May went out with a tech boom: Both prices and rockets exploded this week

It was explosive news week – if you're the price of a popular-but-aging piece of consumer gaming hardware or a Jeff Bezos rocket.

This week on The Kettle, Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by Reg reporters Richard Speed (theregister.com/author/richard-speed) and Dan Robinson (theregister.com/author/dan-robinson) to talk about the Steam Deck's 40+ percent price hike (theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/05/28/steam…) and what it means for the ongoing memory-and-storage shortage (theregister.com/on-prem/2026/03/30/us-pc-shipm…). Sure, it's just consumer hardware, but it's the latest in a line of price hikes justified in the name of AI and geopolitics – and it could spell the beginning of a new normal for hardware prices.

We couldn't ignore the standout story of late last week, though, as a Blue Origin rocket blew up spectacularly (youtube.com/watch?v=1O90WZJALYc) in what may be the largest space industry explosion in more than 50 years. The Blue Origin blowup is likely to delay the Artemis mission for months, if not a year or more.