Still
Crunchy.

Memory shortage squeezes PCs and cloud storage

The day's heaviest news sits in one place: memory is expensive and everyone is adjusting. IDC reports global PC shipments fell 20.1% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2026, some 15.8 million units, though part of that is a 'strong first half pull-in', meaning vendors stockpiled early to dodge price rises. The pressure traces to AI data centres, where hyperscalers are buying up HBM, the high-bandwidth memory used alongside AI GPUs, and memory makers such as Micron have shifted production accordingly. Memory prices have climbed by as much as 500%, with 128GB of DDR5 now costing $3,399. Lenovo, HP and Dell all saw shipments fall between 22.6% and 30.9%. Acer's chief executive thinks the panic is overdone and expects prices to fall in late 2027 as Chinese capacity arrives; IDC disagrees.

Microsoft's response to the same squeeze is to trim what customers get. Shared Microsoft 365 plans will move from 1TB per person to a single 2TB pool at renewals after May 2027, cutting a six-person household's capacity by roughly two thirds. That suits households with one heavy user, less so several. There is a quirk: a single person wanting 2TB is better off on the Family plan. Google has reportedly cut free storage to 5GB and Backblaze now allows throttling heavy accounts, so the tightening is industry-wide.

AI agents get bigger, cheaper and more multimodal

Anthropic added dynamic workflows to its Claude Managed Agents platform, letting a lead agent delegate to as many as 1,000 sub-agents in parallel. In its own test, hiding 70 bugs in a 116,000-line codebase, a single agent caught 14 to 27 per run while the swarm consistently found 66. An OpenAI engineer has called such swarms a waste of tokens, and Anthropic itself warns they burn through plenty, so the verdict is open. Anthropic also launched OSS Scanner, a free service running periodic AI security scans on opted-in open-source projects, flagging vulnerabilities and suggesting patches. The catch: reports are fully model-generated with no human review, so maintainers must judge each alert.

Elsewhere, Asana says its browser agent became 76 times cheaper and five times faster in tests using a GPT-6 model in Codex, though the report names the model inconsistently and the figures are OpenAI's own. Cloudflare released Clef-omni, a decision model, meaning one that returns structured decisions rather than text, that now accepts audio and video input, built on a Qwen3-Omni backbone with frozen weights and trained adapters. Clef-flash also dropped in price. Ai2, meanwhile, rebuilt GPU cluster scheduling around transparent time budgets after researchers gamed its old priority system, echoing a 2011 paper on users planting infinite loops to hoard machines.

Gaming: protection holds, emulation advances, Mojang changes hands

Denuvo may have caught a break: Star Wars: Galactic Racer has so far resisted the hypervisor-based bypass, which exploits virtualisation beneath Windows, that reportedly cracked more than 60 recent titles. Konami plans two further waves of Silent Hill games after being satisfied with the first three. AnyPS5, which relinks PS5 executables for Windows and Linux rather than emulating, says it has translated all 1,166 GPU shader instructions for the console's Oberon graphics engine, with 84.81% of system libraries done. AOC listed a 27-inch dual-mode monitor running 4K at 240 Hz or 1080p at 480 Hz, though only in China for now. Xbox appointed former Reddit product chief Maria Angelidou-Smith as Mojang's chief executive from October 19, replacing Kayleen Walters, who moves to lead Xbox's film and merchandise division.

Hardware gripes and a shared industry bet

Some owners of Amazon's newest Kindles report light leaking around the screen, most visible in dark mode, possibly a byproduct of the flush bezel design. On a broader note, this week's Vergecast argues that gadget season's launches, from Microsoft, Amazon and Apple, share one bet: that AI assistants and agents should sit at the centre of computing. Meta's Muse agent, which gives users a free Ubuntu cloud computer and drew over 500,000 users in a week, is cited as precedent. Separately, FCC chair Brendan Carr said he would defer to Defence Secretary Hegseth on whether networks may air the Fort Hood shooter's execution, noting a planned livestream would fall outside the agency's jurisdiction.