Tech Express | September 29, 2026 — SpaceX's Starship Reaches Orbit for the First Time

1. SpaceX's Starship Reaches Orbit for the First Time, Deploys 26 Starlink V3 Satellites

Source: Kuaikeji (Mydrivers)

SpaceX's Starship lifted off from its Starbase complex on the Gulf Coast on September 28 for its 14th flight, media reported. The flight reached orbit for the first time and deployed 26 Starlink satellites at an altitude of about 269 km. Because one engine malfunctioned, the mission ended seven hours earlier than planned.

Musk wrote on social media that day: "Starship is 2-3 years away from hourly flights." Dean Sladen, a quality manager at Accu Components and an aerospace engineer, said deploying the 26 Starlink V3 satellites into their target orbit was a huge win and marked Starship's first revenue-generating commercial flight. Starship is designed to be the world's first fully reusable spacecraft; its previous 13 test flights since 2023 had all been limited to suborbital spaceflight.

Each V3 satellite offers roughly 1000 Gbps of download capacity, about 10 times the 96 Gbps of the current V2 satellites. SpaceX says Starship's first commercial service is expected to begin in 2028. Musk wants to launch 60 V3 satellites per flight once Starship is in routine operation, with a long-term goal of hundreds or even thousands of launches a year.

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2. Kling 4.0 Debuts, Focused on "Realism, Controllability, Professionalism"

Source: Ifanr

Kling AI has unveiled the major Kling 4.0 update, which the company says focuses on "realism, controllability and professionalism," with large gains in visual realism, creative control and narrative completeness, plus improvements in audiovisual performance, multi-keyframes, lip-sync, text generation and creative replication. Kling 4.0 will officially arrive in October, while Kling 4.0 Flash, a faster and more cost-effective version, opened for small-scale testing on September 28.

In Ifanr's hands-on tests, Kling 4.0 kept camera moves coherent without flicker or warping during large movements such as dolly, pan, tracking and high-angle shots, and maintained consistent character features. It supports 10-bit HDR and 4K or 1080P output, carrying about four times more color information than ordinary 8-bit video, so footage can be imported directly into professional post-production tools such as DaVinci Resolve or Premiere Pro.

Kling 4.0 can natively generate clips up to 30 seconds long, supports long takes and continuous storytelling, and can output a 21:9 ultrawide aspect ratio. Its language support covers nine languages including Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French and Hindi, along with accents and dialects such as Beijing, Taiwanese, Northeastern, Sichuan, Cantonese, American English, British English and Indian English; a single task can use up to 15 reference assets.

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3. Roche Advances AI-Driven Automated Lab, Targets 20 New Molecules by 2030

Source: Cailian Press (Kechuangban Daily)

Reported by Kechuangban Daily on September 29, global pharma giants are stepping up their bets on AI-driven drug discovery. Swiss drugmaker Roche said at an investor event that it will build autonomous AI laboratories to speed up new drug discovery. Aviv Regev, head of research and early development at Roche's wholly owned subsidiary Genentech, said the company aims to achieve "AI independence" in drug R&D, and that the AI automated lab has begun construction.

The lab uses a "Lab in the Loop" model: AI models propose hypotheses, robotic systems run wet-lab experiments, and the data flows back to refine the models, forming a dry-wet closed loop that turns results into intellectual property. Roche plans to reallocate about 2 billion Swiss francs (about $2.41 billion) in R&D savings toward research programs and efficiency gains, aiming to bring up to 20 new molecular entities (NMEs) to market by 2030.

Roche says its AI tool Target Nexus is expected to inform 80% of its research portfolio decisions by the end of 2026. With AI, Roche's Phase III clinical trial success rate has risen from 65% in 2025 to more than 80%. Regev said that from Q4 2025 to Q2 2026, 40% of pipeline decisions were supported by traceable AI. Across the industry, building AI automated labs has become a key arena for global giants.

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4. Apple's Siri AI Is Limited to Newer Devices

Source: 9to5Mac

According to 9to5Mac, Siri AI is a major upgrade and highlight of iOS 27 and other updates, but only newer Apple devices support the overhauled Siri. The outlet compiled the full list of Siri AI-compatible hardware across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro.

The report notes Siri AI is only available on compatible hardware, and only in certain parts of the world. Some experiences are better on select hardware; for example, the ability to fully customize the pace and expressivity of Siri AI's voice is limited to the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, iPhone Duo, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, iPhone Air, iPad models with M4 and later chips and at least 12GB of unified memory, and Mac models with M3 and later chips and at least 12GB of unified memory.

Apple says the limitation exists because its most powerful on-device AI model is restricted to newer products. Users with these models may or may not get faster Siri AI performance.

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5. CPU Lead Times Stretch to 30 Weeks as Chip Supply Tightens

Source: Kuaikeji (Mydrivers)

According to Kuaikeji on September 29, as demand surges, TrendForce has for the first time added CPUs to its weekly radar tracking. Data show CPU lead times have stretched from 16-20 weeks in a balanced market to 25-30 weeks, nearly doubling.

The report notes that GPUs have long been the focus of compute chips, but the rise of agentic AI is rapidly increasing demand for CPUs for task orchestration and logic scheduling. TrendForce says the trend accelerated further after Meta launched its personal AI agent Muse. Muse can autonomously perform multi-step tasks in cloud virtual machines, such as opening a browser, navigating websites and handling tasks in the background, and keeps running even after the user closes the app.

Beyond CPUs, the entire semiconductor supply chain is tightening: DRAM lead times have reached 20 weeks versus 8 in a balanced market; HDD has jumped to 50 weeks; ABF substrates to 48-56 weeks; NAND (eSSD) to 16 weeks; and MLCC to 32 weeks. The only category in line with a balanced market is GPUs, at 30-40 weeks.

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6. A "Samsung 8TB Flagship SSD" Bought for $8,000 Turned Out to Be 128GB

Source: Kuaikeji (Mydrivers)

According to Kuaikeji on September 29, a netizen posted that he bought a Samsung 8TB 9100 Pro flagship SSD on Amazon for nearly 100,000 Indian rupees (about 8,000 yuan), only to find it was actually about 128GB and used cheap hardware from budget brand EVM.

The user said the order was placed on September 20 and arrived on September 26. He didn't suspect anything at first: the packaging had some dents but looked otherwise normal, and the SSD body was made to resemble a Samsung 9100 Pro. But once installed, the system recognized only about 128GB, and further checks showed the drive did not use Samsung hardware at all.

By comparison, Samsung's official specs say the real 9100 Pro uses PCIe 5.0 x4 and NVMe 2.0, with the 8TB version rated up to 14.8GB/s sequential read and 13.4GB/s write. Commenters pointed out giveaway flaws: a too-thin thermal pad, the wrong controller size and a PCB missing several flash chips that should be present. The user is negotiating a refund with Amazon, but the order is marked non-returnable, making the process difficult.

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7. Honor WIN2 Engineering Unit Packs a 12,000 mAh Battery

Source: Kuaikeji (Mydrivers)

According to Kuaikeji on September 29, citing a tipster, the Honor WIN2 series has registered three models under the codename Barrett, with colors including Red-Blue Buff, Quick-Open Black and a "winning" variant. Current information suggests notable gains in battery life and performance.

The phone packs an active cooling fan and a large VC cooling plate, and an engineering unit's battery reaches 12,000 mAh, the largest capacity on any phone to date. Compared with the previous Honor WIN, the WIN2 series adds 2,000 mAh, giving it more than twice the capacity of the iPhone 18 Pro Max.

For performance, the Honor WIN2 series will be among the first to feature Qualcomm's sixth-generation Snapdragon 8 Ultra. The chip uses a "2+6" architecture with two 5GHz super cores and six 4GHz performance cores, mainly boosting AI performance, and can run a 30-billion-parameter AI model on-device. Qualcomm also uses a new offset packaging technology to optimize area and cooling efficiency for better sustained performance.

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8. Huawei FreeBuds Neo Go on Sale Starting at 669 Yuan

Source: Kuaikeji (Mydrivers)

According to Kuaikeji on September 29, Huawei's FreeBuds Neo went on sale today at 699 yuan, with a first-release price of 669 yuan. The charging case features a "flying saucer" curved design inspired by the golden ratio, while the earbuds use a new design and weigh about 4.8 grams each, offered in four colors: Galaxy Silver, Nebula Pink, Zero White and Starry Black.

The FreeBuds Neo feature Huawei's self-developed third-generation audio AI chip, working with a dual-DSP architecture and an NPU AI processor. They can sample ambient noise up to 400,000 times per second, with noise-processing latency as low as 8 microseconds. Average noise cancellation across the full frequency range reaches up to 30dB, and they support two-way quiet calls with three microphones plus a bone-conduction mic to filter ambient noise and strengthen voices.

For connectivity, they support NearLink audio at up to 16Mbps and 48kHz/24bit lossless transmission over distances up to 170 meters. A new game mode cuts latency to as low as 43ms. Battery life reaches about 6.5 hours per charge with noise cancellation on and 10 hours with it off, and up to 40 hours combined with the case.

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9. HarmonyOS PC Apps Top 19,000

Source: Kuaikeji (Mydrivers)

According to Kuaikeji on September 29, the number of apps in the HarmonyOS PC ecosystem has surpassed 19,000 and is heading toward 20,000. Compared with the goal announced at its debut in May last year of supporting more than 2,000 apps by year-end, the app count has grown nearly ninefold in a year, showing the momentum of a domestic PC ecosystem.

HarmonyOS PC apps now cover core scenarios including office, audio-video, education, finance, creation and gaming. Core office apps such as WPS Office, DingTalk, Feishu and WeCom have been natively adapted and deeply integrated with HarmonyOS system-level AI. In finance, corporate online banking from the six major banks plus 25 professional finance apps such as Tonghuashun and Eastmoney are ready.

Professional software remains HarmonyOS PC's biggest weakness. Industry-standard design, architecture and post-production tools such as Adobe's suite, AutoCAD and 3ds Max still have no native HarmonyOS version, forcing users onto virtual machines or compatibility layers. At the HDC 2026 HarmonyOS PC developer forum, the head of JetBrains' IntelliJ division gave a keynote on adapting mainstream development tools such as IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm to HarmonyOS.

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10. Yu Chengdong Shows New Order for Huawei's "Five Marques"

Source: Kuaikeji (Mydrivers)

According to Kuaikeji on September 29, at yesterday's brand launch event, Yu Chengdong reiterated that AITO is the first brand born from the HarmonyOS Smart Mobility partnership and will still receive Huawei's technology enablement for now, while day-to-day operations will be formally handed over to partner Seres. Service rights for all AITO owners will be completely unaffected.

The detail that sparked the most discussion was a brand-introduction slide Yu showed on stage. In the previously published order, the five partner brands ran left to right as AITO (Seres), LUXEED (Chery), STELATO (BAIC), MAEXTRO (JAC) and SAIC (SAIC), with AITO, the first partner brand, always at the far left.

In the slide shown at the event, AITO was moved from the top of the lineup to the far right. The new order is MAEXTRO, STELATO, LUXEED, SAIC and AITO. Reports say that starting January 1 next year, AITO will formally exit HarmonyOS Smart Mobility and Huawei stores.

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