The Cartridge Crunch: Nintendo's Chip Supplier Quit for AI, YouTube Killed Your Tab & Dinner Comes With a JRPG (NX Tech Tips #43)

Nintendo's cartridge supplier just quit for AI chips, Motorola wants $1,600 for a phone that refuses to fold, YouTube deleted the button that sells its own subscriptions — and the best free game of November comes from a burger joint. That's NX Tech Tips #43. Facts first, jokes as the delivery vehicle.

🎮 Nintendo's Cartridge Supplier Quit — for AI

Macronix, the chip maker analysts call Nintendo's main memory supplier for physical game cartridges, announced in its third-quarter earnings report that its ROM chip production "has reached its end" and that it's "gradually decoupling from the game industry." ROM production shrank 39 percent in the last year and now represents just 5 percent of Macronix's business — because AI datacenter memory (NOR/NAND, eMMCs) pays better, and the fab's 25,000 wafers a month can't do both. The $1.2 billion in new capacity takes a year or more to spin up.

What it means for you: Nintendo says it's not abandoning cartridges — but remaining suppliers Rohm and Lapis charge more, Nintendo already charges extra for some physical games over digital, and digital was 61.5 percent of Nintendo's software business last quarter. Physical collecting just joined the luxury aisle.

Your Switch cart's new roommate is a server rack that earns more per wafer. Don't take it personally.

Source: Ars Technica — Nintendo's biggest ROM chip supplier is bowing out

📱 Absurd Pricing of the Week: The $1,600 Rectangle

Motorola's Signature 27 costs $1,600 and does not fold. For that money you get a claimed-brightest-in-a-smartphone 12,000-nit display, a 200MP periscope telephoto (3x optical, up to 100x digital), a 7,000mAh battery, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Those are genuinely monster specs — on a slab, in an era when the same $1,600 buys a foldable.

It doesn't fold. It doesn't bend. It just costs.

Source: Ars Technica — Motorola's Signature 27 has it all if you can stomach the $1,600 price tag

▶️ YouTube Deleted the Subscriptions Tab

YouTube is rolling out its biggest mobile redesign in a decade — server-side, no update needed — and the dedicated Subscriptions tab is gone. Your feed still exists: it's one swipe away inside the new Home tab, and there's a custom-feed builder as a consolation prize. A decade of muscle memory, meanwhile, is officially unemployed.

Users called it sloppy, disgusting, and "the worst UI that has ever been made by Google." The app that sells subscriptions removed the subscriptions button — the 2006 phone-carrier playbook finally made it to streaming.

Source: 9to5Google — YouTube rolling out app redesign without Subscriptions tab

🍔 The Gift: Wendy's Shipped a Free JRPG

WendyQuest: Legend of the Four Corner Stones is free on Steam right now — PC and Steam Deck. You play mascot Wendy saving the land of Savoria from MechBorg's mechs, collecting four Corner Stones with a party that includes Baconator, Frygor, and Sir Chicken. Polygon called it the most surprising JRPG of 2026, and it came from a burger chain. Zero dollars. Fries optional.

Source: Siliconera — Wendy's Releases Free WendyQuest RPG on Steam

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NX Tech Tips publishes every Thursday — regular landscape episodes, comedy first, facts as the cargo. See you Thursday.