The storage industry has been undergoing a significant change, with PCIe Gen 3 M.2 SSDs gradually being phased out as manufacturers focus on newer and faster standards like PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 5. The transition has been slow, however.
According to a report by ServeTheHome, though, SSD manufacturers are finally discontinuing production of these older SSDs for PCs. The report claims that this shift is driven by the growing affordability and adoption of PCIe Gen 4 SSDs, which offer almost double the bandwidth of Gen 3. Major chipmakers like Intel and AMD now support PCIe Gen 4 as the baseline for new platforms, further accelerating the transition. For instance, Intel’s newly launched Core Ultra 200S paired with the Z890 chipset offers PCIe channels that all begin at PCIe 4.0.
PCIe Gen 3 SSDs, which have been around since the early 2010s, are becoming increasingly irrelevant, especially for high-capacity models. While smaller-capacity Gen 3 SSDs remain in circulation, large-capacity drives are now predominantly PCIe Gen 4-based. PCIe Gen 5 SSDs are also gaining traction, offering even higher performance, especially for workloads that demand extreme read/write speeds, such as gaming, video editing, and data-intensive tasks.
This move is not limited to consumer markets. Enterprise-level platforms are also shifting away from Gen 3 in favor of PCIe Gen 5 and even PCIe Gen 6 SSDs, as businesses require higher throughput for servers and data centers. PCIe Gen 3’s limitations are becoming more apparent, particularly in cutting-edge applications, prompting manufacturers to stop R&D and production for Gen 3 models.
In the coming years, the market is expected to see the dominance of PCIe Gen 4, with PCIe Gen 5 becoming mainstream. As manufacturers fully embrace these newer standards, consumers will benefit from faster, more efficient storage solutions that cater to the increasing demands of modern computing.
Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.
Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).