标签：#hardware

Pocket sells a $129 credit card-shaped puck, which sticks to the back of your phone, and promises unlimited recordings, transcriptions, and to-do items.

Flipper Device's new Busy Bar will retail for $249.

Has Silicon Valley been building the wrong things?

Eager to find more public AI-related companies that may do as well as Nvidia, Wall Street investors think they've found a winner with Micron.

For some people, the ice in a beverage is almost as important as the drink itself. That’s the audience Govee had in mind when designing its latest ice maker, the GoveeLife Smart Nugget Ice Maker Pro. This $500 premium smart home gadget is aimed at those who crave what’s called “the good ice,” the soft, chewable […]

Santa Clara, 2029. A speculative fiction about hegemony, sanctions, and the playbook nobody followed.

Paul Meade, the Apple vice president in charge of the Vision Pro headset, is reportedly leaving the company to join OpenAI’s hardware team.

Why 40V Input and 500mA Output Matter in Noise-Sensitive Designs You’ve probably fought a power rail that looked clean on a multimeter but still trashed your 24‑bit ADC readings. The culprit is rarely the DC level—it’s the broadband noise, switching artifacts, and line‑frequency ripple that ride on top. In precision analog, RF, and sensor signal chains, even 50 µV of supply noise can bury a 1 mV sensor signal or degrade an RF PLL’s phase noise by 10 dB. The MAX20151R addresses this head‑on with a combination that’s hard to find in a single LDO: a 40 V input range, 500 mA output drive, and just 6.5 µV RMS output noise (10 Hz–100 kHz). That wide input headroom lets you power sensitive circuitry directly from a 12 V or 24 V industrial rail, an automotive battery, or a noisy intermediate bus without a pre‑regulator. You eliminate an entire buck converter stage, saving board space and avoiding the switching noise that would otherwise require heavy filtering. The 500 mA output current is equally important. Many ultra‑low‑noise LDOs top out at 200 mA or 300 mA, forcing you to split rails or add a discrete pass transistor. With 500 mA, the MAX20151R can comfortably supply a mixed‑signal chain—an MCU, a precision ADC, a low‑jitter clock, and a handful of op‑amps—from a single quiet rail. And because the device maintains its noise performance across the full load range, you don’t have to derate your noise budget as current increases. Field experience shows that transient events on 24 V vehicle buses can easily exceed 40 V during load dump. The MAX20151R’s 40 V absolute maximum input rating, combined with integrated reverse‑voltage protection down to –40 V, gives you a robust front end that survives those spikes without external clamping. This is a practical necessity for any design that must pass ISO 7637‑2 or similar automotive transients, and it’s a key reason engineers are migrating from lower‑voltage LDOs to the MAX20151R in harsh electrical environments. Key Takeaway: If

Mesh came out of stealth in February with a $50 million Series A.

Ask someone to name the most manufactured object in human history and you will hear guesses like the nail, the brick, or maybe the smartphone. The real answer is something almost nobody can name out loud: the MOSFET. This tiny transistor, invented at Bell Labs in 1959, is the on/off switch inside every microprocessor, memory chip, and connected sensor. An estimated 13 sextillion of them have been built since 1960, making the MOSFET not just the foundation of modern electronics but the most-produced artifact our species has ever made. What a MOSFET actually is MOSFET stands for metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor. Strip away the jargon and it is an electrically controlled switch with no moving parts. A small voltage on one terminal, the gate, controls whether current can flow between the other two. Billions of these switches flipping on and off billions of times per second is, quite literally, what computation is. The genius of the design is that it scales: shrink the transistor and you can pack more of them onto a chip while using less power per switch, the trend that drove decades of Moore's law. The breakthrough came from two engineers at Bell Labs, Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng, who fabricated the first working MOSFET in 1959. Their key insight was using a thin layer of silicon dioxide, ordinary glass, to insulate the gate from the silicon underneath. That oxide layer turned out to be the unlock that made silicon the dominant material in electronics, edging out the germanium used in the very first transistors of the late 1940s. Why it beat every earlier transistor The point-contact transistor demonstrated in 1947 and the integrated circuit of 1958 were both monumental, but neither was easy to mass-produce by the standards we take for granted today. The MOSFET was different. It was simpler to fabricate at scale, drew far less power in its complementary (CMOS) configuration, and lent itself to the photolithographic processes that let manufacturers pr

The company says the increases are being driven by rising memory and console storage prices, with costs more than 2.5x higher than previous levels.

Apple raises prices of MacBook Air and Pro along with iPad Air and Pro.

Revenue quadrupled to $41.45 billion compared with the same period a year ago. The company's profit, meanwhile, rose from $1.88 billion to an incredible $28.2 billion year-over-year.

The Internet of Things is now a phrase you see on product boxes, in boardroom slide decks, and across thesis titles in engineering departments everywhere. But it has a surprisingly precise origin. The term was coined in 1999 by a British technologist named Kevin Ashton, and it was not born in a research lab or an academic paper. It started its life as the title of a corporate sales presentation. A slide deck, not a laboratory In the late 1990s Ashton was a brand manager at Procter & Gamble, the consumer goods giant behind products you would find on any supermarket shelf. He was wrestling with a mundane but expensive problem: store shelves kept running out of a particular shade of lipstick, even though the warehouse had plenty in stock. The supply chain simply had no reliable way to know, in real time, what was where. Ashton's proposed fix was radio-frequency identification, or RFID: tiny tags that could be attached to products and read automatically by sensors, with no human scanning each item by hand. The vision was that physical objects could report their own location and status, feeding that data up into computer systems without anyone typing it in. To sell this idea to executives, he needed a title that would make supply-chain tagging sound as exciting as the technology dominating headlines at the time. So he linked his RFID proposal to the hottest topic of 1999 and called the presentation "Internet of Things." By his own account, years later in RFID Journal, the choice was deliberate. Tying tags and sensors to the red-hot word "internet" was the surest way to get senior people in the room to pay attention. The pitch worked well enough that the phrase stuck, and Ashton went on to help found the Auto-ID Center at MIT, a research group that did much of the early standards work that made networked RFID practical. Why the name was actually a good description It would be easy to dismiss the term as a marketing flourish, but it captured something real. Ashton's point

Almost everything that makes the modern world hum, from the phone in your pocket to the sensor on a factory floor, traces back to a single quiet afternoon in a nearly empty laboratory in Dallas. In the summer of 1958, a newly hired engineer named Jack Kilby built the first working integrated circuit at Texas Instruments. It was a crude little thing, a sliver of germanium with a few components and some fine gold wires, but it carried an idea that would reshape electronics: that an entire circuit could be made from one piece of semiconductor material. Every microcontroller and connected device we build today is a descendant of that prototype. The engineer who was left behind Kilby had only just joined Texas Instruments and had not yet earned any vacation time. So when the company shut down for its traditional summer break in July 1958 and most of his colleagues left, he found himself nearly alone in the lab with time to think. The problem on his mind was one the whole industry called the "tyranny of numbers." Circuits were getting more capable, which meant more transistors, resistors, and capacitors, each one a separate part that had to be wired together by hand. Every added component meant more connections, more soldering, and more chances for something to fail. The complexity was becoming a wall. Kilby's insight was disarmingly simple. If resistors and capacitors could be made from the same semiconductor material as transistors, then every part of a circuit could be fabricated together in a single block. No separate components, no forest of hand-soldered wires. He sketched the idea, and when his managers returned he had something to show them. September 12, 1958 On September 12, 1958, Kilby demonstrated his prototype to Texas Instruments executives. The device was a phase-shift oscillator built on a bar of germanium, with its elements connected by delicate gold "flying wires." He connected it to an oscilloscope, flipped the switch, and a steady sine wave rolled acro

HaloBraid aims to help salons speed up braiding with its first device, slated to launch later this year, that acts as a braiding assistant for professional stylists.

The smart glasses are available in several countries starting today in a variety of color and lens combinations.

The first text message ever sent was not a love note, a meeting reminder, or a meme. It was a Christmas greeting. On December 3, 1992, a 22-year-old engineer named Neil Papworth sat at a desktop computer, typed two words, and sent the world's first SMS to a mobile phone: "Merry Christmas." More than thirty years later, that humble two-word message has grown into one of the most quietly important protocols in connected technology, and it still shows up in the IoT devices we build today. The engineer who sent the first SMS Neil Papworth was working for the Anglo-French firm Sema Group Telecoms, part of a team building a Short Message Service Centre (SMSC) for the British carrier Vodafone. The SMSC was the piece of infrastructure that would store and forward text messages across the cellular network. To prove it worked, Papworth sent a test message from a computer terminal to the Orbitel 901 handset of Richard Jarvis, a Vodafone director who was at a company Christmas party. The message arrived. Jarvis read it. But he could not reply, because mobile phones at the time had no way to compose a text. There was no keypad-driven messaging app, no T9, no touchscreen. SMS started life as a one-way novelty riding on a spare slice of the network's signalling channel, and almost nobody involved thought it would matter very much. Why SMS was designed the way it was The technical detail that makes this story relevant to anyone building connected hardware is how SMS was engineered. Text messages were squeezed into the control channel that phones already used to talk to cell towers, the same channel that handles things like call setup. That is why a single SMS is capped at 160 characters: it had to fit inside a small, fixed-size signalling packet. This constraint turned out to be a feature. SMS is lightweight, store-and-forward, and works even when a data connection is weak or absent. The message waits in the SMSC until the device is reachable, then gets delivered. No persistent con

What does an AI company do after one of those not-acqui-hire deals? Groq raised money, is leaning into its neocloud business, and is hiring new execs.

Mach's approach differs sharply from some of its peers.