If you’ve consumed a minute of tech news the last few weeks you have surely heard of that $599 MacBook that has all the tech world by storm.

And by now you might be somewhat bored by seeing the MacBook Neo over your Youtube, Instagram or Tiktok feed even.

Look, it’s common for Apple products to receive special spotlight at launch but the recently launched MacBook Neo deserves the high praise.

And it’s not just me saying it. Linus Sebastian from Linus Tech Tips, being someone who is somewhat critical of Apple products at times, has said that he can only recommend MacBooks now.

If you had told anyone in the tech community that Linus would say that in 2018, they would have laughed at you.

Back then the arguments for buying Windows were genuinely stronger. MacBooks were expensive, ran hot, had bad keyboards, and the performance for the money just wasn’t there.

So what happened between then and now? And why is a $599 laptop the clearest and most surprising expression of it yet?

So, this isn’t another MacBook Neo article but it’s one that covers what was wrong with Apple before their own Silicon.

I’ll talk about what Apple did that no-one else could that led to we getting a $599 laptop from Apple.

And of course there will be a comparison of Neo to laptops at its price-point.

MacBooks Before Apple Silicon

In 2026, I feel if you have to talk about MacBooks you can divide all of them into two categories; Before Apple Silicon and After Apple Silicon because that’s what has provided the biggest edge to MacBooks.

Today’s MacBooks look perfect but it’s important to know that they weren’t like this forever.

To understand why the MacBooks of today are so good, let’s discuss some of the issues that plagued MacBooks before Apple Silicon arrived on the scene.

The Butterfly Keyboard

So, let’s start with the butterfly keyboard.

From 2015 to 2019, Apple shipped MacBooks with something called the butterfly keyboard. The name sounds beautiful but the product really was not.

The butterfly mechanism was an ultra-thin keyboard design Apple used across its entire MacBook lineup for four years running.

The pitch was that thinner keys meant a thinner laptop. The reality was that if a single crumb, a grain of dust, or a tiny piece of debris got under a key, the keyboard would stop working.

Keys would repeat on their own without being pressed. Letters would randomly stop registering. Some people had multiple keys fail simultaneously.

Apple’s solution was to replace the broken butterfly keyboard with another butterfly keyboard. The exact same design. And it would break again.

Reviewers questioned its reliability publicly. The keyboard became a running joke in tech circles. And then it stopped being funny when people started filing lawsuits.

Apple eventually paid $50 million to settle a class-action over it. But the keyboard was just the beginning.

The Dongle Era

The 2016 MacBook Pro redesign removed every port except USB-C. Not some ports. Every single port.

No USB-A. No HDMI. No SD card slot. Just USB-C holes and nothing else.

If you owned an external hard drive, a USB drive, a camera, or a monitor - all of which most people who spend $1,300 on a laptop tend to own - you now needed a dongle to use them.

The dongle era became its own meme. People sitting in coffee shops with a cluster of white adapters hanging off their MacBook like a bunch of grapes.

Apple is selling a $9 dongle for a machine that cost $1,299. Reviewers called it the most dongle-dependent laptop Apple had ever shipped.

The Heat Issues

And then there were the heat issues.

MacBook Pros from 2018 and 2019 showed severe throttling issues. The 2018 15-inch model launched with a software issue that slowed the processor below its rated speed under load, and Apple had to send out a formal apology.

Even though Apple sent patches the problem did not fully go away because the root cause was not the firmware, it was the build itself.

Apple also had to bear the brunt of Intel’s failure because back in 2015 Intel promised delivery of 10nm chips well before they actually arrived.

Apple had already designed the 2016 MacBook Pro enclosure around those promised chips, and Intel was years late.

The heat piping, fan design, and laptop dimensions were all built around a processor that never showed up on schedule, leaving Apple cramming more powerful Intel processors into a body that was too thin to cool them properly.

What this meant in practice: the CPU would hit 100 degrees Celsius under load and throttle down to protect itself.

A $2,000 MacBook Pro with an Intel i9 processor - Apple’s most expensive consumer laptop - was slower under heavy workloads than the i7 model because the i9 generated more heat than the chassis could handle.

Dave Lee, a popular tech reviewer at the time, demonstrated this on YouTube and it went viral. A $2,300 laptop throttling itself below its advertised speeds was not a minor software bug. It was a fundamental design problem.

The 2017 MacBook Pro still carried the defective butterfly keyboard and had performance troubles from thermal throttling. CPUs slowed under heat, undermining the “Pro” status, and the faster Kaby Lake chips barely mattered in practice.

The Pricing Issues

And the price. Let’s talk about the price.

The base 2017 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar started at $1,299 and came with a dual-core Intel Core i5, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage.

In 2017, you could buy a Windows laptop with a quad-core processor, 16GB of RAM, a dedicated GPU, a full set of ports, and a backlit keyboard for $700.

The MacBook cost nearly double, offered half the RAM, had a keyboard that might stop working if you ate a biscuit near it, ran hot, and required a separate $50 dongle.

High starting price relative to Windows alternatives with similar raw specs, accessories and dongles increasing total cost.

Many users found the premium unjustified given compromises in ports, keyboard reliability, and thermal limits.

The arguments for buying Windows during this period were not just valid. They were overwhelming.

Although not everything was bad with the MacBooks. There were things the Intel MacBooks did well.

For example, the display quality was excellent - Retina panels with P3 wide color gamut that Windows laptops at the same price could not match.

Build quality was still best in class. macOS was (and still is) a genuinely better operating system for a lot of people’s daily workflows.

The trackpad was the best in the industry by a wide margin. And for light work - browsing, writing, email, the machines were perfectly capable.

But for anyone spending $1,500 to $2,000 on a machine they expected to perform like a professional computer, the Intel era MacBook Pro was a consistently disappointing experience.

The gap between what it cost and what it delivered was hard to square. And Apple knew it.

The thermal issues in the MacBook line were likely one of the main reasons Apple moved strongly toward its own cool-running ARM processors.

The decision to ditch Intel was not just about ambition. It was about fixing a problem Apple could not fix any other way.

The chassis was too thin for Intel’s chips of the time. And Intel kept missing its own deadlines for better, more efficient chips.

Apple had been waiting years for Intel to deliver something it could actually cool properly, and Intel kept disappointing them.

So Apple built its own.

How Apple Silicon Broke The Laptop Industry

In 2020, Apple announced it was done with Intel.

After fifteen years of using Intel chips in every single Mac, Apple decided it was going to build its own processor. Their first chip was called M1. And it landed like a bomb.

The MacBook Air with M1 launched at $999 with battery life that lasted well over twelve hours in real-world reviewer testing and not just in Apple’s controlled lab conditions.

The machine ran completely silently because it had no fan inside at all. It was faster than most Windows laptops that cost twice as much.

And the surface of the machine barely got warm even under load compared to every Intel MacBook that came before it.

People who had been dismissing Macs for years suddenly had very little to say.

Here is the key thing to understand about why M1 was so fundamentally different from what came before it.

Traditional laptop chips - your Intel and AMD processors are built from separate components that communicate with each other over something called a bus.

The CPU is one piece. The GPU is another piece. The RAM is separate from both.

When any of these components need to share data (which they do constantly) the data has to travel across that bus. That travel creates latency using energy while generating heat as a result.

Apple’s M1 put everything on a single piece of silicon. The CPU, the GPU, the memory, the neural engine for AI tasks - all of it sits on one chip and shares data through a unified RAM.

There is no bus for data to travel across between these components because they are all right next to each other.

The result is a system that does significantly more work with significantly less energy, generates much less heat, and on everyday tasks runs faster than Intel chips that consume two or three times as much power.

Reviews of the M1 MacBook Air showed that in terms of thermals under normal workloads, the machine remained comfortably cool while performing better than Intel-based Macs.

The passive cooling (no-fan design) turned out to barely matter for the tasks most people actually do on a laptop.

Browsing, watching videos, video calls. The M1 handled all of it without breaking a sweat and without making a single sound (because no fan, remember?).

Battery life on the Intel MacBook Air before M1 was around 6 to 8 hours depending on what you were doing.

The M1 Air took 12 to 15 hours. That is not a marginal improvement. That is a completely different category of machine.

And Apple didn’t stop there but kept going.

M2. M3. M4. M5. Each generation built on the architecture of the last. Each generation compounded the advantage over Windows.

Each year the gap between what a Mac could do and what a comparable Windows laptop could do grew a little wider.

MacBook Neo Enters The Chat

By 2026, the M5 has no real competition at its performance level. That is what five years of compounding advantage looks like.

This is why when Apple launched a $599 laptop using the iPhone chip it beat every machine at that price point in the form of a complete package.

Just this month, Apple announced the MacBook Neo at $599. $499 for students.

That is the cheapest new Mac Apple has ever sold in its own stores. By a significant margin.

The CEO of ASUS said publicly that Neo’s pricing came as a shock to the entire PC industry.

That is not a throwaway quote. ASUS makes some of the best Windows laptops in the world.

Their CEO calling an Apple product a shock to the industry means the math did not add up in a way they expected. Something changed.

The thing that changed is the chip Apple chose to put inside it.

The iPhone Chip Inside a MacBook

The MacBook Neo does not run an M-series chip.

It runs the A18 Pro. The same chip Apple put inside the iPhone 16 Pro in late 2024.

When Apple announced this, the reaction in tech circles was immediate and skeptical. People questioned if a phone chip would be enough for a MacBook until the benchmarks came out.

It turns out the A18 Pro beats Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285HX - a flagship laptop processor that sits at the top of Intel’s lineup - by 9%.

It beats the Snapdragon X Elite by 16%. It outperforms AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D by 3%. The only chips that score higher in single-core are Apple’s own M4 and M5.

NotebookCheck’s headline after testing it was blunt: “Apple toys with the competition.” lol.

Now, single-core is not the complete picture.

In multi-threaded performance (tasks that use multiple processor cores) simultaneously the A18 Pro still sits closer to M1-level performance .

The A18 Pro has six cores total, two performance and four efficiency. The M4 has ten.

That gap shows up when you are rendering long-form video, running complex code compilation, or doing anything that needs every core working at full capacity for a sustained period.

But here is the honest truth about who Neo is for.

Most people doing most things on a laptop are doing single-threaded work. Browsing. Writing. Email. Video calls. Watching content.Lightly editing photos.

Those tasks are generally handled by single-core performance, and the A18 Pro is remarkable at all of them.

Apple claims Neo is up to 50% faster for everyday browsing tasks than the bestselling Intel Core Ultra 5 laptop at a similar price.

Reviewers tested that claim and broadly confirmed the number is accurate.

The reason Apple could put the A18 Pro in a Mac and make it work and make it good comes down to manufacturing economics.

The A-series and M-series chips share the same performance cores and are built on the same TSMC 3-nanometer process. They are like cousins.

But the A18 Pro is produced at iPhone scale. Hundreds of millions of units per year. That manufacturing volume drives the cost per chip down dramatically compared to the M-series, which is produced in much smaller quantities for Mac.

That cost reduction is what made $599 possible.

A phone chip made it into a Mac not because Apple cut corners but because the phone chip is genuinely that good, and building it at phone scale made it cheap enough to put in the cheapest Mac Apple has ever sold.

What Is Actually Inside The MacBook Neo

Aluminum body, Not plastic. Aluminum!!

At $599, every Windows laptop you look at is plastic. The Neo is aluminum in four colors:

1. Silver

2. Blush

3. Citrus

4. Indigo

By the way, all of the colors above come with color-matched keyboards, which is a small detail but a nice one at this price.

13-inch Liquid Retina display at 2408 by 1506 resolution, 500 nits of brightness, support for one billion colors, full sRGB color gamut.

This just means that the Neo’s screen is noticeably sharper and brighter than anything else you will encounter at $599 in a Windows machine.

A18 Pro chip comes with a 16-core Neural Engine for running Apple Intelligence and other lightweight on-device AI features locally without sending your data to a server.

The base MacBook Neo comes with 8GB of unified RAM and 256GB storage. The 512GB model is a step-up which also adds Touch ID.

Two USB-C ports. One on the left side running at USB 3 speeds, which is fast. One on the right side running at USB 2 speeds, which is slow in 2026. The headphone jack moved to the right side. No MagSafe. No SD card slot. No Thunderbolt.

Similar to MacBook Air, the Neo has no fans. It has basically no moving parts making noise. The machine is completely silent.

Neo’s battery is also similar to MacBook Air’s with a capacity of 36.5Wh that can power the device for up to 16 hours as claimed by Apple.

Reviewer tests do come close to 12 to 14 hours under normal workloads. Basically, All-day without question.

One thing different from every other MacBook made in the last decade: the Neo uses a mechanical trackpad. Not Force Touch.

Force Touch is what simulates a click through haptic feedback under the trackpad that is used in other MacBooks.

Neo’s mechanical trackpad physically clicks when you press it. The mechanical trackpad on Neo actually moves. It is a cost reduction.

Reviewers noticed it but most said it is still significantly better than any Windows trackpad at this price tier, which is genuinely true.

Neo Versus Everything Else at $599

At $599, the Windows world mostly offers plastic body laptops that flex when you pick them up, displays that look washed out, trackpads that feel imprecise, and batteries that need a charger by early afternoon.

Tom’s Hardware called the Neo “a spectacular budget laptop that should shock the PC industry” and said it “never makes you feel like you’re getting a lesser machine in exchange for affordability.”

Where Neo wins every day in comparison to Windows laptops at similar price-point:

• A chip that is faster than anything Intel or AMD ships in a laptop at this price

• Battery life that genuinely gets through a full day without stress

• Aluminum build quality that does not creak or flex

• A display that is sharper and brighter

• A trackpad that is more accurate even when mechanical

• An Operating System optimized for the hardware

Where Windows wins: raw specs on paper. 16GB of RAM is common on Windows laptops at $599 versus Neo’s 8GB ceiling.

More ports in general. More storage in base configurations. And if your workflow depends on Windows-specific software, the Neo is simply not the answer regardless of how good the hardware is. Gaming is not a conversation on Neo at all.

The honest summary: for the person buying a laptop to write, study, browse, call, lightly edit photos, and do everything a modern connected person does day to day - Neo is a better machine than almost everything Windows ships at $599.

By the way, that is not a fan statement. The reviews and comparisons support it too.

Who This Laptop Is Actually For

OK, the MacBook is great but it is not a silver-bullet. Apple’s targeting a specific audience and it is worth being clear about.

Students are the most obvious answer and Apple knows it.

$499 education pricing puts a real aluminum Mac running full macOS within the range of people for whom $999 was never realistic.

Chromebooks dominate 93% of American K-12 schools right now. Apple is looking directly at that market and pricing accordingly.

Another target are the people already inside the Apple ecosystem.

If you have an iPhone, an iPad, an Apple Watch - the Neo makes all of those devices work together in ways that a Windows laptop simply cannot. iPhone Mirroring, AirDrop, Handoff, Universal Clipboard, Continuity Camera.

All of it works out of the box, immediately, without any setup beyond being signed in to the same Apple account.

First-time Mac buyers who have been curious for years but could not justify $999 as the entry price. Neo removes that barrier.

People doing what most people do on a laptop. Writing, studying, browsing, video calls, streaming, viewing and editing photos casually, managing documents.

The Neo handles all of that without hesitation and does it faster than any Windows laptop in its price range.

MKBHD made a fun point about the 8GB ceiling.

He said if you’re asking about the RAM ceiling on MacBook Neo the laptop is straight-up not for you :p

Because if you know 8GB is low for you, your workflow probably needs more and the architecture of MacBook Neo doesn’t allow RAM to be upgraded. So, that makes it a bad choice for such people.

If your work genuinely requires more than 8GB and some people do like developers, video editors, the Neo is not your machine and you should know that before you buy it.

The MacBook Air at $1,099 starts with 16GB and handles those workloads more comfortably.

Who the MacBook Neo is not for:

• Developers running multiple environments or virtual machines simultaneously

• Designers who need P3 wide color gamut coverage (Neo covers sRGB, not Display P3),

• Anyone whose software runs on Windows and has no Mac equivalent

• Anyone who games seriously

Know your needs clearly before you buy. Watch reviews online and see benchmarks for your specific workflows like how the apps run on the MacBook Neo as reported by people online.

The Neo is excellent at what it is designed for but genuinely limited at everything outside of that.

The Most Repairable MacBook in 14 Years

iFixit is the gold standard for repairability scoring. They tear down every major consumer device, document every component, and score it on how easy it is to repair if something breaks.

Apple products have historically scored terribly on their scale. The 2012 Retina MacBook Pro earned a 1 out of 10. Recent MacBooks have sat between 3 and 5.

When iFixit tore down the MacBook Neo, they said something they have not said about an Apple laptop in a very long time. They said it sent cheers across the office.

The battery - instead of being glued to the chassis with industrial-strength adhesive like every recent MacBook before it - is secured with 18 screws into a tray.

Screws can be removed with a screwdriver. Adhesive cannot be undone without heat guns, specialized tools, careful prying, and the real risk of puncturing the actual battery.

Battery replacement on recent MacBooks required all of that and cost $129 to $199 at an Apple Store. On the Neo, it is a straightforward job.

The USB-C ports are modular too. The headphone jack is modular. Both are color-matched to the chassis.

If a port breaks - which happens a lot, especially on laptops owned by students who plug and unplug things constantly it is a port replacement, not a logic board replacement.

That distinction is enormous. A logic board replacement on a MacBook costs hundreds of dollars. A modular port replacement costs a fraction of that (if available for fair price though).

The keyboard can be replaced without swapping the entire top case, which is how previous MacBook keyboard repairs were handled and why they cost so much.

Apple published a full repair manual for the Neo on the same day it went on sale. Not a few months later. Day one.

iFixit gave it a 6 out of 10. The M5 MacBook Pro scores 4 out of 10. The M4 MacBook Air scores 5. A score of 6 from iFixit is the highest any MacBook has scored in approximately fourteen years.

iFixit’s exact words: “We haven’t been as happy about a MacBook since 2012.”

This did not happen by accident. Apple is targeting the education market and school IT departments care enormously about repairability.

A broken Chromebook in a school can be fixed quickly and cheaply because the parts are accessible and the documentation is public. Apple designed the Neo to compete in that world. The repairability is not a side effect of the design. It is the design.

The Tradeoffs You Should Know

Let’s start with the obvious ones.

No backlit keyboard in 2026 is genuinely difficult to defend. Every Windows laptop at $599 has backlighting. Every other MacBook has backlighting. Neo does not.

Apple says the white keycaps are more visible in low light than darker keys. They are, slightly. It is not enough. Typing in a dim room, on a flight, or in bed without disturbing someone is a real use case and the Neo makes it harder than it should be at this price.

This is the most fair criticism of the machine and it is completely valid.

8GB of unified memory is soldered directly to the logic board. There is no upgrade path. The machine you buy today is the machine you will have in five years.

With Apple Intelligence being memory-hungry and the general direction of software toward requiring more RAM over time, buying a machine with an 8GB ceiling is a decision worth thinking about carefully.

If there is any chance you will push this machine professionally, buy the Air with 16GB.

The right-side USB-C port runs at USB 2.0 speeds. 480 megabits per second. External SSDs, modern USB accessories, and high-speed docks can transfer data at thousands of megabits per second.

Plugging a fast drive into the wrong port on the Neo and wondering why transfers are slow is a trap that is easy to fall into.

External display support tops out at a single 4K 60Hz monitor. One screen, that is your maximum. Multi-monitor setups are not an option with MacBook Neo.

The speakers are noticeably weaker than other MacBooks. Multiple reviewers flagged this consistently and independently. The side-firing speakers do the job for casual listening but they are clearly the place inside the chassis where the $599 price point shows most visibly.

None of these are dealbreakers for the person the Neo is designed for. But they are real tradeoffs and you guys should know about them before spending your money.

Price, Performance & Package

Here at SK NEXUS, we like to define the Apple Silicon MacBooks by three Ps, those are; Price, Performance and Package.

It is a simplified description of how we view MacBooks that is by Price, Performance and the overall product as a package.

Compare a similarly-priced Windows laptop from any of the big laptop manufacturers like HP, Dell, Lenovo with Apple Silicon MacBooks and you’d see their price; they don’t deliver near as much for the price of a starting MacBook.

When you compare the Apple Silicon MacBooks released in 2020, their performance is unmatched when compared to Windows laptops in the same price bracket.

And then there are overall components like the screen, speakers, touchpad, keyboard, full aluminium build, MacOS, all of that make up the final package that is the MacBook.

It is 2026. The M5 has no meaningful competition at its performance level - Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm are all chasing a target that keeps moving further away.

The MacBook Air has been the best laptop in terms of Price, Performance and the overall Package that most people can buy for three consecutive years.

And now the Neo is arguably the best laptop at $599. Apple owns nearly every tier of the laptop market simultaneously. That has never been true before in the history of personal computing.

The path from the butterfly keyboard disaster of 2015 to this specific moment runs directly through one decision made in 2020: ditching Intel and building their own silicon.

That decision took five years to fully show itself.

Year one, M1 shocked everyone. Year two, M2 refined what M1 started. Year three, M3 added efficiency the previous generation could not match. Year four, M4 pushed the performance ceiling further than any competitor had matched.

Year five, M5 made the gap so wide that even the cheapest Mac Apple sells can use a chip from last year’s iPhone and still beat everything Windows ships in its price range.

Every year the MacBook Air kept winning its category. Every year more reviewers switched their recommendation. Every year the comparison articles between Mac and Windows get harder to write in Windows’ favor for the majority of users.

And then Linus made his video recommending MacBooks only.

Linus switching is not just a meme. It is a signal.

When the person whose audience is built on PC building and Windows enthusiasm looks at what Apple has done with silicon and says he cannot recommend anything else in good conscience, that reflects a genuine shift in what is true about these products.

He did not switch because he likes Apple. He switched because the hardware became impossible to argue against for most of his audience’s needs.

The ASUS CEO calling Neo’s pricing a shock to the industry is another signal. He isn’t just a regular executive. He publicly said that the PC industry did not see it coming.

And honestly, no-one did.

The question now is not whether MacBooks are good. Everyone agrees they are. The question is whether anything in the Windows ecosystem is going to meaningfully close the gap, and when.

Competition is coming. Maybe it closes the gap. Maybe it does not but as things stand, MacBooks are winning.

In March 2026, Apple built a $599 laptop with an aluminum body, an all-day battery, a chip that beats every Intel and AMD competitor at its price tier, and the most repairable design any MacBook has had in fourteen years.

That is not an ordinary product launch and that’s why everyone’s talking about it.

My Thoughts on MacBook’s Impact

Apple has been a trailblazer in adopting the ARM-based processors for general purpose use and it has paid them dividends.

To me it feels like MacBook may just win this decade in consumer laptops in price, performance and package.

It’s 2026 already and we don’t have any serious competition to MacBooks. Right from the start of this decade Apple has kept the laptop crown.

And 6 years later, it is still maintaining its lead. But it’s not like the companies aren’t trying. In fact, the competition has started to heat up.

Nvidia is rumored to enter the laptop CPU space with ARM-based chips later this year. Qualcomm is improving its Snapdragon X chips which have performed great.

That Qualcomm Snapdragon chips are already being used and have outstanding reviews especially when compared to x86 mobile chips.

Qualcomm is trying their best to compete with Apple Silicon even when Apple has a vertical integration edge over its laptops.

Vertical Integration basically means that Apple has complete control over the hardware as well as software stack of their MacBooks and that allows them to push optimizations that other laptop manufacturers just could not.

Windows has been one of the biggest bottlenecks in the PC industry for quite some years now and Microsoft is also promising to fix it from the ground-up.

They’re already maintaining ARM-builds for Windows and re-writing core Windows libraries in modern languages like Rust.

With time the Snapdragon chips will get mature and as that hardware ages a couple of years it will land the used lot market in Pakistan.

That is when we’ll go from good-for-most laptops that easily last a day that would be available for cheap prices here.

For me, I’ll be happily recommending Macbook Neo and similar price-point laptops especially when they land inside our used market.

And while Apple’s busy beating the hell out of every other processor, It’s not like the CPU wars in the PC space are over. Intel just launched its Core Ultra 200K Plus series and reviewers are calling it a genuine comeback.

This time we not only have x86 vs ARM but x86 is also redeveloping itself against the performance that ARM-based processors have delivered.

Stay tuned for a whole article discussing what Intel’s been doing lately and what impact could its latest chips have for Windows desktop and laptops moving forward.

Comment down if you’re excited for my article on Intel Core Ultra 200k series.

Further Learning

• Apple toys with the competition - MacBook Neo

• MacBook Neo Is the Most Repairable MacBook in 14 Years

• Apple MacBook Neo review: a budget-priced game-changer

• Budget speed: How fast will the low-cost MacBook Neo really be?

• Apple has officially ended its butterfly keyboard

• Apple Abandons Its Breakable Butterfly Keyboard for Good

• I Can Only Recommend Macbooks Now…

• DAMN, Apple - MacBook Neo

• Apple is Terrifying the PC Industry

• Macbook Neo Review: Better than you Think!

• Mac vs Windows - It’s not close in 2026!

• The 2018 MacBook Pro has a problem with overheating

• MacBook Pros Are Underperforming. A Software Fix Is Coming

• i9 Macbook Pro 2018: Hottest Laptop on the Planet!

• Review: Apple MacBook Neo

Looks like you made it to Part 3 and I respect the consistency.

A quick recap - In the previous piece, we focused on communication aka choosing the right channel, understanding encryption, and accepting the tradeoffs that come with it. If you missed that one, go back and read it first. This builds directly on it.

For anyone new here: this is Part 3 of a practical privacy series designed to help you secure your digital life step by step.

Now here’s a little surprise - even if you’ve done everything right so far - hardened authentication, improved your communication tools - you’re still exposed.

Why?

Say hello to your browser.

Most of your digital life flows through it. Whether it’s your email, work dashboards, banking. Social media - Your browser quite literally sees everything. And even with strong logins and encrypted messaging, browsers still collect and leak behavioral data in ways most people never think about.

But don’t worry - we’re going to fix that.

And before starting, just a quick heads up for the new folks, If you’re unsure about the sequence, follow this order:

• Privacy Is Not Security - The Difference is Important

• Privacy Fundamentals - Part 1: Authentication

• Privacy Fundamentals - Part 2: Communication

How Web Tracking Actually Works

Every website you visit has ways of remembering you. Some of those ways feel harmless while some of them don’t.

The most common method is the cookie. A cookie is a small text file your browser stores when you visit a site. It keeps track of things like your previous visits, preferences, and activity. That’s why your shopping cart doesn’t reset every time you refresh the page. It’s why websites remember your language settings or keep you logged in.

There are two kinds worth knowing about:

First-Party Cookies

First-party cookies are created by the site you’re actually visiting. They’re part of the agreement you implicitly make with that site: “Remember my preferences so this works better.” If you add items to a cart or log into an account, that memory lives inside a first-party cookie. The information stays with that domain.

Third-party cookies

These are set by a completely different domain than the one in your address bar. Usually advertisers, data brokers or analytics firms. Third-party cookies are mainly used for three things:

• Tracking - They track you across different websites to see what you may buy.

• Retargeting - They send you to a website that sells products you may like.

• Ad-Serving - They deliver personal ads that target your desires.

Btw these cookies are almost everywhere - one study found third-party tracking cookies on 92% of websites.

Anyway, let’s take the following example to understand third-party cookies better.

You visit a news site, but behind the scenes it loads content from ad networks. Those networks drop their own cookies into your browser. If that same ad network appears on thousands of websites, it can recognize you on every single one of them through the tiny identifier stored in your browser aka cookie.

This is called cross-site tracking and cookies are just one of many ways to achieve cross-site tracking.

How Tracking Pixels Work

Websites also embed tracking pixels. Pixels are tiny invisible 1×1 images or scripts. You’ll never see them. But when your browser loads the page, it automatically contacts another server. That server logs your IP address, your device type, your browser, the page you just visited and much more. If there’s already a third-party cookie in place, it connects the dots.

So while you think you’re just reading an article, multiple companies may be notified that you were there.

For example, if a page includes a tracking pixel from a large social media company, your browser reports your visit back to that company the moment the page loads.

You can put it this way - a pixel doesn’t identify you by itself. Instead, it acts as the messenger while cookies hold all the actual tiny details about you.

Together, they create something bigger - “cross-site tracking” aka the ability to follow the same person across completely different websites. And cross-site tracking can be achieved through various other methods such as: Browser fingerprinting, Cname cloaking and many more techniques (I won’t be talking about all of them.)

Tracking Through Fingerprinting

A digital fingerprint is exactly what it sounds like - a list of characteristics that, when combined, point to a single device.

Every time you open a website, your browser sends information so the page can load properly because it has to. Things like your browser type, operating system, language settings, and approximate location. But that’s just the beginning. Scripts running in the background can also see your screen resolution, time zone, installed fonts, device memory, graphics settings, and dozens of other small technical details.

At first glance, the pieces feel mundane, but when compiled and analyzed at scale, they create a stable identifier. One that can follow you across websites.

Tracking companies stitch these fragments into a unique profile that distinguishes your device from millions of others by just observing how your system is configured.

It’s important to note that Ad networks rely on two primary ways to keep tabs on users: cookie tracking (which we’ve already discussed) and browser fingerprinting. Cookies store an ID inside your browser. Fingerprinting doesn’t need to store anything at all. It simply recognizes you when you show up.

And because most devices are typically used by one person, identifying the device often means identifying the user.

In short, everything observable gets collected. Everything collected gets compared and the result is a persistent identity tied to your browsing behavior.

For anyone wondering whether clearing cookies solves the problem - this is why it doesn’t. Browser fingerprinting bypasses that reset button entirely. And if you want to test out how much data is collected when you visit a website - check out this website, and click “test your browser.”

Chrome - The Default Browser With a Business Model

Most users just open their browsers and start using it. For the majority of the world, that browser is Chrome. Recent market share estimates consistently show Chrome controlling well over 60% of global browser usage. In other words, when we talk about how the web works, we’re largely talking about how Chrome works.

Truth be told - Google is one of the most powerful advertising machines ever built. While people see Google as a search engine, its core business is advertising. The overwhelming share of its revenue comes from selling targeted ads.

And targeted ads require data.

Chrome and Google Search are two of the most efficient data collection tools ever deployed at scale. Every search query and interaction feeds into a system designed to refine what it knows about you. The more signals Google gathers, the sharper its ad targeting becomes. The sharper the targeting, the higher the ad revenue.

Open Chrome right now. Look at the top right corner. If you see your profile picture or your name, you’re signed in. That means your browsing activity may be linked directly to your Google account.

Don’t remember signing in? You’re not alone. Chrome has increasingly nudged and in some cases automatically signed in - users who log into Gmail or other Google services.

On mobile, it goes further. If you’re using Android, Chrome is tightly integrated with the operating system. Location data can be transmitted when you search. Even when users disable location sharing, less precise coordinates can still be inferred.

If you want to understand just how central Chrome is to the modern tracking ecosystem, deeper investigations are worth reading - particularly reporting from The Inquirer and independent privacy researchers who have examined Chrome’s role in surveillance advertising.

Privacy-Focused Browser Options

There’s no shortage of browsers in the market. In recent years, newer privacy-centric projects like Mullvad Browser and Kagi’s emerging browser have emerged.

That said, I’m only recommending tools I’ve personally used and tested.

Firefox

Mozilla Firefox remains one of the strongest all-around browsers for privacy and security. It combines solid built-in protections and a track record that’s difficult to ignore.

It stands as a genuine alternative to Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and even Safari.

There’s a reason Tor Browser is built on Firefox. The Tor developers chose it because Firefox can be hardened and locked down in ways Chromium-based browsers simply cannot match. It’s also why you’ll see Firefox set as the default browser across many Linux distributions.

Put simply - Firefox has earned its reputation.

That said, out of the box, it’s not fully optimized for privacy. You’ll need to spend some time hardening it.

A clear, step-by-step guide is available at Privacy Guides. Navigate to “Desktop Browsers,” scroll to Firefox, and you’ll find detailed instructions on which settings to enable or disable:

And if documentation isn’t your style, there’s also a practical walkthrough video available here:

Brave

Brave and Chrome are both built on Chromium, the open-source browser engine that also powers Edge, Opera, and Vivaldi. On the surface, they’ll feel familiar and any Chrome extension will work on Brave.

But the real difference is under the hood.

Brave ships with many privacy protections enabled by default. In Chrome, achieving similar functionality would require installing multiple extensions - each one adding overhead and potential security risk.

In practical terms, Brave delivers stronger default privacy with less configuration.

If you want a deeper comparison between the two, these resources break it down thoroughly:

• https://www.droidviews.com/brave-browser-vs-google-chrome/

• https://brave.com/compare/chrome-vs-brave/

You can download brave by visiting this link and for maximizing privacy settings, this configuration guide walks through it step by step:

One important thing to note - switch your default search engine from Google to Brave Search, Qwant, or DuckDuckGo. All three are privacy-respecting options. It ultimately comes down to preference. Lastly, don’t overthink about which browser to go with. Either Firefox or Brave, when properly configured, will significantly reduce passive tracking compared to Chrome.

For transparency - I’m currently using Brave, I prefer the interface.

Extra Protection Tools

The following extensions are optional. But if you want to push your setup further, they’re worth considering.

Ghostery

You can Install Ghostery directly by visiting this link.

Out of the box, its default configuration is solid. You don’t need to tweak much unless you want to.

Ghostery acts as an additional filtering layer on top of your browser’s native protections. It strengthens tracker blocking and improves visibility into who’s attempting to collect data on you.

Password Manager Extension

Although this isn’t directly about tracking, it ties back to Part 1 of this series.

If you’re using a password manager (which you should be) install its browser extension. Visiting the vault website every time adds friction. Friction reduces consistency. Reduced consistency weakens security.

I personally use Bitwarden. If you do as well, you can get the extension here

Optimizing Your Behavior to Build Privacy Habits

keep in mind, neither any browser nor any hardened configuration can protect you if your own behavior keeps undoing the work. At some point, you are the control surface and if you’re careless, all your efforts will be for nothing.

Privacy is alignment between what you want and how you operate daily. Without that alignment, even the strongest setup erodes over time. And if you want a private digital life, your daily behavior has to match it.

Separate to Stay Separate

One of the simplest and most effective privacy habits is isolation.

Use separate browsers or at minimum, separate browser profiles - for different parts of your life. For example: you can use one browser profile for work and the other for personal browsing. What’s important is to - keep them isolated.

Why?

Because correlation is how companies map you.

When your banking sessions, social media activity, shopping behavior, and professional research all flow through the same browser identity, it becomes child’s play for companies to stitch together a detailed profile about you.

But, segmentation can disrupt that.

What’s interesting is, you can take this same logic and scale it up.

One email for banking and formal communication.
One email for social media.
One junk email for online shopping and signups.

You can take it further if you want.

One device per activity.
One network per activity.

At that point, you should ask yourself “How private do you actually want to be?” Then use this logic and adjust things accordingly.

Permissions, Extensions, and Self-Inflicted Leaks

Earlier, I mentioned browser extensions. They are powerful, but that power cuts both ways. A poorly vetted extension can compromise your entire environment and this is more common than you think.

The first problem involves many users installing extensions casually and not even verifying if these extensions are safe to use.

Excess permissions are another problem: clipboard access, microphone access, camera access, location access. If a website or extension doesn’t absolutely need a specific permission, don’t grant it.

To understand how dangerous malicious extensions can be, consider a real-world case.

A malicious extension posing as a ChatGPT search tool remained available for months. Some compromised extensions had behaved legitimately for years before being activated. Once triggered, these extensions deployed mechanisms that intercepted user traffic.

Malwarebytes researchers described a scenario like this:

“You receive a Zoom meeting invitation and click the link. Instead of joining your meeting, one of the malicious extensions intercepts your request and redirects you to a convincing fake page claiming you need to download a “critical Zoom update” to join. You download what appears to be legitimate software, but you’ve just installed additional malware onto your system, potentially leading to full machine takeover and complete compromise of your device.”

Anyway, what you can do right now is identify the different extensions installed in your browsers, ask if you genuinely need them? Ask if they are actively maintained and reputable?

If the answer is “no” - remove it.

And if you suspect compromise:

• Remove the extension.

• Change your passwords everywhere.

• Reinstall your operating system clean.

The Future of Browsing

We’re entering a new phase.

AI-native browsers are already appearing - OpenAI’s Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet, and others positioning themselves as the future of web interaction. All of them pitching the same thing - smarter browsing, seamless automation, personalized assistance…etc.

And increasingly of course - better privacy.

I do believe that this category will grow and AI browsers will become mainstream products.

But many of these platforms market privacy as a feature while operating on data-intensive models. The more intelligent the browser claims to be, the more context it needs to function effectively.

On top of that, novelty often comes at the expense of security maturity.

Comet being exploited was a reminder. New platforms frequently ship fast and harden later making early adopters mere scape goats.

So the advice remains simple - don’t get distracted by marketing, don’t confuse AI features with privacy guarantees and just stick to the fundamentals.

In the next piece, we move one layer deeper - beyond the browser itself. We’ll look at the network layer: networks, tunnels, and much more. That’s the final layer in this privacy series. The last cherry on top.

Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading.
See you next time.

The Algorithm is Winning!

I got a confession - most of my time goes into researching on topics - so, I can help you see what the system doesn’t want you to see. At this point, it’s me versus The Algorithm and the Algorithm is winning…

That’s why I need your help.

If SK NEXUS has earned a place in your inbox, consider subscribing if you haven’t already.

And if you’re active elsewhere, follow along on Bluesky or X (Twitter) or LinkedIn - those are three two places I show up most consistently outside Substack. A follow, a like, a repost - it matters to me, more than you think.

Independent research only works if the signal travels. If this work has been useful to you, help it travel.

What You Might Like

It’s been some time since IoT news started making headlines again, especially in the sea of anything AI.

Of course we just can’t get enough of discussing AI models these days, New iPhones are always in-trend and gamers are also pretty vocal about kidney-priced GPUs.

But a few months ago, something quieter happened in the hardware scene.

Qualcomm - the smartphone chip behemoth, the company behind many of the processors inside our phones - acquired Arduino, the tiny board that taught millions how to build electronics.

Arduino is the reason thousands of students first touched hardware.

It’s the reason hobbyists built smart homes before “smart home” was a thing. It’s the reason countless startups could prototype products without a mountain of cash.

At first glance, it sounds niche esp if you’re not into DIY electronics but let me share with you that it directly impacts some odd 30 million IoT developers, and not just them but the future of hardware in classrooms, startups and inside our homes.

Arduino’s acquisition isn’t your normal corporate transaction. It isn’t just about a big company buying a smaller startup. It’s about the future of accessible electronic hardware.

This article is an in-depth look at the acquisition coming from someone who owns and loves tinkering with his Arduino board.

What Is Arduino?

If you’ve never heard of Arduino, think of it like this:

It’s a palm-sized circuit board with a tiny microcontroller on it. You plug it into your laptop, write a few lines of code, and suddenly you can control lights, motors, sensors - basically physical stuff.

As my friend ChatGPT phrases it: Arduino is the Lego set of electronics.

So, Arduino is a microcontroller board with the ability to digitally connect and control other hardware connected to it. It could be easily programmed just through a USB cable.

Inside an Arduino board is something called a microcontroller. That sounds complicated, but it’s just a tiny computer designed to run very small but fast programs.

Most of your ‘smart’ electronics have some kind of a microcontroller baked-in. Your microwave has one. Your washing machine has one. Traffic lights use them. Cars use many microcontrollers to automate different tasks.

Microcontrollers are generally used to automate one small task like turning off a motor, controlling a switch remotely, etc. They’ve historically been accessible to large companies or specific industries.

What Arduino did was take that tiny computer that engineers used in factories and make it usable by normal people. No advanced lab. No corporate license. Just USB cable, simple software, and your imagination.

These days Arduino is more of an ecosystem now that is not just limited to the physical dev-boards but also includes their own programming software (Arduino IDE) and programming language (Arduino C).

Arduino is known for popularizing DIY electronics by making microcontrollers accessible outside just professional engineering circles.

Note: It’s easy to mix an Arduino with a Raspberry PI.

Even though both share many features and may look similar on surface, they are different devices. You may check our detailed article below on Single Board Computers to learn more:

Hardware scene before Arduino

Before Arduino showed up in 2005, programmable hardware wasn’t as accessible or friendly for normies. Specialized boards existed but they were expensive and locked down too.

Moreover, If you wanted to program a microcontroller, you had to use complicated programming languages (aka low-level languages) C or C++.

You also had to deal with vendor-specific software for each hardware and sometimes buy separate programming hardware.

Before Arduino, we had specialized boards that were not only hard to get a hold of by a normie but were expensive too. Back when the founders of Arduino started, some development boards would cost more than $100.

It wasn’t impossible but it wasn’t welcoming for our average Bashir. Nerds could go through these lengths but most high school students don’t want to.

Most development boards before Arduino were proprietary. Documentation was hard to find and communities were small.

In simple terms: hardware was for trained engineers not curious individuals sitting in their homes who want to experiment with their DIY skills.

The Open Source DNA

Arduino was created in-response to limitations in microcontroller boards of the time. The idea was simple: to create a more open and accessible microcontroller board that is easy to program for students.

One of the co-founders of Arduino was Massimo Banzi who was tasked to teach students computer electronics.

Early on, Banzi discovered that microcontroller boards of the time would cost about $100, didn’t have computing power for complex programs and weren’t compatible with the popular Macintosh computers at the time.

Banzi was lucky to have a colleague at MIT who had designed a simple programming language for new programmers. The better thing was that the project was open-source. That was the inspiration for Arduino IDE.

Note: IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment. In our case, an IDE is just a collection of specialized software that allows one to write and push their programs onto the microcontroller.

A student in Banzi’s program started working on a related project called Wiring, which had a user-friendly IDE and a simple circuit board.

The important thing here is that Banzi and his peers were strong believers in open-source software.

Because their goal was to create a quick and easily accessible platform and they feared the institute won’t be able to fund the project, the co-founders felt they’d be better off opening up the project instead of keeping it closed.

Here’s how one of the co-founders recalls their decision to go open:

“So we said, ‘Forget it,’” Banzi recalls. “ ‘Let’s make it open source.’”

How Arduino Hugged Open-Source

The initial Arduino software and more importantly - the hardware design itself was free and open-source for anyone to use and collaborate on. There was no complex licensing, no nothing!

The initial discussions around pricing the board wanted it to be priced around $30 or equal to going out to dinner at a pizza place. Right from the start, they wanted it to be student-friendly.

You plugged the board into your computer via USB. You opened the Arduino IDE. You clicked “Upload.” That was it.

It also shipped with example code. Want to blink an LED? There’s a template. Want to read a temperature sensor? There’s a template.

That meant people could study it, modify it, even manufacture compatible versions.

Tech publications have highlighted how Arduino’s open hardware model made it popular globally by lowering costs and encouraging clones.

Arduino’s Explosive Impact

Arduino solved the problem of making accessible boards but it didn’t stop there and instead built an ecosystem that combined that hardware with their software.

Their result was an affordable kit that was simple to program and play with even for a high school student.

Because the Arduino designs were open, other companies could make Arduino-compatible boards. These clones often cost one-third the price.

That meant students in developing countries like ours could afford them. Schools could buy them in bulk. Makerspaces could stock them cheaply.

Arduino’s community has also been central to its open identity. Makerspaces around the world love Arduino and there are thousands of projects built on Arduino that are freely available on the internet.

This sense of community work has also contributed to Arduino’s success. For a newcomer much of the work is already done by the community.

The Arduino community has a plethora of software libraries (pre-written programs) that beginners could just plug and play in their projects.

Impact on Education

Arduino’s plug and play experience thanks to the community, is how you see high school students walking around with their prototype robots being controlled over an Arduino board.

Instead of static programs printing “Hello World” on a monitor, students could have their small programs control LED lights, steer their robots or fly their drones.

The Arduino community not only reduced the bar to experience Arduino but also made it fun for beginners.

In a way, getting into engineering and Computer Science courses was fun thanks to Arduino’s community that has their projects freely available on the internet.

This community and plug-and-play experience is why it’s hard to see an Electrical Engineering or a Computer Science without mention of an Arduino board.

Arduino became the gateway into engineering.

That’s why tech outlets have repeatedly described Arduino as foundational to the modern maker movement and STEM education growth.

For many startup founders today, Arduino was their first hands-on experience with how software controls hardware.

Impact on Small Businesses

For businesses, Arduino wasn’t usually the final product inside your house but for many small businesses it was often the starting point.

Startups used Arduino to prototype hardware cheaply. Instead of designing custom PCBs from day one, they tested ideas using Arduino boards.

Many home automation setups, environmental sensors and irrigation related startups played around with Arduino boards before finalizing their products.

Industry analysts have noted that Arduino dramatically reduced early-stage hardware development costs for small teams and startups.

In a sense, Arduino made it easy for hardware engineers to experiment and build and test early versions of their product.

It reduced costs and removed the friction one used to face before Arduinos were a thing.

So Why Did Qualcomm Buy Arduino?

Whether we like it or not, it’s a fact that every device wants to connect to your WiFi and call itself ‘smart’.

Smart devices are everywhere. Edge AI is rising. Even basic products now ship with sensors and connectivity.

Qualcomm wants to be central to that future and Arduino sits at the entry point of that future.

That’s why just last year in October, news came out that Qualcomm just acquired Arduino (the company).

We all know that Qualcomm isn’t a hobby brand. It designs smartphone processors which are way more powerful and complicated than an Arduino.

The company announced it was acquiring Arduino as part of a broader push into AI and IoT devices. From Qualcomm’s perspective, this makes strategic sense.

Arduino has millions of developers and students using its platform. They can influence them in earlier stages to be more familiar with their stack.

If those builders eventually build companies, whose chips would they be more familiar with?

Industry analysts say that this acquisition is Qualcomm trying to “meet developers earlier in the pipeline” of hardware innovation. If you didn’t get it, here’s a meme:

What Changes Technically?

One early sign of direction was the announcement of the Arduino UNO Q, a board combining Arduino compatibility with Qualcomm silicon and more advanced capabilities like Linux and AI support.

The Verge reported that this board aims to blend Arduino’s beginner-friendly ecosystem with more powerful computing hardware.

That means future boards could include:

Better wireless connectivity
Built-in AI acceleration
Stronger integration with modern IoT stacks

For users, that sounds like progress.

But progress always comes with trade-offs.

The Openness Question

Here’s something that worries the open-source community.

Arduino built its brand on openness, free designs and community. Qualcomm built its empire on proprietary silicon and licensing.

So their concern makes sense:

Will Arduino remain open?

Reuters reported that Qualcomm said Arduino would continue supporting multiple chip vendors and maintain its mission.

On paper that sounds good, but corporations don’t think twice before contradicting their own statements.

And open-source communities generally don’t trust big companies nor their press releases. Trust is the most essential element to these small communities and that’s why they’re skeptical.

If openness shrinks, clone compatibility disappears, or licensing tightens, the ecosystem could fragment.

And once a maker ecosystem fractures, it rarely fully recovers.

What This Means For Students and Hobbyists?

At the moment we don’t have much to worry about. If you’re a student, here’s the short version:

In the near term, nothing dramatic changes. Arduino boards still work. Tutorials still exist. Their Arduino IDE still works as it should.

In the medium term, we can expect more powerful boards with built-in connectivity and AI features because Qualcomm already has a proven portfolio in that sector.

That could actually be exciting for us Arduino fans. But affordability and openness will determine whether Arduino stays true to its original mission or not.

For hobbyists and tinkerers like me, this acquisition could mean:

More powerful toys which means more complex projects.

For startups, it might mean smoother scaling from prototype to commercial silicon - especially if one wants to integrate with Qualcomm’s tech.

My Somewhat Optimistic Take

Arduino’s story is personal to me because Arduino UNO was one of my first interactions with a microcontroller board.

On a random night, I had a project idea related to RFID badges, I still remember going through it in detail with ChatGPT which had just come out.

The very next day I was able to buy an Arduino clone for ~900 PKR ($3) from my local electronics market and my project was ready that week.

And that was my first experience with Arduino. I didn’t have to find the schematics of the microcontroller or write Assembly language code just to build out my small project.

That heavy-lifting was already done by Arduino and the community. It was largely a plug and play experience for me.

The more important thing here is that because of Arduino’s open design we (in developing countries) can get Arduino clones for that cheap.

Arduino encourages others to use their designs. An original Arduino that costs me 9,000 PKR ($30) is available for 900 PKR ($3), and for me, both of them are identical in feature-set and performance.

That’s the power of that open-design philosophy.

It’s a fact that without Arduino, hardware would still feel scary to millions and engineering courses wouldn’t be that fun.

It’s a reality too that without companies like Qualcomm, many connected devices wouldn’t exist at scale. The company has shipped like hundreds of millions of processors, just let that sink in.

Arduino’s acquisition connects the biggest open hardware ecosystem with a technology behemoth.

If Qualcomm preserves Arduino’s open spirit, keeps boards affordable, and strengthens and not restricts the ecosystem, this could be an evolution.

If not, it risks becoming another story about corporate greed and a failure of capitalism.

For now, the DIY/maker movement just got a new owner. The next few years will show us which path this takes

And people like me who ever plugged in that little blue board would be watching closely.

As always thanks for taking out the time to go through my blogs. I appreciate all of my readers. I’d love to know about your thoughts down below. Your comments actually make my day.

Any feedback or criticism is welcome down below in the comments!

Further Learning

• The Making of Arduino - IEEE Spectrum

• Qualcomm Buys Arduino, and the Open-Source Community Is Skeptical

• How Arduino changed the world

• How does Arduino detonate the world of open-source hardware makers?

• Arduino and the Open Hardware Revolution

• Qualcomm acquires Arduino in surprising move

• Behind Qualcomm’s Arduino Acquisition: 33 Million IoT Developers

• 15 ingenious projects you can build with an Arduino - XDA

If you’re here, you’re trying to take control of your digital security and that is a good thing.

In the previous piece, we focused on authentication - locking down access, strengthening credentials, and reducing account takeover risk. If you missed that one, go back and read it first. This builds directly on it.

For anyone new - this is the Part 2 of a practical privacy series designed to help you secure your digital life step by step.

Part 1 was about who gets in.
Part 2 is about what goes out.

A lot of people harden their passwords, enable two-factor authentication - and then discuss sensitive matters over insecure channels every day which kills the whole point of privacy and securing yourself.

But worry not, cause I am here, I’ll be guiding you on how to patch this bug in your life. And before starting, just a quick heads up for the new folks, If you’re unsure about the sequence, follow this order:

• Privacy Is Not Security - The Difference is Important

• Privacy Fundamentals - Part 1: Authentication

How Digital Communication Actually Works

A lot of people think of digital communication as a direct exchange - one device sending a message straight to another.

But, that’s not how it really works.

Messages normally pass through multiple layers before reaching their destination. They move through servers operated by service providers. They may be stored temporarily or permanently on cloud infrastructure. Logs may record when messages were sent, from which device, and to whom.

Even when a message appears instant and private, it is usually traveling through systems designed for reliability and data analysis.

It’s important to note that modern communication platforms prioritize convenience, and analytics. Privacy is not their default objective.

What End-to-End Encryption Means

You must have seen this term tossed around here and there, but what does it mean?

When we talk about end-to-end encryption (E2EE), we mean something very specific. Only the sender and the receiver can decrypt the message.

In simple terms, only you and the person you are communicating with hold the keys needed to read the content. Neither the platform, nor anyone else should theoretically be able to view the content of the messages.

That means the message content - what you actually wrote - cannot be read by anyone else while it is in transit. If you want a deeper technical explanation of how E2EE works, including how encryption keys are generated and exchanged, you can read this article:

Now, you know what E2EE is, but another important thing to understand is what it protects and what it doesn’t protect.

What E2EE Protects:

• The content of your messages

• Attachments you send

• Voice notes or media shared within the encrypted channel

What E2EE Doesn’t Protect:

• Metadata (who you contacted)

• Timing (when you communicated)

• Frequency of communication

• Contact lists…etc

So, yes - even with the use of encryption, service providers may still see who is talking to whom and when. Encryption only protects the contents of the message. It does not automatically protect the surrounding data.

Why Encrypted Doesn’t Mean Private by Default

There’s a common misconception that if an app claims to use encryption, it must automatically be private. That’s not how it works. I even talked on this in detail in one of my previous posts, about how security doesn’t guarantee privacy, if you haven’t read that till now, check it out:

As I mentioned earlier, End-to-end encryption protects the content of messages while they are being transmitted. It prevents outsiders from reading what was sent. But encryption alone does not determine how a company operates, what data it collects, or how it handles user information.

An app can advertise encryption while still collecting metadata. Backups may not be encrypted. Servers may retain logs. The user’s personal device itself might just be compromised. None of these risks disappear just because messages are encrypted in transit.

It’s also worth noting that on some social media platforms, end-to-end encryption is not enabled by default. Instagram is a good example of this. E2E encryption is not automatically turned on for chats, you have to enable it yourself.

And considering that Instagram is owned by Meta, a company not widely recognized for its privacy-first track record - it’s worth asking how much protection truly exists beyond the message itself.

Metadata: The Data Everyone Forgets About

Earlier, I mentioned the term “Metadata.” For those of you, who don’t know what it means. Meta data can be described as “data about data.” In the context of communication, it refers to the surrounding information attached to a message rather than the message itself.

It includes who you’re talking to, when you sent the message, how often you communicate, your IP address, your device information, and other contextual details.

A common misconception involves the assumption that the content of messages is the most sensitive part of communication. But patterns can reveal just as much - sometimes more.

Imagine this - you regularly message someone named Fat Billy at 2 a.m. Almost every night. You never contact him during the day. You stop messaging him during exam weeks. You were located in a specific city when sending the messages. You delete the conversation history afterward.

When these details are mapped together, behavior becomes visible and patterns start to emerge which can be used against you. In short, Metadata allows companies or anyone with access - to model behavior and identify relationships.

And this extends beyond messaging, let’s take a look at another example.

Every time you upload a photo from your smartphone, you may be attaching something called EXIF metadata. This is hidden technical information embedded inside the image file. It can include the exact GPS coordinates where the photo was taken, the date and time, the device model, and even the time zone.

This data can be extracted quite easily using tools like ExifTool.

The John McAfee EXIF Metadata Exposure

In 2012, John McAfee who is a cybersecurity entrepreneur was in hiding. A journalist from Vice posted a photo of him online. The image still contained GPS EXIF metadata. Authorities extracted the coordinates and ultimately his location was exposed.

In short, the data attached to the picture ended up exposing him.

Communication Tools to Rethink

Let’s start with email.

Gmail and most major email providers encrypt messages in transit. That means emails are protected while traveling between servers. But that does not mean they are end-to-end encrypted. The provider can technically access message content. In corporate environments, administrators can often read employee emails as well..

SMS is even worse. Traditional text messages are not E2E encrypted. They are vulnerable to interception and are logged by carriers. They should never be used for sensitive communication.

The same caution applies to most mainstream social media messaging platforms. Instagram, Facebook Messenger, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter) either do not provide end-to-end encryption by default - or do not provide it at all. Even where encryption exists, it is often optional and must be manually enabled.

Slack messages and Google Meet calls are not end-to-end encrypted. Zoom does offer E2EE, but it must be manually enabled through the Zoom web portal, and not all meetings use it by default.

What About WhatsApp and iMessage?

WhatsApp claims to use end-to-end encryption. Technically, message content is protected. However, it is owned by Meta, and many folks including me, remain skeptical about broader data practices. For non-sensitive communication, WhatsApp is generally acceptable. But for anything truly sensitive, stronger options exist.

iMessage is end-to-end encrypted and includes encrypted backups. However, it works only between Apple devices. You must share a phone number or email address to use it, and you may not always know whether the recipient is using iMessage or standard SMS.

Once again, for non-sensitive conversations, iMessage and WhatsApp are fine.

Also, just for your awareness - there is also an ongoing lawsuit challenging WhatsApp’s encryption claims. WhatsApp and Meta state that messages are end-to-end encrypted, meaning no one outside the chat can read them. The lawsuit alleges that Meta can access messages in near real time through internal processes.

So far, there is no definitive public evidence supporting those claims. Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t. If it were proven, it would represent one of the largest privacy scandals in modern tech.

Either way, transparency eventually surfaces….

Privacy-Focused Alternatives and Their Tradeoffs

If you want better privacy, you have to choose tools built with that priority in mind. Although better does not mean perfect.

Let’s look at a few widely used alternatives and where their limits still exist:

Proton Mail

Proton Mail is structured differently from traditional email providers. Its architecture is designed so that the company cannot directly access stored email content. This zero-access model strengthens user privacy but can limit certain convenience features.

Emails sent between Proton users are generally end-to-end encrypted. The service is based in Switzerland, a jurisdiction known for relatively strong privacy protections compared to many other countries. Jurisdiction matters because it determines how companies can be legally compelled to provide data.

That said, Proton Mail does not eliminate all exposure.

Email metadata such as - sender, recipient, timestamps - is embedded in the email system itself. Subject lines are not consistently end-to-end encrypted. Messages sent to Gmail or Outlook accounts lose automatic E2EE unless additional encryption steps are taken. IP addresses may still be logged unless masked through tools like Tor or a VPN. And if your device is infected with malware, no email provider can compensate for that.

Undoubtedly, proton significantly improves email privacy but keep in mind, it does NOT redefine how email works at the protocol level.

Signal

Signal is widely regarded as one of the strongest consumer messaging applications available. Unlike many platforms where encryption is optional, Signal’s end-to-end encryption is always active.

Its reputation for security extends beyond everyday users. According to public statements from CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Signal is widely used within the agency. Ratcliffe told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that Signal was installed on his CIA computer upon confirmation and is used by most CIA officers. That level of institutional adoption reflects trust in its security design.

Signal also allows users to communicate via usernames instead of exposing their phone numbers. Contacts can exist entirely within Signal without being uploaded to a central database in a readable form. Your phone number does not need to be visible unless you choose to share it.

Still, Signal has limits.

It requires a phone number to register, creating some degree of identity linkage. Internet service providers can see that you are connecting to Signal servers, even if they cannot read the content. Timing patterns such as - who you message and when - may still exist at a network level. And again, if a device is compromised, even the strongest encryption cannot protect the conversation.

I would recommend checking out the following post by if you want to dive more into learning stuff regarding signal:

Tate's Online Safety Substack

Think Your Messages Are Safe? If You’re Not Using the Right App, They Could Be Intercepted

Rightfully so, many Americans are more worried than ever about the interception of their personal communications and what to ensure the privacy and security of who they talk to and what they say…

Read more

a year ago · 92 likes · Tate Jarrow

Jitsi Meet

For video conferencing, Jitsi Meet presents a different model from mainstream platforms like Zoom or Google Meet. It is open-source and can be self-hosted, giving organizations full control over infrastructure if they choose to deploy it on their own servers.

For casual use, meetings can be started without creating an account, reducing identity exposure. This makes it useful for both informal and professional communication.

However, default Jitsi meetings are encrypted in transit, not always fully end-to-end encrypted in the strictest sense. Server operators can still see IP addresses and certain session metadata. Meeting duration and participant counts remain visible at the server level. As always, browser and device security play a critical role.

Accepting the Limits of the System

There is a hard truth about digital communication that no encryption tool can erase.

For a message to move across the internet, the network must know three things: where it came from, where it’s going, and when it was sent. Without that information, routing simply wouldn’t work. This is metadata and it’s unavoidable.

Keep in mind - you can’t eliminate metadata because that’s fantasy. The real objective is minimizing who can access it and how easily it can be analyzed or correlated over time.

Here are some additional steps you can take to minimize your metadata:

Hide Your IP Address

Your IP address reveals decent information about you - an approximate location, your internet service provider, and sometimes even your identity through account records.

Using a privacy-focused VPN such as Mullvad can mask your real IP from the services you connect to. But understand what’s happening - you’re placing trust on someone else, not eliminating it. Instead of your ISP seeing everything, your VPN provider will be.

There’s more depth to networks, tunnels, and traffic routing than we’re covering here. That deserves its own dedicated discussion and it will have one, stay tuned for that.

Use Apps That Minimize Metadata

Not all end-to-end encrypted services treat metadata the same way.

Some store connection logs. Some build analytics systems around usage patterns. Even the privacy-respecting tools discussed earlier aren’t flawless, nothing is.

But, here’s what you can do - Before using any service, examine how it encrypts data, what it stores, how long it stores it, and how it makes money. All of this matters more than you think.

Blind trust defeats the purpose of privacy.

Control Your Device

If your device is compromised in any way, either via malware or spyware or if someone has root access to your computer, then nothing really matters.

So, start focusing on what you install on your device, where you are downloading applications from, what you are clicking on the internet, what already exists on your device, using an antivirus like malwarebytes is also a good thing.

I would suggest checking out the following pieces to get some help on this particular matter:

Scope and Threat Model

If you are someone technical, you might wonder why this guide doesn’t dive into advanced tactics like identity compartmentalization, timing obfuscation, decentralized systems, or complex anonymity frameworks - all these techniques allow you to minimize your metadata even further.

I get it, such methods exist, they work. But they are designed for high-risk threat models.

This guide is for people trying to raise their baseline privacy, not disappear from nation-state intelligence.

A more useful starting question is this:

“Who are you trying to protect your data from?”

Because protection depends entirely on the threat model.

• Layer 1: Your Internet Service Provide (ISP)

• Layer 2: Opportunistic hackers

• Layer 3: Big Tech companies

• Layer 4: Governments

• Layer 5: Targeted surveillances

Each layer requires completely different tools, discipline, and tradeoffs to protect yourself from it.

The privacy-series I am doing focuses on layer 1 – layer 3. Government-level or targeted surveillance is a different category entirely, and defending against that requires a different level of operational rigor.

Communication Habits That Matter More Than Tools

If you made it this far, good. Most people never question how their communication systems work. You did and that is another step in the right direction.

Know this - Private communication isn’t about hiding. It’s simply about choosing the right channel for the right conversation.

Encryption, apps matter, infrastructure, all of this stuff matters, but behavior sits above all of it.

That’s why you need to start being more aware of your actions.

Be conscious of what you discuss, where you discuss it, and with whom. Not every conversation belongs on every platform nor every thought needs to live in a searchable chat history.

Separate personal and professional channels. Don’t mix identities casually. Check whether your cloud backups are encrypted. And understand this clearly - deletion does not automatically mean disappearance. Data lingers in backups, logs, and recipient devices.

Privacy is shaped by habits more than software, you can start today by working on building small, consistent habits:

• Thinking before choosing a platform

• Limiting oversharing

• Keeping your devices clean and updated

Over time, that discipline compounds.

In the next part, I will shift focus to something that is a bit more overlooked aka The Browser. It is one of the most powerful surveillance surfaces in your digital life. I’ll break down why it matters and what practical steps you can take to fix what’s leaking.

Thanks for reading.
See you next time.

The Algorithm is Winning!

I got a confession - most of my time goes into researching on topics - so, I can help you see what the system doesn’t want you to see. At this point, it’s me versus The Algorithm and the Algorithm is winning…

That’s why I need your help.

If SK NEXUS has earned a place in your inbox, consider subscribing if you haven’t already.

And if you’re active elsewhere, follow along on Bluesky or X (Twitter) or LinkedIn - those are the two places I show up most consistently outside Substack. A follow, a like, a repost - it matters to me, more than you think.

Independent research only works if the signal travels. If this work has been useful to you, help it travel.

What You Might Like

If you want to learn more, you can give the posts of different creators involving , Erich Winkler, , , on different topics a read:

ToxSec - AI and Cybersecurity

The Dead Internet Is No Longer a Theory

BLUF: The dead internet theory graduated from conspiracy to observable fact in 2024. Bots crossed the 51% threshold. Over half of new articles are synthetic. Humans detect AI text at coin-flip accura…

Read more

5 months ago · 55 likes · 61 comments · ToxSec

The Digital Watchtower's Substack

AI companions. The good, the bad, and the very very ugly.

Science fiction has predicted purpose-built cyber companions across the full media spectrum over decades. Joi in Blade Runner 2049, Iris in Companion, Samantha in Her, and even Spielberg’s 2001 Artificial Intelligence centered around Jude Law’s performance as an android sex worker named Gigolo Joe. Even children’s and teen’s media has touched on this tr…

Read more

3 months ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · The Digital Watchtower

Decoded Security

5 simple things you should do to protect your privacy before 2025 ends

The Internet is no longer secure. Was it ever? Probably not, but now we have everything online, everything digitized…

Read more

3 months ago · 15 likes · 5 comments · Erich Winkler

Heuristics vs Traps

What we gave up without noticing: how we traded safety for convenience

We like to think that history moves through shocks and explosions. Revolutions. Wars. Coups…

Read more

4 months ago · 31 likes · 13 comments · Mila Agius

Leadership in Change

Understanding Privacy in the Age of AI, a Deep Dive

Before we start: Ready to implement and build with AI? Join Premium for $1,345+ in tools and systems at $39/yr. start here | Looking for 1-on-1 coaching or a private knowledge hub build? Book a free call…

Read more

2 months ago · 36 likes · 11 comments · Joel Salinas and Mohib Ur Rehman

I called TSMC ‘the most important company in the world’ in the title of my recent article here at SK NEXUS.

I called it so because it’s the only company that is manufacturing advanced semiconductors at a speed and precision that’s unmatched in the world.

And also because the two superpowers of our time (US & China) may go to war over that company.

However, it takes a lot of other important companies to make TSMC the most important one. And one of those companies is ASML.

ASML stands for Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography and this handful of an acronym simply means that this company does research and manufacture materials for semiconductors manufacturing.

Semiconductors are building blocks of brains of our computers - CPUs, GPUs, etc.

On paper, ASML feels boring. It’s a company based in the Netherlands that sells only a few dozen of its chip-making machines each year to only a handful of companies around the world.

When people talk about AI dominance, they talk about NVIDIA. When people talk about semiconductors, TSMC is the main thing. ASML doesn’t usually make headlines as much as other tech companies do.

Yet it’s one of the most valuable and important tech companies ever to exist not just in Europe but in the world.

For a first time reader, this doesn’t make sense. But if you look a bit closer, everything makes sense.

The dozen or so machines that ASML sells each year are their best kept secret.

The EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) lithography machine as it is called is basically an atomic level printer that prints semiconductor chips.

ASML’s EUV machines are so cool that they’re able to create temperatures hotter than the Sun’s surface, the irony :p

It is a machine that relies on mirrors that take many months to polish and are smoother than physics feels comfortable with.

A machine so complex that replicating it would require rebuilding an ecosystem that took more than 16 countries and 20 years of R&D to produce.

That’s ASML. The only maker of EUV Lithography machines in this world. We have a whole section on EUV lithography machines that we’ll get to shortly.

Because of these EUV Lithography machines, ASML has quietly become one of the most strategically important companies in the world.

The rest of the article would provide a detailed answer as to why that is.

What Does ASML Do?

In our normal discussions whenever we come across the list of important tech companies in the world the answer almost always is a company like Google, Apple, or some other from the silicon valley.

Generally people love to talk about how NVIDIA is the only tech company to reach 5 Trillion dollar market cap but they often forget the companies that are powering the core technology behind the scenes. ASML is one of those companies.

ASML which stands for Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography (what a cool name) is a Dutch multinational company that makes the machines used in semi-conductor manufacturing.

Actually, ASML is the only company in the world that makes the Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography machines.

What’s “Lithography”, you might ask?

Lithography is a step in chip manufacturing where patterns are “printed” onto silicon wafers using light. Think of it like an insanely precise projector system.

You shine light through a mask, and that pattern gets transferred onto a photosensitive layer on the wafer.

Smaller patterns mean more transistors. More transistors mean more performance and more efficient chips. And the smaller you go, the harder it gets.

Do that process dozens of times. Stack layers. Add transistors. And you’ve got yourself a semiconductor chip.

Advanced semiconductor chips like those used in our PCs and smartphones are almost all built on ASML’s EUV lithography machines. Without EUV technology, there are no advanced chips to play with.

How Is ASML Different?

Generally, when you look at companies that are related to semiconductors you can divide them into two categories. These are:

• Chip Designers - Companies like Apple, Nvidia are chip designers. They design the hardware specifications of chips. These designers come up with the features of a chip like how many transistors would it have, how much memory would the chip have and so on. These designers don’t physically make the chips.

• Chip Manufacturers - TSMC, Intel, Samsung are chip manufacturers. These companies take designs from chip designers and physically manufacture those at scale inside their chip-making facilities. These companies are also known as fabs.

However, ASML is different. It doesn’t fall in either of the above categories. In-fact, it’s in a league of its own.

It is the only company in the entire world that supplies its sophisticated EUV lithography machines to all the chip manufacturers. These machines produce some of the most advanced semiconductor chips.

We’ll go into detail as to why it is the only company making these machines and what’s so special about them. But for now, just know that without ASML’s machines, fabs can’t build out advanced semiconductor chips.

Chip designers can move between fabs. Apple uses TSMC today, but Samsung manufactures for others. Customers can switch partners. Yields improve. Contracts shift.

If you want to make the most advanced chips in the world - 5nm, 3nm, 2nm - there is exactly one place to go for the machine that prints them.

ASML is the only company shipping extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems at production scale. Without it fabs don’t work and chip designs are useless.

Basically, we won’t have any iPhone launches if ASML suddenly stops existing one fine morning.

The Illegal Tech Behind EUV Lithography

I used the word ‘illegal’ because the technologies behind EUV feel illegal when you try to learn more and dive a bit deeper into their workings.

As a recent article in Financial Times put it, the working of an EUV machine consists of multiple impossible looking processes, all of which have to work 100% of the time at once for the EUV machine to work properly.

Basically, there is zero chance for error and these processes have to be repeated hundreds of times a single second.

Generally, chip manufacturing starts with a silicon wafer - a thin, ultra-flat disc of purified silicon (basically sand).

On that wafer, manufacturers build layer upon layer of circuits. Each layer contains patterns that define transistors, wires, and interconnects.

How do they create those patterns? They use light.....special light.

A light source shines through a mask containing the circuit design. That pattern gets projected onto a photosensitive material. After chemical processing, the pattern is etched into the silicon.

This process is repeated dozens of times.

Smaller patterns mean you can pack more transistors into the same area. That’s basically the infamous Moore’s Law in action.

For decades, chipmakers used deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography. It worked fine as long as transistors were large enough relative to the wavelength of light being used.

Then we started hitting the limits of Physics because features of our chips started becoming smaller than the wavelength of light.

This means natural effects like diffraction started distorting the patterns that would be etched onto the silicon wafer.

And once you go that small you can’t just “focus harder.” You start hitting fundamental optical limits.

Engineers tried tricks. Multiple patterning. Complex processing steps. But costs ballooned and complexity just increased and increased.

That’s when EUV entered the scene which isn’t just an upgrade but a totally different universe. And producing the EUV light isn’t just hard. It’s borderline insane.

As someone who’s into science and technology, the technology behind EUV lithography just boggles my mind.

Producing the Extreme Ultraviolet Light

The process of EUV lithography starts with a special kind of light that is artificially produced by us humans. And it took us about 20 years of R&D just to get this light to a usable state in lithography.

EUV stands for Extreme Ultraviolet. It is a special kind of light that is produced through a complex process by ASML. This light is special because it has a wavelength in nanometers and that’s the only light today that allows us to build advanced chips.

To generate that light, ASML’s EUV machine fires powerful lasers at microscopic droplets of molten tin that are ~30 microns in size or about the size of a white blood cell in our bloodstream.

Each droplet is shot at the speed of 250 km/h and the machine’s goal is to shoot a laser on that droplet and convert each droplet into plasma.

That plasma reaches temperatures of about ~219,700 degree celsius or roughly 40 times hotter than the surface of the sun. And as a result of that explosion, EUV light is emitted.

Each tin droplet gets hit 3 times in 20 microseconds in a row. The first shot flattens the tin and the others vaporize it into plasma form. The last shots, then vaporize the metal into plasma.

Just pause for a second and read all of this again. The process of producing that EUV light is a man-made collision between a metal and a laser to create plasma hotter than the surface of the sun just to produce that EUV light.

If you’ve watched the recent movie Oppenheimer it opens with a quote that sits well in the EUV context too:

“Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this, he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity”

We are literally shooting lasers at molten metal 50,000 times in a single second to create mini suns inside a man-made machine, just so we can etch tiny lines onto silicon.

And it has to happen continuously, reliably, inside a factory running 24/7, no breaks, no downtime, no nothing!

Photolithography and Mirrors

The first job of ASML’s EUV lithography machines is producing the EUV light but that is only half the job because now we need to essentially print using that light, that’s where some special mirrors come in.

Photolithography is the process of getting the EUV light to travel so that it lands on the chip mask (that has the chip architecture), and then onto the final silicon wafer.

And by far, this process is a harder process because of the increasing number of layers and the ever smallest margins of error involved here.

So, now we have the EUV light and the machine now has to reflect that light using a series of the most polished mirrors in human existence to a reticle/mask.

A final semiconductor chip could have 10-100 layers and reticle is basically a mask that has the actual design of layers of a chip. The reticle is so precise that the design is precise up to nanometers, equal to one thousand millionth of a meter.

But things aren’t that simpler because EUV light cannot pass through glass.

That means we cannot use traditional lenses for this light. Instead, the entire optical system that moves EUV to reticle uses mirrors and not just ordinary mirrors.

These mirrors must be polished to atomic-level smoothness. Any defect larger than a few atoms can distort the pattern.

The mirrors are manufactured by Zeiss, a German optics company that has worked with ASML for decades and builds these specialized mirrors that can precisely reflect EUV light.

Components like these mirrors couldn’t be bought off the shelf. They were co-developed through long-term research partnerships, funded across years and billions of euros.

Each mirror contains multilayer coatings designed specifically to reflect EUV at 13.5 nm.

Even then, they only reflect about 70% of the light. After multiple reflections, only a fraction of the original EUV intensity (about 4%) remains.

And that is used by the reticle to print a chip layer and when we stack hundreds of those layers precisely on the final wafer, we get an advanced semiconductor that powers our iPhones, GPUs and self-driving cars.

The Machine Itself

Now let’s zoom out a bit and talk about the EUV lithography machine as a whole.

According to Wired, an EUV machine contains over 100,000 parts. It weighs more than 180 tons and requires specialized vacuum chambers because EUV light gets absorbed by air.

The machine also needs hyper-specialized vibration isolation so precise that even small tremors could ruin the patterning process. They say if a human even leans on an EUV machine the production gets affected.

The wafer stage moves at high speeds but must position wafers with nanometer precision, less than the width of a few atoms.

Everything must align perfectly too. If the laser timing is off and it doesn’t shoot the tin, the plasma fails.

If the mirrors drift, the pattern on our reticle distorts. If vibrations leak in, production gets spoiled and final yield gets affected.

Every step is almost impossible. And all of them must work at the same time.

That’s the TECHNOLOGIA for you :p

Why No One Has Copied ASML (Yet)?

It’s not that no one has tried to copy ASML but no one has succeeded in doing that. Japanese companies like Canon, Nikon jumped on the EUV train but went sideways.

The combination of ASML’s decades of operations that included DUV and now EUV lithography means it has the data advantage that no other company in the world has.

It’s the only company that has not placed a bet on EUV but has made it a success because its machines run 24/7 in fabs like Samsung, TSMC, Intel.

Real world data from having that many machines running for that much time gives ASML the advantage that no competitor has.

Still there are multiple reasons behind ASML’s domination of the EUV technology. Below, I’ll break down some of them:

The Complex Supply Chain

ASML’s final EUV lithography machine that ASML sells has more than 100,000 parts. And the majority of those parts are specially engineered for these specific machines.

A normal supply chain cannot provide lasers that could turn tin to plasma nor mirrors that take months to just polish. This is a multi-decade technological alliance.

At this point you must be thinking:

“Okay, it’s hard. But Uncle Sam (US government) has almost infinite money. Why don’t they have their ASML?”

The thing is that ASML didn’t build EUV alone.

The development of EUV took more than two decades and cost billions of euros. At one point, Intel, TSMC, and Samsung themselves invested directly into ASML to accelerate development because they just needed to ship more chips.

Companies like TSMC and Samsung funded ASML’s research because they were the biggest benefactors of EUV lithography machines. They had iPhones and Samsung Galaxy to sell each year and the demand for chips has only increased.

In other words, the industry funded the monopoly.

But why? you may ask:

Because the alternative - each company trying to build its own EUV ecosystem was even more expensive and slower. ASML was the only one that had a stellar track record for chip-making machines.

Another reason for ASML’s monopoly position is the supplier lock-in. The company’s supply chain is also limited to quite a few companies in the region.

For example: Zeiss (Germany) builds the mirrors that take months to just polish. Trumpf (German Company) provides those high-power lasers that turn metal into sun surface temperatures.

Specialized components used in the final EUV machine also come from highly niche suppliers scattered mostly across Europe, which gives ASML a regional supplier trust.

If other companies wanted to build EUV lithography machines they first had to rebuild this entire network of component companies from scratch.

This means they first have to reverse engineer most of those specialized components.

Rebuilding that network from scratch isn’t just expensive. It’s an insane challenge from a practical POV because it took decades for ASML to build that network.

Even the United States, despite giving away billions of dollars through their massive CHIPS Act funding, does not currently have an ASML EUV alternative.

China has been trying to develop advanced lithography tools, but remains years behind in EUV capability

More than the capital, it’s about time, and accumulated experience in R&D and production for decades that is ASML’s moat.

The Very Long Term Economics

Even if someone could copy ASML’s technology, it’s hard to justify from a money and common-sense perspective.

We know that each EUV machine reportedly costs over $150 million and only a handful of companies in the world can afford them. TSMC, Samsung, Intel are some of them.

That means your customer base is tiny but really demanding too. Just TSMC alone powers NVIDIA, Apple, Tesla, and so on.

If you’re a new entrant to EUV lithography market, you’d need:

• Decades of R&D

• A working global supplier ecosystem

• Customers willing to trust your unproven system

All while competing against a company that already has spent decades in R&D, built a stable supplier ecosystem and handles some of the most sophisticated chips we’ve ever produced.

In lithography companies like NVIDIA, Apple cannot take risks. If your machine fails for a day, billions in wafers are wasted right away.

That’s why no one wants to be the beta tester because their customers and especially the demand because of AI just doesn’t allow them to take risks.

So even if someone built a technically comparable tool, convincing TSMC to switch would be a mountain of effort entirely.

Geopolitics Enter the Chat

It looks like it’s impossible to remove politics when there are humans involved. Lithography is no different.

ASML sits in the Netherlands. The Dutch government, under pressure from the US, has restricted exports of advanced EUV systems to China. They simply cannot sell EUV lithography machines to the biggest manufacturer in the world.

That means ASML’s machines aren’t just industrial equipment. They are geopolitical leverage. Trump’s pressure works on the company because the US has contributed a lot of R&D effort along with many billions to get EUV lithography working.

Controlling advanced lithography means controlling advanced chip production which goes into Artificial Intelligence, iPhones and Self-driving cars.

The US has been pretty vocal in maintaining a lead in AI over China. They call it a matter of national security and ASML is one of their levers to protect their sovereignty over the AI infrastructure.

What Does The Future Look Like?

Because of the Artificial Intelligence boom, we’re going through a wave of demand that we’ve never experienced in the history of computing ever before.

NVIDIA wants to sell more GPUs because OpenAI just can’t get enough of them. Apple’s new iPhone launches get sold more and more and Tesla needs more chips to drive their self-driving computer system.

Although this unusual demand has been bad for us consumers in the form of scarce GPUs and 4x prices of RAM in a matter of months, it is also pushing R&D to further enhance EUV’s potential.

That’s why a couple of days ago ASML reported a breakthrough in EUV tech. Their tin firing lasers have now become more powerful which means the laser can fire 100,000 tin droplets every second (going from a previous rate of 50,000/second).

This means the production capacity would gradually speed up straight up by 50% and the company plans to implement this by 2030.

Other than ASML, China has also heated up its efforts of reverse-engineering ASML’s EUV lithography machines. It is widely known that China has been dumping billions for more than a decade to achieve chip independence.

A couple of months ago, news broke out that China has successfully hacked ASML’s EUV technology. While it’s possible that China could reverse engineer parts of the EUV tech chain, the country has yet to ship chips based on their machines.

This unusually high demand of semiconductors is pushing ASML to innovate more and further optimize its processes.

China and the US are pushing more towards chip independence, especially in the wake of concerns that China may overtake Taiwan by force because of TSMC.

If you’re not sure why China may start World War 3 over a small country because of TSMC, you should check this article on the company that is at the heart of this issue.

ASML is already working on Next-generation lithography processes that sound science-fiction to someone like me. Here’s what the company is working on:

• X-ray lithography

• Electron beam lithography

• Quantum lithography

I’d have loved to talk about the next-gen lithography technologies that ASML is working on but I feel we’re out of space for this article.

This article is already quite short to fully discuss ASML’s current EUV technology, let alone even briefly discuss the next generation tech they’re working on.

Maybe someday we may discuss some of their newer technologies mentioned above. If you’re excited for that, let me know in the comments and I’ll start working on that too :)

Out of all articles I’ve written for SK NEXUS, this was by far the one which involved the most research. My main challenge was to balance the theoretical physics concepts and the practical chip-making processes into a ~3500 words piece.

And in all of this I had to make sure that I’m not making it boring or using terms our Bashir doesn’t know about.

Still, I enjoyed it more than the other articles because of my personal interest in the topic. I hope your eyes glitter the same way mine have done while writing this piece.

And I would love to listen to your thoughts in the comments. I read all of the comments and any kind of feedback is welcome. If you found this blog helpful in any way, a comment or a share would make my day.

A Selection Of Similar Writings from SK NEXUS

Further Learning

• How ASML became chipmaking’s biggest monopoly

• The chip patterning machines that will shape computing’s next act

• How ASML became Europe’s most valuable tech firm

• Why neither Asia nor the US has produced a rival to ASML

• The Tiny Star Explosions Powering Moore’s Law

• How ASML took over the chipmaking chessboard

• The Extreme Engineering of ASML’s EUV Light Source

• The World’s Most Important Machine

• China’s EUV chipmaking tool hasn’t produced a single chip

• ASML makes breakthrough in EUV chipmaking tech

• The $150 Million Machine Keeping Moore’s Law Alive

• Light of the future: How does EUV lithography work?

You must have noticed that we’re moving toward a world where surveillance is becoming the default. Every account and every device leaves a trail. Your digital life is becoming increasingly exposed and valuable to people you never intended to trust.

So the main question is - “What can you realistically do to protect yourself?”

That’s where most people get stuck. The internet is full of advice, but almost none of it is structured. Online advice is scattered or overly technical. You’re either told to “use better passwords” or handed a wall of jargon - nothing in between.

I noticed that gap and decided to fix it.

This article is the first part of a new series focused on practical, step-by-step ways to secure your digital life, and we’re starting at the front door, aka authentication.

In this piece, I’ll break down the different types of authentication, why some are dangerous, why others are misunderstood, and how to implement them properly to strengthen both security and privacy.

If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend reading my previous piece on understanding privacy in today’s digital world. It lays the groundwork for everything that follows.

Who This Guide Is For and Who It Isn’t For

This guide is written for everyday users who want to reduce unnecessary tracking and limit how much of their data spills across the internet. It assumes you’re using normal devices and legal online services. If you’re looking for practical privacy habits you can realistically stick to - you’re in the right place. It’s also for readers who want to understand how accounts are attacked, how data gets collected, and where most people quietly lose control without realizing it.

This is not a guide for people under active state-surveillance. If your safety depends on anonymity or if you are seeking operational-security playbooks, this series is not enough.

With that out of the way, let’s start.

What Authentication Really Means

Authentication is simply the process of proving you are who you claim to be. Every time you log in, unlock a device, or confirm a prompt, authentication is happening.

And keep in mind - the password is just one possible proof you present during that process. Authentication is the broader mechanism deciding whether you are who you claim to be. The password is merely one tool in that toolbox.

This is where people often confuse two related but very different ideas: authentication and authorization.

Authentication answers the question, “Who are you?” Authorization comes after and asks, “What are you allowed to do?” Logging into an account is authentication. Being able to view files, change settings, or access admin features is authorization.

One proves identity. The other grants permission.

The reason authentication exists at all is because the Internet has no built-in way to know who you are. Unlike the physical world, there’s no face or body to recognize. Everything online is just requests flying between machines. So the internet makes a risky assumption by default: you are who you say you are - until something proves otherwise.

This is why authentication matters and why having just a password in today’s age isn’t enough.

What Happens When You Log in

At its core, a login is a shortcut for trust.

You type a username and a secret, usually a password, and the system checks whether that secret matches what it has on record. The server never stores your actual password. Instead, it stores a transformed version of it called a hash. When you log in, your password is hashed again and compared to the stored value. If they match, access is granted.

Once verified, the system creates a session. This is a temporary proof that you have already authenticated, so you do not need to re-enter your password on every page. That session is what keeps you logged in.

The fragility comes from the layers around this process. Passwords can be reused, hashes can be leaked, and sessions can be stolen. None of this means the system is broken. It means it was built for usability first, with security layered on top, not the other way around.

Some of The Main Ways Systems Verify Identity

Modern systems rely on a small set of authentication methods. None of them are perfect. Each solves one problem while introducing others:

Passwords

Passwords are the most common form of authentication and the weakest when used alone. They fail due to reuse, phishing, data breaches, and poor storage practices. Strong passwords and password managers reduce risk, but it’s important to note that they do not eliminate it.

One-Time Codes

One-time codes add a second factor, but the delivery method matters, there are two types of one-time codes:

• SMS-based

• Authenticator app-based

SMS-based codes are vulnerable to SIM-swapping attacks, where attackers take control of a phone number to intercept messages due to which they aren’t really a safe option.

On the other hand - App-based authenticators avoid some major risks and are generally more reliable, but they still depend on device security and user behavior.

Biometrics

Biometrics verify physical traits like fingerprints or face scans. They are convenient, but it’s do know that they aren’t secrets. If compromised, they cannot be changed. In practice, biometrics usually unlock a device that still relies on another authentication method underneath. Banking applications are a great example of this.

Anyway, the key takeaway is tradeoffs. Each method improves usability or security in one area while weakening it in another - so yeah, nothing is perfect just by itself.

How Authentication Actually Breaks in the Real World

No system is unbreakable. Authentication looks solid on paper, but real-world usage introduces human error, reused credentials, and predictable behavior. Due to this dozens of accounts get hijacked nearly everyday. And it’s not that the systems aren’t secure enough, this happens because attackers target users.

Most compromises follow a handful of well-understood paths, repeated at massive scale. Let’s look at the most common ones:

Phishing

Phishing is a method in which attackers trick users into entering their credentials on fake login pages that look identical to real ones. Once the credentials are captured, the attacker logs in as the user.

The damage multiplies because of password reuse. Many users reuse the same password across multiple services. According to Cloudflare’s analysis, nearly 41% percent of login attempts involve credentials that were already exposed in previous breaches. That means one successful phish can unlock multiple accounts.

This is why phishing remains effective even against secure systems.

Phishing, along with several other account-takeover methods, falls under social engineering. If you want a deeper breakdown of how these attacks manipulate behavior rather than technology, you can read the full explainer here:

Multi-Factor (MFA) Fatigue

Multi-factor authentication is meant to stop attackers even if passwords are stolen. MFA fatigue attacks flips the entire game.

Also known as MFA bombing or MFA spamming, this attack involves repeatedly sending authentication prompts to a victim’s phone, email, or authenticator app. The attacker’s intention is to somehow exhaust the person on the other end. Eventually, out of annoyance, confusion, or urgency, the victim approves one of the requests.

That single approval is all the attacker needs.

In practice, the attack usually unfolds in three steps.

• First, the attacker obtains valid login credentials, often through phishing

• Next, they attempt to log in repeatedly, triggering a flood of MFA push notifications.

• Finally, the victim becomes frustrated and taps “Approve,” unintentionally authenticating the attacker.

Yeah, this is it, no fancy hacker-guy exploit goes on behind the scenes.

Account Recovery Abuse

Account recovery attacks come into play when authentication is blocking them or if they don’t have the credentials.

Instead of breaking into an account, attackers abuse password-reset and recovery flows - the very mechanisms designed to help legitimate users regain access.

At the core, these attacks rely on impersonation and social engineering. The goal is to ultimately convince the system you are who you claim to be, and the protections meant to stop unauthorized access collapse.

This plays out in many real breaches. For example, a major ransomware attack against Clorox was traced back to attackers impersonating employees and talking a corporate help desk into handing over credentials.

There are countless variants of account recover attacks but some common flavors of recovery abuse include:

• Security question guessing

• Support desk social engineering

• Email takeover (once an attacker controls your email, every linked account becomes vulnerable via password reset links.)

Why Understanding All this was Necessary…

You might be wondering why I am not getting to the point.

But what you need to understand is, knowing all this - is a part of the process. I am laying out these attack patterns first because you must guard your own mind first.

By now you must have realized that most compromises don’t defeat security technology. They exploit trust, urgency, and poorly designed recovery paths. And understanding all these different attacks is the first step toward securing your digital life and protecting your privacy in a system that rarely does it by default.

Designing Authentication That Works in Real Life

Up to this point, we’ve focused on how authentication fails in the real world - it was to show you a simple truth - most account compromises don’t happen because the technology is weak, rather it’s the fault of the setup itself. (though other factors are play a key part in it as well)

But, this is where we shift from problems to practice.

A reasonable authentication setup doesn’t aim for perfection. It aims to raise the cost of attack while keeping your daily life usable. The goal is to block common failure paths without turning security into a full-time job.

There’s a key idea worth repeating from the last piece - being secure is necessary to protect privacy, but it isn’t sufficient on its own. You can have strong authentication and still leak data through the platforms you trust. That’s why this section focuses on pairing good security hygiene with more privacy-respecting choices.

In the sections ahead, I’ll walk you through how to build a setup that resists the most common attacks, limits unnecessary exposure, and scales with your digital life.

With that being said, let’s start.

Password Manager Setup

Weak passwords and password reuse are two of the most common reasons accounts get compromised. A password manager addresses both by generating strong, unique passwords and storing them securely.

I personally use Bitwarden and have had a reliable experience with it. It’s open-source, works across devices, and gives you control over your vault. That said, the important part is using a password manager you trust and will actually use.

Following are the steps you can follow:

1. Go to bitwarden.com and sign up.

2. Create a strong master password.

   • Long and unique.

   • Include letters, numbers, and symbols.

   • Never reuse it anywhere else.

3. Install the browser extension or visit the site to login and access your vault.

4. Let the manager generate passwords for new accounts.

5. Over time, update old logins with reused or weak passwords.

Your master password is the single point of access to your vault. Treat it seriously. If it’s weak or reused, the rest of your setup doesn’t matter.

App-Based Authentication

Strong passwords are the first layer. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is the second.

MFA means that even if someone gets your password, they still can’t log in without proving it’s you - usually through a time-based code generated on your device.

There are two common types: SMS-based and app-based authentication.
Avoid SMS-based MFA. It’s vulnerable to SIM-swap attacks and number hijacking. App-based authenticators are more reliable and harder to abuse.

I personally use Ente Auth and recommend it. It’s privacy-focused, encrypted, and works across devices.

Following are the steps you can follow:

1. Install Ente Auth on your phone.

2. Create an account and secure it with a strong password.

3. Back up your recovery keys somewhere safe.

4. Go to an account you want to protect.

5. Open Security or 2FA settings.

6. Scan the QR code using Ente Auth.

7. Save the backup codes provided by the service.

From now on, logging in will require both your password and a rotating code from your authenticator.

If you ever receive MFA prompts you didn’t initiate, don’t approve them. That’s often a sign of an MFA-fatigue attempt. Change your password immediately and review recent login activity.

Biometric Authentication

Biometric authentication uses something you are instead of something you remember. On phones, this usually means fingerprint or face recognition.

First, enable it on your device:

• Android: Settings → Security & Privacy → Biometrics → Fingerprint / Face

• iPhone: Settings → Face ID / Touch ID → Turn it on and register

This lets apps ask your phone: “Is this really the owner?”

It’s important to note that not every app supports biometrics. Although the support has improved over the years, it is still inconsistent. So don’t overthink it and do this instead:

• Check your banking apps

• Check email, password managers, and social apps

• Anything that holds sensitive data

If biometric login is available, turn it on.

From an average user’s POV, biometrics adds friction against casual misuse and shoulder-surfing. Just keep in mind that biometrics should be used to tighten access, not to replace passwords or authenticators

Recovery Planning: What to do When Things Go South

One of the most overlooked parts of authentication is having a recovery plan - knowing what to do before things go wrong.

Most people focus on logging in securely, but very few think about what happens if they lose access or trigger suspicious activity. Recovery planning is about making sure that when something breaks, you can regain control without weakening your security or privacy.

There are a few simple steps that make a big difference.

Backup Access

Any authentication system without backups is fragile.

When you enable multi-factor authentication, services usually provide backup or recovery codes. These exist for one reason: if you lose access to your authenticator app or device, these codes are your way back in.

• Save your 2FA backup codes when you enable MFA

• Store them securely, ideally in your password manager or offline

• Don’t rely on “I’ll deal with it later” because convenience eats away at both security and privacy

If you lose your authenticator and don’t have backups, recovery becomes painful. In many cases, it means being permanently locked out of your own account.

A few minutes spent securing backups can save you from a lot of pain.

Setting and Securing the Recovery Email

Your recovery email is often more powerful than your password. If someone controls it, they can reset passwords across your accounts without any fancy hacking.

Here are some basic rules to follow:

• Use a separate email account for recovery

• Protect it with a strong password + app-based MFA

• Avoid logging into it on shared or any untrusted devices

Treat this inbox like a master key. Lose control of it, and everything else follows. And If you’re unsure which email providers to use, don’t worry - I’ll cover that in the upcoming privacy sections.

Periodically Review Recovery Settings

Recovery setups decay over time. Your old emails, unused phone numbers, exposed backup codes - all of these can be used against you if you don’t take care of it.

Build a habit to do some sort of check-in every month that follows this outline:

• Checking recovery emails and phone numbers

• Removing outdated or unused options

• Regenerating backup codes if they’ve been exposed

This part is really important, so don’t ignore it just because it seems not so important.

Password Rotation After Suspicious Activity

You must have heard that quote - ‘Hesitation is defeat’

Well, hesitation is also what attackers rely on.

There are a couple of red-flags that should make you instantly take action. Such red flags can include any kind of unexpected login alerts, MFA prompts you didn’t initiate or even password reset emails you didn’t request.

And if you do end up spotting something like that, then you need to act immediately and do the following:

• Change the password

• Rotate it everywhere if it was reused

• Kill active sessions and log everyone out

Waiting to ‘see what happens’ is how small incidents turn into full account takeovers.

And here’s another tip - Visit Have I Been Pwned. Drop in the email you’re worried about and see if it’s tied to known breaches. It’s not perfect, but it often gives you an early warning and that’s enough to act before damage spreads.

Why Authentication Alone Isn’t Enough

If you’ve made it this far, that’s already a win.

You’ve taken the first real step toward securing your digital life instead of reacting after something breaks.

But authentication is just the beginning.

Strong passwords, MFA, and recovery planning protect the door. What happens after you’re inside is a different problem entirely.

In Part 2, we’ll move beyond login screens and talk about communication - how emails, messages, metadata, and everyday digital interactions expose you even after authentication succeeds.

I’ll break down the basics, show where the real leaks happen, and walk you through practical ways to tighten things up and reclaim some privacy.

Thanks for reading.
See you next time.

The Algorithm is Winning!

I got a confession - most of my time goes into researching on topics - so, I can help you see what the system doesn’t want you to see. At this point, it’s me versus The Algorithm and the Algorithm is winning…

That’s why I need your help.

If SK NEXUS has earned a place in your inbox, consider subscribing if you haven’t already.

And if you’re active elsewhere, follow along on Bluesky or LinkedIn or X - those are the two places I show up most consistently outside Substack. A follow, a like, a repost - it matters to me, more than you think.

Independent research only works if the signal travels. If this work has been useful to you, help it travel.

What You Might Like

If you ask some of the boomer generation around you, you’d be surprised to know that you had to stand in queues to get your WAPDA bill paid in Pakistan.

You paid in cash. You stood in lines either in banks or offices. You paid money through a guy on the physical counter with a not-so-good mood.

If you wanted a bank account you were in for a treat, because the manager wouldn’t easily open your account unless you were someone with deep pockets (this has somewhat improved though).

And If you were a freelancer earning online, there were simply no options for you until just a few years ago.

Fast forward to today, and millions of Pakistanis send money with a thumbprint. Utility stores now display their Raast QR codes.

Freelancers receive international payments into app-based wallets. And the government openly talks about reducing the country’s dependence on cash (so they could tax us more :p).

We Gen-Z folks certainly have it easy when a lot of what was in-person, painful is now being digitized especially in the financial sector.

At the center of this transformation are digital wallets and Electronic Money Institutions, or EMIs that have led this change for the average consumer.

But to understand what is happening, we first need to understand what an EMI actually is.

Even though I want this piece to be a positive outlook one, rest assured, millions of people still stand in lines and are frustrated by the current landscape as well. Just that it is improving, though at a very slow pace.

So What Is an EMI?

An EMI is a company licensed by the State Bank of Pakistan to issue electronic money. That means it can create a digital wallet for you, store your money digitally, and allow you to send, receive, or spend it through apps, cards, or QR payments.

An Electronic Money Institution is not a bank. It is not a savings account. It is not a loan provider.

The key difference is this: your EMI wallet is designed for movement of money, not multiplication of money. It is built for transactions, not for lending. This is where most people get confused.

From the outside, a wallet app feels like a bank. You have a balance. You can transfer money (to wallets and to banks). EMIs also give out a debit card.

But under the hood, EMIs are restricted from lending money or creating credit the way banks do. They operate under a lighter regulatory framework focused specifically on quick payments.

According to the State Bank of Pakistan’s official list, companies such as SadaPay and NayaPay have EMI licenses, while others remain in pilot or approval stages.

This licensing structure is pretty sensitive. It provides limited control to the EMIs. Although for the average Bashir, this distinction doesn’t matter much.

If you want to pay bills, send or receive funds or use a debit card on Daraz, EMIs would generally work the same way a bank would.

However, EMIs usually have some limits on spending and receiving funds above a certain threshold. It’s usually 300K-500K PKR depending upon the service you’re using.

What EMIs Can Do

From our Bashir’s perspective, the main thing about EMIs is simplicity.

He just has to download an app. Upload his CNIC and selfie and within minutes, he has a working digital wallet.

You can transfer money to friends instantly. You can pay utility bills. You can recharge your mobile balance. You can scan a QR code at a store.

Some wallets like SadaPay and NayaPay issue Visa/Mastercard debit cards that work internationally too.

Integration with Raast changed the game further.

Developed by the SBP, Raast enables real-time transfers between banks and wallets. That means your wallet is no longer isolated. It becomes part of a broader digital payment ecosystem.

And the best thing is that there are no fees for using Raast unlike IBFT. Most of the digital wallets now operate on Raast.

Here is something to note:

Digital retail payments in Pakistan have surged in recent years, with SBP data showing digital wallets dominating retail transaction volumes.

For the average Bashir, this means less waiting, fewer forms, and fewer physical visits.

For small merchants, it means accepting digital payments without expensive POS machines and catering to those who don’t have cash on hand (like your writer here).

International transactions are really accessible through EMIs. Buying games on Steam is such a breeze on these cards because you can easily freeze them and set spending limits too.

EMIs sold ease of use and people responded. That is their core strength that they’re simple and easy to use for our average Bashir.

What EMIs Cannot Do

Now there are many limits on an EMI when compared to a traditional bank like HBL, UBL, etc.

EMIs cannot lend your deposited money. They cannot offer traditional savings products with interest in the same way banks do.

Basically, they cannot provide large loans from your wallet balance.

This matters because banks generate revenue from lending. They use deposits to create credit. EMIs cannot do lending and that’s why they focus on transaction services.

For the average user, this means if you want a home loan, a car loan, or structured savings products, you still need a bank. Wallets complement banks. They do not replace them.

Understanding this thing is important because it explains Banks and EMIs exist because they have different purposes and limitations.

Why Pakistan Was Ready for EMIs

Pakistan did not become a digital wallet country by accident. The regulation work was already there thanks to the State Bank working hard in the lock-down days.

First, banking penetration was historically low and it was thanks to a number of issues like FATF regulations too. A large portion of the population either did not have bank accounts or did not actively use them.

In 2015, roughly 16% of the adult population had access to bank accounts.

That created a gap. Fintech did not need to replace banks, they just needed to give the users a simpler option.

This number has jumped to 64% by 2025.

Another reason was that Cash has been the king, Pakistan has always been cash heavy because most people just avoid banks whenever they can. You just don’t want to meet a bank guy on a summer afternoon.

When most payments happen in cash, even a small shift toward digital creates explosive growth.

Smartphones also increased this growth because over the past decade, phones have gotten more affordable and expanding 4G coverage made app-based services accessible to millions.

This was the time people started getting familiar with online shopping on Daraz and getting food through Foodpanda.

Add to that Pakistan’s freelancing boom. Pakistan consistently ranks among top freelance markets globally.

But freelancers need digital ecosystems. They need accounts that can receive payments, connect to cards, and function internationally.

Traditional banks were (and still are) often slow or paperwork heavy. Digital wallets just feel a lot smoother than banking apps.

Finally, there is the demographics. Pakistan is young and a large portion of the population grew up with mobile apps, ride hailing, and food delivery. Managing money through a phone just felt natural.

When you combine low banking access, high mobile adoption, freelancing growth, and a young population, EMIs would have naturally found Pakistan either way.

Banks vs EMIs – The Real Difference

From a user experience perspective, banks and EMIs feel miles apart.

Banks require paperwork, stress branch visits, minimum balances, and painfully longer onboarding processes. Just try to get an account opened for the first time as a student.

They are structured institutions designed for full financial intermediation. And sadly, our banks are not incentivized to modernize or focus on retail users because much of their revenue comes from institutional lending.

Our banks lend to our government (yup, it’s crazy, we may cover it someday)

EMI apps are simple, clean and user friendly when compared to traditional banks.

They don’t have minimum balance requirements and they have digital onboarding and no branch visits.

While our banks made billions when the economy crashed EMIs were pushing small updates for our Bashir because he’s their target user.

This is why many people like me treat wallets as daily transaction tools while keeping banks for long-term savings or loans.

It’s not that one is there to replace the other. Both exist with different purposes for me and many others like me.

The Big Digital Wallets in Pakistan

The Early Movers

Easypaisa was among the pioneers of digital wallets platforms in Pakistan.

Launched as a Microfinance Bank, it built massive agent networks especially across urban and rural areas.

To this day, Easypaisa enjoys the First-mover advantage because it is a popular option especially for people who are from rural areas and looking to send funds back to their families.

Today, Easypaisa is not just a digital wallet anymore but it recently became Pakistan’s first digital bank. What this means is that it has the biggest portfolio of services out of the other popular digital wallets.

JazzCash followed Easypaisa as a microfinance bank and it quickly gained a big user-base too because it already was the biggest telecom provider in Pakistan.

Although your writer has had enough bad experiences with JazzCash in the form of occasional payment delays, it is still a giant with millions of registered users.

The Newer EMIs

Then around COVID days came newer EMI players like SadaPay and NayaPay thanks to EMI regulation work done by the then State Bank governor.

These companies positioned themselves as app-first, card-enabled digital wallets focused heavily on freelancers and urban users.

Instead of agent networks, they leaned into digital onboarding, clean UI and their better designed cards.

The competition between these platforms is not just about users anymore. It is about reliability and customer support.

The Profit magazines showed that digital wallet platforms collectively process trillions of rupees annually, making them essential parts of the digital economy.

Why EMIs Became Popular So Fast

The simple answer from a user perspective is that they were simple and easy for the end-user. Here are some of the core drivers of EMIs growth:

• Instant onboarding that’s totally digital

• No minimum balance requirements

• Simple app interfaces

For freelancers, wallet-linked debit cards allowed international transactions and online purchases without navigating traditional banking complexity.

Services like SadaBiz, although short-lived, tried to provide a solution to the freelancer market’s concerns.

SadaPay also tried creating digital spaces for freelancers and money-minded folks on online platforms like Discord but they were eventually left without a vision.

In a country where bank managers just don’t want to open your accounts and the tough regulations too, users simply are content with a simple NayaPay account for their everyday needs.

How Do EMIs Make Money?

Since EMIs cannot lend deposits, their revenue model revolves around transactions.

Every time you swipe a card or pay through a wallet at a merchant, a small interchange fee is generated. Part of that fee goes to the wallet provider.

Merchants may also pay service fees for accepting digital payments. Partnerships with card networks generate revenue sharing.

Scale is everything. High transaction volumes make thin margins sustainable.

Profit has reported that profitability remains a challenge for many EMI players. Some have shut down or struggled to scale. The business model requires constant growth to justify operational costs.

For users, this means free or low-cost services today are supported by backend economics that depend heavily on the number of users.

Are EMIs Safe?

This is a common question and the simple answer again is: Yes.

EMIs are licensed and regulated by the State Bank of Pakistan. They must comply with SBP’s requirements, meaning customer funds are held in regulated structures.

However, EMI wallets are not the same as bank deposits covered under traditional deposit insurance like banks.

The News has reported on SBP revising EMI regulations to strengthen compliance and oversight.

For users, the practical takeaway is this: make sure the EMI you’re using is properly regulated by the State Bank.

Are EMIs Replacing Banks?

Nope, EMIs are not a replacement for banks.

Banks are for lending, savings, and structured financial products like cars, mortgages and so on, while EMIs dominate ease, speed, and mobile-first payments.

Collaboration is visible. Banks partner with fintech companies. Digital banking arms emerge. Payment systems like Raast bridge gaps between institutions.

But you’re not to get your car financed by an EMI anytime soon.

The Bigger Impact on Pakistan

The rise of digital wallets is not just a fintech story. It is an economic transformation story. It shows that if people are provided better service, they’ll jump to it.

Financial inclusion improves when onboarding becomes easier. Small merchants enter the formal digital economy. Freelancers also get the care they deserve.

The government gains transaction visibility and improved documentation.

Dawn and Express Tribune reporting consistently highlight the government’s push toward digitization as a strategy to reduce informality and increase transparency.

The government wants you and me to use EMIs more, just so they have increased visibility on the money flowing in the economy.

What Comes Next?

The future likely includes deeper integration between banks and fintech companies because SBP has started giving out Digital Banking licenses.

We recently saw Easypaisa become a digital bank from just a wallet while international options like Mashreq also just appeared.

In the coming years, the digital banking space seems to be open for competition and innovation especially in the User Experience side, where traditional banks still suck.

Just as international digital banks come in and set the standard, the locals will have to improve on their service, customer support and UI/UX or have their share eaten by the new competitors.

JazzCash and Easypaisa have started offering lending services in the form of micro-loads. That space may also see a lot of growth and we might start to see companies introducing similar services.

Because of a large number of freelancers we may also see more services tailored around receiving money because that is still one of the complaints shared by the community.

Recently, some banks like Meezan and Alfalah have automated the assignment of PRC codes for receiving foreign money.

Such services along with better integrations with foreign wallets like Wise, ElevatePay are improving too.

We already have apps like Daraz or ticketing apps that integrate Easypaisa and similar wallets into their payment form.

My Recent EMI Experience

I am someone who’s been using EMI wallets ever since the first ones like SadaPay and NayaPay came out.

I remember I was among the first ones to receive the black Founders Club debit card by SadaPay and a shirt lol.

I vividly remember how the SadaPay team had an advertised response time of 13 or so seconds and they delivered on that for the first couple of months.

But I feel things have changed, and for the worse especially for SadaPay especially after their acquisition. I’ve personally felt multiple transfer delays and sometimes cancellations too.

And I’m not alone in this, some of my friends report the same experience.

By the way, Just after Papara acquired SadaPay, we talked about the acquisition in Ep 18 of our Tech Made Fun podcast linked here.

However, NayaPay in my recent experience has been more reliable though. The irony is that things were opposite back when SadaPay launched.

Enough of the rant now, let’s talk about some good.

Actually, Digital finance is not that gloomy in Pakistan it seems. We have a really young population with a large number of smartphone users.

That’s why Pakistan’s digital finance market is just too big to ignore. That’s partly why we’re seeing international giants like Mashreq and Papara here.

Even in local space, the very digital wallets that disrupted the scene are now evolving. EasyPaisa which started as a digital wallet, is now a digital bank.

EasyPaisa was the first one and it’s possible we might see NayaPay or others go this route and offer a wider range of services than they currently provide.

And services like Mashreq are already setting the standard for what the average citizen is going to demand from EMIs and banks too.

A friend of mine recently opened an account with Mashreq and was surprised when the on boarding literally took a few minutes. He was able to perform biometrics, verify his picture with NADRA through the app.

He was even able to do Zakat verification completely digitally, which AFAIK no other traditional bank offers at the moment.

And players like Mashreq aren’t an EMI, they are proper banks with saving accounts and other options coming soon which can spell trouble for legacy banks here in the space.

I feel this would give rise to a healthy competition where banks would have to compete with the digital ones in terms of the UI/UX and the one with the best experience and would win users in the long term.

If this trend goes on, not only are we going to have more competitors but also better service from existing ones.

As we’ve repeated in many of our previous articles, competition is good for the end-users. Just take the example of Chinese players entering our automobile market.

As the digital banking license matures it looks like new competitors are going to raise the bar, existing EMI players would adapt and some of them may just become digital banks.

All the while, traditional banks would either have to change themselves significantly or lose the retail market who just isn’t going to accept a 20th century digital experience.

I am hopeful because I’ve gone through the painful process of arguing with branch staff and visiting bank branch multiple times just to get my first bank account opened (looking at you Standard Chartered).

And now seeing that most of this is being replaced with totally digital account opening experiences in minutes makes me happy that even though it took us long at least we’ve got here.

More From SK NEXUS

Further Learning

• 64pc of adults now have bank accounts - Dawn

• Pakistan’s first digital bank is here

• SBP Awards First Digital Retail Bank License to Easypaisa - SBP

• Die, cash, die! - Profit Magazine

• Turkish neobank Papara has officially announced its acquisition of SadaPay

• Mapping EMIs in Pakistan since 2020

It’s good to have you back.

While working on my last piece on digitization of gambling , I kept running into something strange during research - Prediction markets.

At first, I didn’t think much of it. Then I started seeing odds for elections, wars, policy decisions, even oddly specific future events. And later I realized that these were entire markets.

The deeper I looked, the more unavoidable this became. Instagram reels, YouTube shorts. Clips of people bragging about how much they made by betting on real-world outcomes. Someone won because they predicted this election. Someone else cashed out because they bet on that crisis.

A lot of questions started to pile up in my head.

Why are people trusting markets to predict reality? Why do odds feel more convincing than experts or institutions? And when did forecasting quietly turn into a form of gambling wrapped in data and probability?

And once again I guess, I decided to find the answers to those questions.

You see…gambling doesn’t always look like a casino. Sometimes it looks like insight, sometimes it looks like intelligence. And sometimes, it slips into daily life without you noticing.

In this article, I’ll break down what prediction markets actually are, where they came from, what their growing popularity says about how we understand the future and much more…

Every second counts, let’s continue.

What Prediction Market Actually is

Polymarket or Kalshi are prediction markets. In other words - they are gambling platforms dressed up as forecasting.

On the markets - users are able to bet real money using the USDC stablecoin on who would win. You can wager on everything from the next James Bond actor to whether the U.S. government will confirm the existence of aliens.

What sets Polymarket apart is perception. It’s now regularly cited by mainstream media and amplified by high-profile figures like Elon Musk, who has argued that polymarkets beat polls because real money forces honesty.

At its core, it works by letting people buy and sell shares tied to future outcomes. If the event happens, the share pays out. If it doesn’t, it goes to zero. The price reflects what participants collectively believe, not what’s guaranteed to happen.

Where Prediction Markets Came From

Humans have always tried to price the future. Long before spreadsheets, people were informally betting on wars, royal successions, political outcomes...etc In the 1500s and 1600s, political betting markets were already operating in coffeehouses across Europe.

But it wasn’t as smooth as it is right now.

Prediction markets as a serious concept didn’t emerge until the late 20th century.

In 1988, economists began formalizing the idea that markets could aggregate scattered information better than polls or expert panels. This thinking led to the launch of the Iowa Electronic Markets in 1989, a small academic experiment that allowed participants to trade contracts tied to election outcomes.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, prediction markets gained academic validation. Economists studied them as forecasting tools, not gambling systems. Corporations experimented with internal markets to predict product launches, sales targets, project delays…etc

The idea behind the prediction market was clear - when people have skin in the game, they reveal information more honestly which most of the times lead to more accurate results.

So yes…prediction markets were initially built for forecasting and over time, everything got flipped.

The real public boom came decades later. During the 2024 U.S. presidential election, prediction markets were suddenly everywhere. Odds were screenshotted, shared on social media, cited by journalists, and compared directly with polls. The election acted like a spotlight for prediction markets and that moment changed everything…

How Prediction Markets Gained Momentum

The main reason behind why prediction markets exploded is - the change of environment.

Back in the ol’ days, there was no internet.
But that isn’t the case now.

The internet removed the old gatekeepers. You no longer needed academic credentials, or any permission to participate. At the same time, regulation is slower than ever. Prediction markets didn’t fit neatly into existing gambling, which gave platforms room to operate in legal gray zones while regulators played catch-up.

Crypto accelerated everything. Stablecoins made global participation, bypassing banks, borders, and payment processors frictionless. Suddenly, anyone with an internet connection could participate in markets tied to real-world events.

Once a market starts gaining traction, social media does the rest. Screenshots spread. Wins go viral. Algorithms amplify what performs well, nudging more people towards what it wants them to see.

On top of that - Journalists notice what’s already trending, they along with influencers also start to hop in the shiny train ultimately giving birth to a never ending loop.

That’s exactly what happened with prediction markets.

And if you want to understand how platforms quietly shape what you see, what you believe, and what you pay attention to, I broke it down in detail here:

How Prediction Markets Work

At a high level, prediction markets turn beliefs into prices.

Each possible outcome is represented by a share. When more people believe an outcome will happen, demand for that share increases and its price rises. When confidence drops, the price falls.

As new information appears, let’s say a court ruling or breaking headline or a sudden injury, prices adjust almost instantly. People who react early and correctly are rewarded. Those who guess wrong lose money. That incentive structure is the entire system.

So basically, you’re buying into a probability shaped by the crowd. If the outcome happens, the share pays out. If it doesn’t, then you lose money.

What you’re really seeing is a live signal of collective belief, constantly updated as people put real stakes behind their assumptions. And the market only cares whether you are right or not, it doesn’t give two cents about why you believe something.

Polymarket is also called ‘wisdom of the crowds’ though, it’s partly true because the information can be manipulated via insider trading which is the biggest problem of this system about which we will be talking next.

What the Problem with Prediction Market is

The real problem with prediction markets is the asymmetry.

Imagine a streaming platform sitting on a yet-to-be-released finale. There’s a market betting on whether a major character dies. Writers, editors, interns - dozens of people already know the answer. Any one of them can quietly place a bet days or weeks in advance and walk away with easy money.

That’s literally information leakage with a payout.

Some markets are genuinely uncertain. Elections, championships…etc no one has the final answer beforehand. But many Polymarket questions aren’t like that. They revolve around private relationships, unreleased announcements, medical events, or corporate decisions. In those cases, someone always knows what’s going to happen next.

Markets asking whether a celebrity couple will split, or if some celebrity is going to get pregnant or whether a famous CEO will step down…etc These are invitations for insiders, friends, assistants, or employees to cash in on knowledge the public doesn’t have.

This turns many prediction markets into sucker’s games. You think you’re participating in a neutral forecasting tool. But you’re just trading against people who already have the answer.

The Grey Zone: Forecasting or Just Gambling?

Prediction markets are sold as sophisticated forecasting mechanisms. The language is polished to make it sound like Wall Street rather than DraftKings - “probability signals”, “information efficiency”, “decentralized knowledge”, “wisdom of crowd”...etc.

Yes, the mechanics are dressed in financial language. Yes, there are probability charts instead of point spreads. But under the hood, it’s simple - risk capital on uncertainty, win if correct, lose if not.

Regulation reflects this ambiguity. In some regions, prediction markets are treated like financial derivatives. In others, they’re classified as gambling. In many places, they operate in a gray zone where neither framework cleanly applies. This inconsistency is a clear reflection of what these markets actually are.

And if you’ve been paying attention to how gambling has been digitalized over the last decade, this should feel familiar.

Fun fact - I recently broke down how gambling is moving online, embedding itself inside video games and different consumer apps. If you want the deeper breakdown of how digital gambling is evolving and realize how prediction market is just another form of gambling, you can check this post out:

How Prediction Markets Are Blending Into Content

Prediction markets are beginning to intersect with the creator economy in subtle ways. These markets aren’t any niche financial tool anymore, discussions about them are increasingly appearing in livestreams and social media.

Streamers do not need to actively place bets to influence participation. Simply discussing probabilities or live market movements is more than enough for promoting these markets.

For example - Atrioc, a youtuber, whose audience already gravitates toward economics and probability-driven analysis, represents the kind of community where prediction markets naturally gain traction - even if markets are not the primary focus of the stream.

The overlap is expanding beyond commentary. Sports figures are also entering the space. Giannis Antetokounmpo recently joined prediction platform Kalshi. This is proof of how the market is slowly growing.

Meanwhile, platforms such as Polymarket routinely host markets tied directly to internet personalities.

At this point, it’s important to ask - whether viewers are consuming commentary or are they interacting with tradeable outcomes linked to personalities they follow? Makes sense right?

Comment down below and let me know what you think

Leave a comment

Just to be clear - none of this is inherently ‘wrong’. But the blending of entertainment, and monetized markets raises practical questions. If a streamer discusses a market, is it organic curiosity or sponsored promotion? In a digital ecosystem where affiliate relationships are not always obvious, audiences may struggle to distinguish between commentary and marketing.

This issue is a whole thing in itself - I explored this dynamic in more detail in a previous piece on how online trust itself has become monetizable and why not every recommendation is neutral:

Case Studies That Made People Question Things

Let’s take a look at real cases that grabbed attention and forced people to think about what goes on behind the scenes of this market.

The $400,000 Maduro Contract That Drew Attention

In early January 2026, one of the most striking stories to emerge from the prediction market world centered on a massive payout tied to Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro’s sudden removal from power.

A Polymarket account placed significant wagers that Maduro’s leadership would end by month’s end and those trades were made just hours before a surprise U.S. military operation ultimately removed him from office. When the outcome was confirmed, the bets paid off at near-full value, generating a profit of nearly $400,000.

What made the story so crazy was the timing and the mystery surrounding the bettor. The account had been created only weeks earlier and had little trading history outside of these specific wagers. That led many online observers and analysts to ask the same question:

“Was this luck, or did someone have access to privileged information that the broader public and markets didn’t?”

NFL Banning Prediction Market Ads During the Super Bowl

Prediction markets have officially been placed on the NFL’s list of prohibited advertising categories, according to Front Office Sports. A source familiar with the matter told the outlet that these ads were barred not just from the Super Bowl, but from NFL broadcasts throughout the 2025 season.

The Super Bowl is the most-watched television event in the United States. Last year’s broadcast drew an average of 127.7 million viewers across platforms - the largest audience ever recorded for a single U.S. television event, according to Front Office Sports. Thirty-second ad spots have climbed as high as $10 million this year.

So why block prediction markets?

The answer is pretty simple.

The NFL has spent years carefully managing its relationship with gambling. Sports betting is now integrated into broadcasts, but it’s tightly regulated and politically normalized. Prediction markets operate in a much shadier zone.

They don’t sit cleanly inside gambling law.
They don’t sit cleanly inside financial regulation either.

This ambiguity creates legal and reputational risk and the NFL does not gamble with reputational risk during its events.

Allowing prediction market ads during the Super Bowl would effectively place them alongside established sportsbooks. That’s a stamp of approval - A signal to the public that these platforms belong in the same category.

This decision is pretty subtle, but it reveals something bigger if you look closer - Major institutions are cautious about prediction markets because they understand them very well. This matter suggests that even powerful institutions see them as closer to gambling than forecasting and them taking this decision is a sign of that belief.

What This Means Going Forward

I believe prediction markets deserve a more balanced assessment.

Platforms like Polymarket have proven to be useful as information tools. When people put their own money behind an outcome, that creates a stronger signal than a traditional poll. As Elon Musk has pointed out, markets can sometimes be more informative than surveys because participants have financial exposure. Incentives matter.

However, a priced probability is still just a probability.

At the same time, their expansion is undeniable. As reported by Forbes, trading volume across major prediction platforms surpassed $3 billion in Q3 2025 alone - more than five times higher than the same quarter a year earlier. Industry estimates project the sector could reach nearly $95.5 billion by 2035, with annual growth rates approaching 47 percent.

And now, the very platform you’re reading this on - Substack - has partnered with Polymarket. Writers can embed live prediction widgets in Notes, showing odds for elections, policy moves, or even celebrity drama, all with real money on the line.

This level of growth suggests prediction markets are growing into something bigger.

In my view - prediction markets will continue to expand, and their influence will likely grow. But growth does not resolve their structural ambiguity between gambling and finance. And expansion does not eliminate uncertainty.

What remains unsettled is how regulators, institutions, and the public will ultimately choose to classify prediction markets. That decision may determine whether prediction markets become embedded infrastructure or not…

The Algorithm is Winning!

I got a confession - most of my time goes into researching on topics - so, I can help you see what the system doesn’t want you to see. At this point, it’s me versus the Algorithm and the Algorithm is winning…

That’s why I need your help.

If SK NEXUS has earned a place in your inbox, consider subscribing if you haven’t already.

And if you’re active elsewhere, follow along on Bluesky or X (Twitter) or LinkedIn - those are the two places I show up most consistently outside Substack. A follow, a like, a repost - it matters to me, more than you think.

Independent research only works if the signal travels. If this work has been useful to you, help it travel.

What You Might Like

Random power cuts. Voltage dipping at night. Lights getting brighter when the AC kicks off. That loud thak sound when the generator switches over - none of this feels unusual anymore.

What is unusual is when your PC suddenly refuses to turn on one day. Or your console starts shutting down randomly.

Or your PSU dies and everyone around you confidently declared it was “Chinese quality” or “cheap power supply”.

Most of the time, the PC is not the real problem. The power feeding it is.

And as someone who has learned it the hard way after frying multiple power supplies (one for a PC, the other for a console), I’m writing this article to show you how you can save your expensive tech in the local environment.

This article is written for people who have real money tied up in their setups. Gaming PCs, GPUs that cost more than a bike, consoles that were bought after months of saving.

If you care about your hardware lasting more than a year or two, this is for you.

Disclaimer: This is not an electrician’s guide. Nor am I a certified electrician. This is an educational piece and I encourage everyone to do their own diligence.

To anyone reading this: You should consult your local electrician and laws before implementing anything.

I’m writing this as a person who has done research on his own and tried most of the stuff I’m recommending in this article.

Still, Feel free to disagree and correct any information that I present here in the comments down below.

Explaining Basic Power Terminology

Before we talk about solutions, we need a shared understanding of basic terms like Fluctuations, Surge, Brownouts, etc. Power terms sound scary, but most of them describe very simple ideas that are not much hard to understand.

Voltage

Voltage is basically electric pressure. Think of it as how hard electricity is being pushed into our electric devices.

In Pakistan, the standard is around 220 to 240 volts. That number is not a fixed promise. It is more like a suggestion. In reality, voltage keeps moving up and down throughout the day.

The rule of thumb is that voltage should not go below 220 and not above 240. If that happens then that’s not good for your devices.

More voltage is not better. Your PC does not run “stronger” on higher voltage. In fact, higher voltage creates more heat and stress inside components.

And if anything electric devices hate with a passion - that is heat.

Even though modern electronics are designed to tolerate a range of voltage they are not made to test extremes of that range.

The real problem is that our grid (WAPDA/LESCO supply) frequently goes outside safe limits, both above and below, especially in residential areas.

Fluctuations and Brownouts

A brownout is when voltage drops but power does not completely shut off. Your fan keeps spinning. Your lights stay on, just dimmer.

Low voltage forces power supplies to work harder to deliver the same power. This increases heat and stress inside the PSU. Over time, this kind of stress shortens component life.

Slow voltage drops are often worse than a clean power cut. A sudden shutdown is something modern electronics handle well. Being half-powered for minutes at a time is not.

Surge

Surge is very fast and high jumps in voltage. Spikes are similar too but they are even faster.

We usually experience spikers and surges during rain because that causes these cheap transformers in our neighborhoods to go crazy.

Lightning is not the main cause of spikes for most homes. The bigger culprit is switching. Grid switching, generator switching, big motors turning on and off nearby.

Spikes are dangerous because they do not always kill things immediately. They silently damage components until one day something just stops working.

Even though lightning and rains aren’t the main cause of electric surges, the low-quality transformers that go boom every time rain takes over contribute to these spikes that slowly cut down lives of electric devices.

Ground/Earth

Have you ever touched a metal part of an electric device like a washing machine bare foot and felt a tingling sensation? That is excess electricity moving around the device’s circuit.

This excess electricity that keeps on moving around our electronics is called ‘Ground’.

In proper scenarios, we create a path for this electricity to go to some place like literal earth so it doesn’t keep moving around our electronics. That is where the term ‘Earth’ comes from.

Grounding is usually implemented at the main power intake of a house so all of the connected devices can use that ground to dump excess electricity in their circuits.

That is when the third pin of a power cord comes into play:

Because many homes in Pakistan don’t have grounding and the wiring that supports it. We usually cut down the third pin that is normally an important part of a circuit.

However, in many Pakistani homes, “ground” exists only on paper. Either it is missing entirely or badly implemented. This matters because surge protection relies heavily on proper grounding.

Without a real ground, surge protectors have nowhere to dump excess energy. They still work to some extent, but far less effectively than advertised.

How Modern PC and Console Power Supplies Actually Work

Old vs Modern Power Supplies

Old appliances used simple (dumb) power supplies. They expected clean, stable input and reacted badly to changes in voltage.

Modern PCs and consoles use features like Switch Mode Power Supplies, or SMPS. These are far more flexible and intelligent. They can handle a wide voltage range and convert messy input into clean internal power.

Frequency changes matter far less today. Voltage quality matters far more. Dirty power still creates heat, noise, and long-term wear.

In a sense, modern power supplies have a built-in voltage stabilizer because they have to adjust the voltage to their liking anyways.

Inside a Modern PSU (High-Level Only)

At a very high level, a PSU takes AC power, cleans it up, converts it to DC, and then splits it into multiple rails for different components like fans, motherboard, hard-drivers, etc.

Active PFC (another protection feature) helps deal with inefficient input. Internal protections shut things down when something goes wrong. None of this is magic.

Wide voltage support does not mean infinite tolerance. It means survival, not comfort. Stable input still matters if you want a long life.

Consoles Are Not Special

PS5, Xbox Series consoles, monitors, and even TVs use similar SMPS designs.

They are not immune. They just fail more quietly. Instead of a dead PSU, you may get random shutdowns, controller disconnects, or strange system errors.

Consoles survive bad power longer, but they do not escape it.

Protections Your Devices Already Have

As time progresses, the usual pace is that technology gets better. And that has certainly happened with power supplies that we use in our tech devices.

With time, modern power supplies have gotten better at handling voltage and now most of the good power supplies have many built in protections.

Modern PSUs are smart, but they are not bodyguards.

Built-in Protections

Most decent PSUs include protections like over-voltage, under-voltage, over-current, short-circuit, and over-temperature protection.

These systems exist to protect the PSU and internal components from catastrophic internal failure. They are last-resort systems.

They react when something has already gone wrong.

Automatic Power Factor Correction (APFC) and Metal Oxide Varistor (MOV), are some of the terms used for these built-in technologies.

What These Protections Do Not Handle Well

Repeated brownouts slowly cook components. Poor grounding reduces the effectiveness of internal filters.

Large external surges can overwhelm protections before they react. Long-term stress is different from instant failure. Protections do not prevent aging. They only prevent explosions.

Relying only on PSU protections is like trusting airbags to replace brakes.

Common Pakistani Myths That Actively Kill PCs

In local households, we’ve seen our elders use big mechanical stabilizers to protect expensive devices like refrigerators, ACs, etc.

However, PCs, gaming consoles and much of the modern electronics are pretty different from traditional devices like refrigerators.

Many times, they don’t need the same protections because they operate differently than those devices.

A lot of bad advice comes from treating modern electronics like old appliances. PCs are not fans. Consoles are not refrigerators.

I’ll debunk some of the myths below:

The Famous Muhafiz Voltage Protector

The Muhafiz protector is basically a desi voltage protector with a relay and delay logic. It disconnects power if voltage goes outside a preset range, then reconnects after a few seconds.

Delay is not protection. It does nothing against fast spikes. It does nothing against bad waveform quality. It only helps during extreme over or under voltage events.

It is better than nothing, but it is not saving your PSU the way people think it is.

Old AVR and Stabilizers

AVRs (Automatic Voltage Regulators) were designed for motors, not modern electronics. They react slowly and often distort the waveform while adjusting voltage because they actually have a mechanical motor inside them.

SMPS units do not like distorted input. Harmonics create extra heat and noise inside the PSU.

These stabilizers made sense in the CRT TV era. They are a poor match for modern PCs.

Desi UPS

Many local UPS units output a rough square wave. This forces PSUs to work harder and run hotter.

Instead of clean backup power, you end up feeding your PC something worse than the grid itself.

A bad UPS can reduce lifespan faster than no UPS at all.

Which Protections Actually Matter for Modern PCs?

If you talk to ten different people about protecting a PC in Pakistan, you’ll hear ten different answers:

AVR lagao.

UPS zaroori hai.

Muhafiz laga lo kaafi hai.

Most of this advice comes from good intentions but poor understanding.

For modern PCs, not all protections matter equally. Some are critical. Others are legacy ideas that refuse to die.

Cutoff speed is one of the most important factors. When voltage goes out of range, how fast does the device disconnect power? Slow cutoffs mean your PSU is forced to operate in unsafe conditions for longer. That stress adds up.

Surge clamping rating decides how much excess voltage is allowed through before protection kicks in. Cheap boards often advertise surge protection but clamp too late to be useful. By the time they react, the damage is already done.

Output waveform quality matters only when something is actively modifying power. Devices that distort the sine wave make life harder for SMPS units. Clean power does not mean fancy power. It means predictable power.

Ground dependency is often ignored. Many protections assume proper earthing.

In our local homes where the ground is weak or fake, some devices lose a big part of their effectiveness. This does not make them useless, but it does change expectations.

Thermal and overload behavior decides whether a device fails gracefully or takes your PC with it.

Good protection sacrifices itself. Bad protection panics, overheats, or reconnects repeatedly.

Understanding these basics makes the next section much simpler.

Three Practical Ways to Save Your PC

There is no single perfect solution for everyone. Protection should match risk, budget, and hardware value. That’s why I’ve broken down solutions in my mind to 3 budget segments.

Solution 1: Voltage Protection (Cheapest Entry)

This is where most PC gamers in Pakistan should land because this is among the cheapest solutions you could have.

Modern voltage protection devices are very different from old Muhafiz units

Chinese devices like TOMZN monitor voltage digitally and disconnect power much faster. They allow you to set clear upper and lower thresholds.

Fast cutoff logic matters. Instead of waiting and hoping voltage stabilizes, these devices act decisively. That alone saves a lot of PSU stress.

Pairing voltage protection with a proper surge protector covers two major threats. Long brownouts and sudden spikes. This combination works better than AVRs because it does not try to “fix” bad power. It simply refuses it.

This setup still cannot create clean power. It only blocks bad power. But blocking bad power is often enough.

Pros:

• Strong protection per rupee

• No waveform distortion

Cons:

• No backup power

• Still dependent on grid behavior

Solution 2: Spike and Surge Protection (Mid-Range Sweet Spot)

Once you have gone through the first solution. This is the second level of protection anyone with a PC should consider.

A real surge protector absorbs and diverts excess voltage caused by spikes. It does not regulate voltage.

A surge protector does not provide backup power. Its job is to take the hit so your PSU does not.

Most surge protectors rely on MOV protections. These components clamp voltage once it crosses a certain threshold. Joule rating tells you how much energy the protector can absorb over its lifetime. Clamping voltage tells you how aggressively it reacts.

Extension boards do not count. If it has no surge rating, no certification, and no clamping spec, it is just a fancy socket strip.

APC-class protectors exist because proper surge protection costs money. Better components, better response, and predictable failure behavior separate them from local boards.

Pros:

• Cheap

• Easy to install

Cons:

• Needs proper grounding

• No voltage correction

• MOV protections wear out silently

Solution 3: UPS (Safest and Most Expensive)

A UPS is the most complete solution if done correctly.

Offline UPS units are basic and switch to battery when power fails. Line-interactive units add voltage regulation. Online UPS units constantly regenerate power but cost significantly more.

For home PCs, line-interactive is usually the practical choice.

Waveform quality matters a lot here. Square wave or stepped wave outputs force PSUs to work harder. Heat, noise, and long-term stress increase. This is why many desi UPS units slowly kill electronics.

A good sinewave UPS provides clean cutoffs, basic voltage regulation, and time for graceful shutdowns. It does not make WAPDA better. It just shields you from it.

A bad UPS is worse than none. Cheap batteries, poor inverters, and unstable switching undo all the benefits.

Pros

• Maximum protection

• Power continuity

Cons

• Expensive

• Battery maintenance

• Quality matters a lot

A Special Shout-out

Before writing this article, I came across this fine video by a local Youtuber with the name of GuyThatDoesEverything. This video not only helped me personally but inspired me to write on this too.

I really suggest that you guys watch this video, and maybe drop a like. It is such a good video breaking down the myths and providing affordable solutions to save our PCs and tech devices.

The video practically shows how modern PSUs work, why we don’t need big stupid stabilizers for our PCs and what protections we should go for, when on a budget.

Do not watch it and conclude that PSUs can handle everything. Watch it to understand where they struggle and what are your possible options.

You Can’t Fix WAPDA, But Your Setup

The sad reality is that our local power delivery companies just don’t give a damn about electronic devices used by their customers. You cannot control the grid but you can control what reaches your PC.

Power damage is dangerous for electronics. Hardware rarely dies in one dramatic moment. It ages, weakens, and eventually fails if bad power is supplied for a long time.

Cheap protection is better than none. Good Voltage Protectors are available for cheap in local hardware stores as well as online. But bad protection can sometimes be worse than none.

That’s why you must know what you’re buying and how it’s going to benefit your setup. It’s important that you consult a local electrician before implementing anything that we discussed here.

In the end, peace of mind matters above everything else. No one wants to worry about turning off the main switch every time their light flickers or the transformer goes out.

Further Learning

• What is a PSU: Power Supply Units explained - Corsair

• Protect your PC from transient power spikes

• How To Protect Your Gaming PC from Voltage Fluctuations & Power Surge?

• What is surge and How Does It Impact Your System?

• PSUs 101: A Detailed Look Into Power Supplies

• How to Avoid Power Supply Pitfalls

• Types of UPS Systems | Eaton

• How to Protect Your Computer from Power Surges: Complete Protection Guide

The internet throws around terms like security, privacy, encryption, anonymity, data protection like they’re interchangeable. They sound technical, important (a bit cool as well) But no one really slows down to explain what each one actually means - or why the differences matter.

I was in the same place not long ago. I thought I understood privacy in the digital world. Turns out, I didn’t. It wasn’t until 2025 that the gaps became obvious….

That’s what pushed me to write this piece.

The goal here is simple - Break down what privacy actually means, how it’s different from security, and why it matters beyond buzzwords and marketing language. We’ll look at it from multiple angles without assuming you already know the jargon.

Let’s get into it.

People unlock their phones dozens, sometimes hundreds of times a day. They share their location, contacts, habits, routines - all in exchange for convenience.

And then they wonder where their privacy went.

The irony is hard to miss.

We rant about surveillance and loss of control, but rarely acknowledge the part we played in it. The majority of us don’t even feel it happening anymore. We only wake up when something irreversible happens - something they can’t undo or forget.

And convenience is the real killer here.
In the digital world, it kills privacy.
In real life, it kills growth.

The reality is - We are wired for comfort & the moment something demands effort or thought, we avoid it. That’s how autopilot for our thinking becomes normal and later on…it affects tons of other areas of our life.

Think about it - In our modern society - decisions happen instantly. Accept. Allow. Skip. Agree. Our brains barely engage and this is really dangerous.

On top of that, we carry devices that track our location, sleep, steps, habits, and behavior patterns. Come to think of it - every activity of ours becomes a data point & this didn’t happen by accident. We literally designed a world where observation is the default and opted into it willingly.

Understanding Privacy and Security

Before we go deeper, clearing a very big misconception is important.

Yes, I am talking about privacy and security - sorry to surprise you but they are very different things. It’s not rocket science though, I have been there as well, not knowing the difference.

But here I am…

Let’s flip the switch for you as well.

What Privacy Really Means

First things first - privacy does not mean secrecy.

Privacy isn’t about hiding in the shadows or having something to be ashamed of. Privacy is simply about control. Control over who knows what about you, when they know it, and why they know it.

At its core, privacy is a basic human right. It’s your ability to draw boundaries around your personal information and decide how far those boundaries go. You don’t lose your right to privacy just because you live online.

Here’s a simple example:

• You choose what photos to post on social media.

• You decide whether to share your location.

• You control who can see your profile.

That “act of choosing” is privacy.

Most people think privacy disappears only when data is leaked or hacked. That’s wrong. Privacy is lost much earlier - it’s gone the moment systems decide for you what gets collected, stored, and shared.

So when we talk about privacy, we’re not talking about hiding information.
We’re talking about owning your decisions and in today’s digital world, that ownership is constantly being challenged.

What Security Really Means

Security is the machinery behind protection.

You can say - Security is the technical and procedural methods used to protect your data from unauthorized access, misuse, or exposure.

Think encryption, authentication, access controls, network defenses…etc All these act as looks on doors and protect your data.

But here’s the distinction that matters: security enforces privacy, it doesn’t define it.

A simple example makes this clear. End-to-end encryption secures your messages so no third party can read them in transit. That encryption is security and the fact that only you and the recipient can read the message - That’s privacy.

Privacy vs Security - The Great Confusion

Most people mix these two up, and the tech industry benefits from that confusion.

Security is about defense, it keeps attackers and outsiders away. Privacy is about control, it decides what data exists in the first place and who’s allowed to use it.

You can have excellent security and terrible privacy at the same time.

That’s because security is easy to market. A lot of buzzwords in the security world trigger trust. Words like: “End-to-End encryption”, “Safe”...etc

On the other hand - Privacy isn’t so easy to market. It asks uncomfortable questions about data collection, tracking, and consent and because of that, it often gets ignored.

This leads to another problem - tons of people start to assume something dangerous: if an app is secure, it must be private too.

Hate to break it to you, but that assumption is wrong!

Google is the perfect example. Your account is highly secure, but your behavior, location & habits are still tracked. Basically all of it is working perfectly as intended. You’ve probably noticed the rise of the de-Google movement across the internet and it didn’t come out of nowhere. People are slowly waking up to what’s happening behind the scenes and realizing that convenience came with a long, silent bill.

Anyway, let’s pull this back to the core idea.

Privacy is the goal, security is the tool.
Security enforces rules, but privacy defines the rules.

And here’s a small but important tip for you going forward:
When choosing any app or platform - look for both. Strong security and clear privacy boundaries. One without the other is useless.

The “Nothing to Hide” Myth

“I have nothing to hide” sounds reasonable - until you think about it for more than five seconds.

We’re all human, none of us are hiding secret body parts under our clothes.
Still, you close the door when you shower.

Why?

Because privacy isn’t about secrets, it’s about boundaries.

The problem with the “nothing to hide” belief is that it ignores how surveillance works in the real world. Being constantly observed not only records your behavior, it also reshapes it - People start to speak less freely, think less boldly, conform more…

And when this happens in a long enough time frame - people start to become puppets who neither think for themselves nor question anything.

Here’s another question for the ones who say we have “nothing to hide”:

“Would you still say this, if every text you sent became public tomorrow?”

Probably not.

A major reason for the slow erosion of privacy is having an apathetic attitude. People with such an attitude slowly start to lose control and when they do that - someone else starts to take it - Corporations, Governments, Data brokers…etc

And trust me they won’t use your data the way you would.

The Chilling Effect: How Being Watched Changes Everything

When people know they’re being watched or even suspect they might be - their behavior starts to change…

They start to speak less.
They start to search less.
They start to avoid topics that might look suspicious.

This is a psychological phenomenon known as the chilling effect. The interesting thing is you don’t need any laws or arrests to enforce it. The possibility of scrutiny is enough.

After the Snowden revelations exposed the scale of NSA surveillance, researchers observed something telling: traffic to privacy-sensitive Wikipedia pages dropped noticeably, People started getting more cautious.

Similar shifts were seen in Google search behavior, where users avoided terms they believed could draw attention.

This is where the myth breaks.

Surveillance not only bad behavior, it basically stops all behavior that carries risk - including curiosity, dissent, and independent thought.

I’ve seen this play out in real life too.

In my university, questioning ideas made me “that guy.” The one who didn’t agree. The one who thought too much. The punishment wasn’t explicit, but it was real enough that everything started to suffer - my grades, my reputation…etc

And the fix wasn’t improving arguments.
It was simply shutting up, I had to wear a sheep’s mask to survive.

Now scale that up.

Today, people get arrested for online speech. Others get flagged for using privacy-focused operating systems . Everyone sees what happens to the first few and the rest learn the lesson without being told:

I guess, this is the part defenders of surveillance miss.

A society that behaves only because it’s watched is a weak society and it only produces people who comply and never question.

How We Gave Our Data Away

Humans are wired for convenience.

Our brains naturally gravitate toward whatever feels easiest and demanding. If something removes friction, we adopt it without thinking twice.

The people pulling the strings understand this perfectly.

Modern apps are engineered with the help of behavioral psychologists who study how humans think and function. Every interaction is optimized to reduce resistance and increase compliance.

Notifications act as dopamine hooks.
Personalized ads target moments of human weaknesses
‘Accept all’ buttons are highlighted while privacy options are buried.

By itself, each function seems harmless but collectively, they add up to something bigger - a system where data is taken through comfort.

And that’s the key point.

We didn’t lose privacy because we didn’t care.
We lost it because convenience felt easier than control.

So - “Why do people keep using these apps?”
Because these apps work, they save time and they remove effort. And in a world optimized for speed, anything that slows you down feels like friction.

That is how we give our privacy away - bit by bit.

If you want to go deeper into how these trade-offs work and what’s actually going on behind the scenes to nudge you towards making choices that aren’t even yours, you should give the following pieces a read:

How Tech Eats Your Privacy

Privacy erosion today is gradual. Almost every tech product we touch takes a small bite out of it. Phones, cars, home assistants, smart TVs, fitness watches - nearly everything connected now collects, profiles, and reports back.

Take smart TVs. In 2025, Texas sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense, and TCL for allegedly capturing screenshots of what users watch every couple of milliseconds and selling that data to advertisers. The tech behind this is called Automated Content Recognition (ACR).

In plain language - your TV was watching you watch it - snapping frames, sending them back to servers and building a complete profile on you without you knowing it.

I haven’t written a deep dive on this yet, but props to - he breaks it down properly. If this interests you, read his piece here:

Secrets of Privacy

Smart TV Privacy Settings: How to Disable Tracking on Every Brand

Read more

7 months ago · 92 likes · 15 comments

Now zoom out:

• Rideshare apps track movement.

• Health apps sell behavioral data.

• Wearables log your body.

It’s the same pattern everywhere.

That is called surveillance creep and it’s powered by one thing - “data as currency.” And yes, this involves your data.

The Global Picture: Weak Laws, Strong Watchers

When people talk about privacy, they often frame it as a personal problem.

But this is a global not a personal problem.

In the West, surveillance is market-driven. Liberal democracies like the US, EU, UK, and Canada outsource data collection to Big Tech. Companies harvest behavior at scale, while governments lean on legal access.

The EU is often cited as a privacy leader, yet even there, anonymity is literally dying. Digital ID systems are being normalized, and proposals like chat control show how quickly safeguards bend when power demands it.

If you want to understand that trajectory, I would recommend checking out the following pieces:

Anyway, back to the topic.

In the East, surveillance is state-centric. Countries like China, parts of Russia, and Iran don’t hide the model. Monitoring is centralized and control is explicit.

Basically these countries don’t even try to hide what they are doing.

Then there’s the Global South - Pakistan, India, Africa…etc These regions simply absorb the rules and comply with them.

And guess what you get in result?

A Western-style corporate data extraction paired with Eastern-style state overreach, with almost no legal protection against either.

Another important thing is that – such regions have massive populations, cheap smartphones, weak enforcement of privacy laws…etc. That makes them low-risk environments for experimenting with invasive systems at scale.

Companies roll aggressive data collection, default opt-ins, preloaded apps, and surveillance-friendly features without facing lawsuit or fines backlash and once these systems work - they’re refined and later enforced in other regions as well.

And on top of all this - we also have the illusion of consent.

Cookie banners, consent popups, dark patterns - systems designed to look like choice while guaranteeing compliance. In result you get - weak laws, powerful watchers, and a digital ecosystem that extracts maximum control while pretending to ask permission.

Why Privacy Still Matters

If you’re still here, good. That already puts you ahead of the autopilot majority.

I get it, you must be getting all sorts of questions…

“Does privacy even matter now?”
“Can we even do anything about it?”
“Should we just give up?”

I would advise you to shut out those voices for now.

And keep in mind that - Privacy still matters because behavior changes under observation. When people know they’re being watched, they start to self-censor. Over time, that turns into compliance and eventually, individuality fades. You stop acting like yourself and start acting in ways that feel safe and acceptable.

This is called conditioning and that is what will happen when you give up.

So keep fighting and know that - Privacy is the right to decide who you are without invisible systems nudging and scoring every move you make. And without privacy, you don’t get to choose who you are.

If you’re wondering where the solutions are, don’t panic, slow down…
This was just a foundational piece and I’d strongly recommend reading this next to build a solid baseline:

From here, I’ll be rolling out a privacy guide series – I’ll be explaining how to reclaim control, reduce exposure and take back control of your digital life.

This is just the beginning.
Stay tuned.

Share what you think below.

And if you want more content like this, hit subscribe and restack. I’m on a mission to help people see through the noise, and make them understand what’s going on behind the curtain.

But for this to reach more people, I need your support. Subscribes and restacks aren’t just numbers - they’re what keep this mission alive and spreading.

Dive Deeper

Supply of PC components is always under some form of threat especially when a new tech hype cycle starts.

Back in COVID-19 days, GPUs were the hot thing because Crypto miners and Web3 guys just couldn’t get enough of them.

A similar scenario has shown its face but this time in the form of exponentially rising NAND and RAM prices.

What’s NAND flash you may ask? To put it simply, it’s the main thing that powers your SSDs.

NAND flash stores data really fast and permanently and is the dominant storage we use in everyday electronics.

NAND flash is the foundational storage we have in our PCs, smartphones, gaming consoles, etc.

Now, NAND flash is permanent storage but RAM is where temporary data is stored when a computer is running. It is a very fast form of storage that is refreshed many times a second to store new data.

Basically, almost all modern computers, be they giant PCs or small smartphones, use some form of NAND flash and RAM to function properly.

Recently, consumers like you and me have seen RAM and SSD prices hit the roof as they’ve become 3-4 times (that’s 300-400%) the prices from just a few months ago.

Shops are revising RAM and SSD prices every week and a lot of uncertainty clouds us as we start 2026.

This sudden increase in prices of NAND is due to a couple of reasons and we’ll go over the most important ones in this piece and try to see how the short-term future of consumer hardware looks like.

Some Context And How We Got Here

The Post-Pandemic Situation

To understand why RAM and SSD prices are climbing today, you have to go back to 2022–2023. During the pandemic, PC makers, phone brands, and data centers overestimated how long demand would stay high.

Because many of us were going online and buying new computers, memory manufacturers ramped up production expecting permanent growth. That demand didn’t arrive.

By 2023, the industry had excess RAM and NAND flash. Prices collapsed to historic lows.

SSDs became absurdly cheap, and RAM kits dropped hard. Analysts said that NAND and DRAM prices were falling because warehouses were full and buyers had stopped ordering new stuff.

This oversupply hurt manufacturers badly. Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix all reported steep drops in memory revenue and profit.

For consumers, this was great. For companies, it was bleeding money.

Oversupply Reaction

In this excess supply, The memory industry did the only thing it could do. It cut supply.

Starting late 2023 and continuing through 2024, the three biggest memory makers - Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron - began aggressive production cuts.

Some estimates put these cuts anywhere from 20 percent to over 50 percent depending on the product line. Kioxia and Western Digital followed similar strategies on the NAND side.

These were not small adjustments. Wafer starts were reduced, fabs were idled, and expansion plans were delayed.

Samsung publicly acknowledged that it was reducing memory output to stabilize prices, breaking from its usual strategy of maintaining volume at all costs.

The goal was simple: stop the price free-fall and return memory to profitability.

AI Enters The Chat

The cuts worked. But at the same time, a new source of demand arrived: AI infrastructure.

By late 2024 and into 2025, demand for RAM and SSDs returned sharply - but production had not.

Memory supply was now tight just as buyers started ordering again. Micron warned investors that DRAM and NAND shortages could extend into 2026 because demand was recovering faster than capacity.

This mismatch between lower supply and rising demand is the foundation of today’s price increases.

Why Are RAM Prices Rising Today?

I’ll try to answer this question in the form of three pillars. I feel that talking in threes makes it simple to understand, which is the whole point of this article.

1st Pillar - AI Eats Memory & SSDs, Not Just GPUs

AI is usually discussed in terms of GPUs (that’s true), but GPUs are useless without memory. Training and running modern AI models requires massive amounts of RAM and extremely fast storage (SSDs).

GPUs themselves use RAM too but AI servers use far more RAM than traditional servers.

Estimates say that AI workloads require several times more RAM than conventional cloud workloads. That demand comes directly out of the same supply pool used for consumer RAM.

Data centers training large models store huge datasets on enterprise SSDs, not hard drives.

SSDs are faster, and AI workloads need speed. This is why AI data centers use high-capacity SSDs instead of old and slow hard-drives.

When hyperscalers buy memory in bulk, supply in consumer markets gets lower and thus stuff gets expensive for us.

2nd Pillar - Memory Makers Follow the Money

Most of the price increases in RAM and NAND simply come down to:

Money!

Money!!

Money!!!

Just as George Orwell said in his infamous 1984:

All RAMs are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Enterprise customers pay more and sign long-term contracts which means more business. Faced with this simple reality, memory manufacturers are prioritizing data centers over consumer RAM and SSDs. This is basic business.

They can make more money, they make more money.

Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung have all stated that enterprise and AI-related demand now drives their memory roadmaps. Consumer RAM and low-end SSDs are simply not the priority they once were.

Some companies like Micron have completely shut down their consumer RAM divisions in favor of AI datacenter demand that generates them way more business than us peasants :\

This means fewer chips end up in our gaming PCs, even if overall production looks stable on paper.

3rd Pillar - Making Memory Is Getting More Expensive

Even without AI, memory is no longer cheap to make. Newer NAND and DRAM processes are also getting more expensive, and take a lot longer to ramp. Fewer usable chips per wafer means higher cost per gigabyte.

TrendForce notes that advanced NAND production has higher costs and slower yield improvement, which limits how quickly supply can respond to demand spikes.

This quietly puts a floor under prices. The days of endless cheap SSDs were an anomaly, not the norm, at-least no more :\

The Ripple Effect: Who is Getting Hit?

The Consumer Segment

Right now, the memory market is behaving like an executive club where the biggest, richest customers go first.

Hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI lock in long-term, high-volume contracts for both RAM (DRAM) and SSD storage (NAND flash) years before they actually need it.

Because these companies buy at such scale and often pay a premium to secure capacity, memory makers increasingly allocate production to them first, leaving smaller buyers with what’s left.

Because of these expensive contracts, prices for conventional DRAM have risen to about 3-4x by the end of 2025. Similarly, consumer SSD prices have also jumped.

When enterprise customers hoard available memory supply, consumer markets overflow.

That means PC builders, laptop makers, small OEMs, and smartphone brands often have to wait longer or pay more for the same DRAM and NAND that used to be abundant.

In the end, us consumers who need RAM and SSDs inside our PCs, consoles, laptops, smartphones are being hit the most.

We’re not OpenAI who could spend billions on securing premium RAM contracts. We hunt for discounts and best possible deals for our purchases.

This simply isn’t good enough for manufacturers from a business perspective and that’s why they’re not prioritizing consumers at the moment.

Upcoming Smartphones

This year we’re going to see new phones released with significant increases in their prices because phone manufacturers are also taking a hit when buying new RAM.

For us consumers, this translates to:

• Base models with less memory - Phones that used to ship with 12 GB RAM may now ship with 8 GB at the same price point.

• Smaller storage tiers becoming the default.

• Price stagnation or even increases compared to prior generations, even when other components stay similar.

An industry report warns that rising RAM costs may increase production costs per device by 8–15 percent and dampen demand, especially for entry-level phones where margins are already thin.

So, if you have a good smartphone working for you. It’s better to stick with it for as long as this AI bubble stays with us.

PC And Gaming

If you’ve tried to build or upgrade a PC recently, you’ve probably felt the memory pinch.

A couple of months ago I built my PC with a humble 16 GB DDR4 kit. Turns out now the RAM costs more than half of what I paid for my complete PC.

Mainstream tech outlets have shared that enthusiasts are seeing RAM costs two to four times higher than a few months earlier.

This doesn’t just affect hobbyists - OEMs like Dell and Lenovo are feeling it too. SSDs are also in a similar boat because they use NAND flash.

For gamers and PC builders, the result is:

• Budget SSDs become more expensive, especially in the 1–2 TB range.

• RAM kits at popular sizes (e.g., 16 GB DDR5) are often priced higher or temporarily out of stock.

• Overall PC builds get expensive, making mid-range gaming builds noticeably more expensive than a year ago.

Even consoles and handhelds may not escape this pricing mess. Especially upcoming hardware like the Steam Machine, PlayStation 6 or the rumored XBOX.

Geopolitics And Alternative Players

Memory supply is not entirely a technical story - it’s somewhat geopolitical too.

One of the big wildcard players has been China’s YMTC (Yangtze Memory Technologies), which plans to increase its share of the global NAND flash market.

However, Western sanctions and restrictions on high-end semiconductor equipment limit how much YMTC can directly manufacture, particularly at advanced process nodes.

At the same time, governments in the US, Japan, and Korea are pouring subsidies into memory fabrication under programs like the CHIPS Act.

These incentives are meant to expand future capacity for DRAM and NAND production, but fabricating memory takes years, and these facilities won’t materially ease supply until 2026–2027 at the earliest.

There’s also a broader concentration effect similar to CPUs: a handful of companies (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) still dominate memory production, and only a few alternatives have the ability to scale quickly.

Even companies traditionally on the consumer hardware side, like ASUS, have shown interest in manufacturing partnerships to diversify the ecosystem.

But those efforts remain early and won’t change the global supply picture in the short term.

Impact: A Structural Shift in Computing

When RAM and SSD storage become expensive, devices that were once treated as disposable start looking like long-term investments.

In these cases, people hold onto phones and PCs longer, reparability and memory upgrades become valuable again, and manufacturers face pressure to design for longevity.

At the same time, expensive local storage drives users toward cloud services.

Instead of buying massive SSDs for a laptop, many now opt for subscription-based storage because it spreads costs and avoids steep upfront memory expenses.

On the gaming side of things, one positive could be that developers are now forced to spend more effort into optimizing their video games so they can run on a larger net of hardware that isn’t all bleeding edge.

I feel this applies a lot in the PC gaming space where developers haven’t shown that big of an interest in game optimization like they used to.

Now that the PC hardware has become expensive for many, developers would need to ensure game optimization if they want to sell big numbers.

Is there an end in sight?

The short answer is: We don’t know (specifically, I don’t).

Some industry people are already warning that we could be in a prolonged memory pricing cycle. While many say that this is an AI bubble waiting to be burst.

Analysts project DRAM and NAND price increases continuing into early 2026, with contracts rising quarter-on-quarter.

Because as supply stays tight and demand, especially from AI and data centers, remains strong, prices will rise.

New fabs are coming online in 2026–2027 thanks to government subsidies and long-term expansion plans.

But memory fabrication lead times are quite long (usually multiple years), so even these new facilities will not immediately return prices to the cheap era of 2020–2022.

Normalization depends on whether demand stabilizes or continues to grow faster than supply. And this thing is the hardest to predict. We just don’t know how far this AI bubble will continue to expand.

How I See All Of This?

One thing is clear that this pricing situation doesn’t look like it’s temporary for just a couple of months.

The memory market is undergoing a structural change as it fills the demand we never saw. And this demand is exponential both in terms of hype and the money being flowed in.

Today we’re seeing everyday consumer devices compete directly with hyperscale data centers (having billions of dollars) for the same RAM and SSD supply.

These large companies don’t have trouble raising billions and dumping those to RAM manufacturers for premium chip contracts.

And considering that only a handful of companies in the entire world can scale at modern RAM and NAND manufacturing, the situation looks bleak.

A ray of hope for me would be Chinese companies if they scale on par with the big manufacturers. But I’d keep my hopes limited because I think it will take some time too.

Because we call ourselves ‘Tech Optimists’ here at SK NEXUS, it’s hard for us to be all that negative out here.

It’s true that consumer hardware went through a rough ride last year and it seems like 2026 may be no different. But it’s also true that investor-frenzy at-least at this level would come down one day or the other.

Global financial markets can’t stay stupid for long. True valuations and profits would have to show face and I think we’d see the consumer market improve.

And for those who are looking to buy PC hardware right now, the key is to buy stuff only when you need it and try not to feed into the hype or those trying to sell that everything’s going bad.

Further Learning

• RAM: WT* - Gamers Nexus

• How Did RAM Get So Expensive? And How it’s Going to Get Worse…

• Is the beginning of the end for consumers?

• RAM price hikes: the latest on the global memory shortage - The Verge

• RAM is ruining everything - The Verge

• Many high-capacity NVMe SSDs are now as expensive as gold by weight - Tom’s Hardware

• AI data centers are swallowing the world’s memory

• What is NAND flash memory?

Some time ago, Coffeezilla dropped a deep dive into the world of gambling - the kind that exposes the whole system. I watched it casually at first, then I rewatched it and after that…I started diving down.

That’s when I realized how deep this thing actually runs.

What would have been a quick side curiosity turned into days of researching and connecting dots. Every time I thought I’d reached the end, there was another layer underneath. Another system doing exactly what it was designed to do - just quietly.

I didn’t plan to write about this right away. In fact, I kept putting it off because it demanded some real work.

But here I am…because my curiosity won against my laziness.

Let’s get started.

Picture a streamer cracking open a loot box. Lights flash, chat explodes and the dopamine starts spiking. It feels spontaneous and this scene plays out millions of times a day.

But behind all this - sits a carefully tuned reward system, built to keep players spinning, opening and chasing. This is what most people don’t realize – everything right from the first spin was engineered.

This brings us to today’s topic - “Gamblification” - know that, it didn’t arrive overnight. It evolved from Gacha game design, mobile engagement loops and the psychology of slot machines. Today, it’s threaded into modern gaming so tightly that most people don’t even recognize it for what it is.

Read this piece closely and the systems will reveal themselves. You’ll start noticing the same tricks outside gaming too. Banking apps, shopping platforms, influencers. All using the same psychological playbook.

This post will focus on gaming because it exposes the mechanics best, but these patterns stretch across your entire digital life.

Where the Pattern Was Born

To understand how gamblification spread into everything around you, we need to rewind to the starting point. Before the loot boxes took over the West and before every app learned these tricks, there was one ecosystem that perfected the formula.

Gacha games.

This is where the framework took shape. Once you see how it began here, everything else that came after it will automatically start to make sense.

What is a Gacha Game?

A Gacha game is built on a simple mechanic: you spend in-game currency and you get a random reward. Players call it pulling, rolling, or spinning, but the core idea is the same - you trade resources - sometimes earned through gameplay, sometimes bought with real money for a chance at something better. A new character, a rare skin, a powerful item.

And the randomness you see in the Gacha system is controlled probability. Developers behind the scenes are the ones pulling the strings. They are the ones who decide the drop rates, the rarity tiers, the banners…etc. You never fully know what you’ll get, but the system always knows exactly how often players are allowed to hit the jackpot.

The entire experience is designed to make the process feel harmless while quietly nudging you toward one more pull and the whole mix of uncertainty and structure is what keeps people rolling.

Why is it Called Gacha?

To understand the name, you need to go back to Japan. The word “Gacha” comes from Gachapon. This word stands for toy vending machine capsules.

Okay, but what do vending machines have to do with mobile gaming?

The randomness factor.

You put in a coin, twist the handle, and out comes a sealed capsule with a mystery toy inside. High chance of something common & a tiny chance of something rare.

That’s the blueprint - Mobile games took this exact system and digitized it. Instead of plastic toys, you get characters, costumes or currency. Instead of coins, you spend gems, tickets, or whatever in-game currency the economy revolves around.

Well…what’s the outcome?

It’s a feeling - a rush right before the capsule drops, hoping this time you might end up getting something special.

How Does Gacha Work?

The entire system runs on drop rates - fixed odds that decide what you get every time you pull.

Everyone’s favorite ultra-rare characters sit at the bottom of the probability chart, often below one percent and the only way to get them is through the Gacha itself. There’s simply no alternative.

So, if Jimmy wants the coolest skins, then he will have to roll until the game finally hands that to him.

Did you notice the pattern?

All the rare items are locked behind this single mechanic and unlocking it requires rolling for a very long time - This keeps the player hooked to endlessly pulling the lever and ultimately this mechanism makes them addicted to the game.

And pulling isn’t free either - if you want to pull more often, you’ll have to buy more currency and this does the perfect job of putting holes in the player’s wallet.

Another interesting thing is - almost every Gacha-driven title is free-to-play & people think they can progress without paying. In reality, the deeper you go, the more the system tightens. If you want to stay competitive or avoid looking like a starter player forever, the game slowly pushes you toward spending.

Gacha System vs Loot Boxes

People love to mix up Gacha and loot boxes together.
At surface level, sure - both hand out randomized rewards, usually tied to items, skins, or currency.

Both systems need fuel - either in-game currency or real money - yet their role inside the game is pretty different.

Gacha is the core economy.

It’s the primary way players unlock what they actually need to progress. This can include - characters, upgrades, power boosts - in a way, Gacha is the beating heart of the game’s monetization loop.

That’s why games using this system get their own label: Gacha Games.

But loot boxes? They are merely a side hustle.

A loot box is just a bonus mechanic sitting on top of the main progression. Whatever’s inside can usually be earned somewhere else - often slower, but still doable.

In short, loot boxes just complement the game, they don’t define it.

So the relationship works like this:

• Gacha → always central

• Loot box → optional

And here’s another important thing to keep in mind:

All Gachas are loot boxes
But, not all loot boxes are Gacha

Why Gacha Breaks Players

Gacha has a reputation problem and it’s earned.
People call it “gambling in disguise” because that’s exactly how it behaves. Same reward loops, same adrenaline spikes & the same crash when the result isn’t what you hoped for.

And the addiction hits everyone.

You’ll find horror stories everywhere. A Fate/Grand Order player spent $70,000 chasing his favorite characters. A YouTuber burned $7,200 on Genshin Impact before publicly denouncing Gacha and behind every viral story are thousands of smaller ones, people who felt baited into paying and regretted it the moment they stopped.

Governments did try to do their part…
Some countries now require public drop rates, while others have straight-up outlawed certain Gacha practices.

But companies are always coming up with new workarounds, so governments can’t really solve this issue.

Anyway - the real trap is that - Gacha games are free to play, but progression without spending is basically impossible. The design keeps pulling you toward new characters, better skins & limited items that always look just slightly out of reach.

Natasha Dow Schüll writes in Addiction by Design that - many gambling addicts don’t play to win, they chase the escape, slipping into what she calls the machine zone. Gacha leans on that same psychological loop.

If you’re curious about how these systems manipulate you, give the book Addiction by Design a read or you can also check out my article on dark patterns:

The Digital Casino We Built Ourselves

You’ve seen how the Gacha system works.

Now zoom out.

That mechanic didn’t stay in Japan. Its success became a blueprint because uncertainty makes money.

Here’s where the modern industry now stands:

• Western studios folded the same system into loot boxes, cases, and daily spins and somehow sold it as “innovation”.

• Mobile developers pushed it even further, building whole economies around random pulls and character drops.

And underneath it all sits the real engine - psychology tuned for addiction. Reward loops, dopamine spikes, manufactured desire and you’re about to see how each piece holds players in place.

The upcoming sections are going to be an eye-opener. From the rise of mobile Gacha and Valve’s Arms Deal update to the behavioral tricks engineered to keep players hooked - we’re about to peel the whole thing back.

The Blueprint: How Gacha Took Over Mobile Gaming

The Origins - Gacha Was Born on Phones

The digital Gacha craze traces back not to a triple-A console smash but to a modest 2010 mobile card game called Dragon Collection.

The game was launched on the Japanese social-gaming platform GREE, the entire game was built around randomized pulls. You spent virtual (or real) currency, drew dragon-cards of varying rarity - That unpredictability and uniqueness turned into a formula.

Following Dragon Collection’s success, a wave of mobile titles incorporated Gacha mechanics and some exploded.

One early standout was Puzzle & Dragons (launched 2012). In this game - players used premium currency to summon monsters - then built teams to tackle dungeons.

Then in 2015, Fate/Grand Order leveled up the game. It added story, deep characters, constant updates, and basically made everything 10x better.

And here’s the interesting part about the Gacha system: it works almost too well in character-driven games. Role-playing-games (RPGs) offer a natural fit for Gacha because progression is more than about gear or levels, it’s about collecting unique characters through chance, then upgrading them.

That collection + uncertainty + power spike loop acts as a dependable monetization engine.

And once the profits showed up, every major studio took notice. A system that started as a niche Japanese experiment turned into a global standard, powered by randomness, addiction, and an endless stream of content updates.

Asian Markets: Where Gacha Became a Machine

If you want to see Gacha at its peak, look East.

In Japan, nearly all of the top 200 grossing games include some form of Gacha - a level of adoption you won’t see anywhere else in the world. The system started here, and it still thrives the most here.

Zoom out to the wider Asian mobile game market and that’s when you will notice something even bigger.

Asia dominates global revenue charts. In 2022, three of the top five countries by mobile game revenue were Asian:

• China: $42B, 744M players

• Japan: $13B, 77M players

• South Korea: $5.2B, 34M players

Together, they form the bulk of the $110B global mobile gaming market. And even with a slight slowdown from 2021, Asia’s growth still outpaces most other regions.

This is exactly why Gacha took off here. The scale, the spending habits, the “pay small, pay often” culture - everything aligned.

When the West Realized Gacha Was a Cheat Code

Once Asia started printing billions, the rest of the world paid attention.

Studios in the West realized something interesting - you don’t need to reinvent the ladder, you just copy the one already climbing to the money.

Asian developers had already proven the model:

• Low friction & constant micro-spend

• Unpredictable rewards

• Infinite monetization runway

Western teams got the message fast: “Why sell a game once when you can charge forever?”

And so they imported the formula:

• CS:GO weapon cases - created an entire secondary market where skins turned into speculative assets.

• Apex Legends - leans heavily into cosmetic loot boxes and limited-time pulls.

• Overwatch - turned loot boxes into a cultural moment (I played this game a lot)

These are just some of the games off the top of my head. In reality the whole world is filled with games running on this model.

By the way - if you think these titles were inspired by Gacha, then you are wrong.
Because these games are themselves Gacha - re-skinned, rebranded, and wrapped in western aesthetics.

And just to be clear - Western studios didn’t reinvent the wheel. They just imported a system that was already proven to work, and turned it into a permanent revenue engine.

Valve’s Arms Deal Update: When PC Gaming Joined the Casino

The mobile world not only normalized Gacha - it also perfected it and once the system matured in Asia and spread across the West, something bigger happened: PC gaming picked it up and turned it into an ecosystem of its own.

This is where the story shifts.

You can put it in this way:
If mobile games taught players to spin and roll. Then, everybody’s favorite company - Valve - They taught players how to gamble with style and profit not just with flashy skins, but with a full-blown market and a global trading economy that made virtual items feel more real than half the assets people buy in the physical world.

And it all started with one update.
One decision that turned a shooter into a digital casino.

Now let’s talk about it.

The Day PC Gaming Became a Digital Casino

Up until 2013, most PC shooters treated aesthetics as optional flair - if there were skins or alternate looks, they were usually flat-rate purchases or part of optional DLCs. But on 14 August 2013, Valve launched the Arms Deal Update for CS:GO.

And in that update - Valve didn’t just add a few skins. They introduced weapon cases (loot boxes), randomized cosmetic drops, and real-money trading via the platform’s marketplace. Everything you got had a rarity and a trade value. Suddenly, winning the skins started feeling like hits in a slot machine.

Basically the game update reset the baseline expectation for PC gaming monetization. After 2013, “pay once” became “pay forever”

What the Arms Deal Update Actually Introduced

When Valve rolled out the Arms Deal Update on 14 August 2013, it created a full-blown digital economy around cosmetics and chance. If you weren’t or still aren’t a hardcore gamer, here’s a quick summary of what happened:

• Weapon Skins - Purely cosmetic changes, but each skin had rarity and desirability, creating an internal economy. Players suddenly valued looks as much as performance.

• Crates - The first proper Gacha-style element in PC shooters. Randomized item drops turned collection into chance-driven excitement.

• Keys - Paid items needed to open crates. You can think of this as a “pay to try” mechanic that perfectly mimicked gambling loops.

• Instant Secondary Market - Skins and items could be traded and sold on Steam Marketplace and different third-party sites. Prices were insane - Knives and rare skins sold for hundreds & thousands of dollars. These sites also allowed users to bet skins, further blurring the line between gaming and betting.

Basically, this update transformed CS:GO from a tactical shooter into a microtransaction-driven gambling ecosystem. Players were investing, betting, and collecting.

Why this Was a Turning Point

The Arms Deal Update shifted expectations around what a free PC game could deliver. By enabling skins with real-world value and tradability, it created a backdoor into gambling.

That opened up tons of new doors of consequences:

Within a couple of years, numerous unregulated gambling websites had popped up, letting players bet skins on casino-style games or eSports outcomes. These platforms made skin monetizable and nearly anybody could join, including minors.

And because the base game was so easily accessible - many players (especially teenagers) entered a gambling loop under the disguise of “just playing games.” And the sad thing is that the majority of kids weren’t always aware of what they were getting themselves into.

Meanwhile, social pressure - cultivated by influencers/content creators streaming case openings also played a key role in reinforcing gambling behavior.

Over time, the system evolved into a proper digital sub-economy: skins became speculative assets, sites offered roulette, money flows entered and exited via third-party exchanges, and gambling culture wrapped itself under the banner of gaming.

Long story short - with one update, PC gaming opened the door to an industry-wide transformation - where gameplay, economics, and gambling merged. What looked like harmless cosmetics became a hidden gamble, often for players too young or naïve to realize the stakes.

The Moment Everything Clicks Together

Online gambling is already a monster on its own - we’re just peeling one layer right now. And once you connect the dots, the CS:GO ecosystem starts to look like the early blueprint of digital gambling as we know it.

And this all starts with a simple fact:

“Valve turned a shooter into a casino and acted like the house wasn’t theirs”

The Arms Deal update planted the exact mechanics casinos thrive on - slot-machine animations, suspense bars, rarity colors - the whole psychological toolkit and this isn’t a coincidence. Modern game studios literally hire behavioral psychologists to make video games addictive.

Anyway, you must be wondering: “So why don’t regulators slam all of this shut instantly?”

Because Valve played the Pachinko card:

“We don’t let players cash out directly, therefore it’s not gambling”

A technical truth - but practically meaningless.
Third-party marketplaces made selling skins effortless, and Valve knew it.

And it took major scandals, underage betting, influencer fraud - before regulators even blinked. Sure, Valve reacted - but only enough to appear compliant. Big sites were pressured, some shut down. Others resurfaced, but the cycle continued, just more discreetly.

Which leads to the two running theories of mine:

• Deflection works - As long as the world blames third-party casinos, nobody questions the design of the crates themselves. The spotlight moves away from Valve, even though they engineered the system that made those casinos possible.

• Indirect profit is still profit - Valve indirectly profits from the hype, speculation, and drama around skins. Killing the ecosystem entirely would hurt the very revenue stream they created.

How Games Hack Your Mind

You’ve seen how Valve took a simple idea and turned it into a global money machine. The model basically exploded, but why did it work so well? Why do crates, keys, spins - type of mechanics affect people this hard?

That part is the actual design.

Game studios build behavioral funnels. Character attachments, fear of missing out, sounds pulled straight from slot-machine labs and yes - actual psychologists hired to tune the system.

And now that we’ve covered the “what” and the “who” - it’s time to dig into the “how.”

Let’s break the machine down.

Behind the Hooks: The Psychologists Engineering Your Play

Let’s talk about the people behind the curtain - the behavioral scientists.
Their job is simple on paper - make the game sticky.
That’s the word they use. “Sticky” Neither fun nor meaningful.

These specialists map out where you hesitate, where you get excited, where you’re most vulnerable. They tune the timing of animations for maximum effect, they adjust sound frequencies to hit dopamine triggers.

And the real goal isn’t fun.
Fun is the bait.
The real goal is retention + monetization.

If you want the deeper breakdown of how these systems manipulate you at a subconscious level, check out my post here - it expands this exact idea:

The Pachinko Loophole and How Games Copied It

To understand today’s gaming economy, you have to understand pachinko.

Inside a pachinko parlor, the rules look clean - you win silver balls, you exchange them for items or prizes. There isn’t any direct payout happening. So legally, it’s not gambling.

But walk around the block and you’ll find different exchange booths. You can take your silver balls there, and suddenly they’re worth real money.

Two separate businesses on paper - one seamless pipeline in reality.

All this sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

It’s because Gacha-driven games use the same blueprint.
Take Valve for example - it doesn’t let you cash out skins inside Steam, so the company gets to say: “No real-money gambling here, bro.”

Meanwhile, third-party casinos convert those skins into dollars, crypto, whatever you want. The ecosystem thrives because the exit door is always outside the building - exactly like pachinko.

Here’s a video to make things even more clearer for you, jump to 5:00 to get at the part which is relevant:

And the wild part is this:
Everyone sees the loophole, no one closes it.

Visual Addiction: When Character Design Becomes the Hook

In mobile RPGs, designers know dopamine hits aren’t enough.
So they add something stronger - visual appeal that keeps players emotionally locked in.

That’s why so many games lean into exaggerated, hyper-sexualized characters and this goes way beyond Gacha - you’ll find the same tactic in shooters, RPGs, strategy games, even casual titles.

Designers build characters that trigger attachment, desire, and obsession.
Their goal is to make you want the character - enough to keep logging in, grinding, pulling, and spending.

And this isn’t a joke, all this stuff genuinely affects players.
There are people losing relationships, sabotaging routines, and spiraling into unhealthy behavior because the game engineered emotional hooks that feel just real enough.

The System Was Never Neutral

By now, the mechanics should feel familiar.

Dopamine spikes, fear of missing out and the illusion that you’re in control - that the next pull or the next spin is where you win.

But all of this is just the design.

These systems are built to hook emotions first and logic later.
They target anticipation, reward, loss aversion - and wrap it in the language of fun and choice.

Sure, some of this enhances gameplay, but in practice, the priority is rarely enjoyment alone. Majority of the times - the priority is engagement metrics, return frequency, and monetization.

When you connect everything we’ve covered - mobile Gacha, Valve’s crates, pachinko loopholes, character design - a single theme emerges:

You might not be the one who is playing the video game, perhaps it’s the opposite and now that you have seen this, maybe it’s time to decide whether you want to keep pulling the lever.

The Influencer-Gambling Pipeline

Next, we move to the part nobody likes to talk about.

This part involves - Influencers, streamers, eSports teams, gambling sites and the money connecting them.

This is where loot boxes and skin markets turned into culture. I’ll break down how creators became marketing funnels, why entire careers ended up dependent on casinos and much more…

Let’s start.

How Creators Normalized Gambling

Influencers literally replaced traditional advertising altogether, they became the primary channel for bringing gambling into gaming culture.

A single streamer can reach hundreds of thousands of viewers in real time. According to recent industry research, as many as 75% of the top 300 CS:GO streamers on
Twitch have been sponsored by gambling websites, with some carrying multiple sponsorships simultaneously - even after policies technically banned these deals.

On top of that - these partnerships aren’t always transparent. Investigations have documented gamblers being given site-provided funds to stage exaggerated wins on stream, creating the impression that big payouts are normal when, in reality, those wins were funded by the sponsor and programmed to generate hype.

By the way, do you see how valuable trust is in this ecosystem?

That trust is a currency and it’s routinely monetized against the audience, often without their knowledge. I’ve broken this dynamic down in detail before, you might want to check this one out as well:

Anyway, back to the topic.

Many viewers don’t even realize they are watching ads. They think they are watching their favorite creators gambling live and win win big - a powerful psychological lure for young and impressionable audiences.

A recent report shows that 43.5% of skin gamblers started before age 18, and three in four of their parents had no idea it was happening, often because they learned about gambling through streaming and social platforms.

Also, you don’t have to take a report’s word for it.
You can see it for yourself:

And by now, you must have realized that - this is not accidental.

Kids weren’t seeking out gambling, gambling was delivered to them disguised as content wrapped in entertainment.

The Cost of Staying Clean

At a certain scale, gambling sponsorship stops being optional. You can’t play the long game or even the short game without someone backing you up.

As crazy as it sounds, it’s true.

According to analysis referenced in TrustPlay’s 2025 skin-gambling report, a 2024 investigation by Barron’s found that 120 of Twitch’s most-watched Counter-Strike streamers were sponsored by skin gambling sites, with some receiving offers of up to $200,000 per month.

This pressure intensified because platforms like Twitch failed to enforce gambling promotion rules for years. Before formal bans were clarified and applied, creators who declined gambling deals could literally watch peers grow faster - fueled by casino money, giveaways, and boosted visibility. - Dexertohow highlighted this particular issue as well.

That’s how the spiral formed.

One creator says no.
Another says yes and grows faster.
And the algorithm simply rewarded growth.

So even creators who felt uneasy - end up becoming a part of the same system, because the system makes refusal feel like career suicide.

Here’s another interesting video you can give a watch:

How Gambling Became eSports Lifeline

For years, eSports survived on money most fans never saw.

As eSports Insider reports, gambling sponsors - particularly skin-betting platforms - became critical revenue sources for CS:GO teams at a time when other brands stayed away. These sponsors were often the primary source of financial stability for organizations trying to stay afloat.

No example captures this better than FaZe Clan.

According to owner Ricky “FaZe Banks” Bengtson, FaZe didn’t have enough cash to buy the G2.Kinguin CS:GO lineup they had their eyes on in 2016. To close that gap quickly, Banks and collaborators created a skin gambling site and operated it from Antigua, where they could legally license a real-money gambling platform.

That operation reportedly grossed about $200,000 a day, providing a sudden and substantial revenue stream that helped fund the team acquisition and content expansion

Banks also described the setup as a grey area because CS:GO skins had no official real-world value, but since the money was rolling in - FaZe just kept on leaning into it for their eSports ambitions.

Game Informer revealed that multiple FaZe members failed to disclose their relationships with gambling sponsors, violating advertising rules and drawing attention from regulators. This situation drew some serious ethical and regulatory questions about transparency in influencer promotions.

Despite years of controversy - Valve officially banned skin gambling in late 2025 from official Counter-Strike 2 events including team jerseys and tournament broadcasts - underscoring just how deeply embedded these deals had become before publishers and regulators acted.

The Streamers Who Made Gambling Cool

High-profile streamers like xQc and Adin Ross normalized gambling by broadcasting it to massive, youth-heavy audiences. Studies and surveys consistently show teens discovering betting platforms through streamers, not ads, reinforcing how creator trust outperforms traditional marketing.

Behind the scenes, these weren’t organic play sessions. Reporting has shown creators receiving sponsor-controlled funds and scripted wins. Basically - content designed to manufacture excitement and suppress perceived risk.

In short - Viewers were simply watching a conversion funnel disguised as gameplay.

And the money explains everything. TrustPlay’s reporting shows gambling contracts ranging from six figures to multi-million-dollar deals. At that scale, refusal becomes economically irrational - especially when peers cash in and grow faster by doing the same.

If you are a parent reading this - you may not recognize the names, but your kids do & that’s the problem.

And although I mentioned only 2 names, but that’s not the point - the point is - they’re the most visible examples of a wider ecosystem where influence equals leverage and kids are the collateral.

Who Really Profits From the Game

Earlier, I claimed that Gaming Companies like Valve don’t actually run the gambling sites, but it profits from the ecosystem that feeds them. I just wanted to take out a second and expand on that point a bit.

Think about it - Skins, markets, every case-opening - all that exists because Valve created them. Even a blind man can see that Valve created the infrastructure that gambling platforms monetized at scale. The company collects value from the system while avoiding direct exposure to its consequences.

That mirrors real-world betting almost perfectly. Sportsbooks like Platforms like DraftKings and 1xBet rely on influencers and entertainers to sanitize risk under the label of fun, all while claiming users ‘choose’ to gamble.

Cultural icons accelerate the process - Joe Rogan, Kevin Hart, and top gaming personalities publicly acknowledge gambling harms - while continuing to promote betting platforms or related content.

I could sit here and list dozens of names, but the list is endless.
But I’ll stick to one. Because everyone knows him - Joe Rogan.

For years, Rogan openly compared gambling to drug addiction. He’s called it as destructive as cocaine. He’s talked about how it rewires the brain and all that.

And then you see the same guy promoting DraftKings - one of the largest gambling platforms on the planet.

Do you see the point?

Gambling companies don’t win by convincing reckless people. They win by throwing absurd amounts of money at people with influence. Enough money that even those who know better stop caring.

Greed is the lever and it works on both ends:

- The influencer takes the deal.
- The audience downloads the app.

Both of them end up as puppets - one paid to normalize it, the other nudged to participate.

What the West Normalized, the Rest Will Absorb

For years, the West has been the testing ground.

Loot boxes, online betting, Influencer-led gambling promos…etc. We got entire ecosystems engineered and optimized for being addictive. What started as a form of entertainment has turned into business infrastructure.

Sitting in Pakistan, it’s easy to feel insulated because right now there aren’t any legal casinos or any DraftKings banners on every corner.

But that safety is temporary.

Pakistan has a habit - ignoring the West’s good things and importing its worst ideas instead and now, the same gambling mechanics are slipping in.

Recent arrests & public controversies are proof of all this. Proof that this ecosystem doesn’t need casinos or billboards. It just needs phones and influencers.

So, what do I think?
I believe what happened in the West won’t stay there. Everything will repeat with a different face & same psychological hooks. And right now, it’s more important than ever to get your guards up.

By the way - If you’re starting to connect dots you hadn’t before, these pieces will sharpen your lens further:

Why We Keep Falling for It and How to Fight Back

At this point, one thing should be clear:
This system is pretty dangerous and it relies on you.

And also a lot of you must be wondering - if it’s so obvious, why do we keep falling for it? And why does it keep working?

Because this isn’t about weak willpower.
It’s about digital addiction by design.

The game is built to make you do more than just play, it’s built to make you pay . Everything around you is engineered to push impulsive decisions and the most effective trick of all?

Everyone thinks they’re immune and that belief is exactly how the system wins.

Anyway, here are some practical ways to defend yourself:

• Slow the loop - Anything pushing urgency is trying to bypass thought.

• Reduce exposure - Mute notifications and skip streams that hype easy wins.

• Track incentives - Ask one question: Who benefits if I click this? The answer is rarely you.

• Distrust generosity - Just because a screen shows big numbers, or free rewards doesn’t mean any of it is real. A lot of times those bonuses are just marketing costs, designed to pull you in

• Never trust blindly - You heard it right, don’t trust your favorite influencer either. You don’t actually know them, you see a curated version of them - often one that’s being paid to sell you something.

This mirrors something well-known in security: social engineering.

You must have heard about systems being hacked, but have you heard about people getting hacked? Yes it’s possible and attackers succeed because humans act impulsively and believe they’re too smart to be fooled.

If this way of thinking resonates, and you want to sharpen it beyond gambling - this deep dive expands the framework:

The Final Piece of the Puzzle

If you made it this far, good. Most people drop off before the uncomfortable part.

I saved the final piece of the puzzle for the end - because without it, everything you’ve read so far feels fragmented. With it, the whole system feels aligned.

Here’s a simplified version of the hierarchy:

Streamers → Casinos → Regulators → Gaming Companies

If one streamer refuses a deal, another takes it.
If one gambling site shuts down, five clones appear overnight.
If one country bans it, VPNs or some other loophole is built to bypass the restriction.
If regulators step in, (they rarely do) and when they do, barely anything changes.

And Gaming Companies? They sits at the center.
You can see how - at the end of the day, it all comes down to them, because they company control and own the economy, rules and the infrastructure that makes all of this possible.

Honestly, let’s stop pretending this is complicated.

In reality, if gaming companies wanted to meaningfully disrupt the ecosystem, it could.
If they wanted to break the loop, they already knows how, but since doing that isn’t profitable, that’s why they are never going to do that.

Companies like Valve have us believing that the whole problem is sustained by individuals making bad choices. But, it’s not true - It’s sustained by a structure that rewards exploitation and punishes restraint.

And until that structure changes, the cycle will keep running - quietly and exactly as designed.

Now It’s Your Turn

I’ve said enough. Now it’s your turn.

• If this same system were targeting your younger sibling or child, would you still call it harmless?

• Should companies that control digital economies also be responsible for the harm those economies cause?

• Is this a failure of individuals or a system designed to never be held accountable?

Share what you think below.

And if you want more content like this, hit subscribe and restack. I’m on a mission to help people see through the noise, and make them understand what’s going on behind the curtain.

But for this to reach more people, I need your support. Subscribes and restacks aren’t just numbers - they’re what keep this mission alive and spreading.

Dive Deeper

• Joe Rogan Drops Blunt Take On Gambling Using UFC and NBA ‘Scandals’ as Examples - EssentiallySports

• The Most ‘Based’ Company in Tech? - A Dive into Valve

• $400 Million Rich Kevin Hart Still Promotes Gambling for Money, Coffeezilla Calls Him Out

• https://www.counter-strike.net/armsdeal

• The Illusion of Choice: How Tech Decides Before You Do

• YouTuber blasts “predatory” Genshin Impact after spending $7,000 - Dexerto

Let’s kick off the new year right, with a piece on something that doesn’t get much attention but probably should.

If you’ve been paying attention to gaming hardware lately, something weird is happening. The lines between consoles and PCs are getting blurry; and not by accident.

In the video games industry, we’re seeing a carcinization happen right before us as the two giants; PlayStation and Xbox turn more into actual PCs.

For a long, platform-exclusive games have been the selling point of gaming consoles. People used to buy consoles just to play games from franchises like The Last Of Us, Uncharted, God Of War.

In fact, more than the games, the hardware of these consoles has also started to become just like that of PCs. The newer consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X use the same CPU and GPU architecture as PCs.

It feels that the consoles are fighting for their identity and Microsoft has only made it more obvious as they think of the next Xbox as a PC.

The general trend for AAA gaming appears to be moving towards PCs and as new entrants like Valve enter the market, we’re going to see some exciting shift going forward.

In the midst of this exciting trend, a devastating situation is emerging as the RAM pricing going as far as 400% in just a couple of months.

This exponential increase in RAM prices would have a far-reaching impact on both PCs and consoles going forward, and I’ll touch a little bit on that too in this article.

Here’s an overview of what this article would talk about:

• Some history of the earlier consoles and what made them special

• Why consoles are converging to PCs

• What’s the strategy for the three big players (Sony, Xbox, Nintendo)

• How Valve’s entry may shake things up

• What the future looks like

When Consoles Were Truly Different

Video Game Consoles are generally divided into generations. This isn’t a definitive list but most people generally agree on it.

The First generation of consoles starts with the likes of Atari 2600, released back in the 1970s. As of 2025, we are on the Ninth generation of consoles.

Covering all of the generations isn’t the point of this article. That’s why we’ll start our discussion with the Sixth generation of consoles that roughly starts from the year 1998.

Note: For each of the console generations, I’m taking the release year as the starting point and the launch of the next generation as the ending point for the previous one.

Sixth Generation of Consoles (1998-2004)

The sixth generation of consoles is when the PlayStation 2, the original Xbox, Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo GameCube released. All of them were released around late 1990s to early 2000s.

To date, PlayStation 2 is the most sold gaming console with over 160 million units sold. The Xbox was a huge success too selling over 24 million units and this generation is the one that got us classics like HALO, God Of War.

Seventh Generation of Consoles (2005-2011)

This is believed by many to be the best generation. That is because we had some of the best competition from both sides (Sony and Microsoft) that delivered unforgettable experiences.

The seventh generation got us consoles like the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and the gaming catalogue that includes Demon’s Souls, The Last of Us, Gears of War 2, Halo 3, and many more.

Eighth Generation of Consoles (2012-2019)

The eighth generation began in 2012, and is made up of four home video game consoles:

1. Wii U

2. PlayStation 4

3. Xbox One family

4. Nintendo Switch

On the AAA front, PlayStation 4 was a huge success with classics like Bloodborne, God Of War (2018), Marvel’s Spiderman. The Xbox One was sadly the console that started Xbox’s decline that continues to date.

Console vs PC hardware

Up till the seventh generation, most of the gaming consoles were custom-built devices that had everything from their processor and graphics chips that were specialized.

All the way from early Sega consoles to PS3, most of these consoles had custom processors. The PlayStation 3’s main processor (Cell Broadband Engine) was notorious for being hard to develop games for.

The original Xbox, although used x86, switched to a custom processor architecture (PowerPC) for the Xbox 360 which shifted again to x86 for the Xbox One, that released in 2013 (talk of U-turns :p).

On the PC side, things were pretty simple. Historically, they’ve been only two processor manufacturers, implementing the same x86 processor architecture.

To this day, it holds up. The x86 processor architecture still reigns supreme in the PC space, but tides are turning.

I’m discussing these technical details just to build up the context for the next section.

The point is that gaming consoles historically have been custom devices that were built differently from computers. Their processors, their graphics chips, were very different from PCs.

To sum it up: Consoles weren’t PCs - they were purpose-built machines with unique hardware identities.

Consoles Becoming PCs

The Hardware Side

We just talked about the history of consoles and how they have largely been different from PCs. While that was true for a long time it isn’t the case these days.

Modern consoles, especially the two big ones; Xbox and PlayStation, have shifted this approach and now they’re almost a PC from a hardware perspective.

Starting with the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (2013), the hardware has started to look a lot more like that of PCs.

It turns out that both Sony and Microsoft have contracted with AMD to produce their PlayStation 4 and Xbox One hardware.

Both companies are using the same processor design (Zen) and more importantly they use the same Instruction-Set Architecture that is used by PCs (x86).

If you don’t know what Instruction-Set Architecture is, I’ve written a clean blog explaining it in a simple way. You can check it out below:

Using x86 means that the games that developers write for the consoles are relatively easy to port over to PCs because the underlying architecture is the same as PCs.

And that’s part of the reason why we’re seeing Sony exclusive titles make their way to the PC.

Before the PS4 and Xbox One generation, consoles from both sides used custom processors that had completely different processor architecture to PCs.

Not only were they difficult to develop with but also it was a nightmare to port those games over to the consoles. That is part of the reason we still have classics like God Of War 3, still not available on PC to date.

The point is that today’s consoles like the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series S/S are fundamentally the same as a PC from a hardware perspective. They use the same CPU architecture that PCs use, they use the same GPU architecture that the PCs use.

But that’s not at all to say that all consoles are now similar to PCs, we still have a big player like Nintendo whose consoles aren’t that similar to a PC.

While the two big console manufacturers have shifted to PC hardware, that isn’t to say that everyone has done that.

In fact Nintendo is a great example of a console manufacturer that uses the ARM architecture for its consoles. Its approach still looks like that of the previous consoles where much of the console is pretty different from a PC.

The Software Story

It looks like the hardware for both PCs and modern consoles is converging. While that’s true, the software side is also in a weird spot.

Back with the earlier consoles, games were primarily developed for specific consoles oftentimes by the game studios owned by console manufacturers. Take Naughty Dog for example, who created the Uncharted and The Last of Us franchise.

The game studios were provided with devkits for the consoles and they had access to the exact specifications of the consoles that they were developing games for.

But these days, a large community of developers (especially indie ones) focus on developing first for the PC and then porting it over to consoles. Previously, the exact opposite used to happen.

Still, many large studios prioritize developing on consoles because that gives them access to a stable hardware platform that they’ve been accustomed to.

Xbox: The Console that Became a PC

The Console That Once Was

Xbox started out as an answer to PlayStation, and Microsoft gave Sony a great run for its money with its two successful consoles; the original Xbox and Xbox 360.

Xbox 360 was Microsoft’s last hit and the console on the hardware side was a true console with custom processor architecture, good exclusives and overall a great package at a good price.

That’s the reason the Xbox 360 sold over 85 million units!

But starting with Xbox One (2013), things began to take a totally different turn, and that too for the worse.

When the two consoles (PS4 and Xbox One) were against each other back in 2013, Xbox One just didn’t have a chance and since then Microsoft has taken a different approach to Xbox as a platform.

Microsoft no longer sees Xbox as a console but rather an extension of Windows. Their Game Pass subscription looks more like the product than the console.

The recent price hikes to Game Pass have also weakened the argument for it which was a strong point for the Xbox platform for quite some time.

Modern Xbox uses PC hardware - It has the same processor architecture and design as a regular PC processor, the story is the same for the GPU and storage.

On the software side too, Xbox uses the Windows kernel and cross-store apps. And the Xbox app on PC also supports many of the Xbox games already taking more of the exclusivity away from the console.

More than anything else, the modern Xbox has a perception problem. It is simply seen as a Windows PC that is somehow limited.

If you strip an Xbox Series console down to its fundamentals, what you’re left with is basically a Windows PC in a console-shaped shell. Microsoft stopped pretending otherwise a while ago.

The current Xbox uses the same x86 architecture. A Windows-like OS. Similar development tools. And increasingly, the same software library.

Game Pass Subscription

With Game Pass, Microsoft made it clear that the real product isn’t the Xbox box sitting under your TV.

It’s the subscription. New first-party games now launch day one on both Xbox and PC, and sometimes don’t even bother pretending that one platform is more important than the other.

On paper, this sounds great. One ecosystem. One library. Play anywhere.

In practice, it created an identity problem. To a lot of players, Xbox now feels like a small Windows PC that you’re not allowed to fully control.

You’re locked into Microsoft’s store, locked into its UI decisions, and locked into its update system.

And that store has a reputation problem of its own. Bugs, broken downloads, UI issues, and random errors are common complaints on both PC and console.

That frustration got worse when Game Pass prices went back up just recently. Back in October, Microsoft issued a 50% price increase to Game Pass out of nowhere.

When you’re paying more every month, you start asking harder questions about what you’re actually getting. And for many players, the answer felt like “a PC, but worse.”

Microsoft’s strategy of putting its first-party games everywhere only accelerated this feeling. When Xbox exclusives show up on PlayStation, Switch, and PC, the console loses the one thing that historically justified its existence.

Xbox is already a PC. It just doesn’t offer the openness people expect from one.

Sony: Slowly Becoming a PC Company Too

Sony’s shift has been quieter, but just as important.

At first, PlayStation games coming to PC felt like a bonus. Older titles like Horizon Zero Dawn and God of War showed up years later, long after their console runs had peaked. It felt harmless, even smart.

Then the gap started shrinking.

By 2024 and 2025, Sony became much more comfortable talking about PCs as a core revenue stream. Big PlayStation titles were no longer “never coming to PC,” just “not yet.” In some cases, that “yet” wasn’t very long.

And that creates an uncomfortable question for PlayStation too.

If the hardware is increasingly PC-like, and the games eventually come to PC anyway, what exactly is the PlayStation box selling you? Convenience? Branding? Timed exclusivity?

Sony still has more cultural gravity than Xbox. PlayStation is tied to decades of iconic franchises and moments. But that also means Sony has more to lose.

Xbox already embraced being a service-first platform. PlayStation’s identity is still built on the idea of a special box that plays special games. That identity is now under pressure.

Sony isn’t fully there yet, but the direction is clear. The more PlayStation leans into PC revenue, the harder it becomes to justify a closed console ecosystem.

Sony isn’t fully “crabified” yet like Xbox, but the evolution is happening. PlayStation’s identity is at stake more than Xbox’s.

Nintendo: The Last Traditional Console Maker

Nintendo lives in a completely different universe.

While Sony and Microsoft chased performance and parity, Nintendo opted out of the race entirely. Its hardware has never been about specs.

It’s about form factor, interaction, and first-party games that are designed specifically for that hardware.

The Switch didn’t succeed because it was powerful. It succeeded because it was different.

Nintendo’s biggest franchises don’t just run on its hardware. They are shaped by it. Mario, Zelda, and Pokémon exist inside a tightly controlled ecosystem that doesn’t need PC parity to thrive.

You buy Nintendo hardware because you want Nintendo games, not because it competes with your PC.

That’s why Nintendo feels oddly immune to this whole “consoles becoming PCs” trend. It’s not trying to be a PC. It’s not chasing raw performance. And it doesn’t rely on third-party parity to justify its existence.

If current trends continue, Nintendo might be the only major console maker left with a truly distinct identity by the end of this decade.

Valve’s Return to the Living Room: The GabeCube?

Valve already tried to turn the PC into a console once, and it failed hard.

Steam Machines, first announced in 2013 and quietly abandoned a few years later, were supposed to bring PC gaming into the living room. The idea was cool, but the execution wasn’t.

Linux gaming support was weak, driver support was inconsistent, and the experience varied wildly depending on the manufacturer.

Most importantly, there was no compelling reason for regular players to choose a Steam Machine over a PlayStation or Xbox. There just weren’t that many games to play.

Fast forward to the mid-2020s, and almost every problem that killed the initial Steam Machines no longer exists.

SteamDeck’s Success & Valve’s Edge

The Steam Deck wasn’t just a successful product. It was proof that Valve finally solved the hardest problem in PC gaming: making it feel console-like without killing what makes PC gaming powerful.

Proton now runs the vast majority of Windows games with minimal effort from the user. SteamOS 3 is stable, fast, and purpose-built for gaming. And Valve controls the full stack in a way it never did before.

This matters because Valve doesn’t need exclusives to compete.

There’s a more detailed answer to Why SteamDeck Won, you may checkout my recent article on the topic to learn more:

A living-room SteamOS console today would launch with access to tens of thousands of games on day one. Not future promises. Not “coming soon.” Actual libraries people already own.

That alone gives Valve a structural advantage that Sony and Microsoft simply don’t have. More importantly, Valve understands something the console makers seem to be forgetting: trust.

Steam has spent two decades building goodwill with PC players. Refunds are simple. Mods are supported. Community features are first-class citizens.

The platform doesn’t fight its users at every step. When Valve ships hardware, people are willing to give it the benefit of the doubt because the software ecosystem already works.

The Steam Deck succeeded not because it was powerful, but because it respected the player. It didn’t lock you out of other stores. It didn’t pretend to be something it wasn’t. It was honest about being a PC, just one designed to be approachable.

Steam Machine 2.0

The recently announced Steam Machine could take that same philosophy and scale it up. Standardized hardware. Controller-first UI. Seamless suspend and resume. Couch-friendly ergonomics.

This time, Valve isn’t asking people to gamble on Linux gaming. It isn’t asking devs to write games for Linux. Proton compatibility layer is now mainstream, documented, and battle-tested.

If you’re wondering what Proton compatibility layer is about. I covered it in detail in my SteamDeck article that I shared in the previous section.

Even major publishers like EA and Ubisoft have had to quietly accept that their games run well on Linux via Proton, whether they like it or not.

If Valve prices the Steam Machine aggressively, the impact could be massive.

What does the Steam Machine mean for Sony & Microsoft?

For Sony, it would accelerate the pressure to justify PlayStation hardware at all. Why buy a closed box when a Steam console gives you your entire PC library and future access to everything else? For Microsoft, it could be existential.

Xbox already struggles with identity. A successful Steam console would complete Xbox’s transformation into “a PC ecosystem without hardware relevance.”

Valve doesn’t need to win the console war outright. It only needs to destabilize it.

And unlike Sony or Microsoft, Valve doesn’t need hardware margins to survive. Steam prints money. Hardware is leverage, not a lifeline.

That’s what makes Valve the most dangerous player in this entire convergence story.

It doesn’t need to rush. It doesn’t need to overpromise. It can wait until the moment is right and quietly ship something that reframes the entire market.

That’s why Valve is the biggest dark horse in the console/PC convergence race.

The Storefront War: Steam vs The Rest

By 2026, the most important battlefield in gaming is no longer silicon, teraflops, or console form factors. It’s storefronts.

Hardware has become increasingly commoditized. CPUs and GPUs across platforms are closer in capability than ever. Even consoles now resemble tightly controlled PCs, sharing similar architectures and development pipelines.

What actually differentiates ecosystems today is not the box under the TV, but where your games live, how easily you can access them, and how much trust you place in the platform holding your purchases.

This is where the gap between Steam, Microsoft, and Sony becomes glaring.

State of Microsoft Store

The Microsoft Store is widely regarded as one of the weakest major digital storefronts in gaming. This reputation didn’t form overnight.

Years of buggy downloads, stalled updates, broken installs, confusing UI changes, and poor error reporting have eroded user confidence.

These problems exist both on Windows and across the Xbox ecosystem, where the Store is unavoidable.

What makes this worse is that Microsoft forces interaction with the Store. Even users who would otherwise avoid it are pushed into it through Game Pass, system updates, and platform-level integrations.

For a time, Game Pass softened the blow. The value proposition was strong enough that users tolerated the experience but that value is gone too after price hikes leaving gamers furious.

When the price goes up, flaws stop being “quirks” and start being deal-breakers.

Sony’s PC Strategy

Sony now appears to be considering its own PC storefront, and this is where things get especially risky.

On paper, the move makes sense. Sony wants more control over revenue, data, and customer relationships.

Sony selling its games through Steam means giving Valve a cut and surrendering platform-level influence. But launching a new storefront in 2025 isn’t like launching one in 2005.

Why is Steam So Hard to Replace?

Steam already exists, and more importantly, it already works better than the others. Steam isn’t dominant because it’s the only option. It’s dominant because it consistently does the basics right.

On Steam:

• Downloads are reliable

• Refunds are straightforward

• Cloud saves are mostly invisible in the best way possible

• Mod support is deeply integrated

• Community features aren’t an afterthought

Over time, Steam has accumulated not just libraries, but goodwill. That goodwill is incredibly hard to replicate.

Sony’s reputation on PC is already mixed. Account requirements, regional lockouts, and inconsistent support have caused backlash even when Sony releases games on Steam, a platform people trust.

Moving those same users to a proprietary Sony storefront would mean asking them to give up features they already like in exchange for… what, exactly?

Exclusives alone are no longer enough. Players have learned that “exclusive” often just means “delayed.”

Once users expect a game to arrive elsewhere eventually, the leverage of exclusivity weakens. Without a superior platform experience, a new storefront becomes friction instead of value.

Steam, by contrast, has become the gold standard almost by accident.

Valve rarely markets Steam aggressively. It doesn’t need to. Steam’s power comes from being boring in the best possible way.

It’s predictable. It doesn’t fight users. It doesn’t constantly redesign itself to chase trends. It quietly improves infrastructure while letting players focus on games.

If you’re tempted to learn how Valve wins without ‘doing’ anything, here’s another recent article we did going to lengths into the company’s origins and major breakthroughs:

That’s why storefront dominance matters more than hardware in 2025.

A storefront isn’t just where you buy games. It’s where recurring revenue lives. DLC, expansions, cosmetic purchases, subscriptions, cloud saves, and social features all flow through it.

Hardware is sold once. Ecosystems extract value continuously. This is why every major company wants to own the store, not just the console.

Storefronts also enable ecosystem lock-in in ways hardware no longer can. Your friends list, achievements, mods, screenshots, play history, and library size all create inertia.

Switching platforms doesn’t just mean buying new hardware; it means abandoning years of digital identity. Steam understands this better than anyone, which is why it invests heavily in features that make leaving feel costly, but staying feel comfortable.

Cloud gaming and cross-device support further amplify this effect. A strong storefront follows you across desktop, handheld, living room, and eventually the cloud.

Steam already spans most of these contexts. Microsoft is trying to do the same, but its storefront experience undermines its ambition. Sony is entering late, without the trust buffer Valve has built over decades.

This is why Valve entering the living room with serious hardware should not be underestimated.

Valve’s Ecosystem Strategy

If Valve ships a standardized SteamOS console and their new VR headset, it doesn’t need to convince users to adopt a new ecosystem. The ecosystem is already there.

The hardware simply becomes another access point. Suddenly, the strongest storefront in gaming history is no longer confined to desks and keyboards.

It’s on the couch, under the TV, paired with a controller or strapped to your head with controllers in your hands.

At that point, Sony and Microsoft aren’t competing with consoles anymore. They’re competing with an ecosystem that already owns player loyalty.

And unlike its competitors, Valve doesn’t need to force adoption. It doesn’t need exclusives. It doesn’t need subscriptions to be mandatory. It only needs to make access easier.

In a world where consoles are increasingly PC-like, the best ecosystem wins.

What Consoles Become After 2025

By the time we pass 2025, the shape of the modern console is no longer confusing. The industry has converged, and the “crab” form is unmistakable.

• Modern consoles now share the same x86-64 architecture as PCs

• They run operating systems derived from desktop-class kernels

• They rely on the same engines, the same graphics APIs, the same middleware, and increasingly the same binaries

• Ports are no longer special events; they are the default

• Development pipelines assume multi-platform releases from day one

This convergence wasn’t accidental. It was the logical outcome of rising development costs, lengthy production timelines, and the economic pressure of maintaining custom platforms.

Writing custom hardware architectures and bespoke software stacks became a liability rather than a competitive advantage. As a result, consoles stopped winning by being fundamentally different.

In earlier generations, hardware identity mattered deeply. The PlayStation 2, Xbox 360, and even the PlayStation 4 era were defined by architectural quirks, proprietary APIs, and tightly controlled ecosystems.

Owning a console meant buying into a unique technical environment. Developers optimized for it. Players accepted its limitations because there were no alternatives. That era is over.

Why Flashy Specs Don’t Matter?

In the post-2025 landscape, consoles are best understood as curated PCs with fixed specifications. They exist to simplify access to gaming. Their value lies in predictability, ease of use, and smooth ecosystems rather than raw technical specifications.

This is why hardware specs have lost their narrative power. Teraflops no longer move audiences. SSD speeds no longer dominate headlines. Performance parity across platforms has flattened expectations.

When everything runs well enough, “more power” stops being a selling point. Instead, access becomes the metric that matters.

Consoles are no longer sold as machines; they are sold as gateways. Gateways to libraries, subscriptions, social graphs, cloud services, and cross-device play. The box itself is secondary.

What matters is how frictionless it is to reach games. This is where ecosystem battles replace hardware battles.

An ecosystem decides whether your purchases follow you across generations. Whether your saves sync automatically. Whether your friends list persists. Whether your library expands or fragments over time.

The more invisible these systems become, the more valuable they are.

Microsoft understands this, which is why Xbox hardware increasingly feels like a delivery mechanism for Game Pass rather than a product with its own identity.

Sony is moving in the same direction more cautiously, expanding PlayStation into a broader services platform rather than a single-device experience.

Valve approaches the problem from the opposite end, letting the ecosystem exist independently of hardware.

In all cases, the console’s role is shrinking relative to the catalog it unlocks.

This shift explains why exclusivity has weakened as a strategy. Exclusives once justified hardware ownership. Today, they mostly justify temporary hardware ownership.

When users expect games to arrive elsewhere eventually, the urgency to commit to a single box disappears. Consoles must therefore compete on convenience rather than scarcity.

And convenience is not about power. It’s about continuity.

What Matters, Then?

A successful post-2025 console minimizes decision-making. It remembers your preferences. It works across devices. It respects your time.

It doesn’t fight you over updates, storage, or licensing. It makes accessing your catalog feel inevitable rather than conditional.

Consoles sit alongside handhelds, PCs, cloud clients, and mobile devices as one of many ways to reach the same ecosystem. This is why multi-device strategies are no longer optional.

A console that only works in the living room is incomplete by modern standards. Cross-progression, cross-buy, and cross-save are not “features” anymore. They are expectations.

Consoles promise stability. They promise compatibility. They promise access without friction. In doing so, they quietly acknowledge that differentiation through hardware alone is no longer viable.

This also explains why nostalgia-driven arguments about consoles “losing their soul” feel both accurate and incomplete.

Yes, consoles have lost some of their mystique. They are no longer strange, bespoke machines with exotic architectures. But that loss of mystery is the price of scale.

You cannot build global, cross-device ecosystems on fragile, hyper-specialized hardware. The future console is boring by design.

It exists to disappear behind the software layer, leaving only the experience of the catalog itself. In that world, the best console is not the most powerful or the most unique. It is the one that feels least obstructive.

This is the final stage of convergence.

After 2025, consoles do not win by being different from PCs. They win by being the best way to not think about PCs at all.

What I’m Excited For

For me, the console and gaming industry as a whole is in a transition period. A period where we not only have standardized hardware across the big players but also one where we’re seeing some real shifts happening.

The current generation of consoles isn’t exciting for me. We just don’t have as impressive of a first-party games catalogue like we had with the previous generations.

Both PS5 and Xbox have serious improvements from a game performance POV but there just haven’t been that many games to be excited about, at least for me.

A lot of what has me excited for the future of gaming comes from Valve. Their recent announcement on their upcoming hardware like the Steam Frame, Steam Machine and their controller is what I’m really looking forward to.

Valve doesn’t call their Steam Machine a console but it’d directly compete with the likes of Xbox.

For me, I’m excited about the underlying software technology that Valve is bringing with their hardware.

Their open approach to figuring out game compatibility across operating systems and hardware through layers like Proton, Fex is really exciting for me.

And for some reason I personally believe that Valve just wouldn’t pass the moment of releasing Half-Life 3 with the Steam Machine. I mean, could there ever be a better time?

What I’m Scared Of

I’m generally excited for not just new hardware that’s coming up this year especially from Valve which includes the Steam Frame, Steam Machine and the controller.

But the ongoing price increase of RAM does make me concerned about the future of gaming atleast in the short-term while the AI bubble continues to make consumer hardware out-of-reach for many.

In the last couple of months we’ve seen RAM get 4x the price of what is used to be just few months ago.

A 64 GB kit of DDR5 RAM now costs more than a Playstation 5!

And as I write this, RAM prices continue to increase. I went to a Gaming PC shop a month or so ago and they were quoting RAM prices on weekly basis.

What this means is that going forward new launches of consumer hardware be it consoles, PCs, even laptops and smartphones would be expected to cost more simply because of more expensive RAM.

It is also possible that if the situation continues to go out-of-hand, companies may delay hardware releases for the time being.

To discuss this RAM crises in detail, I’m working on a detailed article that answers why is RAM suddenly expensive, how far can it go, and who would be affected. So, stay tuned for that!

As always Thank You (yes you the reader!) for going through this rather long deep-dive. I had fun writing this as much as researching it and I hope you enjoyed the read.

You know I love engaging with my audience. Your comments, engagement directly improve my work, and help SK NEXUS grow as a community and as a publication.

So please leave any of your questions, opinions or criticisms down below. I’d love to discuss how you feel about consoles, PC, gaming and the upcoming developments in the scene.

I reply to each of the comments so there’s no reason to hold back.

Leave a comment

You’re also welcome to share this piece with a fellow gamer through the button below:

Share SK NEXUS

Further Learning

• Take-Two CEO says consoles aren’t going away

• PCs vs. consoles? The future of gaming looks blurrier than ever

• This Is a PC - Next-Gen Console Watch

• Oversimplified History of Retro Game Consoles

• Xbox system software

• PlayStation CEO: Sony is Sticking to Its Current PC Strategy

• Microsoft revamps Xbox Game Pass plans

• Xbox Game Pass Ultimate Price Rises

• Xbox Game Pass price increase angers players

• Steam Refunds

• Does Sony have a long-term software strategy?

• With the Steam Machine, Valve May Be Defining the Next Generation of Games

• The Steam Hardware Ecosystem and It’s Secret Sauce

• Nintendo is the only company in games that doesn’t have to worry about PC

And to kick it off, we wanted to do this piece for a while. It literally took weeks of work to stitch it all together 😀

Thing is, we moved to Substack in 2025, and figured this is the time to look back and cover all our effort on here in one piece.

If you read any piece of ours, were with us from day 1, or just landed here, we appreciate you! And hopefully, this one piece shows you the amount of effort we’re putting behind this passion-driven initiative.

So strap in, this will be a long one, and we hope you come out of it learning something new.

Every year-in-review risks the same trap: over-celebration of milestones that only matter internally, or forced reflection that reads like performance.

This isn’t that.

SK NEXUS is still small. Our subscriber count won’t impress anyone running a media company. Our traffic is modest. We don’t have venture backing or a growth team.

But we do have something worth documenting: a year where we figured out what we’re actually building, and who we’re building it for.

This review exists for two reasons:

First, to show our readers what they made possible. Every comment, share, and subscription validated that this work matters. You’ll see that reflected throughout.

Second, to be honest about what worked and what didn’t. Small publications survive by learning fast, and transparency compounds learning.

If you’ve been reading SK NEXUS this year, thank you. If you’re new, this is your introduction to how we think and operate.

First, a small origin story

How SK NEXUS Started 2025

At the start of 2025, SK NEXUS was in transition.

We had published articles scattered across our own website, and various platforms. Our average monthly readership sat around 3,000-4,000 views - respectable for a side project, invisible by normal standards. To add on top, these views don’t mean much when there was no way to know the people behind them.

More importantly, we were fragmented. Articles existed in silos. Readers couldn’t follow us easily. There was no central hub, no consistent publishing rhythm, no clear identity beyond “Pakistani tech commentary”.

The writing was solid. The intent was there. But the infrastructure wasn’t.

That’s why we migrated to Substack in early 2025.

Why Substack?

The decision was largely pragmatic:

Email-first distribution meant we could build direct relationships with readers instead of fighting algorithms.

Simplicity meant we could focus on writing, not managing CMS tools or worrying about hosting.

Built-in community features gave us comments, reactions, and engagement loops without custom development.

Credibility came from being on a platform known for serious, independent writers.

But the real reason was control.

Substack gave us ownership of our audience. No one could change the rules or de-platform us overnight.

This means that down the road if we do have to make the switch again, we have a way to do so.

Thanks for allowing this functionality!

What We Were Trying to Build

Going into 2025, our mission was clear: make global tech legible for Pakistani audiences. And it turned out, that applied to the general consumer outside of Pakistan as well, so we adapted.

We worked on:

• Explaining complex tech trends (AI, quantum, digital infrastructure) without assuming prior knowledge or deep context

• Covering local angles on global stories (gaming economics, device affordability, privacy threats)

• Writing for curious readers, not insiders - tech-adjacent professionals, students, builders, anyone navigating a tech-saturated world

The question at the start of the year was simple: Could we turn sporadic blogging into a real publication that people looked forward to reading?

By the end of 2025, the answer was yes. yes we can.

How It Went

The Numbers

As of December 2025, SK NEXUS has:

• 100+ published articles

• 400+ Substack subscribers + 1,000+ Followers on other platforms

• Average monthly readership of 4,000+ views

• And for the first time ever, active engagement on comments, Daily.dev, and Substack

These numbers aren’t headline-grabbing, but they represent real momentum.
Every article now gets read by hundreds. Every publish sparks discussion.

The void we were shouting into? It talks back now.

What Changed After Substack

The migration shifted how we operated:

Publishing consistency improved. We went from sporadic posts to a predictable cadence. Readers knew when to expect new content. We aim to publish every week now.

Engagement skyrocketed. Substack’s comment system and email notifications meant people actually responded. We weren’t just publishing into the ether anymore. We probably got the most comments we have ever gotten in history of publishing our work.

Cross-promotion worked. Linking between articles, building series, referencing past work - all of this became easier. SK NEXUS started feeling like a coherent body of work, not isolated posts.

Discovery improved. Substack’s network effect (recommendations, cross-posts, Substack Discover) brought in readers we’d never have reached on Medium or our own site.

What Actually Changed

Beyond the metrics, something more important happened: we found our flow.

At the start of the year, we were experimenting; testing topics, formats, voices. By midyear, patterns emerged.

owned hardware, infrastructure, and gaming tech for the most part. Stuff where you get your hands dirty and write based on true experiences. Being in Pakistan, it isn’t easy to get access to a lot of tech, but Yousaf pushed through anyways.

Whereas focused on heavy research topic that no-one bothers to explain better to the average person. From privacy to the dark patterns of the digital age, Mohib became our inhouse investigator on such topics.

As for yours truly, I wish I would have actually written more this year but my focus as always has been divided between too many things to manage. I still play the primary editor role here, and every article you see, goes through me first.

For 2026, one of our goal is to bring on another writer to the team, I would like to cover some news style items with our twist on it. Something I did try to do with a series early on, but decided to kill it as yet again, I couldn’t make time for it on my own.

But in the end -

2025 was the year SK NEXUS stopped being a project and became a publication.

People now identify as SK NEXUS readers. They reference our articles in conversations. They correct us when we’re wrong and challenge us when we’re lazy. They share our work with friends.

That’s what growth looks like for us - not vanity metrics, but readers who care enough to engage, critique, and return.

Engagement from our readers is the biggest motivator for us. It shows us that we’re not just another publication writing just for the sake of it.

When we first started writing on Substack, there were days where we’d publish an article, refresh the page, and see nothing. Neither any likes, nor any comments. There wasn’t any sign that anyone was on the other side of the screen.

But we kept writing anyway…tweaking headlines, reaching out, improving piece by piece - often feeling like we were shouting into the void.

That’s why what exists now matters to us. Our posts consistently get read, liked, commented on, and shared. That might look small from the outside, but when you’ve started from zero, it means everything. It means people aren’t just scrolling past - they’re reading, thinking & responding.

Direct feedback from our readers shows that we have actual people reading the stuff we publish, and not just some AI crawler boosting our views. Your feedback and thoughts make us better writers and SK NEXUS, a better publication. Your personal opinions, disagreements & observations actively shape how we think and how SK NEXUS evolves as a publication. We read every single one.

Below are some moments of reader feedback that stood out this year, the kind of conversations we hoped this platform would create:

Impactful Comments

In response to our Humanoid Robot post, shared her opinion regarding the humanoid robot industry.

On the Death Of Ownership article, we had & sharing their detailed thoughts and stories regarding the subscription model that is deeply rooted in today’s society and how we basically own nothing in the modern world.

On the Quantum Tech article, we had 2 industry experts and whom we both really like. They started a pretty interesting conversation regarding PQC, and as always, we just took a backseat and listened to them.

On the Social Engineering post, left such a detailed comment showcasing how dangerous auto-pilot decision making is.

On Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame VR headset article, our reader shared their interest in the x86-ARM translation layer that Valve is going to implement in the headset. Co-incidentally, that translation layer feature is what we were personally very excited about, and Neural Foundry’s comment further opened up the discussion on the topic.

SK NEXUS also has a squad on Daily.dev where we share our articles and engage with the community.

In response to our USB-C article, our reader Daniel shared their frustration with marketing around USB-C and how companies market cables in a really bad way. It was nice to know that we’re not the only ones ranting over the confusion that surrounds the one connector that was created to remove all confusion 😅.

Special Callout: Kernel-Level Anticheats

Once again, it was our loyal reader Neural foundry sharing their thoughts on our article on Kernel-level anticheats.

Because of unfettered kernel-level access that much of the anticheat software now has, we saw incidents like the CrowdStrike outage take place last year. It was a reminder to the world that software access should be vetted.

Our reader asked a really good question on the future of anticheat if Microsoft is successful in locking down the Windows kernel. This question got us thinking about the future of anticheats and kernel lockdown on Windows.

Even if we didn’t have the answer they were looking for, we shared some perspective on the possible future, and that is what helps others to reach a conclusion.

Our Takes So Far

What follows next is a series of illuminating insights - a spotlight on some of the most impactful articles we covered in 2025.

It’s been a complex year in many ways, but here’s a glimpse of the content that emerged. We’ll walk you through standout pieces across different categories and highlight a few honorable mentions that can’t be overlooked.

Consider this your guide to understanding what we covered this year.

Consumer Education

Consumer education was our largest content category in 2025, and for good reason. This is where we spent the most time cutting through marketing BS, demystifying jargon, and explaining technology in ways that actually matter to people’s lives.

The goal was simple: help readers make informed decisions about the tech they buy, use, and depend on.

That meant challenging industry narratives about ownership, repairability, privacy, and control. It meant explaining what’s actually happening beneath the marketing language. And it meant providing region-specific context that’s usually missing from Western tech coverage.

Why it was written

Most people still believe that when they buy tech, it’s theirs. The truth is, buying tech today is often more like renting it. With subscriptions, software lock-ins, and even hardware restrictions, what we “own” is actually in the hands of companies who can revoke access at any time.

This conversation is often missing from mainstream tech coverage, and we wanted to bring it to the forefront.

What it tried to answer

We’ve moved into a reality where true ownership, especially in tech, is fading fast. Whether it’s software or hardware, if the companies behind them decide to pull the plug or ban you, you’re left with nothing.

We’re not just renting software anymore, we’re renting our own devices too. The article answered why we’re stuck in this situation and how it’s becoming more entrenched in our daily lives.

Why it mattered in 2025

This topic went mainstream in 2025. Content creators, journalists, and even mainstream outlets started covering the concept of “death of ownership” in tech.

The discussion grew, especially with increasing incidents of hardware locking down. The shift from ownership to leasing or renting is picking up momentum, and this trend will only get stronger in the coming years.

Why it was written

Right to Repair is a good start, but especially for lower-income regions like Pakistan, there are a lot more issues that need solving alongside it. This article was written to bring attention to those gaps.

As someone who loves tinkering with electronics, the Right to Repair movement resonates naturally. But advocacy without regional context misses the point.

What it tried to answer

The intent was to clearly explain what Right to Repair means in common English and how it came to be. Another focus was explaining why it’s not in most companies’ interest to make third-party repairs easier.

Most importantly, the article argued that we need to press companies to ensure availability of repair manuals and parts for third-party repairs; not just symbolic support for Right to Repair legislation.

Why it mattered in 2025

2025 marked the beginning of expensive tech getting even more expensive. People were already tired of paying premiums for their products, and now AI demand is driving consumer prices higher.

It’s high time that more people understand movements like Right to Repair and advocate for reparability and parts availability for the tech they own.

In 2025, privacy reached new lows with the rise of digital IDs, as governments demanded individuals verify their identity on apps under the guise of child protection. Though presented as a safeguard, this trend poses significant privacy risks and paves the way for more countries to follow suit.

The control of personal information by governments is creeping toward dystopian levels, and it’s crucial to question whether the state should be in charge of privacy, parents should take that role, not the government.

This was our first guide for buying used laptops. The topic comes up constantly in our daily conversations, and there aren’t many resources with region-specific advice.

After buying a used laptop in 2024 and going through months of research, dealing with local shopkeepers, and figuring out specifications, we compiled all those learnings into a practical guide.

By 2025, it became clear that many of the things we thought we owned were already slipping out of our hands. Ownership is being replaced with permissions, anonymity with verification, and choice with engineered nudges.

In Europe, GDPR is being quietly weakened while chat control gains momentum, signaling a future where surveillance is normalized and resistance is framed as irresponsibility. Pair that with enshittification, and the direction is hard to ignore.

Because of the non-stop AI hype this year, everyone was already bored of CEOs promising AGI, Full Self-Driving, and features that are perpetually “coming soon.” Our articles tried to cut through that noise and help readers understand what’s real, what’s speculation, and what’s pure marketing.

The underlying message across all our consumer education content: You deserve to understand the technology you’re being sold. You deserve to know what you’re actually buying. And you deserve honest answers about what’s happening to ownership, privacy, and control.

That’s what we tried to deliver in 2025, and it’s what we’ll keep fighting for in 2026.

Industry Highlights

While consumer education helped readers navigate the tech they already use, our industry coverage in 2025 focused on the shifts happening beneath the surface. The infrastructure changes, power dynamics, and platform battles that will shape what tech looks like in the years ahead.

This is where we covered the “why is this happening now?” questions that most tech news skips.

The tech industry went through some surprising turns this year. The biggest was the Linux discussion steaming up among everyday people, something no one saw coming at this scale.

Why it was written

We wrote this article to give a simple perspective on the infrastructure shift happening quietly in front of us and how Linux is no longer just a secret hidden among computer wizards, but a possible reality for a big part of our tech lives moving forward.

What it tried to answer

The first thing we wanted with this article was to clear the word and concept of Linux for someone who has never experienced it, because searching up “Linux” brings up a lot of information that could be confusing for many.

Another goal was to discuss how this change of operating systems is taking place and who the main drivers are pushing Linux discussions to the mainstream. We also discussed who’d be affected by this change.

Why it mattered in 2025

No one had PewDiePie re-appearing as a Linux-nerd on their bingo cards. Valve’s SteamDeck was a success but even Linux users didn’t expect to break 3% desktop market share anytime soon.

Microsoft screwing up Windows was the only thing that wasn’t a big surprise this year :p

But still, the point is that all of this happened in 2025. And with the growing curiosity around Linux there was a lot of confusion, so that’s what made this article necessary.

In a world where technology seems to advance endlessly, not everything is designed for your benefit. Often, it’s a strategy to get you to keep buying.

If people only bought one piece of hardware and never needed anything new, companies would lose money. To keep you coming back, software becomes the invisible force pushing you toward upgrades. Phones slow down, OS updates make older devices obsolete, and new hardware is required for basic functionality; the cycle never ends.

We explored the history of planned obsolescence so that when you make your next purchase, you can recognize the system at play and hopefully make an informed, empowered decision.

Largely because of the SteamDeck, the Linux desktop market share reached an all-time high. Just take that into context: Linux is 34 years old and always hovered around 1-2% before the SteamDeck’s launch. And gaming on Linux was mostly out of the question (at least for a sane person).

The larger point in this article was to focus on SteamOS, its underpinnings (Proton Compatibility Layer), and how that is going to challenge Microsoft Windows’ monopoly, creating a whole new ecosystem for gamers.

Looking back, none of these problems are new; planned obsolescence, Microsoft’s monopoly, forced upgrades, platform lock-in. What changed in 2025 is that alternatives stopped being theoretical.

For 34 years, Linux hovered around 1-2% desktop market share. Gaming on it was a joke. Then Valve’s SteamDeck hit 3%, and suddenly people realized: you don’t have to tolerate Windows anymore. Not because Linux magically improved overnight, but because Microsoft got so bad that the pain of switching became worth it.

If one thing is clear, it’s that we’re going to hear a lot more talk about openness and ownership when it comes to tech, both on the hardware and software side of things.

This year, the EU advocated for far more stringent checks to ensure openness, interoperability, and repairability of tech hardware. And the US president’s front-facing weaponization of access to technology was another grim reminder that dependence on closed platforms is a vulnerability.

2025 shows that more and more governments and companies are looking for ways to own their software and hardware. Whether through hosting on local cloud, self-hosting their operations, or taking the open-source route.

The SteamDeck proved that openness can win on merit, not just ideology. Planned obsolescence articles proved people are tired of being forced into upgrade cycles. Linux adoption proved that when you give people a working alternative, they’ll take it.

If 2025 proved anything, it’s this: people will choose openness when it actually works. Not because it’s morally superior, but because closed platforms treated them so badly that even switching to Linux looked appealing.

That’s a bigger shift than any single percentage point.

While industry coverage tracked macro shifts in platforms and power, our gaming content in 2025 hit closer to home - literally. Gaming isn’t just entertainment; it’s where global pricing models, accessibility barriers, and regional economic realities collide most visibly.

This is where we explored what it actually costs to participate in modern gaming when you’re not in a Western economy, and what people do when the system prices them out.

Gaming

Gaming was among the most interesting categories to write about this year, largely because it forced us to confront uncomfortable truths about access, affordability, and who gets to play.

Why it was written

Growing up in Pakistan made one thing painfully obvious, modern gaming isn’t priced for us. When a $60 game costs half of someone’s monthly income, what can an average person even do at that point?

As a kid, even saving months of pocket money wouldn’t get you there. We saw friends get scammed on shady third-party sites, and we’ve personally jumped regions and bent Steam’s rules just to afford games. That raised a bigger question ”why is all this even necessary?”

This article was an attempt to dig into answering that question, explaining why piracy persists and what forces people into it in the first place.

What it tried to answer

If platforms keep pricing games for Western economies while ignoring regional realities, piracy isn’t going anywhere. Without fair regional pricing and local economic context, people will keep finding workarounds.

And there’s another side of this problem - risk. You don’t know who cracked that game, or whether it’s quietly logging your data or abusing your hardware. Most players aren’t technical enough to spot that. The takeaway was simple: it’s a systemic failure that creates bad outcomes on all sides.

Why it mattered in 2025

Piracy didn’t suddenly appear in 2025, but this was the year our patience ran out. Prices kept climbing, regional realities kept being ignored, and enforcement kept tightening, without addressing root causes.

We wanted to raise our voice and, more importantly, make people aware that this conversation isn’t just about games. It’s about what happens when one side refuses to listen and only enforces rules. The other side adapts, finds loopholes, and moves anyway. That pattern shows up everywhere in tech, privacy, platforms, personal life.

Gaming just happens to be the clearest mirror.

Why it was written

We were really excited to write this article because it involved personal experience. The article was written right after buying a used workstation computer, and the few months of research that went into it produced some surprising results.

We personally went through the process of researching, figuring out specifications, and dealing with local shopkeepers. That’s what made this article special.

What it tried to answer

The intent was to share the experience of buying a used workstation computer. We didn’t even realize that we could get this much compute for roughly $150.

The point was to show that being on a budget doesn’t mean you’re always at a disadvantage. We wanted to demonstrate that if you play it smartly, you can score a good deal without many compromises.

Why it mattered in 2025

It mattered now more than ever as hardware prices skyrocketed because of a number of factors like AI datacenter demand, tariff uncertainty, and global supply chain issues.

Now is probably among the worst times to build a brand-new PC, especially in capital-stressed countries like Pakistan which are struggling financially. That’s why this perspective of buying used was more relevant than ever.

2025 showed how far indie games have come, with small teams competing directly against massive studios something once impossible. As AI-driven layoffs dominated industry headlines, indie developers quietly filled the gaps left by traditional AAA workflows.

We explored how lean teams and fewer layers of bureaucracy are producing better games, while endless AAA delays turned into running jokes.

This article on kernel-level anticheats addressed serious concerns. We’ve seen what happens when software gets unrestricted access to critical areas of your computer with the CrowdStrike incident.

With more and more games implementing their own kernel-level anticheats and Microsoft promising to lock the kernel down, we had to talk about the future of PC gaming as a whole.

Another reason for writing on this topic was because a lot of people were actually concerned about what kernel-level access means. Most of them didn’t understand what ‘the kernel’ even is. We tried to explain it in a simplified manner exactly for those people.

This article on Gaming PC vs Consoles was our answer to this everlasting debate on choosing between a console and a PC with some local perspective that’s largely missing in Western discussion circles.

As someone who has been a console user and now uses PC, we felt we could present a balanced answer to this debate.

Looking back, gaming in 2025 was a study in contradictions. Indie developers proved that small teams can out-innovate bloated AAA pipelines, yet they’re now being punished for using the same tools the rest of the creative world quietly relies on.

On one side, we had an indie uprising with games competing at levels once impossible for small teams. On the other hand, PC gamers specifically are going through tough times as AI eats up our RAM and companies cut off consumer product divisions completely. We saw Micron’s exit and now NVIDIA’s cutting their consumer manufacturing too. It’s just sad.

If one thing became clear in 2025, it’s that the gaming industry’s center of gravity is shifting away from AAA bloat, away from Western-only pricing models, away from gatekeeping around tools and platforms.

Indie developers are filling gaps that billion-dollar studios can’t. Players in non-Western markets are finding workarounds when regional pricing fails. Gamers are choosing kernel-level security over invasive anticheats. People are buying used hardware because new is unaffordable.

The future of gaming isn’t clear, no one is Doctor Strange, but one thing is obvious: if the industry keeps ignoring regional realities, over-policing tools, and protecting outdated models, the center of gravity will keep shifting toward indies, toward workarounds, toward players and creators who refuse to play by rules that were never built for them in the first place.

Gaming in 2025 proved that when the system doesn’t work for you, you build around it.

If gaming showed us where global systems break down at the consumer level, emerging tech coverage revealed where hype and reality diverge most dramatically.

This is where we spent the year asking: What’s real? What’s speculation? What’s pure marketing? And more importantly - what should you actually care about today, versus what companies want you to believe about tomorrow?

Emerging Tech

Emerging tech is where fascination meets skepticism. It’s easy to get swept up in breakthrough announcements and billion-dollar valuations. Our job was to cut through that and explain what’s actually happening beneath the headlines.

Why it was written

We decided to write this article after coming across a quantum tech-related job while searching for work. We were given an assignment to research the topic and write about it. What started as a task quickly became something we enjoyed, even though we still felt a bit out of our depth.

What frustrated us was that most articles on quantum tech sounded like PhD theses. There was a huge gap between the complexity of the topic and what the average reader could digest. We wanted to bridge that gap, starting from scratch to make it simple enough for anyone to understand, while still capturing the essence of this growing field.

Quantum is still far from mainstream, but it’s developing fast, and we felt the need to share that journey.

What it tried to answer

The biggest takeaway is that while we’re moving fast in quantum tech, there’s still a long and challenging road ahead. The hype, especially surrounding post-quantum security, is enormous but maybe it’s necessary to create urgency so companies can begin the long process of building security systems that can withstand quantum threats.

However, we’ve learned that the media loves to sell revolutions before they even exist. Quantum tech is no exception, and though it’s a hot topic, we mustn’t fall for the hype. As someone who works daily around quantum news, our advice is: keep an eye on it, but don’t get swept away by the noise.

Why it mattered in 2025

This article aimed to shed light on quantum tech and its implications for the future. In 2025, people still view quantum computing as something that feels too far from reality. We wanted to demystify it and show what’s actually happening today in quantum research and security.

By explaining the complexities in simple terms, we wanted to help readers understand what’s real, so when quantum tech is discussed, it won’t sound like some Star Wars movie.

Why it was written

The motivation behind this piece was personal interest in the topic. We’ve been following the technical side of self-driving for some time now from the perspective of a fascinated observer.

One day, we were just discussing self-driving cars with Saqib while hanging out in The Wandering Pro Discord server (which you should definitely check out!). That casual discussion was the spark to write on self-driving cars.

What it tried to answer

The intent was to give a realistic account of the self-driving space as it stands today and how it continues to evolve.

The first article in the self-driving series gave context by providing a comprehensive overview of the self-driving scene, including the big players involved like Tesla, Waymo, etc.

Another major aspect was discussing the LiDAR vs Computer Vision debate that exists in the self-driving space which players are betting on what technology, along with the pros and cons for both.

The last article in this series discussed two of the biggest exits in the self-driving space. A large portion of that article covered the secret car project that Apple worked on for close to a decade.

Why it mattered in 2025

The self-driving space is among the most talked-about domains when it comes to Applied Artificial Intelligence. In 2025, we’ve already started seeing public roll-outs of self-driving cars in fancy cities around the world.

It was necessary to distinguish the real ‘self-driving’ from what companies have been promising for years and discuss the current technology and how it could evolve in the future.

2025 was a pivotal year for the humanoid robot industry, with sightings of robots like NEO, the so-called “next-gen” model - becoming mainstream. Everywhere you looked, discussions about humanoid robots taking over our jobs and lives were taking place.

The hype surrounding this technology was massive, with people both fascinated and fearful about the implications of robots that resemble us so closely. Given the buzz, we felt it was necessary to dive into the reality of this topic. We explored why everyone is investing in it, while addressing the potential and challenges that come with this futuristic technology.

As 2025 was coming to a close, Valve gave us a chance to discuss the cool technology powering their upcoming Virtual Reality headset - The Steam Frame.

The point of the article was to discuss how the gaming VR ecosystem is going to establish itself after Meta has gone past overspending on VR and Valve has come back, 6 years after their first headset.

Even though we didn’t have much information on pricing, the cool technology like run-time translation of PC games, 6 GHz wireless streaming, and Foveated Streaming built into the headset was just too much not to discuss. That’s what we did in the article 😁.

Looking back, emerging tech in 2025 was a masterclass in hype outpacing reality.

We’re drowning in shiny tech narratives. AI, humanoid robots, quantum, self-driving- every week there’s a new breakthrough announcement. Hype moves faster than reality, and most people can’t tell the difference.

And this is the real risk; not the tech itself, but how easily we buy into headlines without understanding what’s actually happening underneath.

In the emerging tech space, Artificial Intelligence dominated mindshare all year. Even though the hype slowed a bit (relative to the previous year), the momentum hasn’t. Companies are still reaching 5 trillion dollar market caps on promises, not delivered products.

On the hardware side, we have companies like Valve working on genuinely cool technology, but affordability is becoming a serious concern, especially when AI is eating our RAM and driving up hardware costs across the board. God knows what 2026 holds for tech hardware pricing.

Whether it’s quantum computing, humanoid robots, self-driving cars, or AI; just know that these systems are built by humans, limited by physics, economics, and messy real-world constraints.

The media loves to sell revolutions before they exist. Companies love to promise capabilities years before they can deliver. And investors love to fund narratives that sound like science fiction.

But breakthrough announcements don’t mean breakthroughs happened. Public roll-outs in “fancy cities” don’t mean the technology works everywhere. Billion-dollar valuations don’t mean the product is real.

Going forward, keep one thing in mind: when a new technology shows up, don’t chase the shine. Study the mechanism. Understand what it can do today, not what it’s promised to do in ten years. Form your own judgment before someone sells you theirs.

That’s the only way to stay grounded when everyone around you is buying lottery tickets and calling them investments.

Our Moat: Deep Dives

Most tech publications follow a script: react to news, summarize press releases, amplify what’s trending. Speed and volume win.

We don’t do that.

Not because we’re above it; fast, relevant takes have value but because that’s not our competitive advantage.

We can’t outpace professional newsrooms or beat algorithmic content farms at scale.

What we can do is go deeper.

What Makes a SK NEXUS Deep Dive

A deep dive isn’t just a long article. It’s a deliberate choice to prioritize understanding over immediacy.

Our deep dives share a few traits:

They explain systems, not just events. Instead of “NVIDIA hits $5 trillion market cap,” we ask: How did a gaming chip company become the backbone of AI? What decisions got them here? What does this mean for the future of computing?

They challenge hype. Every hot tech trend comes with exaggerated promises. Our job is to cut through the noise and explain what’s real, what’s speculation, and what’s marketing.

They’re accessible without being shallow. We assume curiosity, not expertise. We define terms, use local examples, and build up complexity gradually.

They connect global trends to local realities. Understanding why TSMC matters isn’t complete without discussing what a chip shortage means for Pakistani consumers trying to buy electronics.

Why Deep Dives Are Rare

Most publications can’t afford them. Deep research takes time, reading company histories, understanding technical architectures, tracing supply chains, rewriting for clarity. That’s days or weeks per article, not hours.

We can do it because we’re small. No editorial committees, no advertiser expectations, no pressure to publish five times a day. We optimize for quality, not quantity.

The trade-off: we publish less. But what we publish lasts. Our articles from early 2025 still get traffic because they explain fundamentals, not fleeting news.

We keep doing these because it’s the work worth doing.

In a media landscape optimized for clicks and virality, depth is counter-cultural. But it’s also where trust gets built. Readers remember the publication that actually explained something, not the one that fed them a headline.

And frankly, we enjoy it. There’s a satisfaction in researching a complex topic, understanding it fully, and then making it simple for others. That’s the craft we care about.

Featured Deep Dives from 2025

Here are three pieces that embody this approach:

Why it mattered: While most tech companies chase quarterly earnings and scale at any cost, Valve quietly built a $10+ billion empire on a completely different model: flat hierarchy, no managers, employees choosing their own projects. In 2025, as layoffs dominated tech headlines, Valve’s alternative approach felt more relevant than ever.

Key insight: Valve’s “weird” company structure isn’t just ideological - it’s strategic. By avoiding external capital, maintaining employee ownership, and optimizing for long-term R&D over short-term ROI, Valve can take massive bets (like the SteamDeck and Proton compatibility layer) that publicly-traded companies can’t justify. The result: they’ve built an open-source gaming ecosystem that’s challenging Microsoft’s monopoly without needing venture backing.

Why it mattered: In 2025, NVIDIA became the first company in history to hit a $5 trillion market cap. Everyone knows they make AI chips. Almost no one knows how a gaming graphics card company became the most important infrastructure provider of the AI era or why competitors can’t catch up.

Key insight: NVIDIA’s dominance isn’t just about better chips; it’s about the CUDA ecosystem they’ve been building since 2006. By investing over a billion dollars into GPU programming infrastructure long before AI went mainstream, NVIDIA created a moat that’s nearly impossible to replicate. When AlexNet proved in 2012 that GPUs could accelerate AI, NVIDIA was the only company ready. Competitors are still playing catch-up to decisions made 15+ years ago.

Why it mattered: TSMC manufactures over 90% of the world’s most advanced chips. If TSMC stopped production tomorrow, the global economy would collapse; not in metaphor, but in fact. Yet most people have never heard of them. In 2025, as US-China tensions escalated and chip shortages became geopolitical weapons, understanding TSMC became essential.

Key insight: TSMC’s dominance comes from a business model decision made 40 years ago: be a “pure-play foundry” that only manufactures chips, never designs or sells them. This meant companies like Apple, NVIDIA, and AMD could outsource production without worrying about competition. The result: TSMC became the sole supplier of cutting-edge chips for the entire tech industry. Their success is Taiwan’s “Silicon Shield” - the reason global superpowers care deeply about a small island nation.

Why This Matters

Deep dives are our moat because they’re defensible.

Anyone can summarize a press release. Not everyone can explain complex systems clearly, challenge industry narratives honestly, and do it with local context.

That’s the work that compounds. That’s the work that builds trust. That’s the work we’ll keep doing in 2026.

That being said, let’s hear from the writers hard at work -

Before SK NEXUS, writing wasn’t a plan. I was gaming to make a few bucks, messing around with security concepts, learning things the messy way, and occasionally dropping a blog post into the void. Then I stumbled into SK NEXUS and decided to give it a shot. I didn’t expect much. Turns out, I got tricked into a career.

Everything I learned here - researching properly, questioning assumptions, simplifying complex systems, and defending ideas with logic - quietly stacked up. Enough to land a job, enough to change how I think. That still feels unreal.

Early on, I looked up to and his writing. He already had a rhythm and a lane. Over time, I realized that his domain wasn’t mine and that was a good thing. Writing here forced me to find my own lane - privacy, control, gaming economics, AI, etc.

Most importantly I honed the art of learning by execution, failing in public, refining my voice piece by piece - that process was uncomfortable and addictive in the best way.

I grew the most when I dealt with the hardest stories - the ones that didn’t have clear answers and made me uncomfortable. Topics where I didn’t know enough, where I had to admit ignorance first and then earn clarity. That taught me the most valuable skill I picked up this year: not knowing isn’t weakness - refusing to figure it out is.

Looking ahead, I want to go deeper. More complex topics, more uncomfortable questions, more building my own positions - whether it’s AI, gaming, privacy, or whatever chaos comes next.

I’m still at the start. 2026 is wide open.

And if you actually read this far - congrats. You’ve earned knight status. 🗡️

It feels unreal to say that 2025 has passed. Honestly, it feels like yesterday when we just wrapped the second season of the Tech Made Fun podcast.

2025 has passed and while ASI hasn’t destroyed humans yet, we’ve seen AI (specifically LLMs like GPT, Gemini) get really good. For long I resisted their use in my workflow until they started delivering results.

Being a Linux user, it feels good to see that people are actually talking about open-source software and interested in challenging monopolies like Microsoft who year-and-year again have shown nothing but complacency.

I am a bit sad about the politicization of technology around us, especially software but what can I even do about it?

The RAM situation that is just emerging does scare me as it has a far-reaching impact on every device using a computer. And it feels like it will only increase next year.

Still, cool tech is what interests me. I’m really looking forward to Valve releasing their next-gen hardware. Let’s hope they don’t shelve it like the earlier version of Half-Life 3 lol.

I’m really interested in the impact that Valve brings through SteamOS and their upcoming hardware. On Linux, I can already play my steam library just through the Steam client. This is something that wasn’t remotely as easy 5 years ago.

Whatever the situation is, you people can count on me to cover exciting tech and simplify it for you guys with a local perspective on things going forward.

The process of researching for articles has compounded my tech knowledge this year. I wasn’t completely sure of HDR. I didn’t know of Steam, TSMC or NVIDIA’s origins.

But because I went through the research and writing part for articles on SK NEXUS, I have a lot more information to share and topics to discuss.

I cringe when I go through some of the oldest articles I wrote at SK NEXUS, but also feel good that I’ve improved a lot. I can see the improvement in research, writing, and presentation.

As a writer, this year was special because I’m not just a writer anymore. I am now more involved with my readers (thanks to our migration to Substack). I’m pretty active on SK NEXUS’ squad at Daily.dev.

Going forward, you can expect a lot more content from me that is not just researched better but written in a much clearer way. You will see a lot more activity from me here on Substack outside of just sharing articles.

Signing off from 2025 - Yousaf

We started this review by saying SK NEXUS is still small. That’s true.

But small doesn’t mean insignificant.

In 2025, thousands of people read our work. Hundreds left thoughtful comments. Dozens shared articles with friends, colleagues, and communities. Some of you cited our pieces in your own work. A few of you told us SK NEXUS changed how you think about tech.

That matters.

Not because we’re special, but because you made space for this work to exist. Every read, share, and comment validated that there’s an appetite for tech writing that’s clear, honest, and contextually grounded.

You didn’t just tolerate SK NEXUS - you actively engaged with it. You challenged our assumptions. You corrected our mistakes. You contributed your own perspectives. That’s what turned this from a blog into a publication.

So, thank you.

If you’ve been reading since the early days: thank you for sticking around.
If you joined us mid-year: thank you for taking a chance.
If you’re discovering us through this review: welcome. We’re glad you’re here.

What Happens Next

2026 will bring more of what worked in 2025: deep research, honest writing, and a relentless focus on explaining tech clearly without dumbing it down.

It will also bring experiments; some will land, some won’t. We’ll learn either way.

The only way this works is if you keep showing up: reading, responding, sharing, questioning. Independent media survives on reader trust, not algorithms or ad revenue. Your attention and engagement are what make SK NEXUS sustainable.

One Last Thing

If there’s a topic you think we should cover, a question you want answered, or a critique you’ve been holding back - tell us.

Use the comments. Email us. DM us. We read everything, and we take feedback seriously.

This publication exists because of you. Let’s make 2026 even better.

Here’s to another year of learning, questioning, and making sense of the tech shaping our lives.

With or without my help – I wish you the best.

- Saqib Tahir
Founder & Editor, SK NEXUS

Fair warning before we go further. This won’t be our usual tech coverage piece. It’s more of a heart-to-heart update from me to you. You’ve been warned.

So why limit testing?

A quick browse across social media will tell you everyone’s struggling these days. But that’s not the reason behind this theme for us at SK NEXUS.

For me, limit testing came from the stuff I actively chose to take on. The things I said yes to even when they scared me. The parts of myself I realized I had outgrown.

Let’s talk about me personally first.
Hey, Saqib here. I don’t speak to you directly in notes or articles very often. Maybe that’s something I change in 2026.

At the end of 2024, I made a decision. I didn’t want to work solo anymore. I wanted to actually leverage people around me, share the load, and move bigger initiatives forward instead of carrying everything on my own shoulders. This year I pushed into that intention head-on.

Here’s where you can read about it →

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/saqibtahirpk_solo-to-notsolo-activity-7279837822952386560-soUL

It came with challenges. It also came with some nice successes.
And it forced me to learn that doing everything alone isn’t strength; it’s stubbornness.

On the business side, we’ve just wrapped our first full year. The team isn’t big enough to brag about (yet), but we still delivered some genuinely cool software and product work for clients.

One year later, with a mountain of lessons collected, I want 2026 to be the year we grow the business with more direction and a bit more confidence. This was the first time I felt like I wasn’t “figuring it out”, I was building something.

As part of that, I’m thinking about sharing more of the behind-the-scenes of running a product dev company here on this publication. I know it might “dilute” the content a bit, but realistically, I barely get the time to write. So maybe the off-topic stuff becomes worthwhile, especially if it helps people think better about product, process, and execution. You tell me. Would business-style insight pieces interest you?

(Feel free to check some of my past efforts over at https://therift.news/)

Now let’s talk about this publication and the attached community.
This is where the biggest strides happened this year.

We’re almost 10 months into Substack. And we’ve hit some milestones I honestly didn’t expect this early.

We’re about to cross 400 subs.
Articles consistently cross 100+ reads within 3 days.
And for the first time, we’re seeing global engagement from people genuinely curious about tech from our side of the world.

Pretty awesome, innit?

When we moved to Substack, our biggest fear was that nobody would care. Who wants to read yet another “tech publication”?

Turns out the answer was simple: people don’t want another generic tech publication. They want someone to actually break things down in a way the average Bashir/Joe can understand and relate to.

That’s always been our lane. That’s the gap no one else bothers filling.

If someone wants the news, Verge, TechCrunch, and 404 Media exist. Amazing teams. Amazing journalism. But if you want perspectives grounded in lived experience, especially from Pakistan or similar contexts, we can give you a different flavor. Smaller scale. But unique. And honest.

The community side also grew beyond anything I expected.
We went from a tiny 20-person Discord to over 400 members.
Our monthly challenges hit real milestones and created actual accountability loops.
People aren’t just joining; they’re participating. They’re showing up even on days I couldn’t.

One peek at this, and you know that we are creating impact: https://thewanderingpro.com/testimonials/

Back when SK NEXUS was just a seed in my head, the whole point was simple.

Use my experience, my exposure, my curiosity, and bring people together. For years I struggled to do that alone.

Now, with help, and with a small yet mighty community, it feels like nothing is out of reach. And for the first time in a long time, I feel like I’m not carrying the whole thing on my own back.

Looking ahead to 2026, I want us to double down on consistency. At our current size and pace, that’s the only thing that matters. Everything else will sort itself out later.

If you’re new here, here’s the reality.
SKN isn’t my income. It’s a passion project. And logistically, there’s only so far I can push it alone.

And no, I’m not the type to start charging anytime soon. I want this to stay accessible for anyone who wants to learn.

There are only two scenarios in which that changes:

1. AI screws us so hard that we’re forced to gate content for protection.

2. It becomes genuinely unsustainable for me to keep paying out of pocket to run this.

And trust me, if you are one of the very few who have actually supported us, every cup of coffee reinforces our will to keep this open for everyone for as long as possible. It reminds us that someone out there sees value in what we’re trying to build.

Because yes, I do pay the people who help me build this. Not much, but month after month, year after year, it adds up. And since we generate zero revenue from this, some days it feels heavy.

I’m not sharing this to guilt anyone. I’m sharing it because people often underestimate the passion behind this work.
We don’t write for money.
We write because it sharpens us.
Because the craft matters. Because the conversations matter.
Money we can earn elsewhere. This is bigger than that.

So what’s next -

A lot more of what I already am doing to be honest:

Helping more people start their careers by our efforts at The Wandering Pro
Guiding people with the nuance behind tech with our publishing work here at SK NEXUS
Getting founders into market with their products with our work at Biz of Dev

If I zoom out, we actually did a lot this year. More than I give myself credit for.
Now it’s just time to stick with these things longer. Stay consistent. Go deeper.

The systems are in place. The foundation is built.
What’s next is simply doing the work but with more clarity, more support, and more intention than before.

To end things off
I think 2026 is shaping up to be a year of growth.

In 2024, I was doing everything alone.
In 2025, I finally had people around me. We didn’t excel. But we survived.
In 2026, it’s time to build on that survival and aim for growth.

Would it have been nice to have more this year? Yes.
Would it have been nice to struggle less? Also yes.
But the biggest wins usually hide inside the smallest shifts in perspective.

And I hope you start noticing those in your own life too.

With or without my help – I wish you the best.

Just when you thought this year can’t get much exciting, Valve completely takes the gaming world by storm as 2025 comes to a close.

This November, Valve, the company infamous for not being able to count to 3 just did.

Instead of Half-Life 3, the company dropped announcements for 3 pieces of hardware that it’s planning to release next year.

Out of the 3 devices, Steam Frame is a completely new VR headset that is aimed for PC gamers. It is not just Valve’s new headset but a device that brings in some of the coolest tech in VR space.

From a technology POV, Steam Frame has some shiny new features that no headset in the market currently has, such as foveated streaming, running SteamOS and having a built-in translation layer for x86 games.

Because I really like the bleeding-edge of technology, and I need a reason to talk about Linux whenever I can, I am writing this article to nerd about some of the stuff that Steam Frame brings to the scene and its potential impact.

The Release Announcement

Six years ago, Valve announced their first VR game and alongside it, they released Valve Index, their first VR headset. It was their entry into virtual reality world.

The original Valve Index sold well over 149,000 units and costed around $1,000 for a full-kit that included the headset, controllers and the base stations for tracking.

On 12th November 2025, Valve announced 3 new hardware products that they’re planning to launch in Early 2026:

• Steam Frame - Frame is Valve’s latest VR headset aimed for PC gamers

• Steam Machine - It is Valve’s console and a PC

• Steam Controller - This is the second controller by Valve that has the same name as the original Steam controller

For this article, I’ll specifically be discussing the Steam Frame. We will go over the Steam Machine and Steam Controller some other day.

Disclaimer: Valve just announced their new hardware. The pricing and final reviews would only come after launch.

At this moment, I’m using first impressions by reputed reviewers/tech outlets that were invited to test out Steam Frame in-person at Valve HQ.

Technology Steam Frame Brings

The Steam Frame isn’t just any VR headset. As is typical Valve fashion, the company tries to do something new when it comes to most of their projects be they games or gaming hardware.

And Steam Frame is no stranger to Valve’s philosophy. Their latest VR headset has some really unique features up its sleeves.

This article would be far too long if we discuss each of the technologies behind the Steam Frame so instead I’ll discuss the major features that the Steam Frame brings in brief sections.

SteamOS on VR

Steam Frame is the first VR headset in the market that is running a full linux-based OS (SteamOS) natively.

Most VR headsets before the Frame have used custom versions of Android or Windows for PC-based systems but the use of SteamOS integrates it well into the ecosystem that now exists because of the SteamDeck.

Other than SteamOS, some developers have speculated that AndroidVR may be configured on the Frame because Valve doesn’t plan to restrict the software used on the Frame.

Whether AndroidVR gets supported is a speculation and something not confirmed by Valve at this point.

Native Android Game Support

The Steam Frame uses the same snapdragon chips from Qualcomm that most of the world’s Android phones uses.

The Verge confirmed that the Steam Frame can use the same Android APKs developers already use to bring their apps to phones and Android-based VR headsets such as the Meta Quest.

Valve is specifically hoping to attract some of those Meta VR game developers, rather than just any kind of Android app you might find on a tablet or phone.

Valve developers confirmed that Android apps won’t take any performance hit because they natively run on the ARM-architecture hardware.

If you don’t know what ARM architecture is, I’ve got you covered. Early this year, I did an article explaining what ARM architecture is, How it is different and why it is recently making serious inroads into our digital lives.

The article is linked below:

Foveated Streaming

The Steam Frame is a wireless VR headset focused for gamers. This means that it has to have a good amount of focus on balancing graphical fidelity and low-latency because it doesn’t use a wire.

The Steam Frame is a wireless-first headset. Unlike wired headsets, it has to balance games running on its double 4k 144hz screens on a battery, all through a wireless USB dongle.

On a wireless VR headset you can’t just crack the visual fidelity to maximum and expect to drive double 4k screens for multiple hours without visual artifacts. That’s where Foveated Streaming comes in.

Foveated Streaming is a technique that the Steam Frame uses to optimize the content a person engages with inside the headset.

It works similar to Foveated Rendering by tracking eye movement of the player inside the headset. The scene that the player is looking at any given time is rendered at a higher visual fidelity than the out-of-focus content.

As the player moves his eyeballs, the focus switches instantly to the next scene. But Valve is using high quality compression for focus areas and this improves latency during the wireless operation through the dongle.

Foveated Streaming vs Rendering

Foveated Streaming is Valve’s technology while Foveated Rendering is a known concept in the VR space. Both are different technologies with a similar goal.

The goal of both of the technologies, is to focus on the content that the user’s eyeballs are looking at and doing it fast enough so that the user cannot pick it up.

They spares transmission bandwidth that wireless headsets have limited amount of compared to wired headsets, reduce GPU load and improve latency.

But a critical difference between the two is implementation.

Foveated Rendering is implemented at game-engine level. This means that game developers have to support that for each of their games. But Valve’s approach doesn’t need the devs doing extra work on their end.

For those with the Steam Frame, they can just enable Foveated Streaming even across games that don’t have Foveated Rendering support because it works at the headset level.

The first impressions of Foveated Streaming by initial hands-on reviews are pretty positive. Most of the reviews mention that the technology as indistinguishable even when reviewers tried to move their eyeballs quickly to catch it.

But we still have to wait for the final product and the complete hands-on reviews to fully know if the feature is as described in the initial reviews.

The Valve Ecosystem

It is quite clear that through the launch of the Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Controller, Valve is pushing for more than just new hardware release.

Almost a decade after announcing the original Steam Machine, 2026 is when Valve can finally start showing off their ecosystem that is the antithesis to Windows gaming.

It appears Valve is building its own ecosystem. Ever since the release of Steam Deck, Valve challenged the dominance of Windows as an Operating System for games.

Through the help of the open-source community, Valve showed that an open-source ecosystem could work for not just gamers but developers too.

Because of the success of SteamDeck, Valve has already cemented itself as a force in the portable handheld space. Now, it is eyeing not just VR but consoles, through the Steam Frame and Steam Machine respectively.

The glue that binds all of Valve’s devices is SteamOS which is built on open-source technologies that anyone can benefit from. Anyone can just pick up Valve’s Proton Compatibility layer and build their version of SteamOS if they don’t like the official one.

What we don’t know about Steam Frame?

As with most products that haven’t shipped, there are some things that we would only find out when the product launches.

We just have to wait for people to get the hardware in their hands to test it out themselves and share their experiences.

Here are some of the things about the Steam Frame we don’t have much information on:

Pricing

In the release announcements Valve didn’t announce a price for any of the 3 hardware pieces. But in an interview, Valve hinted that the Steam Frame will cost less than the full kit of Valve Index (It was $999).

The price is something that Valve intentionally kept a secret and for good reason. The uncertainty over Trump tariffs still haunts the US and any company building tech hardware around the world.

And the spurt of RAM prices globally hasn’t helped. Recently, we’ve seen prices of RAM double and triple in a matter of just a few weeks because of data-centers needing evermore memory.

The RAM situation especially is so bad that last week I went over with a friend to get him a hard drive. We were talking to the shopkeeper and found out that 16 gigs of DDR4 3200 Mhz RAM now costs 25k PKR (~80 USD).

The prices were so out of hand that the sellers were quoting prices for just a week as they were unsure if prices would further increase or not.

I remember I got a system-pulled 16 GB DDR4 2400 Mhz kit a couple of months ago for 6k PKR (~20 USD).

What this means is that no-one knows what PC component prices will be 6 months from today. We don’t know if Trump tariffs would increase prices for tech or the AI eating up our RAMs.

That’s why it’s a smart move on Valve’s end to have sealed lips on their end on the pricing front while things continue to stabilize if they do by the release.

Game Compatibility

Steam Frame is the first VR headset trying to run x86 games natively on the headset. Now, of course, it won’t run your AAA games, it’s not built for that.

But the idea is to run less-demanding games directly on the headset. The process it’s using to run the games is new and no-one else has done it before in the VR space.

That’s exactly why it remains to be seen how well that x86-ARM translation works, because run-time translation would take some level of performance and battery hit.

I think some level of configuration or tinkering may also be required just like we have with SteamDeck but it’s too early to say anything.

Wireless Experience

Valve describes the Steam Frame as a “streaming-first wireless VR headset”.

This means that the headset is designed for a wire-free setup where you can stream your games or media wirelessly without being in a web of wires like headsets.

Valve doesn’t just want the Steam Frame to be able to play VR games but it claims that the Steam Frame could stream all of the games available on Steam.

So, even if you don’t have VR games in your Steam library, you should be able to stream them just fine on the headset, and play with the Steam Frame controllers.

The initial impressions of their wireless experience are positive but it remains to be seen how the Frame actually ships and how well it performs with time.

Only complete reviews of the device can help us know if the wireless experience is as good as shown in the first impressions.

Stay Tuned to SK NEXUS for a detailed coverage of the 3 hardware pieces when the actually release next year.

Half-Life 3

Ok, hear me out for a second. This is totally based on hearsay, rumors and some monkey logic but….it seems as another Half-Life game is happening, and I’m not the only one who believes this.

You can say I’m on hopium but think of it yourself. The last time Valve released a half-life game was when the Index (Valve’s first VR headset) launched.

It looks like Valve uses Half-Life to build upon new experiments whether it’s a digital storefront or a new piece of hardware.

When it comes to hardware Valve is at its peak. It has seen the success of SteamDeck, jolted the Linux community and now it’s back at innovating in the VR space again.

Considering all this, Isn’t it a good time to release Half-Life 3 with the launch of Steam Frame and Steam Machine?

Don’t you think Valve would want to bundle one of the most anticipated games in history with their flagship hardware?

Offcourse, nothing is officially confirmed yet but there have been documented leaks of a Half-Life X project on the internet for quite a few years now.

Some trusted leakers in the community also believe that Half-Life X could be announced with Valve’s upcoming hardware next year.

Still, if Half-Life 3 doesn’t release this time, it’s just another injection of hopium for fans of the franchise. They’re quite used to it at this point ˙◠˙

Impact on Gaming Industry

A large portion of how Steam Frame will be received depends upon the pricing and its ability to live up to promises it has made. It could very well be the go-to VR for PC gaming.

At this moment, we just have the initial impressions by different creators to make an opinion on the device, and it seems like Valve is up to something.

But if the Steam Frame is received well it will have a far greater impact on the gaming industry as well as the future of Virtual Reality.

The first major impact of Steam Frame’s success would be that as more people get into the Valve Ecosystem, more video-game developers will have their games available for Linux.

Developers won’t need to provide native linux games. They would just have to work with the community to ensure they haven’t placed any obstacles in their games running on devices running SteamOS.

Valve’s original Steam Machine failed because it required developers to actually push native Linux builds for their games.

But this time, SteamOS is quite there and the newer Steam Machine would be using that as its operating system.

Another major impact would be in the VR space where the open-source software translation layer that Valve is contributing to, could be used by other companies to run x86 software on ARM.

As ARM hardware is widely adopted and the Fex translation layer matures, we will have open ecosystems built on it just as Proton Compatibility did for Linux gaming.

Some people also suggested that we may even have android apps working on the headset but this is yet to be confirmed.

What do I think?

Honestly, I can’t be more thrilled!

As someone who has yet to experience Virtual Reality headsets, I’m really interested in a wireless VR headset that cannot only play VR games but stream non-VR titles as well.

I recently picked up the original Half-Life and I can’t imagine how I can enjoy a game that was released long before I was even born. The physics still holds up even if the graphics don’t.

And knowing that one of the best shooters in the VR space (Half-Life: Alyx) is just waiting there to be experienced, makes me more excited about the Steam Frame.

Honestly, if I could afford the Steam Frame by the time it launches, I’ll probably buy it and write the first hands-on hardware review here at SK NEXUS.

So yeah, I am pretty excited about the Steam Frame. It is actually one of those gadgets that truly make you love technology. I plan to cover the Frame in more detail in the future.

I know many more of you would be as excited as I am for the Steam Frame. If you are one of those, the comments for this article are open to nerds, critics or anyone who wants to talk about the Steam Frame.

I love engaging with my readers and your comments actually make my writing better.

Further Learning Resources

• Valve Says Steam Machine Isn’t a Console—but It Is

• How Much Will the Steam Frame VR Headset Cost?

• Valve rejoins the VR hardware wars with standalone Steam Frame

• Steam Frame Hands-On: UploadVR’s Impressions

• Why Is Everyone Posting About a Half-Life 3 Announcement Soon?

• An entire PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory

• New Valve Announcements Are INSANE!

• Steam Frame First Impressions

• Every Other VR Headset is Obsolete Now

• Valve’s new VR streaming trick won’t just work with its own headset

• Foveated streaming is the genius tech behind Valve’s Steam Frame

• Valve is welcoming Android games into Steam

• Steam Frame vs. Every Other VR Headset - Linus Tech Tips

I see you made it here again…drawn to the shadows just like me, so let me take you back for a moment.

When I first stepped into hacking, I wasn’t obsessed with exploits or payloads. I was obsessed with something far more unsettling - how hackers break people, not systems.

I remember trying to learn phishing purely out of curiosity - I wanted to see how deep the rabbit hole went. A friend of mine, a pentester, had access to a paid training course - I asked for his account - He said yes and that became my first backstage pass into how attackers really operate.

I learned how to craft convincing lures, how to automate the entire trap & how easy it was to set bait and watch people walk right into it. I tried it in a couple of safe environments and…yeah, it was disturbing - It was psychology with a keyboard.

And that moment pushed me to write this.

Most people don’t even realize they’re being played until it’s too late. So here’s your upgrade - a new lens to catch the con before the con catches you.

Let’s begin.

She heard a calm voice say “Hi, this is James from IT - we need to reset your password right now” She handed over a code. Five minutes later her company was dealing with a breach.

People assume hacking means green lines flying across the screen. But the easiest target is the person in front of the keyboard and today, with AI being able to mimic voices, write perfect phishing copy, and automate scams, these attacks are scaling faster than our defenses.

All this can be categorized as social engineering and it works because humans are predictable & vulnerable to pressure.

Read on and you’ll learn the main attack methods, real examples that work, and concrete, repeatable defenses you can apply right now.

What Social Engineering Actually is

At its core, social engineering is psychological manipulation with a goal: get you to reveal something, click something, or do something you otherwise wouldn’t. Attackers don’t always need technical skills. They need to be believable and patient.

And sometimes it’s not a stranger in a hoodie behind this attack; it’s people playing friendly, gaining trust, and then using that relationship to extract something.

Key features to watch for:

• It targets different kinds of behaviors - Helpfulness, fear, and urgency….etc

• Tactics often pair urgency with a purpose to push you into a quick decision.

• Everyone’s a target - You may not be famous, but you hold data, access, or relationships someone wants.

In other words - Social engineering is subtle and scalable. With a convincing voice or message, a single attacker can compromise entire organizations. And motive isn’t always cash - some do it to spy on you, to prove a point, or simply for the thrill of breaking trust.

In short - social engineering is about who you trust, and when you trust them.

Trust is valuable. Some people use it to manipulate you, others to straight-up exploit you. There’s an entire business built on that exploitation - leeching off your trust. Read more on that here:

Seeing Social Engineering in Action

Now that you understand what social engineering is, let’s take it a step further. The best way to understand the danger of social engineering is to study actual incidents. These examples show how attackers use psychology to move through defenses that should be impossible to break.

Lapsus$ (2022) - Teenagers Outsmarting Big Tech

A group of teenagers took down half of Big Tech, not joking.

Lapsus$ got into Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung, Okta, and T-Mobile. Their secret weapon was people. They bribed employees, socially engineered support staff, and even pulled SIM-swap tricks to hijack accounts. Once inside, they leaked source code, taunted companies on Telegram, and caused millions in damage - all without relying on sophisticated exploits.

This hack proves that - even the most secure companies in the world can fall if the employees aren’t fully equipped with what’s about to come.

Twilio Phishing Attack (2022)

Attackers sent employees fake IT messages urging them to verify their login. The link looked convincing enough that multiple staff members entered their credentials. Those credentials opened doors to internal systems, giving attackers access to customer data.

Clicking on the link in the messages had taken unsuspecting individuals to a fake Twilio login page, where they entered their credentials and allowed hackers to gain access to customer data.

Now, after Twilio wrapped up their internal investigation, they confirmed something important. According to the company’s official statement, the same attackers had already pulled off a smaller breach weeks earlier by socially engineering an employee over a voice call:

“Our investigation also led us to conclude that the same malicious actors likely were responsible for a brief security incident that occurred on June 29, 2022. In the June incident, a Twilio employee was socially engineered through voice phishing (or ‘vishing’) to provide their credentials, and the malicious actor was able to access customer contact information for a limited number of customers.”

And once again, a social engineering attack proved that the systems aren’t always the weak point. The humans reading the message are.

What You Saw Above is Barely the Surface

The cases you saw above are nothing compared to the size of the real problem. Every year, companies, governments, celebrities, and everyday people get compromised by attacks that start with one message or one moment of trust.

If you want to dig even deeper, here are a few more social engineering incidents worth exploring:

• Twitter 2020 Bitcoin Hack

• Uber 2022 Breach

• MGM Resorts 2023 Shutdown

How Attackers Learn Everything About You

Recon is where every social engineering attack begins. Before an attacker even talks to you, they study you. Every post & every about me line - it all becomes raw material. People forget that the internet never forgets.

In fact, OSINT is an entire skillset built around this. Attackers collect everything:
job updates on LinkedIn, vacation photos on Instagram, conference selfies, random tweets, even your contacts through “people you may know” algorithms.

Piece by piece, they build a complete profile of you - sometimes more detailed than what your own family knows.

And I’ve seen this play out - Some people post every single detail of their life online. Full diaries, daily routines, personal moments. Then when someone targets them, they cry, “How did he know so much about me”?

Simple - Because you told him.

Think Before You Post

Now, don’t get me wrong - this doesn’t mean you need to delete yourself, but be thoughtful and stay vigilant.

I get it - some info needs to be online. LinkedIn, professional achievements & that’s normal. But posting personal stuff without a good reason is how you turn yourself into an easy target. So, if you don’t have a legitimate reason to publish something personal, don’t publish it.

Why Anybody Can Be Tricked

You think a scam won’t work on you. So did a senior engineer who handed over credentials after a calm IT call. That’s the point - social engineering targets normal people who do normal things.

And most people assume - “That sort of trick won’t work on me” That belief is the root problem. This type of attack targets your instincts. Attackers find your blind spots and press them which is the main reason for its effectiveness.

Here’s an example - Banking apps verification calls - The caller claims your account is locked. They sound official, they pressure you, and they ask for verification codes. Many hand them over because the script mimics real bank procedures.

If you zoom out, you’ll notice the same key levers being pulled in every type of social engineering attack:

• Authority - pretending to be your bank, boss, or IT.

• Urgency - “Act now or you lose access”

• Scarcity - “Limited offer, only for today”

• Social proof - “Everyone else already did this”

• Empathy - playing to emotions, fear, or sympathy

What You Can Do About It

You can start by slowing down by insisting on steps that slow them down (call-backs, formal requests). Then you can start relying on a trusted contact method or official website to verify if you are being played or not.

Other than that - you can limit your public exposure because the less they know, the harder it is to build believable pretexts.

How Platforms Accidentally Empower Scammers

Social engineering is not just about clever scammers - it’s also about the design of the apps you use every day. Platforms accidentally hand attackers the tools they need.

Example - Instagram’s $15 blue tick. It sounds harmless - until you realize that scammers use it to look official and most users don’t even know verification is buyable now.

And yes, Meta verifies with an ID
but only to ensure the buyer is a real person, not the identity they claim to be. This means - a scammer can impersonate a celebrity, verify their own face, and still run the fake persona.

The platform hands them instant credibility.

Dark Patterns: When Design Works Against You

Scammers love dark patterns because they work on autopilot. The whole idea is simple:

Make the dangerous option the easiest option.

• Big Continue buttons.

• Pre-checked boxes.

• Urgent banners “Act now or lose access”

• Layouts that hide the safe option behind tiny text.

Humans love convenience, we crave the path of least resistance, but that instinct gets weaponized against us. Once convenience becomes the default, your brain stops fighting back - especially when you’re already trapped in a dopamine loop the app created.

And that’s when scammers step in.

They bring their own tactics, their own dark patterns, their own psychological traps - but you’re already softened by the platform’s design.

You’re already clicking fast.
You’re already trusting the flow.

Put both forces together - the platform’s nudges + the scammer’s tricks
and boom: you end up doing exactly what the attacker wants.

And it’s not just scammers using these patterns. Platforms themselves rely on the same tricks to boost engagement, harvest more data, and keep you hooked. If you want to learn more about that, check out the following post:

How These Tricks Play Out in the Real World

Knowing the tricks is one thing. Seeing them deployed in real attacks is another and the best way to see their impact is to study real attacks where scammers used platform design to slip past people’s defenses. Following are some examples
that show just how easily these features can be turned against you:

The Blue-Tick Impersonation Scam

On Instagram and Facebook, scammers are buying the blue-tick and setting up profiles that look completely legitimate. The badge makes people drop their guard, so when the fake account sends a DM, a link, or a collab offer, users assume it’s genuine.

The trick works because Meta verifies the person holding the ID - not the persona they’re claiming to be. That gap lets scammers impersonate brands, influencers, or support teams with almost no friction. Victims trust the badge, click the bait, and often end up losing access, leaking info, or getting scammed before they even realize the profile was fake.

Fake Donation Campaigns

Scammers have been running fake donation campaigns across Instagram, Telegram, YouTube, and other platforms. They set up profiles that look like charity pages, post emotional stories, and add phone numbers or payment links to make the donation flow feel legitimate.

To make the campaigns look credible, they build networks of fake profiles to repost, comment, and vouch for the cause. This creates an illusion of legitimacy and social proof, pushing people to donate quickly.

How to Protect Yourself in a Rigged System

The only real defense here is a mindset shift: trust nothing, verify everything. Just because someone looks verified, has mutual friends, or seems perfectly legit on the surface doesn’t mean any of it is real. Scammers plan these details intentionally, and platforms make it even easier for them to blend in.

When something feels a little too smooth - stop. Step back, pull yourself out of the dopamine loop for a second:

• Look at the message like an outsider

• Ask if the timing, tone, or request makes sense

Most scams crumble the moment you stop reacting and start observing.
A small moment of skepticism can save you from a huge mess.

AI is Supercharging Social Engineering

There are countless branches of social engineering, and covering all of them in depth would take an entire book. But one thing needs to be crystal clear: AI has put this entire field on fast-forward. Attackers now use LLMs to create highly believable messages. They use voice models to imitate anyone in your contact list. They use deepfake tools to produce fake celebrity endorsements that spread like wildfire.

The Brad Pitt deepfake ad was just a small part of a much bigger system - It’s just one example of how easy instant credibility has become. If a scammer can borrow a Hollywood face in seconds, your brain barely has time to doubt it.

I’ll be doing a full breakdown of AI-powered attacks in a separate article - this is just a preview of what’s coming, stay tuned for that.

The Attacks Everyone Still Falls For

With the foundations in place, this is where we explore the actual mechanics of social engineering. These attack types show up everywhere…

In the next sections, I’ll explain some of the most famous methods in detail so you can recognize them when they happen to you.

Let’s get to it.

Phishing & Spear-Phishing

Phishing is when attackers send mass messages - emails, texts, DMs - that look official enough to make you click without thinking.

On the other hand - Spear-phishing is the evolved form of hyper-personal messages crafted just for you. AI has made this worse - Attackers can now generate emails that match your writing style, reference real coworkers, or clone internal templates.

The worst part is - everyone thinks they won’t fall for this - until they do and then… credentials get hijacked & malware gets inside the system.

You can visit Example Phishing Attacks to look at some practical examples, so you get an idea of what these types of attacks look like.

Pretexting

This one is all about the story. The attacker builds a believable scenario - an HR officer needing documents or a delivery guy asking for verification. The scripts are polished, the details feel legit, and the confidence makes you lower your guard.

Pretexting works because your brain reacts to the narrative before it questions it and the goal is simple - make you respond automatically to authority. Once that happens, the rest is easy.

Baiting

Baiting is one of the oldest tricks in social engineering, and it still works because it preys on curiosity & greed. The attacker leaves something tempting in your path - a free USB drive, a download link promising premium software, a leaked document. Once you take the bait, the attacker gets access: malware installs or ends up stealing your credentials.

Modern baiting happens online too - fake movie downloads, AI tool cracks - all packaged to look harmless but designed to infect your device the moment you open them.

A good example involves - Stuxnet USB Drop - Attackers dropped infected USB drives around Iranian nuclear facilities. Employees plugged them in out of curiosity, giving nation-state malware direct access to air-gapped systems.

Quid-Pro-Quo

Quid-pro-quo is a social trade-off attack. The scammer pretends to offer you something - technical support, discounts, upgrades and in exchange, they ask you for access or information. It’s the classic fake IT support call:

“We noticed an issue on your system; let me log in and fix it.”

Unlike baiting (which relies on curiosity), quid-pro-quo relies on our natural instinct to cooperate. That instinct blinds people, even smart ones, and hands attackers exactly what they need.

A pretty famous example involves - Fake Microsoft Support Scam - Attackers call pretending to be Microsoft technicians offering to fix a malware issue. Once the victim allows remote access, attackers install ransomware or steal credentials.

How to Defend Yourself Against This

The attacks I explained are just the surface layer. In reality - social engineering has countless forms - but they all rely on the same blueprint: pressure, emotion, and blind trust. But once you understand the blueprint, the attack loses its power.

Your defense is boring but effective
Don’t trust first - verify first.

Every scam succeeds because the victim reacted before thinking. Your job is to break that chain, slow the moment down, look at the context & Cross-check the claim through a separate, real source.

And yes, this applies to employees too. Attackers impersonate customers, vendors, even your own IT department to squeeze out data that isn’t theirs. Don’t hand over information just because someone sounds professional.

If you want your eyes opened even further, watch this clip - it’ll show you how easily people can be manipulated:

Defense Playbook - Hack-Proof Your Head

By now, you’ve already seen enough prevention tips across every section, no point repeating all of it. Instead, just keep in mind that hackers always find unique ways to attack you.

These attacks don’t only come from strangers. They can come from a cousin asking for a code, a coworker pretending it’s urgent, or someone playing friendly just long enough to slip past your guard.

So here’s the mental model that actually keeps you alive in the real world:

Pause → Verify → Only then act.

And if your emotions spike - that’s your signal to slow down, not speed up.

Quick Checklist - Screenshot This

When something feels even 1% off, fall back to this checklist. Treat it like your personal reboot button for weird situations:

Keep this checklist somewhere visible. When things feel blurry, this will help you wake up to reality.

If You’re Targeted - What To Do Fast

If you ever realize you’re being targeted, don’t panic. Slow down and switch into incident mode. Your goal is simple: contain → confirm → recover.

Step 1 - Stop responding:
Disengage immediately because it prevents further manipulation.

Step 2 - Save everything:
Take screenshots, save numbers, URLs, usernames - You’ll need them if you report it.

Step 3 - Confirm the truth:
If someone claims to be your bank, your friend, your boss - contact them using a trusted channel. Not the same chat.

Step 4 - Change your passwords:
Start with your main email. Then banking, socials, and anything that shares a password. After that make sure you enable app-based 2FA on all your accounts as well.

Step 5 - Inform the right places:

• If it involves Bank, then - Freeze cards.

• If Employer - inform them about it.

• Friends/family? Warn them that someone may use your name next.

• Local cybercrime office (if relevant)

Step 6 - Reset access:
Log out of all devices, revoke unknown sessions, update recovery numbers/emails.

The Final Truth

If you made it this far - respect. Most people don’t even last two paragraphs anymore.
But now you’re carrying something they aren’t - actual awareness.

You’ve seen how these attacks work. You’ve seen the psychology behind them and now you understand why even the smartest people fall for the simplest tricks. I’ve been in the trenches; I’ve watched basic scripts take down people who thought they were untouchable. Don’t be one of them.

With the passage of time, you are going to notice attackers & technology evolving.

But remember - the backbone never changes: social engineering still exploits the same human weaknesses. I’ve given you the fundamentals. No matter how shiny the new scam looks, the framework is the same.

And that checklist I gave you close to you. Carry it with you & most importantly actually use it - it will act as your protector.

Build mental friction & Guard your public surface.
Treat convenience as the silent enemy - it numbs the part of your brain that protects you.

Your Turn

Before you go - I want you to think about this:

• What’s the last moment you “trusted by default” online and why?

• Which emotion hijacks your judgment the fastest - urgency, fear, ego, or convenience?

Drop your answers in the comments - I want to see how you think.

Leave a comment

If you want more content like this, hit subscribe and restack. I’m on a mission to help people see through the noise, and make them understand what’s going on behind the curtain.

But for this to reach more people, I need your support. Subscribes and restacks aren’t just numbers - they’re what keep this mission alive and spreading.

Dive Deeper

If you want to learn more, you can give the posts of different creators involving , , on social engineering a read:

Digital-Mark

Social Engineering Survival Guide: How to Hack-Proof Your Brain Against the World’s Most Dangerous Attacks

You’ve disabled 5G on your phone, you stash your devices in Faraday pouches, and every byte of your data is encrypted. You feel invincible until a stranger in a crisp uniform asks for your password, and you hand it over without a second thought. 🤐…

Read more

10 months ago · 11 likes · 3 comments · Digital-Mark

Decoded Security

The Psychology of Hacking: Why Smart People Fall for Dumb Scams

Right now, while you’re reading this, someone is crafting a message with your name on it. They know where you work. They know what you bought online last week. And they’re betting you’ll be too distracted by holiday chaos to notice when they strike…

Read more

5 months ago · 7 likes · 4 comments · Erich Winkler

ToxSec AI - Artificial Intelligence Security

AI-Powered Phishing: You Will Fall for This

TL;DR: That gut feeling you get from a weird email? It’s about to fail you. AI is now crafting perfect lures that know your colleagues’ names, your last project, and even your CEO’s voice. We’re entering an era of industrialized social engineering…

Read more

5 months ago · 27 likes · 7 comments · ToxSec

Welcome to the final part of our self-driving series.

So, more than a decade ago, Silicon Valley promised us fully autonomous self-driving cars. Cars that could drive themselves totally on their own.

The concept was of futuristic cars cruising smoothly around cities without need for humans to drive.

It was a promising concept, but the delivery, even after this many years isn’t what many had initially hoped for.

Instead of completely driverless cars driving us places, we have a mix of human and some levels of self-driving. For the most part, humans are still involved in the driving experience.

Even advanced self-driving services like Waymo with their Level 4 self-driving systems still have humans involved in the driving process although sometimes in a remote setting.

It took us years to reach the current level of self-driving that exists today but many of the companies that initially joined the self-driving industry have exited out of the race.

In this race of getting to develop self-driving experiments we’ve seen successes like Tesla and Waymo but there have been some big failures too.

Not a lot of people know about this, but Apple spent more than 10 years working on a secretive self-driving project called the Project Titan, a project that never shipped a product and officially exited a year ago.

And very few people know about the exit of Cruise AI, a startup backed by General Motors for 1 Billion dollars, yes billion with a B!

That’s why today I’ll talk about the history of two of the biggest companies to exit the self-driving race. I’ll largely focus on the biggest one (Apple) while also discussing General Motors’ exit from the self-driving race.

This article that you’re reading is the last in a series of 3 articles we did on SK NEXUS covering the self-driving industry

Our first article in the self-driving series, talks about the current overview of the self-driving industry. I discussed the key terminology, the levels of autonomous driving, the big players in the industry and, an overview of the tech they’re using.

In the second article, we did a deep-dive into the technology that self-driving companies use. We discussed the two popular approaches to solving self-driving (LiDARs and Computer Vision) and shared some perspective on both.

I encourage you to go through these articles in order just so we have a shared ground to begin discussing today’s article.

Apple’s Project Titan

So, Project Titan was Apple’s attempt to build an electric, self-driving car. The initial idea was to build a proper self-driving car but that evolved into building a car with ADAS-like features.

The thing to know about Project Titan is that it was a secret project, so secretive that even today we don’t have a single official image of the car or the technology Apple developed.

So, the project was officially behind closed doors but its existence was obvious from public testing of cars and Apple’s hiring of engineers from the self-driving industry.

The industry had a keen eye on Project Titan for a decade but Apple didn’t announce a cancellation to the public.

But it was in 2024 when Bloomberg broke the news that Apple halted work on their electric car and announced internally that the 2,000 person team on Project Titan would be shifted to generative AI.

2013 - 2014: Hiring for Project Titan Starts

Apple is one of the companies that had eyes on the self-driving industry long before it came up. Reports on the Project Titan go as far as 2013.

Initially Apple executives are reported to have had meetings with Tesla which was trying to make a name for themselves in the EV industry.

The meetings weren’t fruitful and nothing much came out of it other than a few Apple execs leaving for Tesla.

Right around 2014, Apple started work on Project Titan by poaching people from traditional car manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz and Ford from many of their divisions.

Hundreds of people were now working on a self-driving minivan-like car. It was the same time Apple executives were on tour looking for partners around the world. Tim Cook is reported to tour BMW’s facilities also around 2014.

2015: Apple’s Secret Research Lab is Official

The Financial Times breaks in February that Apple has been hiring automotive experts to work in a secret research lab, and The Wall Street Journal immediately follows that up by reporting that the company is working on an electric vehicle that it describes as “minivan-like.” The WSJ report also claims that self-driving tech “is not part of Apple’s current plan.”

As with most things Apple, the news sent shockwaves across the automotive industry. The head of Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler at the time, said one week later that he wasn’t losing any sleep over Apple’s interest in building a car.

It is important to note that even around this time Apple has its lips sealed over Project Titan. Tim Cook famously dodged the question when asked if Apple wants to buy Tesla.

The veil is lifted when a German magazine shares that Apple talked to BMW for their EV tech that powers its i3 compact car. The Guardian does come up with the documents confirming Apple’s interest in developing a self-driving car.

The New York Times reported in September that Apple is still split on whether it should build a self-driving car, an electric vehicle or both.

By this time the Titan project is up to 600 people and Apple is pulling people from other teams. Musk says that Apple is poaching its people.

2016: Focus Shifts

In September, the Financial Times reported that Apple approached McLaren about a potential acquisition or a strategic investment.

One month later, Bloomberg reports Apple is cutting hundreds of members of the Titan team as the company pivots away from building an electric car and toward developing an autonomous driving system.

This is a key moment in this story that shows that up till 2016 Apple was unclear about the future of Project Titan. As initially reported, they were split on a car or the self-driving tech.

Apple executives allegedly give the team until the end of 2017 to prove out the tech and “decide on a final direction.”

2017: The Self-Driving scene heats up

Apple received a permit from California’s Department of Motor Vehicles to test its autonomous driving tech using three Lexus SUVs in April of 2017.

It was the time when Uber was also building its self-driving after poaching experts from Carnegie Mellon University. Google’s Waymo also jumped in around this time with both of the companies accusing each other of stealing their technology.

Right around this time General Motors acquired Cruise for 1 Billion dollars. We’ll talk extensively about Cruise in a bit but right now, let’s switch back to Apple.

2017 is when Tim Cook publicly confirms that Apple is indeed working on an automotive project. He calls it “the mother of all AI projects.” But he dodges answering whether Apple will ever make its own electric car.

Around this time, Apple plans to operate an autonomous shuttle that would bring employees from one building to another on its campus, The New York Times reported. The company also started working on its own lidar sensor.

2018 - 2019: Hiring and Firing

In 2018 Apple expands its self-driving fleet which triples in size.

Around this time Apple poached Google’s AI chief John Giannandrea and now the Project Titan that started with a few hundred employees balloons to around 5,000 people.

Back in 2019 Apple started restructuring and more than 200 workers are fired from Project Titan.

The executives continue the narrative that the future products will “blow you away.”

Around this time, Apple acquired a self-driving startup Drive.ai.

2021 - 2022: Pandemic Shifts Focus Again

The COVID-19 pandemic puts a pause on almost any meaningful reports of what Apple is up to with Titan, as workers stay-at-home and most of the team goes remote.

During this time, though, Apple starts up a brief discussion with EV startup Canoo about a possible acquisition or investment. The talks ultimately go nowhere.

Once again, Bloomberg reports another pivot in December. This time, Apple reportedly scales back ambitions after realizing that a fully autonomous vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals is not feasible.

The company reportedly pivots to a car that would only be autonomous on highways, and Apple even considers using a “remote command center” to assist drivers or control the vehicles during emergencies. The target date slips to 2026.

2023 - 2024: Rest In Peace

Apple has steadily built its test fleet back up in California. But news about the project’s progress dries up. In September, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo shares that the “development of the Apple Car seems to have lost all visibility”.

He writes that he doubts Apple can mass-produce the car without an acquisition of another automaker. Behind the scene the board starts pressuring the company’s leadership for progress on Project Titan.

Apple reaches a “make-or-break point” with the project in January, Bloomberg reports, as the release date is pushed to 2028 and the team reportedly pivots again to an “EV with more limited features”.

This new goal came after “a series of frenzied meetings that included Apple’s board, project head Kevin Lynch and Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook,” according to the report. Apple still doesn’t have a formal prototype.

One month later, Apple killed Project Titan.

Cruise AI - General Motor’s 10 Billion Dollar Failure

As like many others, Cruise AI came as a startup in 2013 focused on converting cars to self-driving systems. With time, its technology and ambition caught the eye of traditional automakers.

In 2016, General Motors Company announced it would acquire Cruise Automation “to accelerate autonomous vehicle efforts.”

Reports estimate the acquisition value at over US$1 billion, making it one of the earliest large bets by a car-maker on the robotaxi vision.

Cruise’s Promise

Right after the acquisition, Cruise aggressively scaled while hiring engineers, expanding testing to public roads, and branding itself as the company that would finally deliver “robo-taxis done right”.

The mix of the startup agility with GM’s capital and infrastructure made it a front-runner in the autonomous vehicle (AV) race.

By 2022, Cruise had secured regulatory approvals to offer driverless rides in San Francisco and was frequently cited as one of the two most promising players (along Google’s Waymo). The narrative was: legacy automaker + startup innovation = the future of urban mobility.

Cruise’s promise was a similar one. It wanted to commercialize driverless taxis in major cities around the world starting with charging passengers in San Francisco. It was among the first to roll out driverless vehicle service.

The Crash (Literally)

Cruise’s exit as a company was a tragic one when in October 2023, one of the Cruise robotaxi struck a human pedestrian and dragged her 20 feet before coming to rest with one of its tires on her leg.

Investigations later found multiple technical failures at Cruise. Their self-driving system failed to accurately detect the pedestrian’s location, misclassified the collision, lost track of the pedestrian.

The Cruise robotaxi then made a repositioning maneuver as if the situation were safe, despite the pedestrian being trapped underneath.

In response to the accident Califordnia DMV suspended Cruise’s permits for driverless operation in the state. Cruise announced a nationwide suspension of its driverless robotaxi fleet (while supervised fleets remained).

Cruise recalled its vehicles for a software update and issued internal reviews. Regulatory fines started to be hit by enforcement agencies.

Cruise CEO resigned in November 2023 and the company started restructuring and experienced layoffs.

This accident followed Cruise’s shut down as General Motors pulled out its funding.

The Drive Ahead

More than a decade, tens of billions of dollars, and countless hype cycles later, the truth is unavoidable:

Full self-driving is not solved.
Not even close.

Apple took their exit. Cruise couldn’t do it. Tesla keeps pushing timelines.

Project Titan and Cruise AI, are two of the biggest exits in the self-driving industry, but they are not the only one. In fact, many other came and went like the Uber ATG, Argo AI and many more.

Out of the tens of self-driving companies that existed back in 2016, only a handful have survived, with only a couple of main players that include companies like Waymo and Tesla.

In the short-term, we have a long way to go. Tesla has the biggest fleet on the road but their self-driving system is still at SAE Level 2, and their ‘Full Self Driving’ software is still in beta.

Waymo has achieved SAE Level 4 and is one of the major forces in the industry but their operations are limited to just a handful of cities and experts question their ability to scale their operations.

Waymo also has to rely on tele-operators that are humans sitting in a remote station. They supervise parts of the current fleet that drive passengers around cities without human drivers.

My Two Cents

For me personally, it is hard to predict how or when the promise of fully autonomous driving will fulfill itself. I am not an expert in any way but I think the future of the technologies involved is exciting.

Because we at SK NEXUS generally try to highlight the optimist side and actually there is good reason to be excited about the future of self-driving cars.

Because of self-driving cars we have seen innovations in other areas like LiDARs becoming significantly cheaper than they used to be. New versions of LiDARs like Solid State LiDARs are also being worked upon.

The sensors are getting cheaper and better while the software also gets tuned with each new update but making sure accidents like Cruise AI don’t repeat is crucial.

In the long-term there are definite improvements to be excited about but it’s clear that self-driving isn’t going to be an overnight revolution.

Even after the billions of dollars spent and years and years of effort, It seems that we still have a long way to achieve the dream of self-driving that our average Bashir imagines but there is no reason to be gloomy about it.

Even if we may not ever get into a completely self-driving car, we are sure to have hybrid solutions that are better than what we have traditionally used to drive our cars.

Honestly, I had to be on my toes for this series. It was not only exciting but challenging for me as writer to write on topics that involve technology and humans.

I hope you enjoyed reading this or another blog in the self-driving series. Engagement with my readers usually makes my day.

If you have any thoughts, opinions or questions related to the Project Titan or self-driving cars, please make sure to leave them in the comments down below.

If you don’t have something to write about down below, you are welcome to share this article to someone who would. Just use the button down below:

Share

Further Resources

• RIP Apple Car. This Is Why It Died

• Apple Gears Up to Challenge Tesla in Electric Cars

• Crash of the Titan: a short history of Apple’s doomed car project

• GM’s Cruise Halts All US Robotaxi Service After Suspension

• GM Closes Acquisition of Cruise Automation

• How GM’s Cruise robotaxi tech failures led it to drag pedestrian 20 feet

• One crash set off a new era for self-driving cars in S.F

• Apple’s electric car project is dead

• Cruise car involved in San Francisco crash

• Why people might never use autonomous cars

• How self-driving cars got stuck in the slow lane

• The Big Problem With Self-Driving Cars Is People

• The Future of Self Driving Cars

Welcome to the holiday season. It’s usually the quiet stretch of the year where tech news slows down. Still, we got some highlights. Valve teased new hardware (more on that soon). Micron bowed out of its consumer business, which means RAM prices are about to punch everyone in the face. The Game Awards are around the corner, and the internet is praying Half-Life X is real.

All interesting. All worth knowing about.

But none of them change your daily life the way one silent technology does - the one thing every modern device relies on no matter what hardware you buy or which game gets announced.

And that tech is GPS.

The thing powering your Uber fares, your map pins, your deliveries, your flights, your banking timestamps, and half the apps you use without thinking.

Let’s pull back the curtain on the system you depend on hundreds of times a day but barely understand.

I belong to the Gen Z (people born around the early 2000s). A large part of my phone usage is ride-hailing, food deliver or using maps. Services like Google Maps are a second nature to people like me.

For centuries humans have traveled and used different sorts of devices and processes to figure out their location.

We looked at the stars to guide and us and looked at our compasses to figure out our location, but nothing ever came close to GPS in terms of convenience and accuracy.

Your Uber, Maps, the food delivery app in your smartphone, all these services rely on a fascinating technology that is largely hidden away from public discussions, and that is GPS.

I think sometimes we take these services for granted. We think that services like Google Maps were always there for us and it’s hard to imagine a time when they were not.

Basically, most of us who have a smartphone depend on GPS in one way or another, yet quite few understand how it works or what it is. This 24/7 free technology is among the coolest tech we have in this age.

To help you bridge this gap, I decided to write on the topic of GPS and uncover the details behind this interesting technology.

What is GPS?

GPS stands for Global Positioning System. It is a web of satellites orbiting our Earth, Ground stations and related technologies that we use to figure out our exact location on Earth.

GPS works in all weather conditions as long as you’re able to communicate with the satellites. You basically just need a clear vision of the sky.

GPS itself doesn’t need an internet connection or even a telephone signal although it can provide much better results with them.

All of us who use a smartphone use GPS in various ways from Google Maps, Ride hailing, Food Delivery, etc. Whenever we fly our airplanes are using GPS too.

Militaries across the world use GPS for precise navigation inside planes, big ships, submarines, missiles and all kinds of scary stuff.

A brief history of GPS

If we look at some of the most disruptive technologies of the past century you’ll see a common pattern - the US Military.

Technologies like the Internet, Self-Driving cars had their seeds sown by the US Military, same is the case with GPS.

Originally GPS was made by the US Department of Defense (DoD) in the 1970s in response to a couple of navigation challenges.

The military wanted precise navigation that works across different weather conditions for their ships, missiles, submarines that all benefit from better navigation.

There were some earlier navigation experiments that the US military conducted but GPS was aimed to be more accurate and to achieve global coverage while requiring less ground infrastructure.

Work on GPS continued and the final system became operational in the 1990s while initially being a prime US military asset. With time, the US military allowed citizens the use of selected features of GPS.

By 2000, the US made the GPS functionality free-for-all across the globe seeing the impact this technology would have in the years to come.

To this day, the US DoD manages GPS for all of us around the globe.

How GPS Works?

GPS is a groundbreaking technology and it is equally complex in its working. I’m not even qualified to explain the real science that goes behind its working (I’ll still try).

But I can share a really simplified version of how GPS works today. Even if you don’t get the full picture you’ll have a better idea of GPS than you had before.

The Three Players

Before we begin the discussion of GPS’ working, let’s discuss the three main players that we’ll talk about going on.

Satellites

In space, above our literal heads about 20,000 kilometers above the Earth, there are more than 30 satellites reserved for GPS that are continuously circling our planet.

These satellites are continuously orbiting the Earth and they are divided in such a way that at any given time four of them can see you no matter where on Earth you are.

The satellites are flying through space and they are constantly leaving messages that can be received by a GPS receiver like a tiny one that your smartphone probably has (you can’t see it, unless you’re JerryRigEverything).

The message from the satellite includes:

• Where it is (inside its orbit)

• What time it send the message

The satellite message also includes some additional data but we’d keep things simple here.

Ground Stations

Back on Earth we have ground stations. These are facilities that communicate with satellites in space and keep them in their right orbits.

You don’t want satellites drifting away from their orbits in space that’s why these ground stations continuously monitor them and adjust the satellites if needed.

Without ground stations, satellites could drift away and we’d be left with an inaccurate GPS system.

GPS Receivers

The third player is the GPS receiver. It is normally a tiny chip that could be in your smartphone, car, smartwatch, drone - basically anything that uses GPS for navigation.

The job of the GPS receiver as its name implies is to ‘receive’ signals from the GPS satellites. GPS receivers need signals from at-least four satellites at a time to pinpoint their exact location in real-time.

Putting It Together

Now that we know about the three main players, let’s talk about how all these work together in a GPS system.

Let’s assume you’re using your smartphone to figure out your location using GPS. We’ll refer to the smartphone as ‘Receiver’.

Receiver Listens For Satellite Signals

Your receiver device (like your smartphone) waits for signals from satellites above you. Each satellite constantly sends its position and a timestamp (the timestamp includes the exact time the message was sent).

Receiver Measures Time Delay

When a satellite’s message reaches your device, it arrives a tiny bit later than when the satellite sent it. Your device compares the time stamp in the message with its own clock and sees the delay.

Because radio signals travel at a fixed and known speed, that tiny delay tells the device roughly how far away that satellite is. The device does this for several satellites, so it ends up with several “how far” numbers.

The GPS receivers we use on Earth have a clock that is less precise especially when compared to the Atomic Clock that GPS satellites use.

Random Fact: On Earth, we generally use Quartz clocks which drift by a few seconds every month. GPS satellites use Atomic Clocks which are so precise that they only drift by one second every 30 million years!!

This shows that time is of the essence in a GPS communication and a few millisecond difference can change results completely.

Receiver Finds Location

After measuring the time delay between the satellites, the receiver uses signals from multiple other satellites and by the fourth one it has a good enough idea for the location.

By the fourth satellite, the receiver already knows three dimensions: Latitude, Longitude and Altitude. That is when our receiver draws the location on a map.

Even though I tried my best I think a visual representation of this concept is much easier to grasp. I have attached a few good videos in the ‘Further Learning’ section at the end of this article to help you in this.

GPS is Everywhere

Now that we’ve discussed some of the technical working that goes on behind GPS let’s go about discussing the actual importance that it holds in the lives of everyone living in the 21st century.

I’m not exaggerating when I say this but GPS seems inescapable. Honestly, my mind kinda stops when I imagine a life without GPS.

I try to imagine myself lost in my city, and just the thought of asking directions from a Lahori scares me ;)

Let’s discuss some of the industries where GPS has had a tremendous impact:

Cars, Aviation and Logistics

GPS has fundamentally changed the way we use our cars, smartphones, how we shop and even how we move large cargo.

All modern cars and smartphones now have some sort of built-in GPS functionality. Apps like Uber, Google Maps fundamentally rely on it.

Airplanes make use of GPS for precise flight paths and landings especially when weather gets bad. They also use it to avoid collisions and stay on their paths.

Large container ships in the ocean rely on GPS to stay on their course. Long-haul trucks and ground logistics vehicles also use GPS to plan the fastest routes and track deliveries in real-time.

Smartphones

Your smartphone quietly makes use of GPS sometimes even when you’re not conscious about it.

All your ride-hailing apps, food delivery apps rely on accurate functioning of GPS for fare tracking, ride searching, or to find you on the map.

Instagram uses GPS to provide your more personalized feed. Even your banking apps use GPS to confirm if that’s you or someone else.

Disaster Response

Whenever a disaster strikes, GPS comes to save the day. It’s a literal lifesaver.

Emergency responders like the Fire Brigade, Police, etc use it to locate people trapped after earthquakes, and coordinate rescue operations.

GPS was an actual lifesaver for many in the recent floods that we experienced here in Pakistan.

Military and Scientific Research

As we discussed above, GPS started as a military project and was just limited to military operations up till the 2000s.

Militaries around the world use GPS for precise navigation especially for specialized vehicles like submarines.

Armies also use GPS for better targeting of their weapons like missiles, even jets and sometimes even nuclear weapons (I know, scary stuff, right?).

It’s through the use of GPS that the USA and many other militaries have precise weapons that can be triggered to the exact location in a couple of minutes.

Agriculture

Even though this isn’t very popular in our country, Farmers around the world use GPS for “Precise Farming”.

Around the world, they use GPS-guided tractors and equipment that allows them to plant seeds, spray fertilizers, and harvest crops with centimeter-level precision.

This approach saves fuel, reduces waste, and increases crop yields. Farmers can map their fields digitally, monitor soil conditions, and even automate machinery to follow perfectly straight lines.

Finance

The finance industry also makes use of GPS for time-sensitive trades as they have to have access to precise timing to timestamp electronic trades for institutions like banks.

Stock Exchanges also rely on microsecond timing to record who bought or sold stocks/shares especially in high-frequency trading but I don’t know if our stock exchange uses it.

Still, the different industries that we briefly touched upon show that GPS isn’t just another piece of technology but it has developed into a core pillar of many societies.

It’s not wrong to say that GPS is a technological backbone for many of the industries that societies fundamentally rely on.

The Future of GPS

GPS III

Even though GPS was built some half a decade ago, work on it continues as it evolves. The US spends more than $1B every year to support the GPS ecosystem.

Companies like Lockheed Martin have been working on GPS-III by sending in more capable GPS satellites into orbit.

Lockheed claims that these newer satellites would have 3X better accuracy and improved anti-jamming capabilities (which is an issue) along with improvements such as a modular design allowing more flexibility.

The GPS III satellites are also designed to work smoothly with other global navigation systems like Europe’s Galileo, China’s BeiDou, this means improved redundancy for us folks.

In addition to the newer satellites themselves, American companies have also started working on improving Ground Control Systems which can operate better in contested environments like war zones.

Every second billions of devices around the world turn to those 30 odd satellites for guidance. From smartphones, submarines to airplanes, a lot relies on GPS.

For those who understand the real science behind GPS, it truly is a marvel of modern engineering. Pin-point timing across moving orbits between planets is unprecedented in our history at-least.

Even if you can’t see those invisible radio-waves that power your smartphone’s GPS, you can enjoy this article and appreciate the work that went behind this tech.

I hope I contributed to your understanding of GPS. Please do share your thoughts related to this tech in the comments below and while you’re at it, a share to someone else who’s curious, would be appreciated :)

Further Learning

• How GPS works?

• Introduction to Global Navigation Satellite Systems - NASA

• Global Positioning System

• GPS: How it Finds You

• Why The US Military Made GPS Free-To-Use

• What Can GPS Do?

• Positioning, Navigation & Timing: GPS III/IIIF Satellites

Hey folks 👋
Welcome back to another SK NEXUS deep dive.

I’ve always loved learning new things, because I genuinely enjoy understanding how stuff works. But most of the internet doesn’t speak human anymore. Every article sounds like a PhD thesis, and that used to frustrate me.

That frustration is what brought me here - I couldn’t find simple explanations, so I started writing them for you.

Recently, I was working on a job case study where I had to write about quantum topics for a technical audience. I went in expecting it to be dull, It wasn’t. In fact, it pulled me in so deep that I ended up writing this - a version made for everyone, not just the experts.

So, let’s start from the ground up.

While we scroll through AI hype, a deeper revolution is already underway.

We got AI everywhere, in browsers, in short form, in my mom’s spaghetti. But the real underdog doesn’t live on your screen, it has been on a winter arc in the labs for decades.

“Amateurs seek the sun. Get eaten. Power stays hidden in the shadows” - Lewis Strauss

The ending of this quote reminds me about quantum technology and if you think about it…you will notice that’s exactly where quantum tech lives - in the shadows.

For decades, quantum sounded like something out of a sci-fi movie…but things have changed now.

The truth is - all of this started more than a century ago, when quantum mechanics was still an experiment in curiosity. That era is what we now call Quantum 1.0 aka the foundation of everything that followed.

What started in the early 1900s as pure theory, has evolved into a second revolution.

Now, we’ve stepped into Quantum 2.0 - an age where quantum computers aren’t lab toys anymore and where breakthroughs happen every other week.

Quantum 1.0 - The Beginning of It All

To understand where we are today, we need to rewind the clock.

Quantum computing didn’t just appear overnight, it’s built on over a century of discoveries in physics.

Before we could build quantum computers, we first had to realize that the universe itself doesn’t play by classical rules. That realization - that particles can exist in multiple states at once - is where it all began.

If you haven’t read The Evolution of Computers, I’d recommend checking it out - it’ll give you a strong baseline to connect the dots between classical and quantum worlds.

First, we would need to learn a bit of physics, but don’t worry, this isn’t a physics lecture - I’ll keep it simple, just enough physics to understand how we got here.

Setting the Stage

At the start of the 1900s, physics looked complete.
Newton had already explained planetary motion & gravity, Hooke had proven that light behaves like a wave.

At that time…to most scientists, the universe felt solved, but when researchers studied how light and heat behaved at microscopic scales, classical physics broke down and that’s when the cracks started showing.

Scientists were realizing that something fundamental is missing when they noticed that - hot metal didn’t glow the way the math predicted and Light acted like a wave one moment, and like a particle the next.

And that’s when a few rebels stepped up - Planck, Einstein, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg - each of them questioning what everyone thought they knew about reality.

Together, they uncovered the truth which had been hidden from a long time.
And it all began with Planck, the man who proved that even energy comes in tiny chunks.

The Birth of Quantum Theory (1900s-1930s)

Max Planck (1900): The Birth of the Quantum

Max Planck was a German theoretical physicist. He was the kind of guy who preferred math to drama….and just so you know - he wasn’t trying to start a revolution, he was just trying to fix an equation that didn’t make sense to him.

In 1900, he discovered that energy doesn’t flow like water; it moves in tiny packets, which he called quanta. That one idea flipped physics upside down - proving that energy is quantized, not continuous.

In short, Planck showed that nature runs on chunks, not streams.

Albert Einstein (1905): Light Comes in Packets

Albert Einstein - you already know the name, the E = mc² guy.

He took Planck’s idea further. While Planck applied quantization to heat, Einstein applied it to light. Years after Hooke showed that light behaves like a wave, Einstein took a deeper look and realized it wasn’t that simple.

Light, he proposed, acts as both a wave and a particle. Each packet of light carried energy - what he called a photon. This idea explained the mysterious photoelectric effect.

In short, Einstein proved that light isn’t just a wave - it can act as a wave, a particle, or even both at once, depending on the circumstances

Schrödinger (1926): The Equation That Changed Reality

Erwin Schrödinger was an Austrian physicist - the kind who turned deep questions into elegant equations. He was interested in math that could describe how the quantum world actually behaves.

He built a model called the wave function - instead of telling you exactly where a particle is, it tells you where it’s most likely to be. You can’t pin down its exact position, but you can predict the odds of finding it somewhere.

In short, Schrödinger showed that in the quantum world, certainty dies - everything is a matter of probabilities.

Heisenberg (1927): The Birth of Uncertainty

Werner Heisenberg was a German physicist and no this isn’t the guy from Breaking Bad. Basically, he was the type of guy who was unafraid to question the very idea of “knowing.” Instead of picturing what particles look like, he focused only on what could actually be measured.

That’s when he realized something wild - in the quantum world, the act of measuring itself changes what you’re trying to measure. You can know a particle’s position or its momentum, but never both at once. The more you know one, the less you know the other.

In short, Heisenberg proved that uncertainty is how nature actually works.

Tying the Threads

You’re probably wondering - Why did I tell you all this?
Because these were the puzzle pieces of the same picture.

• Planck showed energy comes in chunks.

• Einstein proved light can act like both waves and particles.

• Schrödinger and Heisenberg built the math to describe it all.

Together, they laid the foundation of quantum mechanics…the science of how reality actually works.

The truth is - Quantum computing is literally the practical engineering of these same principles. Whatever term that you might have heard in the world of quantum computing - qubit, entanglement…etc all of them trace straight back to these early 1900s breakthroughs.

Now, that you have a general understanding of these concepts, you are on a solid path to understanding quantum computing not just memorizing cool tricks without knowing why they work.

And that’s the difference between a script kiddie of quantum hype and an actual quantum thinker.

When Theory Became Tech

Once the equations were cracked, it was time to test reality.
Scientists did what scientists do best - they started turning theory into tools.
Because, as Oppenheimer once said, “Theory will only take you so far.”

And so began the first quantum revolution - the era where physics met hardware:

• Transistor (1947) - The first real proof that controlling electrons could control information. Without it, no phones, no laptops, no internet.

• Laser (1960) - Einstein’s photon theory turned into beams so precise they could cut steel or perform eye surgery - revolutionializing medicine industry.

• Semiconductors (1950s - present) - Quantum behavior of electrons in silicon made chips, microprocessors, and integrated circuits possible.

• MRI (1970s) - Medical miracle powered by quantum spin. You don’t see atoms, but quantum mechanics lets you map them.

In short, the world quietly shifted - Quantum mechanics moved from chalkboards to factories, labs, and hospitals and just like that - what started as pure theory became the foundation of modern technology.

Quantum 2.0 - Where it started taking off

Welcome to Quantum 2.0 - the era we’re living in right now.
The age where theory turned into computation, and quantum finally meant hardware, not just equations.

But how did it all start?
To answer that, we’ve got to time-travel one last time - back to the 1980s.

Don’t worry, I’m not dragging you through more dusty physics; just one final leap through time before we hit the fun part.

The Birth of Quantum Computing (1980-Present)

The Founding Era (1982-1999)

In 1982: Richard Feynman lit the fuse. He asked a simple question: “Why not build computers that work the same way the universe does?”

In 1985: Just three years later, David Deutsch took that spark and turned it into theory. He described a universal quantum computer - a machine capable of running any computation, just like a classical one, but powered by quantum rules.

Fast forward to the 1990s - things started getting serious.

In 1994: Peter Shor introduced an algorithm that could break modern encryption by factoring huge numbers exponentially faster than classical computers - it’s famously known as Shor’s algorithm.

In 1996: Lov Grover followed up with a faster search algorithm, showing that quantum computers could outperform classical ones even beyond cryptography - it’s famously known as Grover’s algorithm.

By 1999, D-Wave Systems was founded - the first company openly dedicated to building a quantum computer.

By the end of the millennium, the idea had gone from physics lecture to engineering labs - and the quantum race had begun.

The Expansion Era (2000-Present)

In 2000: Edward Farhi and his team at MIT proposed adiabatic quantum computing.

By 2001: IBM and Stanford turned theory into reality, using a 7-qubit processor to run Shor’s algorithm. For the first time - they successfully demonstrated true quantum computation.

By 2010: D-Wave Systems released D-Wave One, calling it the first commercial quantum computer. Though limited, it proved that quantum hardware could leave theory behind.

In 2016: IBM opened its Quantum Experience to the public. For the first time, quantum computing was accessible - not just to scientists, but to anyone with an internet connection.

And in 2019: Google’s Sycamore processor achieved what was once thought impossible - quantum supremacy. It marked the moment quantum computing officially outpaced classical logic.

That was the short version of how quantum computing went from idea to impact.

The story’s far from over - new discoveries are happening almost every day, reshaping what’s possible. But before we dive into the latest breakthroughs, there’s one final piece we need to cover.

And also just for your understanding - following is a rough outline of everything so far.

Quantum Basics - The Core Concepts You Must Know

So, you’ve made it through the history - congrats.
Now comes the real fun part: the fundamentals.

These are the core principles - the stuff you need to know if you want to sound like the cool guy who actually gets how this works.

Bit vs Qubit - The Core Difference

A bit (short for binary digit) is the smallest unit of information in classical computing.
It can only exist in one of two states - 0 or 1.

You can think of it like a light switch - it’s either off (0) or on (1).
Every program is built from billions of these bits flipping between 0 and 1

Bits are simple but they are also…limited.

On the other hand, a qubit (short for quantum bit) is the quantum version of a bit.
But unlike a classical bit, a qubit can be 0 and 1 at the same time - a state called superposition.

Think of it like a spinning coin - while it’s spinning, it’s both heads and tails. Only when it lands (when you measure it) does it become one or the other.

This “in-between” state allows quantum computers to process many possibilities at once. That’s why a few qubits can outperform millions of classical bits.

Once again - since tables help me see the difference, I made one for you as well:

Coherence - The Lifeline of Quantum Computing

Earlier, I talked about superposition - that it is the qubit’s superpower…but what I didn’t mention is that - it’s also its greatest weakness.

Qubits can, in theory exist as both 0 and 1 at the same time, but that state is ridiculously fragile. A tiny bit of heat or even a whisper of noise can knock a qubit out of superposition and force it to “collapse” into a definite 0 or 1.

All these effects break what’s called quantum coherence - the ability of a qubit to maintain its quantum state over time. When coherence is lost, we call it decoherence, and it’s the biggest villain in quantum computing.

Keeping qubits coherent is like keeping a soap bubble from popping in a hurricane.

Scientists are trying to fight it using different methodologies such as quantum error correction…etc. Don’t worry, we won’t being going deep into that (unless you enjoy brain pain), but just know this:

Coherence is everything.
Without it, quantum computing simply doesn’t work.

Entanglement - The Quantum Web That Binds Everything

Entanglement is one of the strangest and most powerful ideas in quantum physics. It happens when two particles - say photons or electrons - become linked in such a way that their states are no longer independent.

You can think of entanglement as - that if you touch one particle, then the other will feel it instantly. Einstein famously called it spooky action at a distance.

So, when you hear “entanglement” in the world of quantum computing - just know that it means - when two or more qubits share a single connected state. They act as one unified system, no matter the distance between them.

This instant correlation is what gives quantum computers their real superpower - the ability to perform multiple complex operations at once, a kind of shared brainpower classical bits could never achieve.

The Breakthroughs - How the Tech Is Evolving

Every other day, something big happens in the world of quantum technology and I am going to admit it, it’s quite hard to keep up with AI & quantum world news.

And now that you’ve got the fundamentals - it’s time to dive into some of the most recent quantum-breakthroughs redefining what computation even means.

Harvard’s Self-Healing Quantum Computer

Harvard just pulled off one of the most impressive experiments ever - a self-healing quantum computer. In simple terms, it can automatically detect and fix its own errors while running and this is a major step toward making quantum machines stable and scalable.

In the quantum world, two problems haunt researchers:

• Decoherence

• Atomic loss

We have already discussed decoherence, but atomic loss is also another major issue - it’s a headache unique to neutral-atom systems. Here, each atom represents one qubit, and sometimes those atoms just vanish from the grid. Other systems can reset qubits; this one loses them entirely.

Imagine a piano losing random keys mid-performance - that’s what physicists have been dealing with.

Harvard’s team partially solved this problem using different methods, basically they built a system that can detect when an atom disappears and instantly replace it - all while keeping the rest of the machine stable.

The result involved a quantum computer that can run for hours instead of seconds which is a very big thing in the world of quantum computing.

If you want to dive into the technical details of this particular breakthrough then you can visit my personal blog site for that.

Google’s Quantum Leap Beyond Supercomputers

Similarly Google also dropped another bomb in the quantum race - claiming its latest quantum computer has officially outperformed classical supercomputers.

In a recent experiment, Google’s team ran an algorithm that computed the structure of a molecule - a task so complex that even the most powerful supercomputers couldn’t handle it. It marks the first verifiable instance of a quantum system running an algorithm beyond classical reach, a milestone Google calls “repeatable, beyond-classical computation.”

What makes this matter? It’s a signal that quantum computing is getting closer to practical use in all the industries though Google does admit real-world applications are still years away.

But for now, we can say that - these machines can actually do something more than just theoretical benchmarks.

IonQ’s 99.99% Quantum Precision

We also have IonQ - which recently hit a new quantum milestone, its system can now perform one of the most fundamental operations, a two-qubit gate, with 99.99% accuracy.

But, wait…what the hell is a two-qubit gate?

In classical computers, logic gates like AND or OR take two bits and combine them. Quantum gates do the same with qubits, except they can entangle them - this connection, called entanglement, is what gives quantum computers their insane potential.

• Single-qubit gate = changes one qubit’s state.

• Two-qubit gate = links two qubits together.

You can think of it like this - Imagine a musician playing solo (a single qubit) vs a full band playing in sync (two-qubit entanglement). That harmony is where quantum power lives.

This matters because - this milestone means IonQ’s hardware can entangle qubits almost flawlessly which is indeed a step in the right direction.

The Global Push

While these headline breakthroughs steal attention, they’re just part of a much wider race. All over the world, labs and tech giants are grinding toward the same goal - making quantum computing actually work

• Google is pushing toward fault-tolerant qubits - the kind that keep running even when errors hit.

• IonQ and Rigetti are scaling quantum hardware for cloud use, making quantum access easier and broader.

• Microsoft is betting on topological qubits - a theoretical but promising way to build quantum systems that could be far more stable.

Different paths, same finish line: a world where quantum machines leave the lab and enters the reality.

Beyond the Breakthroughs

So, what you read is a very high-level overview of what’s happening in the quantum space. Even the breakthroughs…they were just a handful, off the top of my head and by the time you’re reading this, there’s a good chance something else has already dropped. That’s how fast quantum computing is evolving.

But they’re still just steps - pieces of a much bigger puzzle that’s far from solved.

You’ll see headlines claiming “quantum supremacy by 2028” or “commercial quantum in five years.” Ignore the countdowns. No one knows how long it’ll take, maybe five years, maybe fifteen or maybe some superhero level physics breakthrough happens tomorrow and resets the clock entirely.

Either way, celebrate the progress - but keep your feet on the ground. The hype is loud, the reality quieter and that’s where the real story is.

The Industrial & Governmental Push

You have already seen that quantum tech is becoming more than just theory & science, it’s becoming the means to power.

Big tech and startups are moving beyond theory. They are focusing on building software, hardware and entire ecosystems that are needed to make quantum computing usable at scale.

This is the commercialization phase - where ideas are turning into infrastructure.

And it’s not just Big tech. Governments are also watching & funding - because whoever controls quantum computing controls encryption, intelligence, and digital warfare.

Call it what it is: a new front in global dominance.

Anyway, let’s look at how all this is unfolding in real-time and what it really means.

The Quantum Race Is Already On

If you look closely, you will realize how high different companies have moved quantum computing up their priority list - the proof is everywhere:

• IBM is building real machines you can access through the cloud. Their 1,121-qubit Condor chip and the open-source Qiskit toolkit are early signs of a quantum-as-a-service future.

• Google’s track record speaks for itself: Sycamore proved quantum supremacy in 2019, after that Willow dropped & on top of that they published the 2025 RSA research-paper - all this points towards the same thing - Google is engineering the future.

• Startups like IonQ, Rigetti, and PsiQuantum are the wildcards, each betting on different hardware approaches. Some are already public, meaning quantum tech has entered Wall Street.

• Even the infrastructure is taking shape - AWS bracket and Azure Quantum are examples of quantum access through the cloud not being a dream anymore.

In short, the race has already started and whoever gets there first will own the future of computing.

Governments Enter the Quantum Arena

You thought the quantum race is just a battle of technological supremacy? Wrong! It’s also a battle of power and that’s why different governments are furiously fighting the battle:

• In the U.S - the National Quantum Initiative bundles research funding through NIST, NSF and DOE, are aims to keep America ahead of China in quantum computing, networking and cryptography. It’s a strategic move to ensure the country doesn’t fall behind.

• China is not sitting idle, here are some of its major accomplishments:

  • It launched the satellite Micius in 2016 - the world’s first quantum communication satellite.

  • Established intercontinental quantum key distribution using Micius, sending encryption keys between China and Austria across ~ 7,600 km.

  • Reported to have begun mass production of stealth detecting quantum radars aimed at detecting stealth aircraft.

• In Europe, the Quantum Flagship commits around €1 billion over ten years to build Europe’s quantum industry and achieve tech independence.

• Pakistan is exploring deals with China under CPEC to establish quantum research hubs - I live here and I think it’s a bold move. Quantum dreams are great, but maybe start with stable Wi-Fi.

And trust me this list is never ending, from what I have seen it’s pretty clear that the Governments are trying to ride the quantum wave and in some cases, even steer it.

The Quantum Security Shift

Guess, what the first thing that quantum would break? It’s math.

Right now, attackers are already preparing for that moment through a tactic called Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (HNDL). It’s exactly what it sounds like:

1. Hackers copy encrypted data.

2. Store it safely.

3. Wait until quantum computers can decrypt it.

By the time we notice, it’ll be too late.
The scary thing is - HNDL doesn’t make noise and nothing that looks wrong - until one day, the encryption we rely on (RSA, ECC) simply stops working.

And just so you know this isn’t an “if” anymore - it’s when. In 2025 Google published new research showing that breaking RSA-2048 encryption could require fewer than one million noisy qubits and could be done in under a week.

That’s why the world is moving toward Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) encryption designed to survive quantum attacks:

• Apple’s PQ3 protocol is already live in iMessage.

• NIST has finalized its PQC standards for global use.

• Microsoft and Apple have announced PQC support in upcoming OS releases.

If you believe HNDL is just a Big Tech problem, think again. Banks, hospitals, anyone moving encrypted data is already in the crosshairs.

And if you’re one of those who say “I have nothing to hide” - you’re at risk as well.

Imagine a breach where all that encrypted data sits untouched for years. But once quantum decryption catches up, it all unlocks at once. Old chats, medical records, transaction logs - everything coming back at once.

When that happens, it won’t be Big Tech that suffers first - It’ll be you.

If you want to learn more about HNDL and understand the dangers of it, then you can check out this piece - The Quantum Threat is closer than you think.

The Race for Digital Dominance

Alright, I’ll admit - that was a lot to take in.
But beneath all the technical noise lies a simple truth:

Governments see quantum as the next nuclear moment.
Whoever gets there first, sets the rules of digital warfare.

Control over encryption, privacy, and secure communication is the new world currency.
Governments know it, corporations know it, everyone knows it.

Beyond Quantum Computing

In the world of quantum tech - Quantum computing gets the majority of the spotlight but the reality is a bit different - Quantum computing is just a small branch of the bigger quantum world - the same way cybersecurity is one branch of computer science.

It’s important, but it’s not the whole story.

Quantum technology is stretching far beyond computers, we’re seeing:

• Quantum sensors - Sensors that navigate without GPS

• Quantum networks - for secure communication that can’t be intercepted

• Quantum clocks - for ultra-precise timekeeping in satellites and finance

• Quantum materials - Materials that could reshape energy and superconductivity

It’s the same story we saw decades ago. Early computers were slow, rare, and locked away in labs. Today, everything runs on them. Give it time, and quantum will follow the same trajectory - From labs to daily life - From theory to infrastructure.

If you want to see how that computer boom unfolded, check out my article on The Evolution of Computers:

And if history really does repeat itself - then we already know where this road leads.
It all reminds me of the Netflix series “Dark”:

“Everything repeats itself again and again for all eternity, because none of us are prepared to let go.”

I’m not claiming to predict the future, but from how things are moving, it’s clear we’re heading in the right direction - fast. Every other day brings a new breakthrough, a fresh milestone.

The Bigger Question: Power, Trust, and Control

Great job making it here - you’ve basically time-traveled from the 1930s all the way into the quantum age. But before we wrap this up, let’s slow down a bit.

By now, you probably know that - Quantum isn’t some sort of magic, it’s math, physics, and an insane amount of engineering. And scaling it remains quite hard. Decoherence, stability, energy cost, error correction - all of these still haunt researchers. Even Harvard’s atomic loss fix only solved it partially.

I get it, we’re moving fast…but we still have a long & tough road ahead.

And let’s not ignore the quantum hype.

The media loves to sell revolutions before they exist. Every industry loves to shout “revolution!” before the tech even works - Quantum’s no exception.

Look at NEO the humanoid robot praised like a digital messiah, but under the hood, it’s still limited. The same goes for the gaming industry - promises first, reality later.

If you are interested in learning more about the hype pattern, then check out my following pieces:

Anyway, back to the topic.
Sorry - my mind slips sometimes.

There is a positive side too - every generation of computing looked impossible before it happened. So while quantum’s full potential is still locked behind a few technical nightmares, what’s happening right now is promising.

The future looks bright, no doubt…
…But behind every bright future lies a power struggle.

Quantum revolution is going to be a whole redefinition of control and when it’s embedded deep inside communication networks, finance, and national defense, the real question won’t be how quantum works - it’ll be who owns it.

Because the one who owns it, will be the one with the most control.

Now It’s Your Turn