On 21 September 2026, Jeff Geerling documented a firmware lock, introduced in late 2024, that prevents swapping the RAM chips on a Raspberry Pi 5. The move targets resellers who modify entry-level boards, but it also removes the right to repair and upgrade your hardware.
On August 13, 2026, Spotify released Soloist, an official headless Spotify Connect client for Raspberry Pi and Linux, with a local WebSocket API for DIY integrations. Homelabbers who patched together unofficial clients now have a supported path — with strings attached.
Proxmox VE 9.2 is now natively available on ARM64 (aarch64), sharing a single package repository with x86-64. Raspberry Pi is not yet officially supported, but RK3588 boards and Apple Silicon Macs are ready today.
On November 19, 2025, SoftBank acquired Ampere Computing for $6.5 billion. On July 24, 2026, Phoronix confirmed that Linux support for the Snapdragon X Elite had regressed further. Between those two dates, the ARM/x86 divorce became final: Asahi Linux runs on M5 Macs, multi-arch containers are mundane, and AWS Graviton now powers over 20% of new EC2 instances.
