which tells us far more about the real market than any grand claim about reshaping music creation.

So Who Is This Actually For?

Suno Vinyl is primarily personalized merchandise, and viewed through that lens the concept begins to make considerably more sense. It is for the person who generates a birthday song for Dad and thinks presenting him with an actual record will be funnier and more memorable than texting him a link. It is for couples who want their AI generated anniversary anthem sitting beside the wedding photographs, and for people creating fictional bands, joke albums and personal projects who simply want to hold the finished result in their hands.

There is also a more legitimate creative use case for musicians who employ AI as one tool inside a larger process involving their own lyrics, vocals, instrumentation or production. AI assisted music and fully AI generated music are not the same thing, something we have argued repeatedly in our recent coverage, and a physical pressing of a genuinely collaborative project may have real personal or promotional value.

But none of that turns Suno Vinyl into the next meaningful development in analog playback. For most customers, it is closer to a custom photo mug that happens to spin at 33⅓ rpm, which is not necessarily an insult because personalized products can be fun. It merely means the thing belongs in a very different conversation from an AAA Blue Note reissue, and nobody should expect Kevin Gray to arrive with tasting notes.

The Copyright Mess Now Comes With a Record Sleeve

The physical format also makes the unresolved legal and ethical issues surrounding AI music feel considerably more tangible. Suno says users who create songs while subscribed to its paid plans are considered the owners of those songs and retain commercial usage rights, while material created on its free tier is intended for noncommercial use. The company also acknowledges that ownership of a generated recording does not necessarily mean the work qualifies for copyright protection, particularly when the human contribution is limited.

That distinction becomes harder to ignore when the thing arrives in the mail with your name printed on the jacket.

Suno’s relationship with the traditional music business remains equally complicated. Warner Music Group settled its dispute with Suno and entered into a partnership intended to support future licensed models and new AI experiences involving participating artists, yet litigation involving AI training and copyrighted material continues elsewhere. A Munich court recently ruled against Suno in a case brought by German rights organization GEMA, illustrating just how unsettled the legal framework remains even as companies race ahead with new commercial products.

That is why Suno Vinyl deserves more attention than a goofy product announcement normally would. AI music now has creation platforms, label partnerships, licensing agreements, streaming distribution, royalty policies, chart debates, copyright litigation and physical records. It has managed to recreate almost the entire music industry with remarkable speed, although nobody has yet announced an AI tour manager capable of losing the band’s cash somewhere outside Cleveland.

Physical Media Deserves Better Than More Content

We have spent much of 2026 covering the continued strength of physical music because records and CDs provide something increasingly valuable in an era of rented digital access. They offer ownership, preserve particular masterings and editions, support artists and labels, and encourage listeners to engage with albums rather than allowing an algorithm to pour background audio through the room until everyone goes to bed.

That is what makes Suno Vinyl simultaneously fascinating and faintly ridiculous. The vinyl revival has been driven partly by listeners deciding that certain music deserves more attention, more permanence and more emotional investment than another disposable stream, while Suno’s technology is built around making the creation of additional music almost frictionless. Those ideas are fundamentally at odds, and putting one inside the packaging of the other does not solve the contradiction so much as give it a rather handsome record sleeve.

The Bottom Line

Suno Vinyl is an important story attached to a profoundly unnecessary product. The company plans to let users take up to 46 minutes of music from their Suno libraries, add custom artwork and receive a genuinely pressed 12 inch PETG record for approximately $45 plus shipping, but there is almost no audiophile reason to care. Suno has disclosed very little about the mastering or manufacturing process, the record is PETG rather than conventional PVC vinyl, and the same amount of money can buy exceptionally well produced recordings containing music written, performed and engineered by human beings.

That comparison is ultimately beside the point because audiophiles are not really the customer. Suno Vinyl is a keepsake, novelty item, personalized gift and piece of creator merchandise designed for people who want something generated on a screen to feel more permanent, and that is precisely why the product matters even if most serious record collectors would never consider buying one.

AI companies have become remarkably good at generating limitless quantities of content. Suno is now testing whether putting some of that content into a physical object can make consumers assign it greater emotional and monetary value, and perhaps it can. If the next phase involves AI generated yacht rock pressed onto PETG, numbered 1 of 1 and listed on Discogs for $175, we may finally have reached the runout groove.

For more information: vinyl.suno.com

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The Trump administration is paying another $1.2 billion to cancel an offshore wind lease, this time to German utility RWE. 

The energy company said in an announcement that the wind farms would have been built off the coasts of California, Louisiana, and New York. Instead, RWE will spend $900 million to buy a small stake in a Louisiana liquid natural gas export terminal.

The New York wind farm would have generated more than 3 gigawatts, according to Heatmap News.

The remaining $300 million will go toward buying natural gas turbines to power 15 peaking power plants around the country. Peaking power plants are among the most expensive and most polluting natural gas power plants to operate. It’s unclear when those will be completed — there’s currently a backlog for new turbines stretching into the early 2030s.

RWE isn’t backing off its offshore wind investments elsewhere, though. The company said it bought 6.9 gigawatts of capacity in the U.K.’s recent auction.

The Trump administration has paid $3.93 billion for the 12 leases it has coaxed developers into abandoning.