Daily News Stuff 6 April 2026

• Samsung has raised its contract memory prices by another 30%. (Notebook Check)
  
  That's after doubling their prices in the first quarter, and whatever they did in the previous quarter.
  
  Best time to buy 128GB of RAM was a year ago. Which I did.
  
  Second best time was New Year's Eve during a short-lived sale of Corsair modules on Amazon. Which I also did.
  
  So I'm set for now.
  
  
  
• Ubuntu has quietly increased the memory requirements for the upcoming 26.04 release. (OMGUbuntu)
  
  To be fair, they increased the requirement from 4GB for 18.04 to 6GB. And that's for a full client install with the Gnome UI; you can install a server with a quarter of that.

• Apple continues to roll out device-level age verification. (9to5Mac)
  
  First Britain, now Singapore and South Korea. Though they do use the age of your Apple / iTunes account to calculate that, and mine is at least 14 years old, and you have to be 13 to have an Apple account, making me 27.
  
  Good to know.
  
  Also, this is only if you want to download "mature content" through Apple services, and why the hell would anyone do that?
  
  
  
• Apple has just approved drivers to let users attach external GPUs to Macs. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Given that there are now zero Macs that support internal GPUs, this is kind of a big deal.
  
  Because the alternative would be to just install the driver without Apple's approval.
  
  
  
• Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold. (Jeffrey Snover)
  
  Charles Petzold wrote the seminal book Programming Windows.
  
  In 1988.
  
  
  
• The XFX Swift Radeon RX 9060 XT OC Gaming Edition is $460 on Amazon. (WCCFTech)
  
  That's a 16GB model, so the MSRP is $350. Given the clusterfrog of current hardware prices, that might not seem too bad.
  
  But in Australia right now, you can pick up that exact model on Amazon for the equivalent of $310 before tax. I have to pay that tax (10% GST), but you don't.
  
  Not sure if you can order from Amazon Australia in the US, or if it just laughs in your face and redirects you.
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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