CCS Insight expects global smartphone shipments to fall 15% this year as AI-driven demand pushes memory manufacturers toward higher-margin server chips. "[S]ome entry-level devices have already seen their sticker prices go up by more than 50 percent since last year," reports The Register. From the report: The firm found that the primary smartphone market (meaning new devices) contracted 4.4 percent in the first quarter of this year, despite sales channels front-loading (meaning stockpiling) product inventory, as device prices begin to rise sharply. As CCS notes, this casts an ominous shadow on the outlook for the rest of the year, and it seems things have worsened since The Register first started reporting on the smartphone memory woes. Back in January, the forecast was for handset price rises of 6-8 percent, while the most pessimistic outlook was that the global market might contract as much as 5.2 percent. By February, analysts were expecting to see a decline in shipments of around 8 percent across the global market, and for prices to increase by about 14 percent. The root cause of all this is the AI craze, which has seen huge demand for high-performance GPU-filled servers to process it all. Chipmakers have moved to capitalize on this by prioritizing production of high-margin memory components for those servers, rather than making the plain old DRAM and NAND needed for PCs and phones. "The memory chip crisis shows no sign of slowing down in the near future, ramping up the pressure on manufacturers and consumers. Memory components now account for more than 30 percent of a manufacturer's bill of materials in some smartphones." said CCS research analyst Ben Hatton. "The full impact has yet to be felt in many regions, but it's clear that device prices will accelerate over the rest of the year."

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Le OPPO Find X9 Ultra s’impose aujourd’hui comme le meilleur photophone Android du moment. Ce modèle vise d’abord les passionnés de photo, car il combine un zoom puissant et une autonomie record. Désormais, Bouygues Telecom le propose avec une offre de lancement attractive. Voici donc notre décryptage complet de sa fiche technique, de ses qualités […]

L'article OPPO Find X9 Ultra : test, prix et offre Bouygues a été publié en premier sur Bbox-Mag

À quelques jours du coup d'envoi officiel du Prime Day, Amazon dégaine déjà ses premières offres depuis le lundi 15 juin. On a passé les promos au crible pour ne garder que les offres avant-premières réellement intéressantes.

Commodore has unveiled the Callback 8020, a $499 Sailfish OS flip phone that runs most Android apps but deliberately blocks social media, browsers, email, and workplace apps to discourage doomscrolling. The "not dumb dumbphone" still supports messaging, music, maps, ridesharing, hotspots, a removable battery, and plenty of Commodore nostalgia. "The phone uses T9-style texting with predictive input, includes Commodore SID ringtones, ships with a selection of Commodore and Sailfish games, and even includes Snake," reports TechSpot. From the report: Commodore says it has developed patent-pending technology that prevents browsers and social media apps from being sideloaded, while DNS-level blocking should stop them from working even if someone finds a way to install them. Users can still sideload nearly anything else if it's not available on the Commostore, but apps designed for doomscrolling remain off limits. That means useful services such as WhatsApp, SMS, Signal, Telegram, WeChat, Spotify, Uber, Lyft, maps, podcasts, QR scanning, voice notes, and hotspot support work, but the likes of Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Gmail, and browsers do not. The Callback 8020 has a 3.25-inch 480 x 640 internal display, a MediaTek Helio G81 chip, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, a 48MP Sony rear camera, an autofocus front camera, dual SIM support, USB-C, a headphone jack, FM radio, and something many of us miss from flagships: a removable battery. There's no 5G as Commodore argues that 4G VoLTE and Wi-Fi better fit a device meant to discourage constant streaming and scrolling. [...] The main screen is touch-capable but disabled by default, while the outer display keeps things deliberately sparse, showing basics such as time, battery, signal, and notifications via dome LEDs. The 8020 name is a nod to Commodore's 8010 modem from 1980. The phone comes in ProtoPET White, SX Silver, BASIC Beige, a translucent Starlight Edition, and a gold Founders Edition with a 24-karat gold-plated Commodore button. Standard models start at $499, the Starlight version is $549.99, and the Founders Edition costs $640. Preorders open June 30, with shipping targeted for winter. You can watch the launch ad on YouTube.

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[Deal du jour] L'iPhone 17 Pro bénéficie d'une réduction sur Amazon en avant-première pour les abonnés Prime. Le dernier smartphone haut de gamme d'Apple voit son prix s'alléger de 130 € à quelques jours des Prime Day.

Depuis le lundi 15 juin, Amazon propose déjà des offres estampillées Prime Day, à quelques jours du coup d’envoi officiel de l’événement. On a déjà fait le tri pour vous remonter uniquement les promotions en avant-première que l’on estime vraiment intéressantes.

Depuis le lundi 15 juin, Amazon propose déjà des offres estampillées Prime Day, à quelques jours du coup d’envoi officiel de l’événement. On a déjà fait le tri pour vous remonter uniquement les promotions en avant-première que l’on estime vraiment intéressantes.

Joybuy n'a pas attendu novembre pour son Black Friday. Le rival d'Amazon propose son édition en plein mois de juin, avec cinq offres tech qui méritent déjà le coup d'œil.

[Deal du jour] L'iPhone 17e voit son tarif baisser de 50 € chez Joybuy, passant ainsi de 719 € à seulement 669,99 €. C'est l'occasion idéale de s'équiper d'un smartphone iOS particulièrement endurant et doté d'un stockage généreux à un tarif plus doux.

Vous trouvez que payer vos jeux 89 € est trop cher ? Imaginez devoir débourser 3 millions de dollars. C’est la somme qu’un fan a dépensée pour acquérir un exemplaire original de Super Mario Bros., encore sous blister.

Longtime Slashdot reader necro81 writes: The heavily promoted, $499 T1 "Trump Phone" was originally said to be "Made in the USA" and ship in September 2025. Later, that was downgraded to "Assembled in the USA." Given the Trump Organization's lack of engineering or supply chain expertise, many assumed the "T1" would just be a private-label phone made by someone else. After a number of delays, the first phones are finally shipping. iFixit has performed a teardown and concluded that the T1 is a just gold-painted 2024 HTC U24 Pro -- a device from a Taiwanese company, probably using mainland China design and supply chains. In collaboration with NBC News, the iFixit team examined both phones using CT scans, side-by-side teardowns, and even reassembled a working T1 using a U24 Pro main board. As for "assembled in the USA," that may be true, in the same sense that your phone's repairman can "assemble" a phone from a handful of subassemblies sourced from someone else. Or it may have been assembled in Guangdong, China like the other U24 Pros. iFixit sums it up: "What you have is not an 'American-Proud Design,' but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I'm failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I've certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time." Quinn Nelson of Snazzy Labs on YouTube also published a comprehensive video of his experience ordering, unboxing, and tearing down the phone. "From pre-order emails landing in Gmail spam thanks to botched DMARC records, to paying for the $47.45 Trump Mobile 47 Plan over the phone, the entire buying experience was a disaster worthy of its own review," writes Nelson.

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[Deal du jour] Joybuy s'apprête à frapper un grand coup en proposant un pack Apple d'été inédit dès ce soir. Le lot regroupant l'iPhone 17 (256 Go Sage), les AirPods Pro 3 et quatre AirTags s'affiche à 699 € au lieu de 1 337 €.

Les Prime Day ont lieu officiellement la semaine prochaine, mais Amazon n’a pas attendu le coup d’envoi pour dégainer ses premières offres. On fouille en direct dans son grand catalogue pour vous recommander les meilleures promotions en avant-première.

UK's Members of Parliament (MP) were "looking for proof that smartphones and social media are rotting children's brains," writes The Register — but they got "a less satisfying answer from neuroscientists on Wednesday: nobody can really prove it." Appearing before the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee this week, three researchers spent much of the session explaining that concern and evidence are not quite the same thing. Asked what evidence exists on the impact of digital devices on infants and young children, Professor Denis Mareschal, director of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, replied: "There is very little, if any, causal research in the early years. Almost everything is correlational." MPs kept coming back to the question — and the experts kept coming back to the same answer. When questioned about social media's impact on adolescents, Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of the University of Cambridge was equally cautious. "What evidence do we have of the impact of digital devices or social media on the adolescent brain?" she asked. "Almost nothing. There are a few small studies, but they haven't been replicated, and they're purely correlational...." MPs also wanted to know whether neuroscience could settle one of the liveliest arguments in the debate: how old a child should be before they're allowed onto social media. "What neuroscience can't do is pinpoint a precise age," Blakemore said. "The individual differences in brain development are vast...." If there was a takeaway from the hearing, it was that concern about digital childhood is running well ahead of the evidence needed to settle the argument.

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Cette semaine, les sujets à la une de Numerama sont très divers : de la tech, une bourde et un conflit entre deux emblèmes de la pop culture. Bonne semaine !

Vous pensiez avoir touché le fond du désespoir en attendant le sixième tome du Trône de Fer ? Un implacable calcul mathématique va enterrer pour de bon le moral des fans de Game of Thrones.

Vous pensiez avoir touché le fond du désespoir en attendant le sixième tome du Trône de Fer ? Un implacable calcul mathématique va enterrer pour de bon le moral des fans de Game of Thrones.

[Deal du jour] Pour protéger votre portefeuille sans l'encombrer, ce traceur d'Ugreen se pose en alternative idéale à l'AirTag grâce à son format carte de crédit. Pratique et compatible avec le réseau Apple Find My, il profite actuellement d'une bonne réduction sur Amazon.

Two recent studies argue that smartphones may have contributed to falling birthrates by reducing in-person social interaction, sexual frequency, and other conditions tied to unintended pregnancies. "One of the studies published in May is called 'The Collapse of Teen Fertility in the Digital Era' and the other, published just Monday, is titled 'Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T's 2007-2011 Carrier Monopoly,'" reports KTLA. "Both were chronicled in a New York Times piece by political writer Sabrina Tavernise on Monday." Slashdot reader sabbede submitted the story. From the report: The one from May, authored by two University of Cincinnati professors, posits that teen fertility "collapsed globally" starting around 2007 -- the same year the first iPhone was released. "Smart phones changed how teens spend time with each other ... this change in turn drove the collapse in teen fertility," the study's abstract reads. "Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur." The study claimed that countries "across the income and policy spectrum" were affected by the teen fertility drop, and that researchers used data from multiple countries, including the U.S., England and Wales, to rule out "country-specific contraceptive access and welfare reform stories." "This model predicts that the shift towards the phone-mediated equilibrium affects multiple aspects of teen behavior," the abstract continues, concluding that "the same instrument that produces a collapse in teen fertility produces a surge in teen suicides." The study published on Monday looks more closely at the United States, explaining that nationwide general fertility rates have fallen 22% since 2007. "[This is] a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors," the National Bureau of Economic Researchers study states. "We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone." As mentioned before, the first iPhone was rolled out in 2007, and this study makes use of that timeframe as "a natural experiment" by using data from 2007 through 2011, when iPhones were only sold on AT&T. "From June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T's mobile broadband coverage," the study says. "Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5-8.0% at ages 15-19 and 3.2-6.6% at ages 20-24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint's pre-2011 coverage footprint are null. Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women." "Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33-52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15-44," researchers continued. "National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use and reducing sexual frequency."

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Sauf coup de théâtre, Ryan Condal passera la main après la saison 4. Le showrunner ne prévoit pas de revenir dans le monde de Game of Thrones après House of the Dragon. Ces dernières années, il a été ciblé par les critiques du public et publiquement désavoué par George R.R. Martin.