The average US electric vehicle sold for $56,126 in July, up 1.6% on a year earlier and the first rise of 2026, according to Kelley Blue Book. Automakers cut EV incentives by 24.3% year on year after pulling models and shrinking supply.

The average electric car in the United States sold for $56,126 in July. That is 1.6% more than a year earlier and 1.2% more than June, and it is the first increase of 2026 after prices had fallen every month since December, according to Kelley Blue Book.

The sticker is not what moved. Manufacturer discounts on EVs fell to $6,626 in July, down 24.3% on the same month last year, so buyers simply paid closer to the asking price.

Electric cars are still discounted far harder than anything else on the forecourt. Incentives run at 11.8% of the transaction price against 6.4% across the industry, with Tesla at 10.4%.

Automakers can pull back because they cut supply first. A dozen EV models have been discontinued in the US this year as tariffs, the lost tax credit and import costs reshaped the market.

“Automakers have less excess inventory of EVs,” Sam Abuelsamid, vice president of market research at Telemetry, told Business Insider. “They don’t have to spend as much on incentives, and they don’t have to negotiate on price as much. It gives car companies more pricing power.”

The whole market is drifting upwards. The average new vehicle went for $49,855 in July, up 1.9% year on year and the highest figure of 2026.

One caveat sits inside the EV average. Luxury buyers are disproportionately likely to buy electric, according to K.C. Boyce of research firm Escalent, which pulls the number up regardless of what is happening to prices.

Cheaper cars are coming to push it back down. Slate’s stripped-out pickup, priced at $24,950, is due to start deliveries later this year.

Ford’s Fathom pickup starts at $28,350 before destination, reaching $29,945 on the road. Escalent found buyers define an affordable new car as $32,000 to $48,000, so both land underneath it.

The firm’s most useful finding is not about price at all. Bundling a home charger and its installation with a new EV shifted how affordable buyers judged it by as much as taking $8,000 off the sticker.

OFFBEAT

Turns out this space thing really is hard

Virgin Galactic has delayed its return to commercial spaceflight until February 2027, and plans to raise ticket prices later this year.

The delay was disclosed alongside the company’s financial results, which showed a net loss of $56 million for the second quarter of 2026, down from $67 million a year earlier. Revenue for the quarter was $0.1 million, compared to $0.4 million in 2025.

According to CEO Michael Colglazier, demand exceeded the number of seats offered in the first $750,000 batch, prompting the company to prepare another at a higher price. Those customers will, however, have to wait a little longer. Colglazier said: “Our first ship is now expected to enter commercial service in February 2027 rather than the fourth quarter of 2026.”

He blamed the delay on the extra time needed to “complete avionics and systems installations.”

During an earnings call, Colglazier said: “No single issue is driving the schedule push. Rather, we have experienced modest time duration extensions across hundreds of relatively small but important installation tasks involved in the first build of our new spaceship.”

In response to an analyst question, Colglazier elaborated: “The number of those kind of ‘Oh, we did not expect this to not fit just perfectly,’ coming in is higher than we had allotted for. That just has started to accumulate on us. It really picked up at the tail end of July. For a bit, we thought we could manage that end, but the team just needed more time to do it the correct way.”

Integrated vehicle ground testing is expected to begin later in August, followed by flight testing in October. A second spaceship is due to join the fleet in March 2027, and the company expects to stop burning cash and “deliver positive quarterly cash flow within 2027.”

When Virgin Galactic reopened suborbital ticket sales in April, it charged $750,000 for a seat, up from the $600,000 price it cited in 2023. That was a substantial jump from the $100,000 envisaged more than two decades ago, when Sir Richard Branson announced plans for a scaled-up version of Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne. At the time, the company said commercial flights would resume by the end of 2026.

Virgin Galactic’s last commercial flight took place in 2024, after which the company paused operations to focus on its next generation of spacecraft. Virgin Galactic is not alone in grounding its space-tourism service. Earlier this year, rival Blue Origin announced that New Shepard flights would pause for “no less than two years” while it worked on its crewed lunar program. ®

That makes it the cheapest EV in Kia’s lineup.

What we know so far: AMD’s Ryzen 7000 CPUs were once notorious for self-destructing on AM5 motherboards with older BIOS versions, but Team Red rolled out a firmware update to fix the problem in 2023. While there’s no indication that the issue has returned, a Redditor is now reporting that their friend’s Ryzen 7 7800X3D swelled up and burned out while running with the default BIOS settings after only three months of use.

According to Redditor Magoth04, a three-month-old Ryzen 7 7800X3D was irreparably damaged while installed in a fully updated MSI PRO X870-P WIFI motherboard. The post claims that the system abruptly shut down while gaming a few days ago and then entered a boot loop before dying for good.

When the owner opened the case to troubleshoot the problem, both the CPU and motherboard reportedly had “visible burn marks,” and the chip also appeared to have swollen slightly. Both the processor and motherboard were reportedly rendered unusable following the incident.

The user claims that the CPU was not overclocked and that the voltage and current limits had not been manually tuned, either. However, AMD’s EXPO setting had been manually activated to allow the memory to run at its advertised speed. The poster added that the CPU was cooled by a 360mm AIO and that system temperatures appeared normal before the catastrophic failure.

When asked whether they had contacted AMD to request a refund or replacement, the Redditor said that the RMA process was already underway. However, it’s unclear whether AMD will honor the warranty, since the chip had already been delidded before the RMA was requested.

The report of yet another Ryzen 7000 failure is bound to send shockwaves through the AMD community, given that this is not the first time something like this has happened. Back in 2023, users began reporting that some Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPUs were burning up and damaging or destroying their X670-series motherboards.

AMD claimed to have fixed the problem with an AGESA update that capped the voltage at 1.30V across all AM5 motherboards. The update appeared to have resolved the issue for a while, but in late 2024 and into 2025, users once again started reporting swelling, boot-looping, and burnout issues, this time involving the Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

AMD blamed motherboard manufacturers for allegedly ignoring its recommended voltage and current limits. Some motherboard makers, such as ASRock, even admitted that at least some of the failures could be attributed to aggressive PBO settings.

The root cause of the latest failure remains unclear, but it appears that the fixes rolled out by AMD and the precautions taken by motherboard manufacturers may not prevent every potential voltage spike during EXPO memory training, potentially leaving some systems vulnerable to permanent damage.

Image credit: Magoth04 / Reddit

When the iPhone X debuted in 2017 for a record-high price of $1,000, people were wondering: How long will this phone last? Now we have an answer. 

On Thursday, Apple classified the iPhone X as obsolete. To be clear, the device won’t suddenly stop working. “Obsolete” is a classification for devices that Apple stopped selling seven years ago, and the company will no longer offer hardware service. This is a step down from the “vintage” category, which refers to devices that Apple last sold five to seven years ago.

I never owned an iPhone X, but I admit I envied the people who did. It was the iPhone that made me start paying closer attention to smartphones. 

I remember seeing the iPhone X advertised on a billboard over San Francisco’s Union Square. Its curved corners and minimal bezels gave it a space-age vibe and made all other phones look dated by comparison. There was even something futuristic about that controversial front camera cutout, which everyone decided to call the “notch.” (Apple never used the term, at least not in the iPhone X’s press release.)

The iPhone X “is the beginning of the next ten years for iPhone,” said Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, Philip Schiller, in 2017.

Schiller’s prediction was spot-on. The all-screen form factor continued to show up in each generation of flagship iPhones, even as the notch evolved into the Dynamic Island on the iPhone 14 Pro. Today, there’s only one iPhone model that still has a notch: the entry-level iPhone 17E.

Nine years after the iPhone X’s debut, another contender for the most expensive new iPhone may soon be appearing. Apple’s foldable iPhone is heavily rumored to launch next month with an expected price tag of at least $2,000. And with the ongoing RAM crisis driving prices higher, it seems almost quaint to imagine a $1,000 flagship phone today.

We’re also set to see Apple’s 20th anniversary iPhone next year. While I can’t imagine the “iPhone 20” will be as revolutionary as the iPhone X, maybe Apple will surprise us once again.

Jason Chun is a CNET writer covering a range of topics in tech, home, wellness, finance and streaming services. He is passionate about language and technology, and has been an avid writer/reader of science fiction for most of his life. He holds a BA from UC Santa Barbara and an MFA from The New School.

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The invisible SynthID will remain.

I have been following rumors about Google’s new HiLight feature long before the company even announced its name. A few weeks ago, reports spoke about the feature as Google’s AI interface, something that glows when users speak to Gemini. 

Now that the company has wrapped the Pixel 11 launch event, everything’s out in the open, and one of the only two things it does is light up when you speak to Gemini. So, after all the speculations and build-up, Google’s big reveal is… basically the same thing we thought it was, and I have some strong thoughts about that. 

I thought Google was onto something

My excitement (and disappointment) about HiLight comes from how the smartphone industry has treated LED notification lights. While an always-on display informs you about notifications, it also demands more attention, making it harder not to pick up the phone and respond. In comparison, I find LED indicators on the back, like those on Nothing and CMF phones, less intrusive.

While they tell us there’s a notification, they don’t compel us to pick up the phone immediately. They also let you rest your phone face-down on the table while you’re enjoying a dinner with your family or friends, playing an intense game of UNO, or enjoying a new release at the theater. 

That’s exactly what I, or someone who has seen the smartphone market evolve over the years, seeing all the phases of LED notification indicators, would expect HiLight on the Pixel 11 Pro phones to do. It sounded like the perfect idea on paper. Little did I know that the company planned to chain it to a hyper-restricted software experience. 

Here’s what HiLight can do at the moment

Exactly two things. First, it works as a Gemini conversation indicator, switching between different glow patterns for listening, thinking, and responding. Basically, it gives you visual confirmation that the assistant heard you without you having to pick up the phone. Fair enough. We’ve seen similar implementations on Amazon’s Echo speakers and Google’s own Home Speaker.

Second, it lights up in one of five colors when a favorite contact calls. This works with both the Phone app and WhatsApp (the only third-party app it supports, via 9To5Google). And while you might think you could choose the color you associate with a favorite contact, you can’t. Google picked five colors for you, and you simply assign them to people.

So, at launch, one of the most hyped Pixel 11 Pro features can essentially only do these two things, which feels like a frustratingly small use of what could have been a genuinely useful RGB light on the back of a phone. 

The fact that Google handed you give colors and called it a day, even though the RGB light ring can physically render so much more than that, isn’t even the worst part of it. 

The problem becomes obvious when you actually use it

The biggest caveat of Google’s stringent approach to an otherwise perfect idea is the lack of third-party app support. 

According to an Android Headlines report by Alexander Maxham, Google has no plans to unlock the restricted HiLight for other apps within its own ecosystem or open it to third-party apps. The closest thing to a roadmap Google offered was a mention of RCS messaging support arriving down the line, but that’s pretty much it. 

The entire point of having a rear-facing RGB light is to keep the user informed when the phone is sitting face-down. Among the few things Pixel 11 Pro owners are missing out on, despite having the physical hardware sitting right there on the device, are general notifications from apps you could be using daily, including Slack, Teams, social media apps like Instagram, or even Uber, for that matter.

Then comes charging or battery indication. I know it’s an RGB ring, and integrating progress levels that are otherwise shown through horizontal UI elements is tough. However, how difficult would it be to use the light to tell the user the battery is dying? Is blinking red twice or three times really that difficult? I’m not even talking about a live charging status.

If the hardware actually supports full-spectrum RGB LED capabilities, I don’t get why it’s locked to only five color options. Would a color-coded system in the app be too difficult for users to understand and customize? Pink for Instagram, purple for Teams, or yellow for Snapchat?

Perhaps a yellow or amber flickering light when someone captures a self-portrait from the rear-facing camera, supporting the timer beeps that the phone already makes? I’m just thinking about ways Google could have made the hardware addition more useful and more interesting. 

I’m not asking Google to cram every one of these functionalities into HiLight at once. In fact, I know for a fact that implementing all of them together would invite more chaos than it would solve problems. But Google can gather a team of engineers and designers to brainstorm intuitive ways to integrate the hardware deeper into the Pixel experience and make it sound or feel much less gimmicky than it currently does.

It’s not too late; Google can still turn this around

There’s no point in comparing Google’s HiLight RGB light with Nothing’s circular or horizontal LED modules. By nature of their shape and design, Nothing’s LEDs are better suited to simpler depictions of Live Updates on Android phones. However, that doesn’t mean Google can’t make HiLight highlight other things.

While HiLight is one of the most lethargic rear-facing LED implementations on a smartphone, it doesn’t have to stay that way forever. Fixing it doesn’t really require reinventing anything: open the API to developers, let people assign custom colors through a color wheel or similar setup, add a charging or power indicator, and ship the messaging feature that’s already been promised.

If Google genuinely wants people to put their phone face-down and be present in the moment, it also needs to trust those same people and grant them more control over what HiLight does for them. I’m rooting for an omnipresent HiLight interface that can cover far more than it does today, and I’ll remain optimistic that Google will eventually move in that direction.

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Aircraft, ships and vehicles now carry many radio systems in a small space, so designers must know how much energy leaks from one antenna into another before any hardware is built. This leakage is described by the mutual s-parameters between the antenna ports, and it decides whether two systems can operate at the same time on the same platform. Measuring it by trial and error at every candidate position is slow and costly. Predicting it by simulation is difficult for two reasons. First, the platform is electrically large, which means that its dimensions span several hundreds of wavelengths, so the model needs a large number of unknowns. Second, the coupling levels of interest are very low, in some cases down to -100 dB, which leaves little margin for numerical error. This White Paper addresses both problems with a full-wave solution based on the Method of Moments applied to the Surface Integral Equation, using higher-order basis functions to keep the number of unknowns low. Two examples are studied in detail: a metallic cube carrying two quarter-wavelength monopoles, and a realistic airliner carrying five monopoles at 1.06 GHz, where the fuselage is about 140 λ long. Three modelling techniques for obtaining accurate low-level results are compared in terms of accuracy and the number of unknowns each one requires, and the complete geometry of each model is documented so that every result can be checked independently.

The Smart Tank series is HP‘s answer to the refillable-ink trend we’ve tracked closely, and for the price, it’s worth checking out the HP Smart Tank 5101 all-in-one printer for $170 (was $260) at Amazon.

Based on our experience testing HP printers, this one’s an easy recommendation for home offices, as well as the back-to-school prep and dorm rooms. First, the bottled ink refills are much cheaper than traditional inkjet cartridges, saving you money – and it includes two years’ of ink in the box. Second, the model features a built-in scanner and copier for work and study.

Why we recommend it

Having tested all the best HP printers, the brand is one of our top-rated in the printing field (our hardware editor has been using his HP printer for almost ten years now).

Refillable ink tank printers have become the more sensible long-term option for anyone who prints regularly, since the upfront ink supply eliminates the recurring cartridge cost that makes budget inkjets expensive over time.

HP, including two years of ink in the box with the Smart Tank 5101, removes a lot of the math you’d otherwise have to do around break-even points.

It also covers the basics well: printing, scanning, and copying are all handled through the HP Smart app, and setup requires nothing beyond connecting to Wi-Fi.

For more top picks, we’ve tested the best ink tank printers and the best home printers, too.

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