☕️ Memory shortage hits the MacBook Air

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's newsletter:

💻 Memory shortage hits the MacBook Air

📈 Trump sells early post access for $100K

🐉 Alibaba unveils its most powerful AI model

🐋 DeepSeek launches world's cheapest AI model

👓 Apple glasses to track your health

🇪🇺 EU can fine AI makers 3% of revenue

Plus: 🎁 10 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

FROM OUR PARTNER

• A global memory shortage is now squeezing supply of the MacBook Air, making Apple's most popular laptop harder to find before the end of August as the company hurries to restock.
• Orders on Apple.com carry a roughly two-week backlog, and Mark Gurman reports Apple is buying RAM from China while pushing shoppers toward the $1,999 base MacBook Pro over the $1,299 Air.
• Tim Cook called the situation "a hundred-year flood on the memory pricing," and relief looks unlikely before 2028, since the M6 Air due in spring 2027 will use the same LPDDR5X memory.

• Trump Media and Technology Group launched Truth API, a paid service that gives trading firms and other subscribers early access to Truth Social posts from Trump and other high-profile accounts, for as much as $100,000 a month.
• The feed promises a real-time stream of the platform's "most market-moving Truths," and it stands out because Trump, its biggest user with 13 million followers, is also the largest shareholder of the parent company and could gain from it personally.
• Democratic senators Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren asked the SEC to investigate whether the service breaks the law, calling it insider trading and market manipulation since Trump often reveals policy moves on tariffs and Iran there first.

• Alibaba revealed Qwen3.8-Max, which it calls its most powerful AI model yet, as Chinese firms push to catch up with U.S. companies in the race to build stronger artificial intelligence systems.
• Due out next week, the model has 2.4 trillion parameters and a context window of 1 million tokens, letting it read and work with thousands of pages of text at once, Alibaba said.
• Alibaba said the model can code on its own for weeks with little human help, spending 16 days in one test building a coding tool, and can review legal papers, run financial research, and grasp long videos.

• DeepSeek released V4-Flash, a version of its flagship AI model that a research firm ranks as the cheapest well-known model to run on benchmark tests, costing over 100 times less than Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.
• Artificial Analysis pegged V4-Flash at about 3 cents per test, versus 86 cents for Moonshot's Kimi K3, $1.86 for OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and $3.15 for Claude Fable 5, charging $0.14 per million input tokens.
• V4-Flash scored 50 out of 100 on the firm's Intelligence Index, matching Google's Gemini 3.6 Flash but trailing Kimi K3 at 57 and top models from Anthropic and OpenAI by nine or more points.

• Apple is developing health and fitness tracking for its planned non-AR smart glasses, though these features probably won't arrive with the first model expected in the coming year, according to Mark Gurman's Power On newsletter.
• The idea revisits an abandoned plan for Vision Pro, where a version of Fitness+ would have let people follow workout classes while the headset analyzed their movements, but the project failed because the headset was too heavy.
• Since the glasses lack displays, the approach must differ, and it could pair a heart-rate sensor like the one in AirPods Pro 3 with cameras that watch activities and suggest ways to improve workouts.

• The European Union can now inspect AI models before they launch, block them from its market, and fine providers up to 15 million euros or 3% of yearly turnover, whichever is higher.
• The powers, part of the 2024 EU AI Act and enforced by the EU AI Office, took effect on Sunday and reach any company offering a general-purpose model in Europe, no matter where it is based.
• Refusing an information request, giving misleading answers, or blocking a model evaluation is fineable on its own, exposing U.S. labs like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, which must appoint an EU-based representative.

Other news & articles you might like

• Apple still plans a camera-free AirPods Pro update for 2026 LINK

• Judge denies xAI’s request to block Minnesota ban on ‘nudify’ apps LINK

• How bitcoin cold wallets lost $70 million in an attack that never touched the devices LINK

• A real macOS flaw worth $200K went unreported because Apple's bug bounty inbox was full of AI slop LINK

• Xbox consoles are now much more expensive in the EU and UK LINK

• EchoStar's Hughes filed for bankruptcy as its satellite internet subscribers fled to Starlink LINK

• Google’s AI is digging up Chrome bugs that humans missed for years LINK

• Hugging Face Doesn’t Want to Sue OpenAI. It Does Want $100 Million LINK

• AI's talent wars have a loyalty problem LINK

• SpaceX's post-IPO plunge sets tense backdrop for first earnings report LINK

🧰 Trending tools

You can check the previous tools here, or add your tool here

📚 Trending papers & reports

🎓 Want to master the AI tools we cover every day?

Techpresso's AI Academy has 330+ step-by-step tutorials on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and every tool that matters. No fluff — just practical workflows you can use at work. Try it free for 7 days.

Did you know? Pokémon" is a contracted form of the Japanese title "Pocket Monsters.

💬 How did you find today's edition?

We read every reply — just reply to this email and let us know how we can improve!