Framework is opening US preorders for its new Laptop 12 today, a couple of months after announcing the system at an event in February. Framework's DIY edition of the laptop, which is missing RAM, an SSD, a USB-C charger, and an OS and requires some assembly, will start at $549. A fully assembled pre-built version with 8GB of RAM, a 500GB SSD, a 60 W charger, and Windows 11 Home starts at $799.

All preorders placed on Framework's site require a $100 deposit, and almost all configurations begin shipping in July. A first batch of systems is slated to ship in June, but this requires a $250 donation to Hack Club ; Framework says the donation will be used to buy Framework 12 laptops for high school students.

The Laptop 12 was built to be a more budget-friendly system, which is reflected in its specs, screen size, and its mostly plastic construction. But like the Laptop 13, the Laptop 12 prioritizes upgradeability and repairability and retains the USB-C-based Expansion Card system that was the Laptop 13's biggest innovation when it was introduced. Each Laptop 12 has four Expansion Card bays plus a headphone jack, allowing the installation of USB-C, USB-A, DisplayPort, and HDMI ports, as well as the other Expansion Cards Framework offers.

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When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the Powers of 10 video , which came out in the 1970s. Perhaps you remember it, with the narrator taking us both outward toward the fathomless end of the Universe and then, reversing course, guiding us back to Earth and inside a proton. The film gave a younger me a good sense of just how large the Universe around us really is.

What I did not know until much later is that the short film was made by the Eames Office , which was founded by the noted designers Charles Eames and Ray Kaiser. It's the same organization that produced the Eames Lounge Chair. It goes to show you the value of good design across genres (shoutout to Ars' resident designer, Aurich Lawson ).

Anyway, I say all that because the Power of 10 film continues to live in my head, rent-free, decades later. It was the first thing I thought of when looking at today's image of the Milky Way Galaxy's center. The main image showcases huge vertical filaments, with the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's core clearly visible. This image, captured by a South African radio telescope named MeerKAT, also shows the ghostly, bubble-like remnants of supernovas that exploded over millennia.

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For the second time in six months, SpaceX will deploy a US military satellite that was sitting in storage, waiting for a slot on United Launch Alliance's launch schedule.

Space Systems Command, which oversees the military's launch program, announced Monday that it is reassigning the launch of a Global Positioning System satellite from ULA's Vulcan rocket to SpaceX's Falcon 9. This satellite, designated GPS III SV-08 (Space Vehicle-08), will join the Space Force's fleet of navigation satellites beaming positioning and timing signals for military and civilian users around the world.

The Space Force booked the Vulcan rocket to launch this spacecraft in 2023, when ULA hoped to begin flying military satellites on its new rocket by mid-2024. The Vulcan rocket is now scheduled to launch its first national security mission around the middle of this year, following the Space Force's certification of ULA's new launcher last month.

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Framework, the designers and sellers of the modular and repairable Framework Laptop 13 and other products, announced today that it would be " temporarily pausing US sales " on some of its laptop configurations as a result of new tariffs put on Taiwanese imports by the Trump administration. The affected models will be removed from Framework's online store for now, and there's no word on when buyers can expect them to come back.

"We priced our laptops when tariffs on imports from Taiwan were 0 percent," the company responded to a post asking why it was pausing sales. "At a 10 percent tariff, we would have to sell the lowest-end SKUs at a loss."

"Other consumer goods makers have performed the same calculations and taken the same actions, though most have not been open about it," Framework said. Nintendo also paused US preorders for its upcoming Switch 2 console last week after the tariffs were announced.

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Among the many surprises during last week's wider unveiling of the Nintendo Switch 2 was the pricing: $450 for the console itself and $70 to $80 for many first-party games . Now, in a set of interviews posted today (but conducted during last week's unveiling event), Nintendo executives are explaining and defending those prices, even as Trump's tariffs are apparently forcing the company to pause and reassess its whole launch strategy .

Nintendo of America President Doug Bowser was speaking to CNBC just as Trump's tariffs were being announced, and said in the moment that "we're still all trying to really understand [the tariffs] better and understand what possible impacts may rise from that." At the same time, he said that the company "didn't consider tariffs into that equation" when choosing the Switch 2's $450 price and instead went with what "we felt that was going to be the right price point for our consumers and the right value proposition if you will for the device that we're creating."

Elsewhere in that CNBC interview, Bowser suggested that Nintendo isn't following the Wii U example of selling hardware at a loss in order to gain more potential software customers. Instead, Bowser said the company is "trying to find a way to maintain... margins on the hardware even though they may be more slim than they are on software," and then "to make sure that they're seeing the value in their investment in one of our devices" through software.

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We're used to updating Windows, macOS, and Linux systems at least once a month (and usually more), but people with ancient DOS-based PCs still get to join in the fun every once in a while. Over the weekend, the team that maintains FreeDOS officially released version 1.4 of the operating system, containing a list of fixes and updates that have been in the works since the last time a stable update was released in 2022 .

FreeDOS creator and maintainer Jim Hall goes into more detail about the FreeDOS 1.4 changes here , and full release notes for the changes are here . The release has "a focus on stability" and includes an updated installer, new versions of common tools like fdisk , and format and the edlin text editor. The release also includes updated HTML Help files.

Hall talked with Ars about several of these changes when we interviewed him about FreeDOS in 2024 . The team issued the first release candidate for FreeDOS 1.4 back in January.

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After giving CinemaCon attendees a sneak peek last week, Paramount Pictures has publicly released the trailer for Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning , the eighth installment of the blockbuster spy franchise starring Tom Cruise as IMF agent Ethan Hunt, and a sequel to the events that played out in 2023's Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning .

This may, or may not, end up being Cruise's last film in the franchise; everyone's being pretty cagey about that question. But the trailer certainly gives us everything we've come to expect from the Mission: Impossible films: high stakes, global political intrigue, and of course, lots and lots of spectacular stunt work, including Cruise hanging precariously mid-air from a 1930s Boeing Stearman biplane.

(Spoilers for Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning below.)

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A second unvaccinated child has died of measles in Texas, according to state health officials and the hospital in Lubbock, Texas, that treated the child.

“We are deeply saddened to report that a school-aged child who was recently diagnosed with measles has passed away," a representative for UMC Health System in Lubbock said in a statement emailed to Ars Technica. "The child was receiving treatment for complications of measles while hospitalized. It is important to note that the child was not vaccinated against measles and had no known underlying health conditions. This unfortunate event underscores the importance of vaccination."

US Health Secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. identified the child as 8-year-old Daisy Hildebrand . Media reports indicated that she died early Thursday morning .

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A White House investigation has reportedly identified the mistakes that led to a journalist being added to a Signal text chain in which bombing plans were discussed hours before the strikes occurred.

As previously reported, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz last month invited The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat in which top Trump administration officials discussed a plan for bombing Houthi targets in Yemen. Waltz publicly claimed that Goldberg's number was "sucked in" to his phone and added to a different person's contact information without his knowledge.

A report published yesterday by The Guardian said a forensic review by the White House IT office "found that Waltz's phone had saved Goldberg's number as part of an unlikely series of events that started when Goldberg emailed the Trump campaign last October." The Guardian reported:

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