Zachary Tong had never designed a chip. He had never programmed an FPGA either, and he will tell you his electrical skills were rough. With about a month left before the first wafer.space deadline, he still decided to write a microprocessor, send the file to a real foundry, and wait to see if silicon came back alive.
Sellers in Aliexpress spent the past year listing a handset called the Gionee D999, and the first glance does most of the selling. Long, narrow, black, and topped with a stubby antenna, it reads as a direct copy of the brick phones that sat on car seats in the early nineties. Open the box and the story changes. Behind the rubber keys and a slide of thin plastic sits a full Android phone, sold for about a hundred dollars and aimed at anyone who wants WhatsApp on a device an older relative can still hold without squinting.
Apple put active noise cancellation on the $149 AirPods 5 with Wireless Charging Case last month, and the price gap with the year-old AirPods Pro 3, priced at $179 (was $249) for early Prime Day, suddenly looked harder to defend. Shoppers who only wanted a little quiet on a train now have a cheaper open-ear option. People who sit with both pairs still reach for the Pro 3 when the room gets loud.
Sally Gray flew to San Diego in December 1996 for a children’s science show with a name that already sounded like a dare. It’ll Never Work had sent her to the visual arts department at the University of California, and the brief was odd even by the standards of that series. She was supposed to meet one of the most important young painters alive. His name was AARON. He was 23. His work had already hung in serious galleries. He was also a computer program, and Gray introduced him that way on purpose, as if the hardware were a student who had grown up in the department.
