PC users have a hoarding problem. A tab-hoarding problem, to be more specific. Our browsers are filled to the brim with dozens, if not hundreds of tabs, lingering remnants of our web travels that we refuse to let go of in fear of never being able to find them again — even though sifting through endless browser tabs cripples productivity. OpenWorkspace, a new piece of Windows and MacOS software that was revealed at CES 2026, has an elegant solution to the tab-hoarding dilemma — and it does so by tossing the PC’s traditional application-focused approach out the window in favor of something that I personally find so much more compelling. In fact, I’ve tried kludging my way to similar workflows using a mish-mash of various tools in the past and OpenWorkspace does it so much more elegantly. I didn’t expect to stumble across software that could completely revolutionize the way I use my PC while wandering around the CES 2026 show floor, but hey, I guess I should expect the unexpected in Las Vegas. How OpenWorkspace reimagines desktop productivity OpenWorkspace’s press release calls it “a desktop automation platform that saves and automatically restores complete desktop layouts,” and while that’s technically true, if anything, it undersells the program’s usefulness a bit. Let’s walk through this step by step, starting with how the software actually handles before we get into the tab management bit. OpenWorkspace Designed for large monitors or multi-monitor setups, OpenWorkspace completely takes over your primary desktop with its dual-region “FocalContextual” interface. You’re able to define a section in the middle of the screen where one or more tabs — the core information about the project you’re currently working on — sit front and center. Supplementary tabs can be staged in a secondary holding section around the edges of the display, where they’re still available at a glance, but don’t dominate your central focus, ready to be summoned at a moment’s notice. Think of it like doing manual work on a physical desk; your immediate work sits in front of you, with supporting papers spread around the periphery. This is one of the two secret sauces baked into OpenWorkspace, and the concept that flips traditional computing concepts on its head. Windows 11’s current tiling system offers nothing like it. Opening the OpenWorkspaces interface summons it atop the current workspace for easy switching. Willis Lai / Foundry Think about it: Ever since the PC’s graphical user interface debuted in Xerox PARC in the 1970s, it has been focused on applications, not your actual workflow focus. That’s why tab hoarding happens; you keep all those sites open in a singular browser window. It’s no way to live. OpenWorkspace makes your focus your focus instead of the overall application itself. Founder David Adler told me it was inspired by his work in the high-frequency trading industry, where every second of delay can cost you real money. Setups like this are must-use in that field, Adler told me, but there’s nothing like it in the consumer space — OpenWorkspace is his solution. How OpenWorkspace kills tab hoarding dead But the FocalContextual interface is just part of OpenWorkspace’s secret sauce. The other part is how quickly it can save and cycle through premade tab layouts — a serious time-saver that helps keep you laser-focused on the task at hand. Creating a new workspace takes mere minutes, aided by keyboard shortcuts and visual cues built into the app that makes arranging windows fast and easy. Once you’ve arranged a workspace — ideally around a specific focus theme, like “the Johnson project” or “my Nebraska 2026 trip” — you can save it, and then summon it instantly to pick up where you left off. It’s stunningly fast. Flick your fingers over a keyboard shortcut and BOOM! You’re back to the last project. Do it again and BOOM! Another workspace appears instantly, with primary and secondary windows arranged just like you left them. Adios, endlessly hunting for tabs buried deep inside Chrome. “Research shows that manually restoring the 6 to 12 windows and documents required for a typical task takes 70 to140 seconds, while OpenWorkspace restores the same environments in 2 to 3 seconds for an approximately 40× reduction in time-to-task,” the company’s announcement says. “By capturing complete desktop states as workspaces, OpenWorkspace frees the user from this manual overhead and places that responsibility on the system.” I believe it — OpenWorkspace’s task switching is that fast. It’s because the software saves the layout, window, and setting arrangement as a proprietary file format (locally — your data never touches the cloud). Activating a workspace summonses the whole configuration immediately. The setup has additional benefits as well. OpenWorkspace runs on both Windows PCs and Macs, with Linux support envisioned in the future. Since OpenWorkspace saves entire workspace layouts, it’s easy to share them with others as well — adios, complex documents full of stodgy links. As PCWorld’s manager, I could immediately picture sharing workspaces to make, say, employee onboarding and project management so much easier in my organization. Pricing and availability OpenWorkspace is expected to launch in February for $180 as an annual license, with major feature updates aimed at a quarterly basis. Think speech support, the ability to use Workspace beyond browser tabs, and so on. OpenWorkspace That’s a steep fee for consumer software, which makes sense given its business-centric utility. That said, after using the app at CES 2026, I could absolutely see myself paying up for OpenWorkspace, especially if it adds the ability to manage other programs like Word, Excel, and Discord. You see, I’m already a believer in focused, contextual workspaces. I paid for Stardock’s Groupy 2 app long ago, so I can bundle open programs together like browser tabs. When I work on a project, I create a Groupy window with the Word doc I’m working in, any reference materials, my Excel spreadsheet data, and so forth. I do the same for gaming apps, swapping between the “work and play” contexts using Windows 11’s virtual desktops feature. My janky little setup works, and helps me stay focused, but it’s nevertheless a major kludge — and it’s still centralized around the long-held idea of manually managing individual windows and clicking through tabs. (Ugh.) Using OpenWorkspace feels infinitely better and faster. It still has a few wrinkles to iron out, but I cannot wait to get my hands on OpenWorkspace with my own system. I could get so much more done so much faster. Read...

CES 2026 is in full swing and I’ve been surrounded by PC hardware all week. Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm are proud of their new platforms. PC manufacturers have unveiled lots of impressive new laptops, and I even saw fanless air-cooling technology for handhelds. But one thing I haven’t seen is pricing—from anyone I’ve talked to. “Have you announced pricing on this yet?” is a question I kept asking, and so far I haven’t gotten any answers. So, I stopped asking. CES often isn’t a place where you hear about pricing, but things are especially chaotic for the PC industry this year. Skyrocketing RAM prices are confusing the entire industry RAM prices are skyrocketing. Some stores are even selling it at “market price,” like it’s lobster or something. Rising memory prices also mean that SSD prices are up, although less dramatically. Research firm IDC expects PC prices to increase by 20 percent in 2026. Foundry There’s a lot of uncertainty in the air and no one wants to announce prices because of it. For one thing, it’s unclear how expensive RAM is going to be in the months ahead. But also, I feel like no manufacturer wants to go first—if you announce a price, your competitor can use that to undercut you. PC manufacturers are figuring out how to spread price increases across their hardware lineup, too. When I talk to people about pricing, they all shrug and say the RAM situation is chaotic. No one knows exactly how it will affect PC prices. The tariff story no one wants to talk about The PC industry suffered through quite the mess last year. PC manufacturers announced a lot of pricing prior to the unveiling of the tariffs—and then they had to walk it all back. In early 2025, I had one PC manufacturer tell me, point blank, that a laptop’s MSRP had gone up by $200 due to tariffs. After that, everyone was extremely quiet. Many PCs arrived with higher than expected prices. In 2025, I reviewed a lot of budget laptops that felt like they had a few too many corners cut for their retail prices. PC manufacturers moved manufacturing between countries to minimize the impact of tariffs. Pexels / Edit by Foundry This week, the US Supreme Court is expected to rule on tariffs. It’s unclear what the ruling will be and what its effects will be. Who wants to announce pricing before the dust settles on that? Here’s another story that people rarely talk about when it comes to PC pricing: the US dollar had a big decline in 2025, falling 9 percent against other major currencies. If you’re setting PC hardware prices in dollars and those dollars are falling against other currencies, that’s a big factor. These PCs weren’t designed for this chaotic RAM market It takes a significant amount of time to design and manufacture a PC or any other kind of hardware device. Truth is, the hardware being shown off by PC manufacturers at CES 2026 was designed for a different world—one where RAM and SSD prices remained stable. In an alternate world where RAM prices were knowingly headed for the moon, Microsoft may have spent the last few years optimizing Windows 11 to work well with 8GB of RAM rather than setting 16GB as the de facto standard with its Copilot+ PC requirements. We’d probably see fewer premium laptops with 32GB of RAM, which is often unnecessary for many workloads but desirable for manufacturers who want to include it as a flex to sell higher-spec models. Asus Zenbook A16 at CES 2026Matt Smith / Foundry We might’ve also seen more user-upgradeable RAM on laptops. This is a feature that’s often confined to business laptops, some gaming laptops, and tinkerer-friendly hardware like the Framework laptops. Instead, 2025 saw a lot of laptops with non-user-upgradeable RAM. Intel integrated RAM into Lunar Lake’s SoC design, and many laptop manufacturers stuck with soldered RAM that wasn’t user-upgradeable. The future of PCs may be operating systems that are more efficient with RAM, more hardware that gives users the ability to easily upgrade, and—unfortunately—higher prices all around. Do MSRPs mean anything in 2026? The fixed “manufacturer suggested retail price” may not make sense anymore in 2026. It already didn’t make much sense in 2025. RAM is just the latest chaotic element here. The forces of supply and demand are at work in the component market, and the industry is buying up so much memory for AI data centers that consumers and the PC industry are no longer the priority. That’s why Crucial stopped selling RAM to consumers and focused on data centers instead. Nor Gal / Shutterstock.com The idea that a PC manufacturer could set a fixed price for hardware when manufacturing and import costs are in such flux may be outdated now. For example, Microsoft keeps raising Xbox hardware prices. Instead of an MSRP that drops, as in previous hardware generations, we’re now seeing MSRPs that increase over time for a wide variety of reasons that all keep driving costs up. Companies like CyberPowerPC have raised prices in response to RAM costs going up, too. There’s still value to be found Hardware prices are going up. While that sucks, it’s not a reason to avoid purchasing a machine you really love. People often talk about investing in quality items that really matter, like a good pair of shoes or a mattress. I’d say the same for laptops and PCs: if you use it a lot, you should prioritize your PC and get something you’re really happy with. If you’re looking for value, it’s still out there. Despite the fact that RAM prices are up, there are still lots of great deals you can find on laptops and pre-built desktop PCs. The same will likely be true for next-generation hardware… if you can wait. I’m thankful there’s still a PC industry making awesome products, even if some manufacturers like Crucial are pulling out of it. At least Nvidia still makes consumer GPUs, even if they just had software advances like a new version of DLSS to unveil this year. I look forward to hearing more about the pricing on these machines and peripherals in the months ahead. I’m just not hearing much about it on the ground at CES 2026. Further reading: The best of CES 2026 and what blew us away Read...

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Hey. Psst. Listen here. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but RAM prices are kind of insane. Bad enough that people are getting desperate to find ways to save a little money. Desperate enough, for example, to manually de-solder the memory chips off of laptop RAM and re-solder them onto a blank desktop RAM circuit board. Which is exactly what one modder did. According to VideoCardz.com, a penny-pinching PC user in Russia bought up much older, cheaper DDR4 RAM in laptop SO-DIMMs, painstakingly removed the individual memory chips by hand, and then manually soldered them in place on a pair of blank DDR5 DIMMs. With lots and lots (and lots, soldering microchips is incredibly fiddly) of work and a bit of custom firmware loaded, the Frankenstein deed was done. The “price” for a single 32GB stick of assembled DDR5 came out to a bit more than 17,000 rubles or approximately $218 US dollars. That’s about a third the price of what that hardware currently goes for in Russia, according to the modder, and it looks like he has the tools and the know-how to make multiple sticks of RAM… if he can keep sourcing the chips. The modder, Viktor “Vik-on” Veklich, seems to know his business; he sells a series of RAM tester parts, most recently a DDR5 model. This isn’t the only example of people getting creative — or desperate — to find new memory. Users are looking into laptop-memory-to-desktop adapter parts, now frequently sold out on Amazon. This is older, slower DDR4 memory, but any memory port in a storm. We’re also seeing more interest in new parts that use older, easier-to-find memory and processors, like brand new motherboards with AMD’s AM4 socket and DDR4 memory compatibility. Read...

Micron—one of the “big three” companies that manufacture the vast majority of memory on the planet—is shutting down its Crucial brand. This is the arm of the company that sells RAM and storage products directly to consumers. Instead, Micron is shifting its focus to the “AI” boom… the same situation that’s making memory explode in price all over the world. Consumers are, to use a technical term, pissed. In a recent interview, a Micron vice president tried to downplay the situation, explaining that Micron is still technically supplying RAM and other memory products to consumers… by selling it to PC manufacturers. “Our viewpoint is that we are trying to help consumers around the world,” said Christopher Moore, VP of Micron’s Marketing, Mobile and Client Business Unit, in an interview with Wccftech. “We’re just doing it through different channels. We still have a very sizable business in the client and mobile markets.” He continued: “We are also, of course, servicing our data center customers.” The notion that Micron hasn’t completely abandoned consumers because it’s still supplying at least some PC manufacturers was one I heard at CES last week. It was similarly unconvincing there, too, as company after company refused to commit to pricing for forthcoming products, for fear of rising memory prices erasing their profit margins before release. Those data center customers are the reason why RAM prices are skyrocketing: rapid, massive buildup for the “AI” industry is gobbling up most of the current and projected chip supply. Put aside the debate on whether LLM-powered businesses are in a bubble. Truth is, good old fashioned supply and demand is still in play, raising prices considerably on finished laptops and desktops and making DDR5 memory for consumers triple or even quadruple in price. Micron—now making hay while the sun shines—is shuttering its Crucial brand at the end of January. This ends nearly 30 years of selling to consumers for PC building, repairs, and upgrades. Foundry “This is not a Micron issue, it’s an industry issue… and there’s just not enough supply to go around,” said Moore to Wccftech. It’s an echo of the statement Micron made in its announcement (e.g., it’s following the money). That’s certainly true, but I hasten to note that neither of Micron’s competition—Samsung and SK Hynix—have yet shuttered their direct-to-consumer memory and storage product lines. (That sound you hear is me knocking on the wood of my desk.) If the first question asked at CES was “What are we going to do about the memory crunch?” and the answer was a big, disappointing shrug, then the next question was “When is it going to end?” I’ve heard estimates all over the place, ranging from 2027 up to 2032, as today’s developing data centers will still be sucking up chip supply into the next decade. Moore is a little more optimistic than that, citing a new Micron manufacturing facility that will be finalized in 2027, according to an interview with PCWorld’s Mark Hachman. In just a few days, Micron is planning to break ground on a New York facility that’ll be the biggest semiconductor factory in the US. But with 3 to 4 years of construction and fitting required for a new fabrication plant (on the low end), it’s still going to be a long, long time before expanded manufacturing capacity can start chipping away at the current supply crunch. That’s assuming the macroeconomic AI bubble doesn’t burst, of course. But if that happens, we’ll all have more problems than merely trying to afford a gaming desktop upgrade. Read...

The ongoing DRAM and flash memory / SSD shortage shows no signs of alleviating, with memory vendors telling PCWorld that the shortages in both markets will continue to drag on for months, even years. The CES 2026 trade show in Las Vegas last week was an opportunity for customers to talk to suppliers and vice versa, trying to scrounge up whatever memory chips they could. But the news just keeps getting grimmer. In mid-November, analysts began reporting that DRAM prices could rise throughout the first half of 2026. In early December, Micron said that it would discontinue its Crucial brand and its practice of selling DRAM directly to consumers. Kingston has also warned that prices will continue to go higher in the near term — pushing PC prices upwards as well. Executives at Micron say those customers — presumably including PC makers — are now asking for multi-year deals to assure supply. “I think, from our view, 6 to 12 months looks to be extremely constrained, and even out to 24 months looks very, very constrained,” said Mark Montierth, senior vice president of the mobile and client business unit at Micron, in an interview with PCWorld.com at CES. “DRAM, for sure. SSD maybe not as much, but that’s because there are more players, and it’s harder to triangulate all that.” Chris Kooistra, the vice president of marketing for Other World Computing (OWC), which manufactures SSDs, told PCWorld he sees the SSDs being constrained for at least six months, following a price spike in 2025. OWC sold SSDs at a higher price on Black Friday than at the beginning of November because of the unexpected and unavoidable price increases, he said. A third source at a peripherals manufacturer that buys memory and storage for its own uses also characterized the situation: “Best guess, SSDs, many months. DRAM, I don’t know. Years, maybe.” Close to chaos When a financial market careens out of control, governments can put a halt to trading to give the industry a breather, and restore order. There has been no such pause for the memory market, which traditionally cycles between boom years, when prices soar, and busts, when they plunge. Both SSDs and memory modules are tied very closely to the individual prices of flash chips and DRAM, as they don’t have that much more additional logic. As hyperscalers have snatched up every bit of memory and storage they can, the commodity memory makers say they have to keep up. Micron, for example, justified its closing of Crucial by noting that the total market for data centers rose from about 40 to 60 percent. (Micron still sells memory modules, even to consumers — just indirectly, via PC makers. “The [Crucial] storefront that lets you buy stuff from us is shutting, but not our support for that [consumer] market,” Montierth said.) “So it’s not that we’re focusing on that market, it’s that market is just exploding so fast,” Chris Moore, Micron’s vice president of marketing for the client business, added. “We have models internally of how much of our supply we want to go into every segment, and that segment is growing so fast that it’s just to maintain our share there is requiring more bits.” Right now, the shortages in both memory and storage are demand based, and simple economics says that when demand increases and supply remains the same, prices will increase. But it’s not an orderly market; companies have little time to plan. Phison, which manufactures SSD controllers as well as “white label” SSDs sold under other brands, reportedly is sold out for 2026, Digitimes reported, with chief executive Khein-seng Pua reporting that most NAND makers are sold out for the same period. The short-term “spot” market is drying up. And no one quite knows what to expect. “Most companies have an agreement each year of general allocation, then it is discussed and updated quarterly with pricing amounts,” Phison U.S. president Michael Wu said, as reported by Phison representative Lynn Kelly in an email to PCWorld.com. “The recent shortage has changed these typical planning cycles, however, since demands are exceeding industry supply. So allocation today is based on market dynamics.” Unless the AI market folds, the only real way out is new fabs Some strategies that might work in the logic market. Both AMD and Nvidia are considering reviving cheaper outdated silicon just to provide customers a price break, and — in the case of AMD — allow them to use older DDR4 memory modules instead. (The problem with that approach is that the DDR4 market is essentially dead, as DRAM makers have moved on to DDR5.) And in storage, manufacturing older flash memory simply wouldn’t offer as much storage, making them less “bit dense” and exacerbating the problem. Micron launched a single-sided M.2 2230 SSD, the Micron 3610, at the show, with capacities from 1TB to 4TB. New fabs also take years to complete; Micron broke ground on a DRAM fab in Boise in October 2023, and Moore said that first output will be in mid-2027. (Micron originally said DRAM output would begin in mid-2026.) At CES, Micron also announced that it will break ground on Jan. 16 on a new $100 billion megafab in New York that will potentially be the largest semiconductor facility in the U.S. We’re all on the same boat now, after the downturn in 2023 that was so painful,” Moore said. “No one could afford to go build new fabs…That’s what we’re paying for right now, when consumers were really happy.” Read...