Apple is working to bring more manufacturing to the United States, including chip fabrication and Mac mini assembly, but it’s a slow-moving project.
TSMC is building several fabs near Phoenix, Arizona
There is increasing pressure to bring more of Apple’s manufacturing and assembly stateside. However, even with $600 billion in investments, what can be done in the US is insignificant compared to the global supply chain. The Wall Street Journal got special access to various facilities in the United States to examine how Apple is repatriating its supply chain. Executives like COO Sabih Khan joined tours of the TSMC Arizona plant, the Foxconn Houston facility, and others. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums
alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: A team of researchers working at Quantinuum in the United Kingdom and QuSoft in the Netherlands has now developed a quantum algorithm that solves a specific sampling task — known as complement sampling — dramatically more efficiently than any classical algorithm. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, establishes a provable and verifiable quantum advantage in sample complexity: the number of samples required to solve a problem.
“We stumbled upon the core result of this work by chance while working on a different project,” Harry Buhrman, co-author of the paper, told Phys.org. “We had a set of items and two quantum states: one formed from half of the items, the other formed from the remaining half. Even though the two states are fundamentally distinct, we showed that a quantum computer may find it hard to tell which one it is given. Surprisingly, however, we then realized that transforming one state into the other is always easy, because a simple operation can swap between them.”
Asha Sharma, the new CEO of Microsoft Gaming, at Microsoft Ignite 2025. (Dan DeLong Photo for Microsoft)
“And the thing about games is, if you get good at one game, you can be good at any game. … They’re all hand-eye coordination and observing patterns.”
That’s a line from Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin’s 2022 novel about two friends who build a video game company from nothing — struggling with the tension between art and commerce, and ultimately with the challenges of operating a business at scale.
This describes almost perfectly what Asha Sharma will be attempting to do in her new role leading Microsoft’s Xbox and video-game business: She’ll need to take all the patterns she’s observed as an executive with Facebook, Instacart, Seattle startup Porch, and Microsoft’s AI platform, and apply them to a world she hasn’t played in before.
And get this: it’s one of her favorite books.
Speaking last year on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast, Sharma mentioned she had read the novel every year for the past three years. “I love it so much,” she said, calling it a “beautiful story.”
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She didn’t mention on the podcast speed round that it’s a story about video games. It wasn’t really relevant at the time. But it is now, given the news Friday that Sharma will succeed 38-year Microsoft veteran Phil Spencer as CEO of Microsoft Gaming, in a shakeup that also saw Xbox President Sarah Bond — previously seen as Spencer’s likely successor — decide to leave.
Sharma was a surprise pick, in part because she has no prior video-game industry leadership experience, and limited background as a gamer, which is creating skepticism in gaming circles already. However, she has experience running large tech platforms, the clear trust of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and a belief in the potential of AI to reshape every business.
On that last point, she quickly offered some reassurance to Microsoft employees and the broader universe of Xbox gamers in her introductory memo last week.
“As monetization and AI evolve and influence this future, we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop,” she wrote. “Games are and always will be art, crafted by humans, and created with the most innovative technology provided by us.”
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Sharma laid out three priorities in the memo: great games above all else, a recommitment to Xbox’s core console fans, and what she called the “future of play” — new business models and a shared platform where developers and players can create together.
She vowed not to treat the company’s iconic franchises as “static IP to milk and monetize,” and said she wants to return to “the renegade spirit that built Xbox in the first place.”
Her first act was promoting longtime studio chief Matt Booty to executive vice president and chief content officer, pairing her platform background with his decades of gaming credibility.
“My first job is simple,” she wrote. “Understand what makes this work and protect it.”
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The challenge ahead
There’s a lot to protect, and plenty of work to do.
Microsoft has been in gaming for decades, from early PC titles like Flight Simulator to the launch of the original Xbox console in 2001.
Under Spencer, the company made massive bets on expansion, acquiring ZeniMax Media and its family of studios — including Bethesda — for $7.5 billion in 2021, and then closing the $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2023, the largest gaming deal in history. That brought Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Candy Crush, Diablo, and Overwatch under Microsoft’s roof, making it the third-largest gaming company in the world by revenue.
Spencer also expanded Xbox’s reach across PC, mobile, and cloud gaming, and built Game Pass into a major subscription service, transforming the division’s business model.
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But the financial picture has been rough. Microsoft’s gaming revenue fell 9% in the most recent quarter, with hardware revenue down 32%. The division represents about 7% of the company’s total revenue, and has faced pressure in recent years to meet aggressive profit targets.
Xbox’s challenge has not been a lack of talent or popular franchises. GeekWire gaming contributor Thomas Wilde observed that the biggest problem has been instability: waves of layoffs and studio closures that left even successful teams uncertain about their future.
In his memo about the transition, Nadella said Sharma brings “deep experience building and growing platforms, aligning business models to long-term value, and operating at global scale.”
The implication in the selection is clear: Xbox spans console, PC, mobile, and cloud platforms, requiring an operator who knows how to make all the pieces work together.
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That’s the job Sharma has done everywhere she’s been.
From Wisconsin to Redmond
Sharma’s career and biographical details have been widely scrutinized over the past few days, as the video game and business press have scrambled to figure out who this person is, who arrived seemingly out of the blue to lead one of Microsoft’s biggest consumer brands.
Now 37, she grew up in Wisconsin and started working at 17, with an early role at SC Johnson, according to a 2014 MarTech profile. She earned a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, and by the time she left college had worked at Cargill, Deloitte, and Microsoft, and lived abroad in Hungary.
As of last fall, she was a second-degree black belt in Taekwondo, explaining to Rachitsky on his podcast that the discipline is “more mental than it is physical.”
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She has been at Microsoft for two years, running the CoreAI product organization, the team behind Azure AI Studio, the company’s AI model catalog, and the developer tools for Microsoft Copilot. She was previously COO of Instacart, and before that VP of product at Meta, where she ran Messenger and Instagram Direct. She’s on the Home Depot and Coupang boards.
What’s lesser known is that she got her start at Microsoft, interning at the company and then working in marketing right out of college before leaving to help build Porch, the Seattle home services company, where she was COO during the company’s early years.
In a 2024 interview with GeekWire at Microsoft’s Build developer conference, not long after rejoining the company, Sharma talked about what brought her back. After years working across different types of organizations, she said, the lesson she drew from her career was the importance of working with great people on problems that matter.
She described feeling fortunate to be working on “some of the most important technology of our lifetime” at a critical juncture, with people embracing a growth mindset.
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Winning over the gamers
Part of what made Spencer so beloved among Xbox fans was that he was one of them — a lifelong gamer with a prolific achievement history and a habit of wearing gaming T-shirts under blazers at industry events.
Sharma knows she can’t replicate that overnight, but she’s clearly trying to close the gap.
Over the weekend, she began engaging directly with Xbox fans on social media, sharing her gamertag (AMRAHSAHSA, her name spelled backwards) and listing her top three games as “Halo, Valheim, Goldeneye” — Microsoft’s flagship franchise, a popular survival game, and classic title that first launched on the Nintendo 64 in 1997.
When one fan accused her account of being run by AI, she replied: “Beep Boop Beep Boop.”
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She’s also getting public support from inside Xbox. Longtime exec Aaron Greenberg, the division’s VP of marketing, wrote on X that after spending time with Sharma during the past week, he was “incredibly optimistic about the opportunity ahead under her leadership,” describing her as “exceptionally bright, eager to listen and learn from others, no ego.”
The activity history in Sharma’s Xbox profile, which IGN and Windows Central quickly dissected, shows she’s played about 30 titles since mid-January, gravitating toward narrative-driven indie games like Firewatch, Gone Home, and What Remains of Edith Finch — the kinds of games you’d play if you wanted to understand games as art, not just entertainment.
She unlocked her first achievement Jan. 15, about five weeks before the announcement of her new role. It was a Halo: Master Chief Collection milestone, fittingly titled “Your Journey Begins.”
It’s not even been a week since vivo introduced the new V70 series, which, btw, I reviewed for a month and loved, and the Chinese smartphone maker is already gearing up to introduce a third brother in the lineup. The vivo V70 FE. Speculations about the phone began a couple of days ago, when a tipster posted its specifications and said it could launch globally this month. Well, I have some bad news. The vivo V70 FE is not launching in February, not in India, at least. If it were, I’d already be using it. This means the launch is still a few weeks away, and we could see it by the end of March.
vivo V70 FE Specifications
Since vivo hasn’t confirmed any of the following specifications, take them with a grain of salt. Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, the V70 FE will reportedly come in three colors: Muse Purple, Ocean Blue, and Titanium Silver. The display will be a 6.83-inch 1.5K AMOLED panel that should support a 120Hz refresh rate. The design will take cues from the V70, featuring flat sides and panels, but it will differ by housing a vertical camera module similar to those on Samsung phones. Speaking of the cameras, there will be two of them, including a pretty sizeable 200-megapixel primary sensor with OIS, coupled with an 8MP ultrawide lens.
Everything will be powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 7360 Turbo processor, which scores around 1 million in AnTuTu and should be a decent performer for the price. Storage variants could be three: 8GB+256GB, 12GB+256GB, and 8GB+512 GB. And OriginOS 6 will be running the show on top of Android 16. The leaks also suggest 6 years of Android updates, but that seems unlikely, since even vivo’s flagship phones don’t offer that level of support. Another highlight should be the 7,000 mAh battery with support for 90W fast wired charging. As for protection, the V70 FE will be IP68 and IP69 certified.
Considering the recent price hikes for many phones, launching the vivo V70 FE makes a lot of sense. It’ll be a pretty compelling option for people shopping in the 30K segment, and while vivo hasn’t confirmed the India launch yet, I’m pretty sure it’ll make its way here next month. So, if you’re planning to buy a new phone, maybe hold off a bit, as the 200MP main camera, coupled with a new design, does look interesting.
The US Department of Defense has reportedly reached a deal to use Elon Musk’s Grok in its classified systems, according to Axios. That follows news that the Pentagon is currently in a dispute with another AI company, Anthropic, over limits on its technology for things like mass surveillance.
Last year, the White ordered Grok, along with ChatGPT, Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude to be approved for government use. Up until now, though, only Anthropic’s model has been allowed for the military’s most sensitive tasks in intelligence, weapons development and battlefield operations. Claude was reportedly used in the Venezuelan raid in which the US military exfiltrated the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.
However, the Pentagon demanded that Anthropic make Claude available for “all lawful purposes” including mass surveillance and the development of fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic reportedly refused to offer its tech for those things, even with a “safety stack” built into that model.
xAI, by contrast, agreed to a standard that would allow the DoD to employ its AI for any purpose it deems “lawful.” However, the xAI model is not considered by officials to be as cutting-edge or reliable as Anthropic’s Claude, and they admit that replacing Claude with Grok would be a challenge. The Pentagon is reportedly also negotiating deals with OpenAI and Gemini, both of which it considers to be on par with Anthropic.
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xAI had announced a version of Grok for US government agencies in July 2025. Shortly before that, though, the chatbot started spouting fascist propaganda and antisemitic rhetoric while dubbing itself “MechaHitler.” All of that followed a public spat between Musk and Trump over the president’s spending bill, after which GSA approval of Grok seemed to stall. Earlier this week, Anthropic accused three Chinese AI labs of abusing Claude’s AI with “distillation attacks” to improve their own models.
If you’ve been to a wedding or a downtown coffee shop in the last 10 years, you’ve probably seen those little lightboxes that are so popular these days. They consist of letters placed on a plastic frame in front of a dim white light, and they became twee about five minutes after your hipster friend first got one. However, they can also make a neat basis for an LED display, as [Folkert van Heusden] demonstrates.
The build is straightforward enough, using daisy chains of 32×8 LED matrix modules, two each for the three rows of the lightbox. This provides for a 24 character textual display, or a total display resolution of 64 x 24 pixels. An ESP8266 is used to command the matrixes, which are run by MAX7219 display controllers. Thanks to the microcontroller’s onboard wireless hardware, the display can be addressed in a number of ways, such as using the LedFX DDP protocol or [Folkert’s] Pixel Yeeter python library. Files are on GitHub for the curious.
Quite a few of these exist out in the wild — [Folkert] has built a variety of modded lightboxes over the years with varying internals. The benefit of the lightbox is that it effectively acts as a handy housing for LED matrixes and supporting electronics, while also providing a neat diffuser effect. The lightboxes are also readily wall mountable and generally look more like an intentional piece of signage than most things we might homebrew in the lab.
OnePlus just gave small-phone fans exactly what they wanted. The company confirmed the 15T, calling it the “dream machine” for people who prefer pocket-friendly devices. A community lead broke the news on Weibo, and the internet immediately took notice.
The phone is a direct answer to anyone tired of palm-filling phablets. Internal letters describe the 15T as the “small screen big demon king,” promising flagship muscle in a smaller body. Leaks point to a 6.32-inch display, a size that’s become rare in a market obsessed with going bigger. If the rumors stick, you won’t have to trade power for portability anymore.
What a 7,500mAh battery means in a small phone
Small phones usually die fast. It’s the one compromise you always make. The OnePlus 15T might kill that trade-off entirely. Reports suggest a battery between 7,000mAh and 8,000mAh, with multiple leaks zeroing in on 7,500mAh.
That’s huge for any device. Inside a compact 6.32-inch frame, it’s practically unheard of. Certification listings also point to 100W wired charging and wireless support. If this pans out, the 15T won’t just keep up with bigger phones. It’ll outlast most of them while taking up less space.
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Everything else you get in a compact body
Battery life is the headliner, but it’s not the only trick. The 15T is tipped to run on a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset with up to 16GB of RAM. The screen is rumored to be a 6.32-inch OLED with a 165Hz refresh rate and 1.5K resolution. That’s flagship territory through and through.
Camera details are still shaking out. Early leaks mentioned a 200-megapixel main sensor, but newer rumors point to a dual 50-megapixel setup with a telephoto lens. The front camera might land at 16 megapixels instead of 32. Internal letters insist imaging has taken a full leap forward. It’ll launch with Android 16 and ColorOS 16.
When you can expect to buy one
China gets the 15T first, and it’s right around the corner. Reports target a mid-to-March launch, backed by certification database sightings and Weibo invites. Expect it in Cloud Ink Black, Morning Mist Grey, or Powder pink.
Global customers might wait a bit longer. Rumors suggest a separate OnePlus 15s for international markets, possibly with tweaked cameras. But the important part is finally official. The compact flagship you’ve been asking for is real, and it’s landing this spring.
The talk started with The Verge’s Tom Warren, who recently noted Microsoft is early in exploring how to grow its Game Pass offerings. Jez Corden later fleshed that out. He claims to have heard Microsoft is specifically looking at tucking those extra subscriptions into Ultimate. Nothing is confirmed. But if it happens, that recent price hike suddenly makes more sense.
What extra services might show up
Names were dropped. World of Warcraft’s monthly fee. Fallout 1st for Fallout 76 private servers and extra stash space. Minecraft Realms for persistent friend worlds. Whatever The Elder Scrolls premium tier is called. Right now you pay for these separately on top of Game Pass.
Bundle them and those individual charges vanish for Ultimate subscribers. The math flips fast if you already pay for one or two. Corden made the point plainly in his video. At $30, stacking all those extras makes the top tier a no-brainer for anyone deep in those games.
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Why Microsoft is pushing now
The $30 price tag landed recently and not everyone loved it. Some subscribers questioned whether Ultimate offered enough over the standard tier. Adding actual paid services answers that question directly.
It also fits what Microsoft has been building. The company now owns Activision Blizzard and Bethesda. World of Warcraft subscriptions, ESO Plus memberships, Fallout 1st fees already feed the same beast. Wrapping them into Game Pass eliminates decisions. You stop asking whether to restart your WoW sub. It’s just there, part of the membership you already carry.
This is still a rumor. Corden stressed he heard Microsoft was exploring the idea with no guarantee it ships. These things take time if they happen at all.
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But the shape of it tracks. Microsoft has spent years and billions collecting subscriptions. Rolling them into one super tier is the natural endgame. Watch your payment method. If you already shell out for any of these extras, Ultimate might soon cancel a few recurring charges for you.
On Monday, creative suite maker Canva announced the dual acquisition of startups Cavalry, which works on animation, and Mango AI, which works on improving ad performance.
UK-based Cavalry works on 2D motion animation for different verticals such as advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Canva said that Cavalry’s tooling will add to the existing capabilities of Affinity, Canva’s professional creative editing suite for photos, vectors, and layouts, which it acquired in 2024
Canva revamped Affinity’s design last year and made it free for all users. The company said that since then, people have downloaded the software over five million times. Affinity has the capabilities of photos, vector, and layout editing. With this acquisition, Canva wants to add motion editing to its suite.
“By bringing Cavalry alongside Affinity, we’re closing that [motion editing] gap and unlocking a complete professional suite spanning photo, vector, layout, and now motion editing,” the company said in a blog post. “Together, these tools form the foundation of a full-stack Creative OS for professional work, while preserving the depth and control professional creatives rely on,” it added.
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Besides Cavalry, Canva has also acquired stealth startup MangoAI, which was working on building reinforcement learning systems to improve video ad performance, according to its website. Canva said that the startup’s first product helped clients create and launch ads and observe outcomes to improve future campaigns.
MangoAI was built by Nirmal Govind, former Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, a former data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Canva said that Govind will become Canva’s first ” Chief Algorithms Officer” and Misra will work on improving Canva’s marketing products.
In January 2025, Canva acquired marketing intelligence startup Magicbrief and later last year, it launched a growth tool called Canva Grow for asset creation and performance measurement.
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MangoAI Co-Founders Nirmal Govind (left) and Vinith Misra (right) together with Canva Co-Founder and COO, Cliff Obrecht (centre).Image Credits: Canva
During a sit-down at Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht told TechCrunch that Canva Grow is doing “incredibly well,” especially when it comes to creating static content and publishing it to Meta platforms.
“It is quite an early product, but we’ll soon be launching a lot more things around video creation, deploying across multi platform,” Obrecht had said. “So it’s very early, but it’s very much got a very loyal small user base, but a lot of big brands are spending money, and then we’re scaling up massively.”
With the new acquisitions, the company wants to bolster its position as a marketing solution by potentially adding video creation and more granular measurement. Canva closed 2025 at $4 billion in annualized revenue with more than 265 million users and 31 million paid users.
New York-based ad tech company Optimizely has notified an undisclosed number of customers of a data breach after threat actors compromised some of its systems in a voice phishing attack.
Optimizely has nearly 1,500 employees across 21 global offices, and its customer list includes over 10,000 businesses, including high-profile brands like H&M, PayPal, Zoom, Toyota, Vodafone, Shell, Salesforce, and Nike.
In breach notification letters sent to affected customers, the company, the threat actors reached out on February 11, claiming they had access to its systems.
Optimizely also told BleepingComputer that the attackers breached some of its systems and stole what it described as “basic business contact information.”
“The threat actor gained access to Optimizely’s systems through a sophisticated voice-phishing attack, but was unable to escalate privileges, install software, or create any backdoors in the Optimizely environment, and we have no evidence that the threat actor was able to access sensitive customer data or personal information beyond basic business contact information,” it said.
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Optimizely also noted the “incident was confined to certain internal business systems, records in our CRM, and a limited set of internal documents used for back-office operations,” and added that its “business operations continue without disruption.”
The company also warned customers to be wary of attacks that could use some of the stolen data in further phishing attempts, which may use calls, texts, or emails to ask for passwords, MFA codes, or other credentials.
ShinyHunters links
While Optimizely didn’t share how many customers had their information exposed in the data breach and has yet to name the threat actor behind the attack, it told affected customers that “the communication we received is consistent with the behavior of a loosely affiliated group who use sophisticated and aggressive social engineering tactics, most often involving voice phishing, to attempt to access their victims systems.”
In these attacks, threat actors impersonate targets’ IT support, call employees, and trick them into entering credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes on phishing sites mimicking their companies’ login portals.
As BleepingComputer first reported, the threat actors have also recently altered their social engineering attacks to use device code vishing, abusing the legitimate OAuth 2.0 device authorization grant flow to obtain Microsoft Entra authentication tokens.
Once in, they hijack the victim’s SSO account and gain access to connected enterprise services, including Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Zendesk, Dropbox, SAP, Slack, Adobe, Atlassian, and many others.
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Nothing apparently wants to leave nothing much to the imagination. The British company teased its new 4A phone on Monday, but without the bright pink color some expected. Potential customers did get a look at the latest iteration of the company’s Glyph notification system, the Glyph Bar.
In a post on Monday on X, accompanied by the words, “Built different,” Nothing showed the back of its new 4A phone — in only white and shades of gray. It wasn’t quite the “bold new experimentation of color” that CEO Carl Pei had hinted at on Instagram, which seemed to suggest the 4A might experiment with pink.
The X post also revealed Nothing’s new Glyph Bar, which consists of seven small square LED lights to the right of the camera. The Glyph interface is a light pattern on all Nothing phones. These lights are basically notifications for things like incoming calls and texts, battery charging, deliveries and more, all without turning on the main screen.
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A representative for Nothing did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.
The 4A and 4A Pro are the latest models from Nothing, which Pei founded in 2020. The London-based company is known for making Android phones with minimalist designs, a transparent back plate and the Glyph interface. The company is still a niche phone-maker, with a global market share of 1% (2% in India) and a valuation of more than $1.3 billion.
Nothing has differentiated itself with creative touches amid the focus on minimalism, especially in the Glyph interface. When the company launched its first phone — the Phone (1) — in July 2022, the Glyph consisted of five LED strips. The Phone (2) in July 2023 had 11. A significant shift occurred in July 2025 with Phone (3) and the introduction of the Glyph Matrix — a circle of 489 mini-LEDs that enabled the phone to display symbols, such as emoji, for a broader range of notifications.
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The Glyph Matrix was introduced with Nothing’s Phone (3) in 2025.
Nothing
CNET’s Katie Collins checked out the Phone (3) in the summer of 2025 and was impressed by the array of information the Glyph Matrix could show, including the time, the phone’s battery percentage and pixelated portraits that show who’s calling.
The Glyph Bar on the new 4A phone will be 40% brighter than the Glyph Bar on previous models, Nothing says. The company adds that the bar, with dozens of mini-LEDs housed within the small squares, will allow people to configure more notifications with a less distracting design.
For example, you might set a particular light pattern to let you know when a specific person is calling or when you get a text from another person. You can also configure a light pattern to let you know when a delivery arrives at the front door.
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YouTuber Austin Evans, who has more than 5.7 million subscribers to his channel, where he tests all sorts of tech products, says he doesn’t consider Nothing’s Glyph to be “massively useful,” but that it’s a nice change of pace from the typical phone design.
“It’s a nice feature that’s more of a design choice than practical feature but it’s far better than just a slab of glass you just cover with a case,” Evans told CNET. “I quite like the aesthetic that Nothing offers. I feel like smartphones have gotten too bland, clean and boring, and it’s nice to see someone doing something actually different.”
Even though the 4A might not be colorful at the March 5 launch, Pei’s pink phone tease could have been about another model, the 4A Pro. That phone, the most sophisticated ever from the company, will launch along with the 4A at Central Saint Martin’s, the famous London school of art and design, on March 5.
One report said the 4A could feature a Snapdragon 7-series chip, which offers more powerful AI, 5G and gaming capabilities.
