Hey You!! Do you hate gaming on Windows? Do you like SteamOS? Do you want to have it on your PC (for free)? You might not know this but Valve has opened up SteamOS for compatible PCs. That means anyone with supported hardware can go ahead and install it on their machines.

The processor in your phone started as beach sand. Yup, Literal sand! The stuff you build castles with. This sounds like a fun fact and it kinda is. But the actual process of going from sand to a working chip is one of the most expensive and difficult things humans have ever figured out.

From Sand to Phones - Part 1: The Sand in Your Phone

From sand to silicon wafer: how chips are made, why the purity is absurd, and why only a few companies on Earth can do it at scale.

sknexus.org

Bluetooth is named after a Viking king who had a blue tooth. And the logo is the initials of that king. Bluetooth is a really cool piece of technology. Look, Bluetooth 4.0 in 2010 made fitness bands possible by optimizing power draw so small devices could last months on a coin cell battery.

Your phone chip started as sand but not just any sand. Look, the silicon in your phone chip has to be pure and I mean 99.9999999 percent pure, to be exact. That's 9 nines. One impurity atom for every billion silicon atoms. For context, that is purer than almost anything humans produce at scale.

From Sand to Phones - Part 1: The Sand in Your Phone

From sand to silicon wafer: how chips are made, why the purity is absurd, and why only a few companies on Earth can do it at scale.

sknexus.org

Bad news if you were waiting for hardware prices to drop. Valve's engineers told Bloomberg this week that component prices are still getting worse. Not stabilizing but getting worse. A Valve engineer said retail prices are lagging bulk supply conditions by three to six months.

One company controls over 90 percent of the global consumer drone market. Most people have never heard the name. DJI started in an apartment in 2006. A student who had crashed his toy helicopter too many times decided to build the flight controller that would fix the stability problem.

There is a technology inside Valve's new VR headset that nobody else is doing. It is called Foveated Streaming and here is what it does. We know that our eyes can only focus on a small area at a time. Everything else in your vision is blurry whether you notice it or not.

Valve’s Bold Bet on the Future of VR: Steam Frame Explained

Holiday season came early for gamers

sknexus.org

Most people don't appreciate how a three-person tech publication survives in the age of LLMs and short attention spans. AI scrapers continue to copy our stuff without permission, and desire for quality writing has gone down too. Still, WE WILL NOT SELL OUT.

Why We’re Going Paid

We're going paid so our deepest work isn't treated as disposable. Most of SK NEXUS stays accessible, but here's what changes.

sknexus.org

Is it just me who gets an itch every time new tech hardware gets launched? As someone who spends a lot of time reading about tech, it is natural to feel excited I guess. Just last year RAM prices have more than tripled. NVMe SSD prices have followed a similar pattern.

Xbox just laid off roughly half of id Software. 96 people in Texas and 40 remote roles gone. id Software made Doom and basically the modern FPS genre. Doom The Dark Ages just shipped in May. Their statement said the team is now about the same size it was when they made Doom 2016.

AMD is fighting two giants at the same time. Intel in CPUs and Nvidia in GPUs. Both are bigger and better funded than AMD with with decades of experience. Most companies pick a single fight. AMD has no choice but to fight with two behemoths. And here is the thing:

99% of gamers are not playing on an RTX 5090. Most of us are on old hardware, mid-range cards, machines that were never supposed to run recent games. And yet somehow we still play. That is because of technologies most people have never heard of.

If you've been looking at PC hardware prices lately, you've probably seen a price bloodbath for RAM and SSDs. The same thing is now happening to finished products. Apple recently raised prices across MacBooks and iPads because of higher RAM and storage costs. Xbox hardware prices are up too.

Our GPUs have a cool trick up their sleeves. We know about upscaling, where your graphics card renders fewer pixels and lets AI fill in the rest. Frame generation takes that idea one step further. Here, instead of inventing pixels, the GPU invents entire frames.

Even Apple, the company with one of the the strongest supply chains on the planet, says it can no longer shield customers from the impact of RAM prices. They just announced price increases across several MacBooks and iPads.

When people talk about AI dominance, they talk about NVIDIA. When it comes to semiconductors, we have TSMC. But there's another company sitting quietly behind both of them. A company so important that if it disappeared tomorrow, advanced chip production across the planet would effectively stop.

While people are enraged over prices for the Steam Machine there is something to celebrate. Turns out now Valve just confirmed that you can use SteamOS for you own machines starting the latest 3.8 update that got pushed.

Valve just officially launched the Steam Machine starting at $1,049. We have 4 options to choose from: 1. 512GB model for 1,049 2. 512GB model with Steam Controller for 1,128 3. 2TB model for $1,349 4. 2TB model with Steam Controller for $1,428

NVIDIA started out as a hardware company but today its software is the bigger contributor to its recent success. Gamers like me know NVIDIA as the company behind GeForce graphics cards but that changed years ago. Now AI chips and AI supercomputers are NVIDIA's main hardware offerings.

Valve's new Steam Controller is so popular that if you reserve today, you may not get it until next year. This isn't limited-ed item or a luxury gadget. We're talking about a gaming controller. Valve says demand grew so quickly that new reservations are now showing estimates for next year.

All of us know about Apple, Intel and NVIDIA. These trillion-dollar tech giants are hard to ignore even for the non-techies. But there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of the company that all of them depend on, that is TSMC. TSMC is not an AI company, nor does it do social media.

Your GPU is kinda lying to you and you probably don't know. If you've played a modern game recently, whether on a PC, a PS5 Pro, or even a handheld, there's a good chance the image you're looking at was never fully rendered by your hardware. Some of those pixels were probably created by AI.

Most people don't know (or care) about their operating system. They don't even know what OS means. They just want to buy a Steam Deck and have their games working. For decades, Desktop Linux was only popular among a small niche of people who took operating systems pretty seriously.

Intel offering value processors wasn't on my 2026 bingo card. For years, the CPU market was AMD pushing forward while Intel tried to explain why the next generation would be better. But that might be changing because Intel's new Core Ultra 270K Plus packs 24 cores and launches at $299.

Yes guys, we have more rumors around the Steam Machine. A new leak suggests Valve could officially announce the Steam Machine on June 23, with reservations reportedly opening a week later. Nothing is confirmed yet, but if we trust the leaker, we may be less than two weeks away from launch.

What comes to mind when someone mentions a "gamer"? A kid yelling into a headset? A PlayStation in the living room? A sweaty PC gamer locked in his mancave? Turns out the biggest gaming platform in the world isn't Sony, Microsoft, or evne Nintendo but it is the phone sitting in your pocket.

Most of us use GPS dozens of times every day without ever thinking about it. It powers every app from Uber, Google Maps, and even banks now. The tech just works. You open an app, tap a button, and somehow your phone knows exactly where you are. So, I went a bit deep into how GPS actually works.

AMD was supposed to be dead. Back in 2015, its stock traded for less than $2. Intel dominated CPUs. NVIDIA dominated GPUs. AMD was losing money, losing market share, and fighting off bankruptcy rumors. Fast forward to 2026 and the story looks very different.

MacBook Neo became one of Apple's biggest surprises of 2026. The company reportedly had to double production. The MacBook Neo 2 is rumored to arrive next year with Apple's A19 Pro chip and 12GB of unified memory.

I am constantly just so *annoyed* that the worst, scammiest people mean none of us can have nice things ever. www.theverge.com/games/947741...

Valve is phasing out physical Steam gift cards due to scammers

Valve says “scammers have adapted.”

theverge.com