Personal Tech

Slowdowns, crashes, BSODs reported on pricey mobile workstations

HP customers are reporting problems with BIOS updates for the PC maker’s premium laptops.

Over the past few months, customers have used forums to register complaints over unbootable devices, spikes in fan noise, and Blue Screens of Death following BIOS firmware updates.

An example cropped up in April, when a user of a ZBook Ultra G1a (a very expensive mobile workstation) complained that a BIOS update had caused the machine to “freeze completely during the boot process.”

The customer wasn’t alone: other forums including Reddit showed many other users experiencing problems.

The cause appears to be a BIOS update, flagged as critical, and pushed through Windows Update. As a critical update, the patch was automatically applied, which is where the fun begins for affected users.

In the case of the ZBook Ultra G1a, the broken BIOS versions are 01.04.03 and 01.04.05. The problematic BIOS versions for the EliteBook X G1a are 01.03.11 and 01.05.00.

Stopping the update is one option, and the BIOS lets users prevent the operating system from initiating updates. However, once the update has completed, reverting to a known working version is problematic. Users have reported some success using the network BIOS downgrade functionality, but only with an HP USB-C to Ethernet dongle.

This is far from HP’s first rodeo when it comes to BIOS updates turning laptops into expensive paperweights. In 2024, an update left some devices irretrievably bricked and customers facing hefty hardware repair bills. 

The current issues come at a time when Microsoft is working to improve the reliability of Windows and applying greater scrutiny to third-party drivers sent through Windows Update. The service can also be used for BIOS and other firmware updates.

HP told The Register: “HP is aware of purported BIOS issues and is looking into the matter.” The hardware vendor suggested that affected users contact its support teams for assistance.

Timing is everything. On May 20, Richard Hughes of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) project announced that HP was joining Lenovo and Dell as premier sponsors. The LVFS initiative is an open source firmware updating solution. Here’s hoping that HP is only bringing its dollars and not any of the BIOS update quality problems currently frustrating some of its customers. ®

A buzzy de-extinction company is making headlines again, the Smile spacecraft launched on its way to observe Earth’s magnetic shield in action, and a new study cast doubt on the existence of water vapor plumes on Europa. Plus, SpaceX’s Starship V3 lifted off for the first time. Here are this week’s most interesting science stories.

Chicken or artificial egg

Colossal Biosciences, the “de-extinction” biotech company best known for its claims of reviving the dire wolf, announced this week that it has hatched 26 healthy chicks from 3D-printed artificial eggshells. According to the company, it’s a step toward its goal of bringing back the South Island giant moa (Dinornis robustus), an enormous bird that’s been extinct for some 600 years, and the dodo.

Colossal’s artificial eggshell is made up of a semi-permeable silicone-based membrane lattice that allows oxygen to pass through while still protecting the inner contents, and a rigid support cup that holds it all together. The embryo is taken from an egg laid in the usual way, by a hen.

“In the current workflow, scientists examine eggs laid by real hens within 24 to 48 hours of laying, select viable candidates, and transfer the contents — minus the shell — into the artificial egg structure,” Colossal explained in a blog post. “All upstream biology, from fertilization through laying, still occurs in a living bird. For de-extinction applications, the artificial egg is intended as a later-stage incubation vessel, not the point of genetic intervention.” The moa laid eggs roughly eight times the size of an emu’s, so no species alive today could serve as a surrogate for the entire process. Colossal says it is eyeing the Nicobar pigeon as a possible surrogate egg-producer for its dodo project, and is considering the emu or tinamou for the moa.

Colossal Biosciences

Colossal’s methods and de-extinction goals have garnered a fair share of critics over the years, many of whom have questioned the purpose of focusing on resurrecting extinct species while there are plenty of endangered species today that could benefit from this type of intervention. Colossal says its system could be applied to conservation. And just as some scientists argued that Colossal’s dire wolves aren’t true dire wolves but genetically modified gray wolves, skeptics say the latest announcement should be taken with a grain of salt.

“They might be able to use this technology to help them make a genetically modified bird, but that’s just a genetically modified bird. It’s not a moa,” Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist with the University at Buffalo, told the Associated Press. “That’s not an artificial egg because you’ve poured in all the other parts that make it an egg. It’s an artificial eggshell,” Lynch added.

Smile spacecraft to study Earth’s ‘invisible armor’

The European Space Agency (ESA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) this week launched a joint mission to gather the first X-ray observations of Earth’s magnetic shield and study how it responds to solar wind. It’ll also observe the northern lights in ultraviolet for stretches of 45 minutes at a time, which is longer than any other mission. The Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer, or Smile, is equipped with an X-ray camera and an ultraviolet camera, along with a light ion analyzer and magnetometer. It launched on May 19 atop a Vega-C rocket from French Guiana and is expected to begin collecting data in July.

“We are about to witness something we’ve never seen before — Earth’s invisible armour in action,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said.

“The evidence that Smile collects will help us better understand planet Earth and our solar system as a whole,” added ESA Smile Project Scientist Philippe Escoubet. “And the science it uncovers will improve our models of Earth’s magnetic environment, which could ultimately help keep our astronauts and space technologies safe for decades to come.”

Water vapor plumes on Europa? Maybe not

A new analysis of data from the Hubble Space Telescope has scientists questioning previous findings that Jupiter’s moon Europa is spitting plumes of water vapor into space. It’s been thought that cracks in Europa’s icy shell could allow water from its subsurface ocean to escape, and in 2014, researchers announced that this did indeed appear to be the case. But, after looking at 14 years of Hubble data from its Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (HST/STIS), members of that same team now say the earlier conclusion “just doesn’t hold up the same way anymore.”

NASA

“The evidence for water vapor plumes on Europa isn’t as strong as we first understood it,” Dr. Kurt Retherford from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), one of the authors of a 2014 paper, said. “One of the difficulties in interpreting the data back then was determining where to place Europa within its context,” Retherford said. “The way Hubble works left some uncertainty in terms of placement relative to the center of the image. If Europa’s placement was off even just by a pixel or two, it could affect how the data gets interpreted.”

In the new study, the researchers looked at Lyman-alpha emissions, which are associated with hydrogen atoms. “Our reanalysis took our original 99.9 percent confidence in the plumes’ existence and reduced it to less than 90 percent confidence,” said lead author Dr. Lorenz Roth, from KTH Royal Institute of Technology. “That’s simply not enough evidence to support the certainty of claims we made at the time.” The previous findings, they say, may have been based on statistical noise.

But it’s still within the realm of possibility that Europa is home to water vapor plumes, and it may not be long before we have a better understanding of what’s going on there. In 2024, NASA launched its Europa Clipper mission to study the icy moon. It’s expected to reach Jupiter in April 2030 and perform its first Europa flyby the following year.

Before you go, be sure to check out these stories too:

Psyche did a Martian flyby to get gravity assist from the red planet.

Notable rounds this past quarter include Neurent Medical, Aerska, Evervault, Circuit and XFuel.

VC funding into Irish SMEs fell 58pc to €221.7m in first quarter of this year, finds Irish Venture Capital Association’s (IVCA) quarterly Venture Pulse survey.

The drop in funding, however, is in comparison to a record-setting Q1 2025, when Irish firms raised €532.8m. The report was published in association with William Fry.

Life sciences SMEs led funding rounds this quarter, accounting for 54pc of the total investment – or €119.5m, followed by fintech at 13pc (€28m), software at 12pc (€26.9m), cybersecurity at 9pc and environmental tech at 8pc.

The true impact of funding into AI companies, meanwhile, is difficult to estimate, noted IVCA, which classifies companies by their core industry, even if AI is embedded in their products and services.

According to the report, AI represents just 2pc of the total funding raised in Ireland this quarter. Meanwhile, globally, AI accounted for around 80pc of the record $300bn invested in start-ups in Q1 2026.

Notable rounds include Galway medtech Neurent Medical, which raised €62.5m and biotech Aerska, which raised $39m in February. Evervault, New York and Dublin-based data encryption start-up raised $25m, while fintech Circut raised €20m and enviro-tech XFuel raised €18.5m.

IVCA’s report found that funding declined across all deal-sizes except for investments less than €1m. Though this range already suffered a 42pc decline in the same quarter last year.

Meanwhile funding in the €3m to €5m range fell 77pc to €7.9m from €35m a year earlier, and deals worth €5m and €10m dropped 62pc to €16.5m from €43.8m.

85pc of the total capital raised during this quarter came from international investors. “This is glass half full territory,” noted Caroline Gaynor, IVCA’s chairperson, “as it once again highlights our exposure to overseas investment, but also emphasises the appetite for quality Irish tech firms, despite unprecedented spending on AI in the US.”

Given Ireland’s high exposure to international investments, geopolitical tensions, including the ongoing Iran war, could impact investor confidence, IVCA said, adding that it is hard to predict its impact on SME funding in the next quarter.

“Ireland is a small market subject to global geopolitical headwinds. But local policy initiatives may mitigate against this to the benefit of early stage Irish start-ups looking to raise funding this year.

“For example, Enterprise Ireland has raised its direct investment limit from €250,000, and we should see the benefits of the Government’s €250m Seed and Venture Capital Scheme 2025-2029 start to feed through this year.”

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In 1985, the best computer a reasonably affluent American could buy was the IBM PC AT, which cost $19,400 in today’s money. Today, a Tecno Spark Go costs $30 in a Nairobi market stall and runs a processor billions of times faster. No other good in history has experienced a cost decline on that scale.

That era is now ending. The International Data Corporation predicts worldwide smartphone shipments will fall 13% in 2026, the largest single-year decline ever. In Africa and the Middle East, the drop exceeds 20%.

The crash is concentrated at the cheapest end of the market. IDC calls it “a structural reset of the entire market.” A huge share of the world’s population is getting priced out of smartphone ownership.

The reason is memory. Smartphones, like all computers, use DRAM. The global supply of DRAM is remarkably inelastic because memory is extraordinarily difficult and expensive to produce.

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For decades, most DRAM went to smartphones and laptops. In the last three years, AI emerged as an enormous and hugely profitable consumer of memory. The result is a massive reallocation of DRAM production away from consumer electronics and toward AI data centres.

Three companies, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, produce more than 90% of the world’s DRAM. Building a single state-of-the-art memory fabrication facility costs $15 to $20 billion. It takes years of producing defective chips before yields become competitive.

These memory makers learned a brutal lesson from decades of boom-and-bust cycles: always leave demand unmet. Intel, Texas Instruments, IBM, Germany’s Qimonda, and Japan’s Elpida all exited or collapsed. The survivors’ strategy is capital discipline above all else.

AI changed the calculus. Training and running AI models requires high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, which stacks multiple DRAM dies vertically and connects them with thousands of tiny channels. A single gigabyte of HBM consumes more than three times the wafer capacity of a gigabyte of standard DRAM.

In 2023, HBM accounted for 2% of memory makers’ wafers. By end of 2026, it is expected to reach 20%. HBM margins run at 70% or higher. Commodity DRAM margins sit between 20% and 30%.

The memory makers did not expand total production to meet HBM demand. They reallocated existing capacity. Every wafer pushed into HBM removes capacity from the memory that goes into phones and laptops. By end of 2025, SK Hynix was directing 30% of its wafers to HBM.

Micron went further. In December 2025, it discontinued its consumer-oriented Crucial brand entirely. It ceased all consumer shipments and redirected everything to AI and enterprise. One of three global DRAM producers simply left the consumer market.

The result: between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026, LPDDR4 prices increased 250%. LPDDR5 prices rose 220%. DDR5 prices in Germany surged 414%. Memory’s share of the bill of materials on a budget Android phone went from around 15% to as much as 50%.

For budget smartphone makers like Transsion, Oppo, Vivo, and Lava, the model is broken. These companies bought last-generation components on the spot market and assembled phones at extremely thin margins. Transsion shipped 105 million phones in 2024 and held 48% of the African smartphone market.

But the sub-$100 smartphone is becoming, as one analyst put it, “permanently uneconomical.” Phones that sold for $50 now sell for $120 or more. Transsion’s net profit fell 54% in 2025. It cut its shipment target by 40%.

Oppo slashed shipments by more than 20%. Vivo cut by nearly 15%. Xiaomi’s annual shipments fell 19% year on year in Q1 2026.

In India, the sub-$100 smartphone market collapsed 59% year on year in Q1 2026. In Africa, where 81% of smartphone shipments were in the sub-$200 category in 2025, many consumers will simply be priced out of phone ownership entirely. The technology that connected hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people to the internet is becoming unaffordable.

The memory makers have never been more profitable. In 2025, they earned a collective $70 billion in profit. In 2026, they are expected to earn more than double that. Samsung’s workers nearly went on strike this month over how those profits should be shared.

The crisis is not staying in the poor world. Samsung’s consumer division could not secure a long-term LPDDR agreement with Samsung’s own memory division. The Galaxy S26 shipped with less memory than expected at higher prices. Samsung executives warned the company would record its first-ever annual net loss on smartphones.

Dell hiked laptop prices 15% to 20% in December 2025. Apple, which traditionally negotiated multi-year memory agreements to smooth costs, saw its latest contract expire in January 2026. The memory makers refused anything longer than quarterly pricing.

In February, Apple agreed to pay Samsung a 100% premium on the LPDDR5X memory for the iPhone. Over the course of 2025, the 12GB chips powering the iPhone 17 Pro increased in price by 230%. Apple has delayed the iPhone 18 standard model to spring 2027 and pushed back the new Mac Studio from summer to autumn.

The outlook is worsening. Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform, launching in late 2026, will pair Rubin GPUs with Vera CPUs that are enormously hungry for LPDDR. By 2027, Vera Rubin is projected to consume more LPDDR than Apple and Samsung’s consumer divisions combined.

JPMorgan projects memory could account for 45% of the iPhone’s component cost by 2027, up from roughly 10% today. Apple will face a choice: cut into its margins or dramatically increase prices. Neither option is attractive for a company that sells 230 million phones a year.

The only near-term supply relief is coming from China. ChangXin Memory Technologies already commands more than 30% of China’s LPDDR market and its DRAM has been spotted inside Corsair’s retail DDR5 kits. But even CXMT is planning to convert about 20% of its capacity to HBM, because the margins are irresistible.

Hyperscalers are willing to outbid budget phone manufacturers for access to DRAM. Microsoft and Google executives reportedly spent the end of 2025 “practically taking up permanent residence in Korea” lobbying Samsung and SK Hynix for allocation. More than 30% of hyperscaler capital expenditure now goes to DRAM alone.

South Korea’s deputy prime minister said this week that “the benefits of AI must also go to the public.” The memory crisis is the starkest illustration of why that statement matters. The wealth created by AI is accruing to three memory makers and the hyperscalers they supply. The cost is being paid by the world’s poorest phone buyers.

The last few decades democratised computing. Cheap smartphones connected hundreds of millions of people to the internet. That trend has reversed. The long arc of consumer electronics getting faster, cheaper, and more powerful every year is over. The people who will feel it first and worst are the world’s poor. The rest of us are next.

The Konkr Pocket Block will be smaller than the company’s previous vertical handhelds.

British officials announced an order for 72 units of the RCH 155 howitzer mounted on Boxer armored vehicles. The deal carries a value near one billion pounds and marks a major step in restoring the army’s long-range fire support after earlier systems went to Ukraine. Deliveries start in 2028 with full operations expected around 2030.

Engineers installed a fully automatic 155-millimeter gun module on an eight-wheeled Boxer chassis. That means the two crew members may stay in their shielded cab the entire time, out of harm’s way, while controlling everything from a safe distance. They never have to expose themselves when firing because the entire process takes place within the cab. They’re using tried-and-true technology from earlier tracked howitzers, but this time they have the added benefit of being mobile. The gun is completely automated; a robotic arm handles the shells and propellant charges while the crew sits back and loads the fuses from the comfort of their cab. They can fire up to eight shots per minute, and the technology even allows them to drop numerous rounds at once, sending projectiles along different courses so that they all land in the same place at the same time.

With the appropriate guided shells, the cannon can fire at a range of 70 kilometers, and this will only improve as they complete testing of rocket aided and ramjet options. The elevation ranges from nearly level to a whopping 65 degrees, and the turret can turn a complete 360. It means that the crew can aim, load, and shoot while the vehicle is still moving. This continual motion makes the howitzer far more difficult to strike, as enemy fire cannot identify it. The Boxer design also allows it to travel like a sports car, with a top speed of 100 kph on the highway and a range of more than 700 kilometers on a single tank. There is no need for huge trucks or rail carriages to move it throughout Europe. Anyone who has had to handle maintenance on a military vehicle will appreciate the modular design; the drive section simply takes off the mission module, making repairs much faster in the field.

It’s also rather well armored, as the hull and floor satisfy all military specifications, and the overpressure mechanism keeps chemical or biological threats at bay. The crew compartment is separate from the gun, which is a useful safety precaution when the thing starts firing off a number of shots. The prior tracked howitzers were difficult to put up and not particularly adaptable. The RCH 155 changes all of that because it provides immense firepower while also allowing you to drive in, drop a few rounds, and roll before the opposition even notices you’re there. It has enough ammunition on board to continue battling without needing to restock.
[Source]

A new Gen AI subdomain has been found for Apple’s website, with the domain’s appearance solidifying AI as one of the major topics at WWDC in June.

Apple’s annual WWDC event is set to start on June 8, with its keynote setting the tone for the rest of the year. While Apple is secretive as usual about what will be mentioned, one web-based change has practically confirmed one of the most likely topics.

A new subdomain for genai.apple.com has been found, reports MacRumors. Attempts to load the subdomain comes up with connection time-out messages, indicating that it has been registered but not configured for its final server destination.

It is a different kind of error versus typing a wrong URL or subdomain. It means there is something Apple intends to do with the subdomain.

Confirming expectations

The domain change solidifies artificial intelligence as one of the major topics of conversation for WWDC 2026. Previous rumors and speculation, as well as events over the last two years and the prominence of AI in the tech industry in general, meant Apple had to bring it up at some point during the keynote.

The elephant in the room will be Siri, Apple’s digital assistant that has been waiting on its delayed overhaul for two years. With substantial support from Google Gemini, 2026 should be the year that Apple’s promised revamp will actually work.

Rumors have and indicated there will be other AI-related changes on the way, including bringing an easier way to access Visual Intelligence in the Camera app. Photos will also gain more AI editing options.

There’s also the prospect of wider AI changes, including allowing users to select which third-party AI service providers they want to answer prompts and to handle tasks normally dealt with by Apple Intelligence.

Ubiquiti has released security updates to patch three maximum severity vulnerabilities in UniFi OS that can be exploited by remote attackers without privileges.

UniFi OS is a unified operating system that powers UniFi Consoles and helps manage IT infrastructure, including networking, security, and other services, as well as UniFi applications such as UniFi Network, UniFi Protect, UniFi Access, UniFi Talk, and UniFi Connect.

The first flaw (CVE-2026-34908) enables attackers to make unauthorized changes to targeted systems by exploiting an Improper Access Control weakness in UniFi OS, while the second (CVE-2026-34909) allows them to access files on the underlying system by abusing a Path Traversal vulnerability, which could be manipulated to access an underlying account.

A third maximum severity security issue (CVE-2026-34910) makes it possible for malicious actors to launch a command injection attack after gaining network access by exploiting an Improper Input Validation vulnerability.

On Thursday, Ubiquiti also patched a second critical command injection flaw (CVE-2026-33000) and a high-severity information disclosure (CVE-2026-34911), both affecting Unifi OS devices.

Ubiquiti has yet to disclose whether any of the five vulnerabilities were exploited in the wild before disclosure, but shared that they can be exploited in low-complexity attacks and were reported through its HackerOne bug bounty program.

At the moment, threat intelligence company Censys is tracking nearly 100,000 Internet-exposed UniFi OS endpoints, most of them (nearly 50,000 IP addresses) found in the United States.

However, there is currently no information on how many have been secured against potential attacks targeting the vulnerabilities Ubiquiti patched this week.

​In March, Ubiquiti patched another maximum-severity flaw (CVE-2026-22557) in the UniFi Network Application that may allow attackers to take over user accounts, as well as a vulnerability (CVE-2026-22558) that can be exploited to escalate privileges.

Ubiquiti products have been targeted by both state-backed hacking groups and cybercriminals in recent years, in campaigns that hijacked them to build botnets that concealed the threat actors’ malicious activity.

For instance, in February 2024, the FBI took down Moobot, a botnet of hacked Ubiquiti Edge OS routers used by Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) to proxy malicious traffic in cyberespionage attacks targeting the United States and its allies.

Four years ago, in April 2022, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) also added a critical command injection flaw (CVE-2010-5330) in Ubiquiti AirOS to its catalog of actively exploited vulnerabilities and ordered federal agencies to secure their devices within three weeks.

Automated pentesting tools deliver real value, but they were built to answer one question: can an attacker move through the network? They were not built to test whether your controls block threats, your detection rules fire, or your cloud configs hold.

This guide covers the 6 surfaces you actually need to validate.

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