Facepalm: Tencent has reportedly canceled Last Sentinel, its ambitious cyberpunk open-world crime game that was supposed to rival Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto. The game had been in development at Tencent’s Lightspeed LA studio for more than six years, with the Chinese tech giant reportedly investing more than $300 million in its development.

While Tencent disputes the cancellation rumors, Bloomberg News claims that the project is effectively dead, with around 80 developers reportedly laid off this week. Lightspeed LA confirmed the layoffs, citing a “shift (in) creative and development direction” following “extensive internal reviews and play-testing.”

While the report of Last Sentinel’s shutdown is disappointing, it is not entirely unexpected. The game was unveiled with a flashy teaser at The Game Awards in 2023, but Lightspeed LA failed to show any public gameplay even after more than six years of development. Additionally, internal testing in early 2026 reportedly received predominantly negative feedback, effectively sealing the game’s fate.

The report claims that the project was plagued by several problems throughout its six-year development, including the studio’s controversial leadership style, which insiders described as “polarizing.” Industry veterans also believe that a team of only a few hundred developers was always going to struggle to build a worthy GTA competitor.

Despite the reported cancellation of Last Sentinel, Lightspeed LA remains operational, with the remaining staff being moved to an unannounced open-world project headed by creative director Todd Papy. The report adds that some of Last Sentinel’s code and gameplay elements may be reused in the new game and other Tencent titles.

Lightspeed LA was established in 2020 under Tencent’s Shenzhen-headquartered LightSpeed Studios. Led by Steve Martin, the former head of Rockstar San Diego, the studio was tasked with developing an open-world sandbox game featuring a female protagonist and centered on vehicle theft, similar to GTA, Saints Row, Cyberpunk 2077, and Watch Dogs 2.

Lightspeed LA is not the first Tencent-backed North American studio to run into trouble. Established by Tencent’s TiMi Studio Group to create AAA games for Western audiences, TiMi Montreal closed earlier this year after five years of operation without ever releasing an original game. The Los Angeles-based Team Kaiju also shut down in 2023 after canceling an unannounced project.

AI may not make your digital audio player sound any better, but it is increasingly likely to make the next one more expensive.

Shanling has issued a blunt warning that rapidly rising component and material costs will lead to higher prices across its product range. Beginning in August 2026, newly introduced models will carry higher MSRPs, while fresh production runs of existing products are expected to become more expensive as they reach distributors during August and September.

More concerning for consumers, Shanling says some products may be discontinued because their current pricing can no longer be maintained without pushing them into the wrong part of the market.

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What Shanling Is Warning Consumers About

Shanling says the problem began with rising prices for processors and RAM but has since spread to more basic memory components, printed circuit boards, copper wiring, aluminum, and other electronic parts.

The company expects three major consequences:

• Higher prices for new products: Shanling says products introduced beginning in August will be priced according to the new component costs. It is warning buyers to expect larger generational price increases than the company has historically imposed.
• Higher prices for current models: New production runs of Shanling’s best-selling products are scheduled to arrive during August and September. The company expects those batches to carry higher MSRPs across what it describes as a wide range of models.
• Product discontinuations: Some products may not survive the increase. Shanling says certain models may be unsuitable for a higher MSRP and could be discontinued instead.

Shanling has not yet identified which existing models will increase in price, how large those increases will be, or which products are most vulnerable to being discontinued.

That distinction matters. Nobody should start panic-buying every silver box with a Shanling logo as though the machines have finally become self-aware. Current products remain available, and regional pricing will depend on distributor inventories, currency movements, import costs, and dealer policies.

However, the warning suggests that the first visible increases could appear as existing inventory is replaced by more expensive production batches.

We Have Already Seen This With the Shanling M3 Plus

The company has already demonstrated how memory prices can affect its product lineup.

In March, Shanling replaced the $469 M3 Plus with the $559 M3 Plus Master Edition, citing sharply higher memory costs caused by what it called the “AI chase.” The new version received 6GB of RAM, power-supply revisions, capacitor changes, and a slightly different sonic tuning, so the additional $90 was not merely a price increase pasted onto the same player.

Still, Shanling made it clear that the original product could no longer be manufactured at its previous price.

The new warning indicates that the M3 Plus was not an isolated case.

Why This Matters to Shanling Customers

Shanling competes in some of the most price-sensitive corners of the hi-fi market.

Its current lineup includes the $129 M0 Pura digital audio player, the $199 EC Play portable CD player, the $629 EC Zero T Max tube and R2R CD player, and the SM90 network player priced below $1,000. The company also sells desktop DACs, headphone amplifiers, Bluetooth components, full-size disc players, and more expensive portable players.

A $50 or $100 increase is inconvenient on a flagship player costing several thousand dollars. On a $129 or $199 product, it can completely change the competitive landscape.

Shanling may therefore face three unattractive choices: raise prices, reduce specifications, or discontinue products that can no longer be manufactured profitably. The company has so far indicated that it expects to use at least two of those options.

How Did AI Make a CD Player More Expensive?

The enormous expansion of AI data centers has changed how semiconductor manufacturers allocate production capacity.

AI servers require vast quantities of high-bandwidth memory and high-capacity DDR5. Those parts also generate higher margins than the conventional DRAM and NAND used in consumer electronics, giving manufacturers a powerful incentive to prioritize data-center customers.

IDC says this shift is restricting the supply of general-purpose memory while raising costs for smartphones, computers, and other consumer products. The research firm does not view the problem as a simple short-term inventory cycle, but as a potentially lasting reallocation of manufacturing capacity toward AI infrastructure.

Samsung has also warned that the global memory shortage could persist through 2028 as large data-center customers secure capacity through long-term supply agreements.

The impact is now spreading beyond products that contain large amounts of memory. Shanling says costs are also rising for PCBs, copper, aluminum, and other basic materials used throughout audio components.

Your portable CD player is not secretly training a large language model while you listen to Dire Straits. It is simply competing for parts and manufacturing resources with an industry that can spend considerably more money securing them.

Shanling Is Not Alone

FiiO raised US prices on several products beginning April 1, including the JM21, M21, M33, and DISC portable CD player. The updated prices ranged from $89.99 for the DISC to $699.99 for the M33.

Roku has also increased prices across its streaming-player lineup, with some models rising by as much as $50 as memory and storage costs reach home-theater products.

Shanling’s announcement is more troubling because it extends beyond higher prices. The possibility of discontinued products means consumers could face fewer choices, particularly in entry-level and mid-priced categories where manufacturers have less room to absorb additional costs.

Will Shanling Prices Come Back Down?

Shanling’s answer is unusually direct: “Honestly, we do not know.”

The company says it is not optimistic that component manufacturers will quickly increase availability or reverse the current pricing trend. Shanling has promised to announce individual product changes in advance whenever possible.

For consumers already considering a Shanling DAP, portable CD player, streamer, or headphone amplifier, the sensible approach is to watch dealer inventory and official announcements over the next two months.

There is no evidence that every product will suddenly become more expensive on the same day. But Shanling has now confirmed that higher prices are coming, and that some existing models may not return once current production runs are exhausted.

AI was supposed to make consumer electronics smarter. So far, it is also making them more expensive and occasionally making them disappear.

Reference: https://en.shanling.com/article/101328

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Ferrari’s 12Cilindri Spider already delivers one of the purest open-air experiences available today. Its long hood, short deck, and 6.5-liter naturally aspirated V12 create a classic front-engine layout that rewards drivers who want wind, noise, and mechanical drama in equal measure. Novitec has now applied its own set of carefully chosen upgrades that sharpen the car’s appearance, improve its stance, and most importantly give the engine a more assertive voice when the roof is stowed.

The kit includes a new high-performance exhaust system designed exclusively for this V12. The consumer can pick between stainless steel construction and a lightweight Inconel variant, which is the same material used in Formula One. The exhaust’s dynamic butterfly valves let the driver to adjust the sound to their mood, quiet it down for regular use, or turn it up for that unmistakable, sharp scream. You can also apply a 999 fine gold finish to the Inconel pipes, which improves heat dissipation and gives a distinct visual sparkle. Tailpipes are available in a variety of finishes to complement or contrast with the car, as well as insulated sports catalysts to significantly increase exhaust flow. This is where the exhaust system becomes more important in an open-top car like this. The V12’s natural intake note becomes a continuous companion, one you can enjoy every time you step behind the wheel instead of only hearing through the closed windows.

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Carbon fiber parts finished in high-gloss resin were employed to remodel the car’s bodywork. They’re all quite tastefully done and keep close to Ferrari’s original designs, so it’s an evolution rather than a radical shift. A front lip spoiler and covers for the side air intakes give the nose more purpose and improve airflow at higher speeds. Carbon coverings are also used on the hood outlets, trim panels under the front wheel arches, mirrors, and rocker panels. At the back, there’s a three-piece lip spoiler and a matching diffuser, which work together to generate downforce without making the car look garish or aggressive in profile. Under the hood, exposed carbon panels and dual air-filter boxes help transform the engine bay into a showcase.

These complement the new forged wheels, which are truly eye-catching. The NF12 is a novel design developed with Vossen, with five spokes that taper off into a Y shape and a centrelock-style hub cover. The front wheels are fitted with 21-inch 275/35 tires, while the rears get 22-inch 325/30 rubber. The staggered sizes fit well into the arches and assist to highlight the car’s athletic lines. Being available in a variety of colors and surface finishes definitely helps them blend in with the rest of the car. On top of the wheels, you can have Novitec sports springs, which will lower the car by 30mm, helping to tighten the handling response and giving the car a more grounded appearance when parked.

Inside, Novitec has completely retrimmed the cabin in leather and Alcantara, with options ranging from a plain black interior to a fully bespoke affair. There are no changes to the car’s chassis here, only some new materials to complement the more aggressive exterior look. The 6.5-liter V12 engine remains intact, producing 830 horsepower and 678 Nm of torque. There has been no tinkering of power figures, only a concentration on getting the sound correct, keeping the heat under control, and getting the chassis and body improvements exactly right. The eight-speed dual-clutch transmission and rear-wheel drive layout are all typical Ferrari features.
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You may have a 4K television. Perhaps you have even bought an 8K screen, despite the shortage of things worth watching in 8K. A 16K display is, today, a rarity. But even when those eventually become commonplace, yours probably will not cover 14,900 square meters, rise 73 meters into the air, or wrap over your head and behind your peripheral vision.

That is approximately what happens inside Sphere in Las Vegas. The venue’s interior display is quoted as having a resolution of 16K by 16K and an area of 160,000 square feet, or about 3.7 acres. Unlike most enormous movie screens, it is not illuminated by a projector. The entire surface is a direct-view LED display: an immense, curved video wall assembled from tens of thousands of smaller pieces.

After seeing The Wizard of Oz at Sphere, however, the most interesting part was not simply the screen’s size. It was how thoroughly the screen could disguise itself.

Where Did The Theater Go?

Before the presentation began, the auditorium appeared to have a conventional architectural ceiling. Great orange ribs curved over the seating, while ventilation grilles, suspended loudspeakers, lighting fixtures, curtains, and video monitors completed the illusion. It looked like the Radio City Music Hall’s proscenium. Then the show started — and the apparent theater completely disappeared. The speakers, the TVs, even the stage.

The obvious first conclusion was that the LED surface must be optically transparent, allowing the audience to see the real roof behind it until the pixels illuminated. That explanation was attractive because Sphere’s audio system really is installed behind the display, and the surface must allow sound through it.

It was also, apparently, wrong. The only explanation that makes sense is that the ceiling, ribs, grilles, speakers, and monitors were already being displayed by the screen. It was like a holodeck impersonating a physical theater interior. When the Oz material began, the system simply replaced one complete visual environment with another.

That’s what happens when a display fills nearly all of your useful visual field. A normal screen announces itself with a bezel, a wall, or at least a clearly visible edge. Sphere’s display extends upward and around the audience, removing many of those references. Give the image credible perspective, texture, shadows, and familiar architectural details, and the brain accepts the pixels as a room.

The same effect makes the Oz landscapes seem less like scenes displayed in front of the audience and more like places into which the auditorium has been inserted. Of course, there are more special effects. For The Wizard of Oz, there is wind and smoke, along with paper leaves, flower petals, and foam-rubber apples that fall from the sky. All of this makes it even more immersive.

Not Your Standard 16K Monitor

Calling it “16K” is not exactly untruthful, but potentially misleading. Consumer display resolutions normally describe a rectangular raster. A 4K UHD television has 3840 by 2160 pixels, or about 8.3 million pixels. An 8K set has four times as many, at roughly 33 million.

A literal 16,384-by-16,384 image contains about 268 million picture locations, but that’s not how Sphere is built. Sphere describes its interior display plane as 16K by 16K, but that does not mean it is equivalent to a square desktop monitor with a neat, uniformly spaced Cartesian grid. It is a custom media surface with complex curvature and geometry, driven as one enormous canvas.

Sphere says the screen reaches 240 feet high and wraps up, over, and around the audience. SACO, the company responsible for the LED technology, describes the interior as the world’s highest-resolution LED screen and says it has more than 120 times the resolution of an HDTV.

Published numbers vary slightly depending on the source. One source describes approximately 64,000 SACO LED tiles, while structural contractor Seele refers to approximately 65,000 LED screens or frames. The difference may be terminology, rounding, or the boundary between the LED tile and its mechanical carrier. Either way, this is clearly not a single panel that arrived in the world’s largest shipping crate, but rather was built on-site.

The surface is assembled onto a precisely engineered secondary structure. Seele says it created 839 facet units containing approximately 45,500 custom structural components. Those facets establish the overall geometry and give the LED hardware suitable mounting points while maintaining alignment across the enormous screen wall.

In other words, the apparent smooth curve is made from many accurately positioned pieces. At the intended viewing distance, the facets and individual emitters merge into a continuous image.

Feeding The Beast

Building the display is only half the problem. The other half is getting a quarter-billion-pixel-class image onto it up to sixty times per second without tearing, losing synchronization, or pausing while somebody clears a buffering dialog.

The public description of the playback chain resembles a broadcast plant crossed with a high-end video wall. Pre-rendered content is kept on network-attached storage and streamed to dozens of 7thSense media servers. Each server produces 4K video at 60 frames per second, with the streams distributed using the SMPTE ST 2110 professional-media-over-IP standards. Pixel processors drive the appropriate regions of the display.

Hitachi Vantara says the storage system can deliver data at up to 400 GB/s with less than five milliseconds of latency. (At least it did for Postcard from Earth; it could be capable of more, for all we know.) The material is handled using 12-bit color and uncompressed 4:4:4 chroma sampling. That does not necessarily mean every show continuously consumes the maximum quoted bandwidth, but it provides some sense of the infrastructure needed to treat the whole venue as a dependable display rather than an interesting laboratory experiment.

Content also has to be geometrically transformed for the screen. An image that looks correct on a flat monitor would be badly distorted if copied directly onto the curved surface. The production pipeline therefore needs a detailed model of the display and the audience’s relationship to it.

Stretching Oz Beyond The Frame

The Wizard of Oz presents an additional problem: the 1939 film was photographed for a nearly square 1.37:1 frame. Sphere’s interior is absolutely not 1.37:1 or even close.

Simply magnifying the original would waste most of the display. Cropping it to fill the screen would remove the actors and much of the composition. Instead, Sphere Studios expanded the film’s world beyond the photographed frame, using Google AI tools along with conventional restoration, compositing, animation, and visual-effects work.

The original photography remains central to the presentation, but scenery, skies, crowds, buildings, and environmental details extend far outside the old frame. Sphere says the project used AI to enhance characters and expand scenes while attempting to preserve the performances and familiar imagery.

This is more complicated than expanding a still photograph. The additions must remain temporally consistent as the camera and characters move. A tree cannot change shape from frame to frame, and a newly invented Munchkin cannot grow an extra arm whenever the model becomes distracted. The generated material also has to survive at extraordinary scale, where a small artifact can become several meters wide.

Whatever one thinks about altering a classic film, it is difficult to imagine adapting this particular source material to this particular display without reconstructing substantial portions of the unseen world.

Of course, not everyone is thrilled. If you hated colorizing black-and-white movies, this will probably set you off. Even the original Star Trek got new digital effects.

What Happens When A Pixel Dies?

With roughly 64,000 or 65,000 LED assemblies, failures are inevitable. We couldn’t find much public information about Sphere’s exact maintenance procedure, but we can infer some probable scenarios from other large LED systems. Big systems generally report power, temperature, communications, and controller faults automatically. We would imagine that Sphere can do this, too. Then, technicians can also probably display red, green, blue, white, black, and low-gray test patterns while cameras or human observers look for dead, stuck, or miscalibrated pixels.

A single failed subpixel may be invisible from most seats during moving content. A stuck-bright pixel in a dark sky would be much more conspicuous, as would an entire failed tile or data branch.

Seele says the screen structure includes 229 accessible panels, suggesting that maintenance access was designed into the system rather than left to exceptionally adventurous climbers. A failed field-replaceable assembly could be swapped, repaired on a bench, and returned to the spare inventory.

The replacement would then need calibration. LEDs from different production batches — and LEDs of different ages — do not produce precisely identical brightness or color. A technically functional replacement could appear as a visible rectangle unless the controller corrected its red, green, and blue response, gamma, and low-level output to match its neighbors.

Curiously, this may be one of the hardest features to appreciate during a show: tens of thousands of modules are working together, yet the audience perceives no modules at all.

The Screen That Pretends Not To Exist

Sphere’s specifications are impressive, but resolution alone does not explain the experience. Spread 16K pixels across a screen tens of meters high and the pixel density is far below that of a phone. The system works because the pixel pitch, viewing distance, brightness, content, architecture, and human visual system were engineered together using a lot of science.

While the Wizard of Oz was an impressive feat, we hope they’ll bring us something like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or maybe a triple feature with shorts from Star Trek, Star Wars, and Avatar. Sure, the rights to pull that off would take a team of lawyers, but we can dream, can’t we? What movie would you like to see on a giant screen like Sphere? Or would you only see an original production? Any of you out there work behind the LED curtain?

And of course, Henry Cavill is involved.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel sidestepped investors’ questions about preorder demand for the company’s long-awaited Specs smart glasses during Monday’s earnings call, just weeks before the device’s September launch event.

“What we’re hearing from folks is really that they want to try Specs,” Spiegel told investors. “It’s obviously a high consideration purchase at $2,195. Obviously, developers and folks who are familiar with the platform really understand it and understand the technical leaps we’ve made with this generation. I think for the broader public and consumers, it’s going to be really important for folks to go hands-on. Our upcoming launch event will be an important sort of starting point for that consumer-oriented journey.”

The company unveiled Specs in June after spending more than a decade developing the device. The wearable’s $2,195 price tag is significantly higher than most Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, which start at around $350, but lower than Apple’s Vision Pro, which starts at $3,500.

Investors also pressed Spiegel on why he believes Snap’s strategy is financially viable for a company of its size, why it chose to go it alone rather than partner with another company, and what gives him confidence that the company can compete with Apple, Meta, and Alphabet.

Spiegel responded that Snap believes the long-term opportunity to develop the next computing platform is “enormous.”

“I think what some folks maybe don’t understand yet, especially because Specs are so new and we’re really the first mover in this category, is how difficult the product is to execute from a technical perspective,” Spiegel said. “When we started innovating in the social space, we were a late entrant. So, most of the apps at the time, whether it was Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, were already in existence, and we had to really innovate to continue to grow. What’s so unique about this opportunity for us is really that we’re a first mover, and that really plays to our strengths as an innovator.”

When asked about product-market fit, Spiegel said it will likely be closer to the end of the decade before the company sees mass-market consumer adoption.

“I think things, for example, like weight and cost are going to have to come down to see you know unit volumes really meaningfully pick up.” But we do have, I think, a real advantage here in that developers have been building on the Specs platform now for several years.”