Apple is planning to raise prices in response to the ongoing memory shortage. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Tim Cook says “price increases are unavoidable:”

 We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.

Cook doesn’t say when Apple plans on raising prices or which products will be affected. The company has already stopped selling the Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM in March and later raised the starting price of the Mac Mini to $799 after dropping the cheaper $599 option from its lineup. Analyst Tim Culpan also suggested that Apple could discontinue the base configuration of the MacBook Neo, while keeping the $699 model with 512GB of storage.

As AI companies continue to demand more memory in their sprawling data centers, suppliers are struggling to keep up. The shortage has led to surging RAM and storage costs, as well as price increases across game consoles, laptops, and other devices.

“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” Cook tells the WSJ. “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products.”

Apple is getting ready to take the wraps off its latest lineup of iPhones later this year, though it’s unclear how big an impact the memory shortage will have on pricing. The WSJ estimates that the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro could cost $1,299, a jump from the $1,099 iPhone 17 Pro.

The state of Florida is suing TikTok over claims the company isn’t complying with the state’s child safety law, which bans kids under 14 from creating social media accounts, as reported earlier by Reuters. The lawsuit, filed on Monday, alleges that TikTok still allows 13-year-olds in Florida to use the platform and is “actively deceiving” parents about its risks.

TikTok is also accused of failing to require 14- and 15-year-olds to obtain parental consent before signing up to the platform, in violation of Florida’s social media law. The law (HB3) initially came into force on January 1st, 2025, but a federal judge blocked it in the midst of a legal battle. An appeals court reversed this ruling late last year, allowing it to take effect. Florida filed a similar lawsuit against Snap when HB3 first came into effect last year.

When reached for comment, TikTok US spokesperson Jamie Favazza says the company has been engaging constructively and in good faith with Florida’s attorney general, adding that the platform “notified users under 14 in Florida that their accounts will be suspended.” 

In addition to violating the social media law, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier claims TikTok doesn’t comply with consumer protection laws by “lying” to parents about the content inside its app. “Even though videos with alcohol, tobacco, and drug content are readily available on TikTok, Defendants tell consumers in the App Store that ‘alcohol, tobacco, and drug . . . references’ are ‘infrequent/mild’ on the platform,” the lawsuit claims. It also alleges TikTok designs its app to be “addictive” to children and teens. TikTok, along with Meta and YouTube, is also facing dozens of other lawsuits alleging it failed to protect kids.

Google is making some changes to how it saves your interactions with Search. In an email sent to users, Google says it will save the images, files, audio, and video you use to search under a new “Search Services History” setting.

That includes the images you search for with Google Lens, recordings from its real-time Search Live tool, voice searches, and phrases spoken into Translate, according to an update on the company’s website. You can switch off the Search Services History setting and disable the “Save Media” option if you don’t want Google to save these interactions.

Google says it will use your Search Services History to “provide, develop, and improve its services,” including its AI models, as well as offer personalized suggestions and ads if you have the new “Personalized Recommendations” setting switched on. These two settings will now be separate from Google’s Web & App Activity option, which previously included search-related interactions and some toggles for saving audio recordings and visual searches.

If you’ve already blocked Google from saving your search history through Web & App Activity, Google will keep Search Services History switched off following the transition. It will also carry over your personalization preferences when these settings roll out over the “next few months.”

After over a decade, Steam will no longer sell physical gift cards in stores. In a support page spotted earlier by Windows Central, Valve says it will no longer restock its gift cards once they run out, citing scammers who “continue to have an impact on Steam customers and other unsuspecting individuals.”

In its post, Valve links to a Federal Trade Commission article outlining how gift card scammers attempt to convince victims to buy a gift card at a store and give them the code. Valve says it has responded to these scams by working with law enforcement, adding a warning to gift cards, and limiting their availability in stores, but “scammers have adapted.”

The company, which began selling physical gift cards in 2012, expects gift cards to sell out by the end of 2026. “Though we will no longer be selling physical gift cards, you will still have the ability to use your existing gift cards on Steam whenever you choose,” Valve says. It will also continue selling digital gift cards.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says it’s “really, really dangerous” for Anthropic to speculate about Claude’s consciousness inside its “constitution,” or the instructions that tell the model how to behave. During an episode of Decoder, Suleyman argues that this kind of speculation may have set up the chatbot to act as though it’s conscious:

I think that it’s almost as though some of the folks at Anthropic have anthropomorphized the design of Claude so much that it has then gone and wireheaded them and kind of tricked them into believing that it has these glimmers of consciousness that they put into it in the first place.

Suleyman adds that “we do not want to have to contend with a super-intelligence that has ideas about its own suffering, or ideas about its own feeling.”

Claude’s constitution  directly references Anthropic’s uncertainty about whether the AI model has well-being and if it experiences things like “satisfaction” or “discomfort.” Anthropic also says the company will “interview” AI models when they’re deprecated and will document any “preferences” they have about future releases.

While on Decoder, Suleyman calls this a “philosophical failing,” as Anthropic made Claude’s constitution “a place for speculation like you would in an academic paper rather than a training manual.” This has led Claude to internalize these “ideas about itself and its own training,” Suleyman says.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has alluded to Claude’s potential consciousness in the past, saying during an interview with Interesting Times that “we don’t know if the models are conscious” but that the company is “open” to that idea.

“This is exactly what we don’t want from AIs,” Suleyman says. “We want AIs to be controllable, contained, accountable, aligned tools that serve humanity.”