Tech Pulse 🤳

iPhone Duo is official. Book-style fold, 5.4-inch cover screen, 7.6-inch continuous display unfolded, thinnest iPhone Apple has ever made. $1,999 to start, up to $3,199 for 2TB. Biggest hardware swing since Vision Pro. See more

Apple TV is about to run four straight weeks of major premieres, starting next week with Slow Horses, still the most consistently great spy show on any platform. Nobody else is stacking a lineup like this right now.

iPhone 18 Pro just launched and Gurman's already saying Apple is saving the real redesign for next year's 20th anniversary iPhone. Reportedly the biggest design overhaul since the iPhone X. See more

iPhone Air launched at a $200 premium over the 17. Trade it in against the new lineup and Apple's credit erases that entire gap, meaning early adopters paid extra for a phone that resells like it never had one.

Apple TV just dropped the trailer for Brothers, a new comedy from a The Office alum starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. See more

M5 Ultra Mac Studio can drive up to 8 displays, and it is not just a spec sheet flex. Trading floors, video editing bays, control rooms, that headroom gets eaten fast once you start plugging in. See more

Apple's M6 just landed, and it's the first look at the chip generation that leads straight to A20 Pro in iPhone 18 Pro. See more

Apple quietly moved AppleCare for the new Mac Studio and Mac mini. It used to sit right on the configure page, now it's buried a few clicks later in checkout. See more

iOS 27 is expected to land alongside the new iPhone lineup this September, following Apple's usual pattern: developer beta at WWDC in June, public beta in July, full release tied to new hardware in fall. See more

Notability's new Mac workflow starts recordings straight from calendar events, then files the transcript and notes right under that meeting automatically. See more

Apple just dropped a behind-the-scenes look at its new Mac mini M6 ad, and the production work is wild for something that plays as a simple 30 second spot. See more

Apple quietly refreshed the 40W Dynamic Power Adapter (up to 60W) for the EU and Vietnam today, now with retractable two prong plugs that fold flush into the housing. Same day, the $19 Polishing Cloth got a price cut. See more

Airbound just raised $37M from Greenoaks, DoorDash, and Lachy Groom to replace delivery trucks with rocket-like VTOL drones. See more

Spotify says it's fixed the outage that stopped audiobooks from playing, but reports are still coming in of chapters stuck mid book or refusing to load. See more

OpenAI is tightening ChatGPT Plus usage limits again, this time citing compute management. Translation: demand is outpacing the GPUs they can throw at it. See more

New Mac mini runs M6 or M5 Pro, new Mac Studio scales up to M5 Max or M5 Ultra. Real generational jumps, not a spec bump for the sake of a press release. This is what happens when Apple silicon actually has a roadmap.

Apple just reversed course on Hide My Email. Plans to drop the icloud.com domain for generated addresses are scrapped, meaning the feature keeps working the way privacy-focused users actually expect it to. See more

OpenAI's head of product Thibault Sottiaux told TechCrunch 'the world seems to be ready' for agents, the pitch has shifted from chatbots that answer to agents that act. UX is now the hard problem, not just model quality.

Android 17's Motion Assist is rolling out, using onboard sensors to detect when you're in a moving vehicle and automatically dimming or simplifying the screen to help with motion sickness. Pixel gets it first, of course. See more

GameHub's new update lets you load PC mods straight onto Android, so yes, that Thomas the Tank Engine dragon replacer mod in Skyrim is now portable. See more

Fitbit's founders are back with Luffu Link, an LTE band that works with zero phone nearby. All day health sensing, voice logging, location tracking, and a direct line to trusted contacts if something goes wrong. See more

The Pixel 11 doesn't record your life, it records the version you wish had happened. AI reshaping photos after the fact isn't a camera feature, it's fiction with a timestamp. iPhone still captures what actually occurred.

An Android app is now doing what Google's own Always-On Display should have done years ago, turning a passive lock screen into a music and widget panel. See more

Google Maps on Android Auto is reportedly dropping traffic data mid drive, no colored road overlays, no congestion rerouting, just a blank route. Been happening on and off for a month across the Android ecosystem.

Gemini now shows up right in Android's text selection menu, even inside third-party apps. Convenient, sure, but baking an AI shortcut into every long-press just shows how bloated Android's basic UI has become. See more

OpenAI wants agents for everyone, not just engineers writing code. The bet: if an agent can book, buy, and file things without hand holding, mass adoption follows. See more

Microsoft is now paying people to get friends onto Edge, 500 Microsoft Rewards points per successful referral. Says a lot when a browser needs a referral bonus instead of just winning on merit. See more

Amazon is quietly hiking prices across Echo, Kindle, and Fire TV lines, and the RAM and NAND shortage is the real culprit. See more

Google's dangling a $200 gift card to anyone who buys a Pixel 11 Pro before August 27, which tells us plenty about how confident they are it sells on merit. A discount code isn't a spec sheet. See more

FTC antitrust case closed: Zillow and Redfin settled, and the terms actually require Redfin to get back into rental advertising rather than staying out of it. See more

Stanford's numbers are stark: employment for 22-25 year olds in AI-exposed fields is down 19% versus more AI-resistant jobs since generative AI went mainstream. See more

Oura reportedly targeting a September IPO at a $16B+ valuation. For a ring that tracks sleep and recovery, that's a massive jump from its $5.2B valuation just last year. See more

AI voice recorders like this handle recording, transcription, and speaker labeling on device, no more dumping hour long meetings into a notes app and hoping. Price just dropped too, makes the case even easier.

Reports point to the Galaxy S27 Ultra borrowing a camera module layout that reads a lot like iPhone 17 Pro's. Samsung spent years mocking Apple's design, funny where the inspiration ends up flowing now.

Leaks claim Samsung is reviving a shelved redesign for the Galaxy S27 after apparently scrapping it for the S26. See more

Google pairing Gemini with Keep is a genuine threat to bloated productivity apps, one toggle auto sorts and cleans up cluttered notes. Handy, sure. Still doesn't fix Android's fragmented ecosystem underneath it. See more

Google Sheets quietly replaced paid apps and Android users are the ones tweeting about it, which tracks. See more

Waymo's leaning on a custom chip built with Intel to handle its robotaxi sensor fusion instead of off-the-shelf silicon. See more

Notion's databases and nested pages are great until you spend 20 minutes formatting instead of writing. Ditching it for a plain notes app removed the friction. See more

Flock's CEO is calling for 'compromise' as backlash grows over its ALPR camera network, thousands of devices scanning plates across the US, data shared with agencies with little public oversight. See more

GrapheneOS teasing 7 years of updates on future Motorola hardware, foldables included. Ambitious for a privacy fork that's usually confined to Pixels. See more

Xperia 10 VIII leaks ahead of its reveal and we're still searching for what actually changed. Same design language Sony's leaned on for years, same mid-range chip tier expected. See more

Pixel 11 Pro starts at $1,099. Getting one for $399 means stacking trade in credit, carrier promos, and store gift cards just to land near iPhone pricing without iPhone resale value. See more

Android Pulse is already sitting on a lot of phones and Google quietly confirmed what it does: background diagnostics, flagging bugs and performance issues before users even notice. See more

A clipboard manager is the best upgrade a phone has needed in years, and that says everything about the phone. iOS has had universal clipboard and handoff built in for ages. See more

Ox Alpha showed up on the leaderboards with zero attribution and it's already got AI Twitter in full detective mode. See more

Smartphone cameras aren't capturing reality, they're computing it. Even shooting RAW, you're getting a file after multi frame fusion, tone mapping, and AI denoising have already touched it. See more

A Pixel Watch Ultra is basically inevitable at this point, but Google should skip the generic "Ultra" playbook and pull from Fitbit Air instead. See more

Dutch regulators just hit Uber with an €825M GDPR fine, second largest ever under the law. The issue: drivers say they were suspended or fired by automated systems with no human explanation or appeal. See more

Android 17 quietly flags risky behavior before you have to ask it to. Sounds nice, but iOS has run privacy that way for years, on device processing, permission nudges, App Tracking Transparency by default. See more

Apple Watch Ultra 2 is the elevated smartwatch experience people keep asking us about, titanium case, 3000 nit display you can actually read in direct sun, 36hr battery. See more

Notability finally landing on Android after all these years is a good app hitting a platform that still can't give it a decent stylus experience to match. Great software, wrong canvas. See more

Edge computing keeps getting cheaper. Small teams are shipping full platforms without a single server.

A new wave of indie social platforms is betting that people are tired of algorithmic feeds.