Archer Aviation demonstrated public eVTOL flights in California and they were so quiet! [Video] After an announcement last week, eVTOL developer Archer Aviation completed display flights to the public at the 2025 California International Air Show. This public display was Archer’s latest aerial achievement in the public eye as it moves closer to certification and commercial eVTOL operations. While Archer Aviation ($ACHR) has been a mainstay on Electrek‘s eVTOL news beat for the past few years, the past few months have been fascinating. In May, Archer signed on as the exclusive air taxi provider of the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. By June, it became the latest sustainable aviation developer to begin bona fide piloted test flights in its flagship Midnight aircraft (pictured below). Archer’s success continued through the summer, as it reported milestones that marked its longest piloted eVTOL flight (55 miles in 31 minutes), as well as its two highest altitude flights, reaching heights of 7,000 and 10,000 feet. Last week, Archer announced that it would be demonstrating the capabilities of its Midnight eVTOL to the public with multiple flights over the weekend during the California International Air Show. One day later, we have footage of one of the flights that we want you to see (and try to hear). Archer shows of eVTOL tech during display flights in CA As promised, Archer Aviation completed display flights with its Midnight eVTOL during both days of the 2025 California International Air Show in Salinas, CA, this past weekend. The Salinas Municipal Airport is actually home to Archer’s test flight facility, and the startup was a sponsor of the event. The annual air show was expected to welcome over 65,000 attendees, not including the 1,000 expected to visit from Archer’s engineering, operations, and flight test departments. According to Archer, its Midnight eVTOL was scheduled for initial test flights, followed by notable flybys from other prominent groups, such as the Blue Angels and the USAF F-16 Viper Demo team. While those other aerial teams are indeed more death-defying entertainment, their conventional technology is significantly more polluting, from an air and noise perspective. That’s a huge selling point for eVTOL developers like Archer, as they offer more and more public flight demonstrations to inform people of the benefits of this segment. You have to see Archer’s flight footage of the Midnight to understand what we’re talking about. The aircraft is zooming by over the crowd, and you can not only clearly hear the emcee tallying off the eVTOL’s specs, but you can actually hear murmurs and conversations of people in the crowd—no chance you’re hearing any of that when the Blue Angels soar by. Obviously, there’s a huge design gap between an all-electric air taxi and an F/A-18 Super Hornet, but the test flights still showcase how much quieter certain aerial travel can be. A better comparison would be a helicopter, which could easily be replaced by eVTOL vessels in the near future. --There is a different video of the flyover at the link-- A video that I found on Youtube.
After Dell, Acer & ASUS Have Surrendered to Memory Shortages; PC Makers at Large Prepare for Extensive Price Hikes Acer and ASUS are now preparing for an extensive hike in PC products, as it is the only remaining option for manufacturers to combat the DRAM supply constraints. Acer is Looking to Adjust RAM Configurations in PC Products to Minimize the Impact of Memory Shortages The supply chain has now begun to react to the memory shortages, and the AI sector is consuming a significant portion of DRAM production lines. In a previous report, we discussed how Dell had been preparing to increase product pricing by a substantial margin, which included a rise in base prices as well as the costs of upgrading RAM configurations. According to the Taiwan Economic Daily, Acer and ASUS are expected to respond to supply chain constraints by increasing prices, which could impact both enterprise and consumer PCs. Acer's Chairman, Jason Chen, has disclosed that moving into Q1 2026, the PC pricing structure would be a lot more difficult compared to the previous quarters, as he associates this with how DRAM prices have risen by 50% in just a few weeks, and this has affected the BoM (Bill of Materials) for several products within Acer's portfolio. However, Chen did avoid speculating on how the price hike might play out, as he claims that finished goods take time to arrive at their destination, and sometimes this can take up to months. And based on the current situation, DRAM prices are changing by the day, not the week. Interestingly, Acer's Chairman has stated that the supply chain shouldn't aggressively impose price increases on consumer products; instead, manufacturers should maintain a diverse portfolio to ensure they can react to such situations with resilience. He then mentions that Acer's consumer division accounts for only 50% of the company's total sales, with the remaining figure coming from industrial and AI-focused systems. Yet, despite such a structure, Acer cannot avoid rising product prices, as the situation has become dire. We mentioned in a recent report that companies are planning to shift towards 8 GB as the baseline configuration for mid-range laptops. It appears that Acer's CEO has validated this claim, stating that this could be one way manufacturers might counter DRAM shortages without raising prices too much. Based on what we are seeing, the PC supply chain is heading into a time of uncertainity and price hikes, which could be a troublesome period for consumers.
If you look at price trends for DDR4 and DDR5 RAM since June'ish, you can see DDR4 take off around June, then when that got so expensive that DDR5 became a better choice for the price, DDR5 took off... DDR4 RAM has probably tripled to quadrupled in price since June. DDR5 took off around September and has probably quadrupled since then. It's nuts.
i haven't seen any projections on when things are supposed to get better on the prices of Memory. Prices could stay elevated for quite a while since the demand for AI related hardware is expected to remain high.
Maybe when AI demand dies down or when supply can catch up. The fact that Micron stock has more than quadrupled since April is bananas.
AI videos are increasingly taking over YouTube and Twitter, particularly short videos. It wouldn't surprise me if, one year from now, 80% of them were AI generated.
I have a dummy account on Facebook since I don't use it for anything other than to harass one of my friends, and it seems like at least 60% of the Facebook Shorts videos recommended to me are fake videos. Crazy crap along the lines of "crocodile vs. polar bear". It's recommending them because I've clicked on a few wildlife videos, but damn, enough with the lumberjack french-kissing a kodiak bear videos.
Not only are they getting more realistic, but apparently creating them is getting exponentially easier too. There was a period of time when spam ruled email and the outlook seemed bleak, but spam filters eventually solved the problem. Can the same thing happen to AI generated videos?
Chatter - speculation has the futures of companies such as Nvidia AMD Broadcom etc looking bright for a while. If things are going to be good for the above, then the companies in the Memory part of Tech should also do well. In regards to companies doing Memory Chip Fab, I don't know how long it takes for them to expand production capacity. I don't have them building new facilities and expanding production just on speculation.
Email spam for me is worse than ever before. I used to never get spam, but in the past 3-5 years, it's been getting worse. It's been really bad this year. It's probably due to all the security breaches in recent years combined with list dumps on the Dark Web. Well, that, and I'm still using my email address from the 1990s (lol), but I'm slowly transitioning to using email aliases to make it easier to get around security breaches (with an abundance of caution in these challenging times, etc, etc, yada yada)
When I switched from AOL to Gmail a very long time ago, spam instantly became very rare and went to zero not long afterwards. ]I still check my AOL address every 3-4 months to clean out spam.
Google -- Gemini will help with detecting AI video & pictures created by Google AI, but so far doesn't address AI content created by non Google means. You can now verify Google AI-generated videos in the Gemini app We’re expanding our content transparency tools to help you more easily identify AI-generated content. You can now check if a video was edited or created with Google AI directly in the Gemini app. Simply upload a video and ask something like, "Was this generated using Google AI?" Gemini will scan for the imperceptible SynthID watermark across both the audio and visual tracks and use its own reasoning to return a response that gives you context and specifies which segments contain elements generated using Google AI. For example, it might say: “SynthID detected within the audio between 10-20 secs. No SynthID detected in the visuals.” Uploaded files can be up to 100 MB and 90 seconds long. Both image and video verification are now available in all languages and countries supported by the Gemini app.
I think Micron's doing expansions in fabs at a few locations around the US. One of them I recall will be a DRAM facility that's supposed to be up and running with the expansion by 2027 or so. I don't know what companies like SK Hynix or Samsung are doing. The memory prices are probably going to stay for a while because I was reading article a couple of weeks ago saying that major manufacturers are wary of overproducing and ending up with a glut of memory on their hands that they basically have to give away. Some were saying this is like a bet against AI or at least a hedge against it since one of the bigger names like an nVidia, Broadcom, etc. may not hit targets or meet expectations in sales due to a possible cooling of demand. They're not saying it will happen, but, like I said, they also don't want to be giving the RAM away if they produce too much. I have some dummy accounts for GMail, but nowadays I try not to give away any more info to Google than I need to, as they have their claws into everything it seems. lol. My next phone will probably be an iPhone again. I have a couple of GMail accounts to use for various services. I don't even check those email accounts. Yahoo email is telling me when my packages will be arriving (incorrectly, half the time) even though I never really asked for that. That's when I had had enough.
Roomba’s bankruptcy may wreck a lot more than one robot vacuum maker iRobot filed for bankruptcy a few days ago. It's kind of sad companies like this don't make it. This reminds me - there was a company called Friendly Robotics in Irving, Tx that was making robot mowers back in the early 2000's, and you could see their mowers mowing up and down their corporate lawns back then. I think they were based in Israel or started there. I believe they were also the company that created the first robotic vacuum cleaner. They changed their name to Robomow. They were bought out by MTD Holdings (which owns a lot of huge names) a few years ago, but I don't know how Robomow itself is doing.
