12 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Jay Peters

Jay Peters

Senior Reporter

Senior Reporter

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    Jay Peters
    Jay Peters
    Meta + Kalshi and Polymarket?

    In addition to tasking staffers at Meta to develop a prediction markets app, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also asked executives to look into partnerships with Kalshi and Polymarket, The New York Times reports. Meta wants to get “at least 100 million monthly active ‘predictors’ for the app,” which is set to be targeted toward 18- to 34-year-olds, the NYT says.

    Jay Peters
    Jay Peters
    Instagram’s Adam Mosseri is showing off some concepts for changing your algorithm.

    “We want your algorithm to feel like something you talk to rather than something that happens to you,” Mosseri says. This month, Instagram announced it would start letting you tweak your algorithm.

    I’ve compiled some screenshots of the concepts below, but check out Mosseri’s post to see the mockups in motion.

    A screenshot of Instagram showing a pull to refresh.
    A screenshot of Instagram showing a way to tweak your algorithm between reels.
    A screenshot of Instagram showing how you could type to change your algorithm.
    1/3
    One idea is to pull from the top of your feed to get to a menu with different options.
    Image: Instagram
    Jay Peters
    Jay Peters
    The not-Pro iPhone 18 might get a small RAM bump to help with AI.

    The iPhone 17 has 8GB of RAM, but Apple’s “lower-end” iPhones set to launch in the first half of next year will get — drumroll please — 9GB of RAM, says supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo:

    My latest industry checks suggest Apple’s lower-end 1H27 iPhones, powered by the A20 chip, will move to 9GB DRAM (1.5GB × 6 dies), up from 8GB (2GB × 4 dies) in the current A19 models, to keep the system running smoothly under AI workloads.

    Jay Peters
    Jay Peters
    Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, on his new YouTube channel: “I just kind of started it on a whim.”

    Mikhail Klimentov interviewed Schreier about the channel, where Schreier sits in a room and explains things about video games. “A rule that I set for myself is that I will not do any video that takes me more than 30 minutes to do in any way,” says Schreier.

    The oldest video on Schreier’s channel was posted on May 27th, and he already has more than 100,000 subscribers.

    Jay Peters
    Jay Peters
    PlayStation and Xbox hardware had a tough May.

    “PlayStation hardware unit sales fell to their lowest May total since May 2000, while Xbox hardware unit sales were the lowest ever recorded for a May month,” says Circana analyst Mat Piscatella.

    The PlayStation figures are probably explained by the recently-hiked prices. With Xbox prices going up soon, sales might continue to be grim.

    Jay Peters
    Jay Peters
    Tech writer and investor Om Malik has died.

    Malik, who founded the tech blog GigaOm in 2001 before eventually transitioning into venture capital, died on Wednesday at Stanford Hospital “after a long health journey with his heart,” said Om’s family in a post on his website.

    Jay Peters
    Jay Peters
    Valve tweaked its wording about what the Steam Machine can do.

    A post on Resetera points out that now, instead of claiming that the Steam Machine is capable of “4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR,” Valve’s website says that the PC offers “Up to 4k gaming with FSR 4.1.”

    In our testing, the Steam Machine struggled to hit 4K/60FPS while using FSR with some titles, so this revised claim seems more realistic.

    A screenshot from Valve’s website highlighting what the Steam Machine’s CPU and GPU are capable of. The text reads: “CPU & GPU Up to 4k gaming with FSR 4.1, thanks to a discrete semi-custom AMD desktop class CPU and GPU.”
    Image: Valve
    Jay Peters
    Jay Peters
    US physical game sales recently went up — just a bit.

    They were up 3 percent year-over-year from May 2025 to May 2026, according to data shared by Circana analyst Mat Piscatella. Even so, he says that the “overwhelming majority of volume is done digitally now.”

    Rockstar’s choice to make GTA VI physical versions a code in the box might mean that even more games are digital-only.