Tech News Roundup — July 16, 2026 (AM)
Microsoft blocks a Patch Tuesday update for Dell PCs after reports of shutdowns and overheating; Pplware covers the OpenAI Codex Micro — a physical device for orchestrating agents; the FCC under Brendan Carr moves to let broadcast giants consolidate; and on Linux, AMD tags ROCm 7.14 “TheRock” while Mesa 26.2 enters feature freeze.
Apple
AppleCare Plus price hike for Macs/iPads. An AppleCare Plus subscription for a Mac or iPad will cost more soon, with prices going up by $0.50 per month or $5 per year for new sign-ups while remaining the same for existing subscribers, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Gurman says that under the new AppleCare Plus pricing, “a plan for a new 13-inch MacBook Air increased to $7.99 from $7.49, or to $79.99 from $74.99 annually,” following a move last year that similarly raised the plan’s price on iPhones.
The Verge
Apple Watch Series 12 features. Apple Watch Series 12 is expected to be unveiled in September and indications are that the new generation of Apple’s smartwatch will arrive with several improvements. Rumors point to more performance, longer battery life, new health sensors, and a refreshed design that continues the line’s evolution. Apple is positioning the model as a key piece of its health ecosystem, with tighter integration with iOS 26 and the broader Apple Intelligence feature set.
Google/Android
- Pixel 11 camera bar leak. A new teaser for Google’s upcoming Pixel 11 lineup reveals that the phones will feature some kind of glowing orb on the camera bar, as reported by 9to5Google.
Google’s store page for the Pixel 11 has a short video that shows the glowing, color-shifting orb to the one side of the camera bar. The store page doesn’t share any more information about it, but perhaps the orb is the “Pixel Glow” light feature that has popped up in Android 17 betas.
The Verge
Microsoft
- Microsoft blocks Windows 11 KB5101650 for Dell PCs. Microsoft has confirmed that it has blocked the availability of the recent Windows 11 July Patch Tuesday update (KB5101650) on Dell PCs, after Dell reported a number of issues including unexpected shutdowns, overheating, poor performance, and more caused by the preview update that released before it.
The KB5101650 began rolling out on July 14, and includes a number of quality of life improvements and fixes.
- Windows 11 recovery options. If you’ve been using Windows as long as I have, you probably remember when a serious problem often meant backing up your files and reinstalling the operating system from scratch. Whether it was a bad driver, a failed update, or corrupted system files, a clean install was frequently the fastest way to rescue your computer.
I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Over the past several years, Microsoft has quietly transformed Windows 11 into a much more resilient operating system.
Gaming
- Valve / iFixit Steam Deck batteries. Valve has been incredibly friendly to customers who need repairs - which is why it was so surprising to hear that Valve was already discontinuing the battery for the Steam Deck LCD handheld. It would have meant you could no longer just buy a battery from iFixit and install it yourself. Why would Valve stop stocking the most important replacement part just as people are starting to need it?
Here is Valve’s answer to The Verge, as of 5PM ET: “We just confirmed with iFixit that they plan to have batteries back in stock by next week.”
“iFixit will be getting the same OEM parts sourced through Va…
The Verge
- Roblox shutting down video chat. Roblox will be shutting down Roblox Connect, its video calling service introduced in 2023.
Roblox Connect let you video chat with other people using your Roblox avatar, which would be able to mimic the movements you were making in real life. You could also run around with people on the call in a shared virtual environment.
The Verge
- Wuthering Waves Xbox performance complaints. Wuthering Waves is a fairly popular gacha game that first launched on PC and PlayStation before eventually making its way to Xbox. Unfortunately for fans, the Xbox release hasn’t quite lived up to expectations. Players have been calling on developer Kuro Games to address a range of technical issues, with one user, @ClebsAlexandre on X (formerly Twitter), showcasing just how rough the game looks on an Xbox Series X.
The footage highlights severe texture pop-in, graphical glitches, missing shadows, and what appears to be very low-quality settings, leading some fans to speculate that the Xbox ve…
- Dispatch Xbox Series X|S debut. After months since its Xbox port was announced back in March 2026, the wait to play the hit superhero game Dispatch will soon be over, as Adhoc Studio has announced its Xbox release date.
On July 29, 2026, players will get to enjoy Dispatch on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Xbox Play Anywhere.
Brigandine Abyss demo/release. Brigandine Abyss, the strategy-RPG follow-up to the classic Brigandine series, has announced both a demo and its official release date. The demo is available now on Steam with the first chapter playable, and the full game launches later this year. The title retains the monster-collecting and territory-capture mechanics that defined the originals while modernizing the combat system.
Call of Duty Kill Block map. Xbox and Activision have broken with tradition and partnered with Fanatics Fest to show off one of the most innovative new maps heading to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 when it launches this October.
Multiplayer map reveals are typically reserved for the annual Call of Duty NEXT event, but a date for the celebration of all things Call of Duty has yet to be confirmed for 2026.
- Xbox Game Pass cracks. Xbox recently revealed a pretty impressive lineup of games coming to Xbox Game Pass, with Palworld 1.0 and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 among the biggest announcements. However, while Palworld 1.0 is still on the way, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 has since been removed, with Xbox updating its original announcement to include the following note:
“We’ve removed Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 from the list of titles coming soon to Game Pass.”
As for why it was removed, your guess is as good as mine, but Tony Hawks is actually an IP Xbox owns, making its removal even more head-scratching, though some ha…
- Xbox Stream Your Own Game additions. Dozens of games were just made available to stream through Xbox Cloud Gaming. Those titles are now supported by the “Stream Your Own Games” part of Xbox Game Pass that lets you stream supported titles through the cloud.
As popular as playing titles that come with Xbox Game Pass is, many of the best Xbox games do not come with the subscription.
- 8BitDo FlipPad Game Boy controller. Both 8BitDo and GameSir announced tiny gamepads designed to turn smartphones into Game Boy-inspired handhelds at CES 2026. GameSir released its Pocket Taco months ago, but the longer wait for 8BitDo’s FlipPad has been well worth it. While the Pocket Taco may be a better fit for some players and devices, the FlipPad is a thinner, lighter, cheaper, and smaller alternative that’s easier to keep on hand for occasional gaming on your phone without having to rely on an emulator’s touchscreen controls.
The FlipPad is one of 8BitDo’s smallest gamepads to date, but instead of using Bluetooth, it direc…
The Verge
- Steam horror game Xbox exclusive. Over the past year, a new upcoming indie horror game has been making waves on the internet by the name of Shift At Midnight. It’s an asymmetric co-op horror game that was originally planned to release only on PC via Steam.
However, on July 10, 2026, the game’s developer, Bun Muen, announced on Steam that it will also be making its way to Xbox consoles, Xbox Game Pass, and Xbox Play Anywhere alongside the PC version on July 22, 2026.
But what exactly is Shift at Midnight, you may ask?
Linux & Open Source
AMD ROCm 7.14 TheRock preview. AMD’s software team appears to be busy getting ready for next week’s Advancing AI event happening next week in San Francisco. In addition to the release today of the Lemonade 11.0 local AI server, TheRock 7.14 was also tagged as the modern build system for ROCm working on the latest tech preview releases of this open-source AMD GPU compute stack…
Mesa 26.2-rc1 released. Mesa 26.2 was branched today from Mesa Git and in turn Mesa 26.3-devel is now open on mainline…
AMD Lemonade 11.0 local AI server. Ahead of the AMD Advancing AI event next week, today AMD released Lemonade 11.0 as the latest feature release of their local AI server supporting AMD Ryzen CPUs, AMD Radeon GPUs, and AMD Ryzen AI NPU acceleration…
Ubuntu 26.04 vs Win11 vs CachyOS. Earlier this month on Phoronix I reviewed the Razer Blade 18 RZ09-0582 as the first laptop Razer is certifying for Linux use via Canonical’s hardware certification program for Linux. It offered very nice performance with the Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics albeit costly with a configured price of $5399 USD. That review featured benchmarks on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS but for those wondering about the performance of Ubuntu against Windows 11 on this gaming/AI developer laptop, here are comparison benchmarks plus also tossing in the rolling-release CachyOS distribution.
AI/ML
- xAI sues over Grok CSAM deepfakes. The Elon Musk-owned xAI is suing a South Carolina man who allegedly used the company’s Grok AI chatbot to generate child sexual abuse material (CSAM). In a lawsuit reported earlier by Reuters, xAI claims Terry Wayne Harwood “knowingly and intentionally used Grok to circumvent safeguards, alter nonconsensual images, and generate and distribute CSAM,” breaching the company’s policies.
Harwood was arrested in February for allegedly possessing and distributing CSAM and is facing eight felony charges.
The Verge
OpenAI Codex Micro physical device. OpenAI has introduced Codex Micro, a small physical device designed to coordinate AI agents locally rather than relying on the cloud. The product extends the Codex agent platform with a hardware anchor that can run agent workflows on-device, with low-latency handoff to remote execution. Pplware sees it as a direct competitor to similar agent-control hardware emerging from Anthropic and Google, marking OpenAI’s first consumer hardware effort beyond the headset partnership with Jony Ive.
AI slop movies. This weekend, cinephiles across the world will march to their local theaters to feast their eyes on Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of The Odyssey. It’s on track to rake in anywhere between $80-$100 million in just a few days. People are clearly excited to see how Nolan uses cutting-edge filmmaking tech to make the Homeric classic feel fresh.
The Verge
Enshittification. Bryan, a food broker from Michigan, wasn’t sure if he’d be able to make it to urgent care in time. He started feeling off on Thursday, and by Saturday, he was having to use the bathroom every 15 to 30 minutes.
“It’s no joke about the explosive diarrhea,” Bryan, who asked that his last name be withheld for obvious reasons, told me.
The Verge
- Suno scraped millions of songs. Suno data obtained in a hacking incident has exposed that the AI music generator was trained by scraping millions of songs and lyrics from online audio platforms, including YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, 404 Media reports. Given that Suno has avoided revealing what’s in its training datasets and how they were acquired, this a rare glimpse into what Suno has actually been taking from online platforms.
That’s relevant because Suno has been the subject of several lawsuits that allege it used copyrighted materials to train its AI models.
The Verge
- OpenAI hardware launch for Codex. OpenAI is finally releasing some hardware. No, it isn’t the mysterious AI-powered device the company is developing with former Apple designer Jony Ive, a project already tangled up in a messy lawsuit. Instead, it’s a product designed to be used with its coding platform, Codex.
The device, a square-shaped block of buttons called Codex Micro, is a collaboration between the AI company and keyboard maker Work Louder.
The Verge
Security
Hashcat password security. Hashcat is the open-source tool that demonstrates why weak passwords remain a security risk. Pplware walks through how the tool recovers passwords from hash dumps using GPU-accelerated brute force and dictionary attacks, and how password length and entropy — not complexity rules — are what actually determine crack time. Practical demo with a 6-character lowercase password cracked in minutes vs. a 14-character passphrase surviving days.
Hardware
Skullcandy Crusher + Bose ANC headphones. Skullcandy announced a new version of its Crusher wireless headphones today featuring a few of Bose’s audio technologies including its QuietControl ANC and head-tracking spatial audio. The Crusher headphone line differentiates itself from the competition through the use of both full-range and dedicated bass drivers in each ear cup to boost deeper frequencies.
The Verge
HP OLED 2-in-1 back-to-school deal. With storage and memory prices still at an all-time high, we’re happy to tell you about a solid deal on a good laptop when we find one, rare as they are. Best Buy is selling the HP OmniBook X Flip 2 in 1 for $999.99 (usually $1,649.99) with an Intel Core 7 Ultra CPU, 16GB of LPDDR5X memory, and a 1TB SSD. The star of the show is the 1920 x 1200 OLED touchscreen, an uncommon perk at this price point. It will display deeper black levels and have faster response times than screens in other similarly-priced models.
The Verge
Lucid EV bankruptcy rumor. Lucid Motors found itself in a tough bind this week, fending off bankruptcy rumors and watching its stock price plunge as a result. The company quickly denied the report, calling it “completely false” and pointing to its available free cash flow as evidence that it has enough runway to operate into next year.
But despite the swift response, the damage was widespread.
The Verge
- Newegg gaming CPU bundles. AI continues to wreak havoc on the tech industry, driving up the prices of processors, RAM, motherboards, and more PC hardware so companies can keep up with its hunger for more power (and RAM).
Fortunately, Newegg is offering a limited sale on several discounted bundles containing AMD processors we’ve tested and rated highly for their solid performance, alongside compatible motherboards and 16GB RAM modules to help these CPUs reach their full potential.
So, if you’re looking to upgrade your PC with some of the best CPUs for gaming or productivity content creation, along with the best motherb…
- Alienware entry-level RTX 5050 laptop. An entry-level Alienware PC almost sounds like a contradiction; it’s long been the all-out brand you could choose when money isn’t a concern, and you’d rather have a guarantee your games will run. So, does the Alienware 15 need to exist, or is it just competing with the tantalizingly new category of high-end gaming handhelds?
Including NVIDIA’s RTX 5050 graphics certainly piqued my interest, because until now, I’ve never seen what this low-end laptop GPU can actually do.
- Samsung Z Fold 8 teaser. Samsung gave a sneak peek of the “brand new shape” for its upcoming Galaxy Z Fold 8 in a new teaser for Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The video includes a few shots of Spidey taking a foldable phone off a 3D printer and opening it book-style, but each shot is heavily obscured by lens flares. This is likely the redesigned Galaxy Z Fold 8, which is rumored to have a wider, passport-like shape.
Apple is also rumored to be readying a foldable iPhone with a similar design, which could launch later this year.
The Verge
JBL Flip 7 deal. Sure, Bluetooth speakers are awesome to have for picturesque beach trips, camping weekends, and other outdoor adventures. But they’re just as good to have for some sprinkler time in the yard with the kiddo, or for blasting some tunes or a podcast while you make food. No matter the use cases you have in mind, now’s a good time to pick up one of the best compact Bluetooth speakers.
The Verge
Starlink V5 antenna. Starlink has launched its V5 antenna — smaller, more efficient, and faster than the previous generation. The new dish is roughly 30% lighter than the V4 and consumes less power while delivering higher peak throughput, making it easier to install in mobile and maritime applications. Existing customers can upgrade at a reduced price for a limited window.
Telecom
- FCC / broadcast deregulation. The Federal Communications Commission will vote next month on whether a single company can own broadcast stations that reach more than 39 percent of US TV households.
In a Breitbart op-ed on Wednesday, Republican Chair Brendan Carr announced an August 6th vote to end the national ownership cap rule, which was intended to prevent one company from dominating the media landscape and incentivize serving local communities.
The Verge
Homelab
CTRoadmap on Synology NAS. CTRoadmap is a local-first, Docker-based web application for creating and maintaining an interactive infrastructure atlas. It lets homelab and self-hosted users visually map servers, nodes, services, storage, containers, scripts, configs, URLs, and relationships on a canvas, while maintaining rich documentation in a human-readable JSON file. Key aspects include a flexible canvas editor with layers, families, … Read more about How to Install CTRoadmap on Your Synology NAS
In Brief
GNR Portugal tire infractions. Portugal’s GNR (Republican National Guard) recorded more than 4,000 infractions related to tires during a recent nationwide enforcement campaign. The violations range from excessive tread wear to mismatched tires across axles, with the bulk of fines issued on commercial vehicles. GNR says the campaign is part of an ongoing summer road-safety push ahead of holiday traffic.
Amazon best-sellers. Pplware curates a roundup of the most worthwhile Amazon best-sellers right now — a mix of practical tech accessories, useful household gadgets, and well-reviewed everyday items. Each pick balances price, ratings, and genuine utility over impulse-buy flash. Highlights include a USB-C hub under €20 and a smart plug that works without a hub.
Netflix Stranger Things re-release. Netflix just can’t let Stranger Things go. Since the final episode aired on New Year’s Eve there’s been a behind-the-scenes documentary, an animated series that expands the story, and now, on the 10th anniversary of the show’s original release, Netflix has released a new version of the show’s first season.
The Verge
WhatsApp backups without iCloud. WhatsApp is moving to end its dependency on iCloud for chat backups, introducing an end-to-end encrypted cross-platform backup system that works for both iOS and Android. Users will no longer need to allocate iCloud storage for chat history, and the backup size cap that has long plagued WhatsApp-on-iPhone users is finally being lifted. The change is rolling out gradually in the beta channel.
Permanent DST in US. The US is getting closer to observing daylight saving time year-round. On Tuesday, the House advanced the Sunshine Protection Act on a 308 to 117 vote, which would turn clocks one hour ahead permanently, as reported by CBS News.
President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social in May that the bill would save the “hundreds of millions of dollars” spent by people, cities, and states that have to change their clocks.
The Verge
Renewable gasoline pilot. A pilot project in Portugal is testing 100% renewable gasoline in unmodified combustion engines. The fuel is produced from agricultural residues and waste biomass via a Fischer-Tropsch process and reportedly burns cleaner than fossil gasoline with comparable energy density. If the trial succeeds, the consortium behind it plans to scale to commercial production within five years.
Brazil betting ads ban. Rio de Janeiro has become the first Brazilian capital to ban online betting advertisements in public spaces, with the prohibition taking effect on Monday. The ban covers billboards, bus stops, and street furniture across the city, and is part of a broader push to curb gambling addiction that has spiked since Brazil legalized sports betting in 2023. Other Brazilian capitals are watching closely and may follow.
Roundup compiled from the TTRSS Tech feed. 43 articles from 5 sources summarized.