Raspberry Pi has published an official guide for building a cyberdeck, leaning into a viral trend of homemade portable computers built from repurposed cases, purses, and other oddball hardware. The guide uses a Raspberry Pi 5, keyboard, battery, and Pelican-style case. The Verge reports: Raspberry Pi's head of social, Ashley Whittaker, acknowledged the cyberdeck trend today, saying "we haven't been able to get away from cyberdecks this year." Raspberry Pi has also increased its prices multiple times this year due to rising costs for RAM and other components, which could be another reason to support this growing market of active and would-be hobbyists. The 16GB version of the Raspberry Pi 5 included in the company's official cyberdeck guide got a $100 price hike in April, nearly as much as the board's original $120 price.

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BrianFagioli writes: PINE64 has some very bad news for Linux hardware fans. PINE64 says it has no plans to produce additional Linux devices in the near future because of the ongoing DRAM and eMMC shortage. Future production will depend on component pricing after mid 2027, while existing PineNote and PineTab2 inventory could run out in roughly three months. The company says PineTime, PineVoice, and Pinecil production will continue as usual, but the outlook for its Linux hardware is much less certain. "That's it for this post, all in all it's a bit bleak for the Linux devices, but in the meantime PineStore still have a great lineup of MCU powered devices which will continue to expand with more exciting devices," the company said.

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IGN reports: [A] new report suggests that all three memory manufacturers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — have collectively sold through their 2027 memory manufacturing capacity to, you guessed it, AI companies. According to a report from Digitimes and spotted by TweakTown, all DRAM and HBM capacity has been sold through for 2027, with no further supply planned. (The companies themselves have not yet confirmed this to be the case.) Of course, that only means that retail prices are going to go up even further in the near future. Selling through all the capacity for next year would be bad enough for consumers, but the problem is that most of the companies buying up this capacity have done so through long-term purchasing agreements, essentially pre-ordering memory that hasn't even been manufactured yet over a five-year term. Unless more capacity opens up somewhere in the next few years, it's hard to imagine that RAM will become more affordable and less scarce any time soon. It's not just memory that's affected. According to that Digitimes report, NAND storage is growing in demand too. Luckily, NAND capacity hasn't been completely absorbed, because there are more companies supplying the stuff. But it's not exactly hard to see that SSDs have been growing steadily more expensive over the last six months or so.

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The review embargo has lifted for the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro, and the consensus across the board is that it is a massive leap forward in terms of build quality and battery life. The main issue reviewers complained about is the sky-high price, with the higher-end model jumping dramatically from $2,100 up to $2,900 due to the memory shortage crisis. (Some note that the price "nearly doubled" overnight while they were in the middle of testing.) In his video review, Marques Brownlee says, "This is their best build yet. They're finally doing what people have been asking for: a premium... modular... laptop." ZDNET agrees that this device "represents a new approach for Framework and a maturation of the brand's catalog," noting that the new construction is "sleek and airtight, with no gaps, spaces, or evidence that was even put together by your hands at all." Tom's Hardware echoes this enthusiasm, declaring that "The Framework Laptop 13 Pro's sturdy design, haptic trackpad, and bigger battery feel like they should have been there all along". Battery life, which has historically been a weak point for Framework, is now a standout feature. Ars Technica points out that the combination of Intel's efficient Panther Lake chips and a new 74-watt-hour battery is "finally long enough to decisively eliminate 'mediocre-to-poor battery life' as the laptop's biggest downside." They also said it's "Framework's nicest-looking, nicest-feeling, most polished laptop design." For Linux users, the machine appears to deliver on its promises. Phoronix says the device "is designed with great Linux compatibility in mind," offering a seamless out-of-the-box experience for distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora. As mentioned above, the overarching complaint is the extreme cost. Ars Technica notes that Framework unfortunately "switched to an exotic new upgradeable LPDDR5X RAM format just in time for those modules to become astronomically expensive." Still, Marques Brownlee summarizes the long-term value proposition perfectly: while it might be painfully expensive on day one, "the longer you keep this laptop, the more it feels worth it" because you can easily repair and upgrade it over time. Compared to Apple's flagship, the Framework is "80% of the quality, way more modular," he says.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Tom's Hardware: The Zilog Z80 has just turned 50 years old. This iconic 8-bit processor first went on sale in July 1976 and stayed in production for 48 years until Zilog, now a Littelfuse subsidiary, stopped accepting orders in June 2024. However, there's an open-source replacement closer than ever to shipping in the chip's original 40-pin DIP package thanks to community-funded fabrication... The chip powered the ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, MSX machines, Nintendo's Game Boy, Sega's Master System, the Pac-Man arcade cabinet, and Texas Instruments' graphing calculators, then shipped in industrial controllers for decades after home computing moved on to more powerful successors. Zilog's end-of-life notice, dated April 15, 2024, told customers its wafer foundry was discontinuing support for the Z84C00 family, and last-time-buy orders closed that June. However, Renaldas Zioma's FOSS Z80 project, launched shortly after the end-of-life notice, now has working silicon. The first version, fabbed on SkyWater's 130nm node through Tiny Tapeout 7 on a die of just 0.064mm(2), has been confirmed as functional via the project's GitHub repository. A QFN64 version with all 40 pins exposed followed on the Efabless CI2406 shuttle, two further runs then went through IHP's 130nm process, and the current run targets the classic DIP40 form factor using chip-on-board assembly on GlobalFoundries' 180nm GF180MCU node via Wafer.Space. The end goal here is to fab a drop-in replacement for machines like the ZX Spectrum and RC2014 kits... Zilog is trimming the Z80's official successor line as well. A product change notification from last October put the eZ80L92, along with several Z8F-series microcontrollers, on end-of-life, citing "little to no demand..." [T]he pipelined eZ80 architecture, introduced in 2001 and still inside TI's current TI-84 Plus CE calculators, otherwise remains in Zilog's catalog. In 1999 Slashdot was calling Zilog's updated eZ80 "one of the fastest 8-bit CPUs available today, executing code 4 times faster than a standard Z80 operating at the same clock speed." Slashdot headline from 2001: Zilog To File For Chapter 11.

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