New MacBooks, broken iPhones, dancing robots, and AI that might be planning something sinister. Just another week in tech, right?
10,183 drones, 110 robots, and one very expensive crypto hack
Dragon in the Texas air
Let’s start the week with some exciting events. This week, 71,297 drones lit the sky, setting two Guinness World Records. Sky Elements teamed up with Shenzhen-based drone manufacturer Damoda to form an enormous blue dragon from 10,183 drones. The team launched several performances over the week despite the weather, including thunderstorms. Every performance involved over 10,000 drones, using a drone-in-a-box system that stores, charges, launches, and receives them in dedicated trays with minimal manual work. Read the news here.
Apple’s $1,999 foldable iPhone is already cracking
The new device was launched last week, and we already see the internet flooded with complaints. Some even say that the phone developed cracks along the fold within hours of unboxing. Not exactly the premium unboxing experience they paid for. However, for the sake of justice, let’s admit that most of the images of cracked screens were fake.
Without disclosing the cause of damage, Apple has acknowledged the problem and offered replacements through AppleCare.
A phone that folds in half is impressive, but the one that cracks before you’ve finished setting it up? Read more at Yahoo Tech.
Microsoft has a 60,000-person exit door
What if you were a Microsoft employee, and one morning you woke up with an offer to quit your job voluntarily, or you would be fired? This is what happened to 60,000 Microsoft employees this week. The company presented the Voluntary Exit Offer on Monday to employees from the US, Canada, India, and the UK to exit the company with financial support and career-planning resources (terms that are not usually offered when employees are laid off or fired). The company commented that they are not looking for ways to cut the workforce, but they can’t ignore timing, and investments of billions of dollars force the company to keep costs under control. As always, human resources are the easiest to cut. Get the details on GeekWire.
Anthropic is going public
This Monday, Anthropic has filed for a US IPO on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol “ANT.” The target valuation is insane; estimated at around $2 trillion, Anthropic may become the largest public company debut in history. The company has 14,000 enterprise customers that contribute to $10 million in revenue, while the total revenue is reported at $16.3 billion for the first half of 2026.
Computing is the company’s biggest expense, with a commitment of more than $500 billion in spending across six partners over the next decade. Currently, this bill is mostly paid by Amazon (it will have a 12% ownership cap) and Google, which are among its biggest investors.
Now, the biggest question for investors to decide is whether Anthropic’s growth justifies the bill or whether the AI boom is getting a little too expensive. Read more about the news at Reuters.
Instagram wants us to stop scrolling and start binge-watching
Instagram is for short videos, and YouTube is for long-form videos, right? Right? Well, it was true before Instagram announced that they are testing a new long-form video upload called Features. If Meta plays the feature right, they may compete with YouTube or even take its place for long-form content.
The strategy is clear: keep audiences, creators, and their advertising dollars inside Instagram’s ecosystem. Because apparently, the only thing better than scrolling endlessly is watching something for an hour and a half. Am I the only one thinking of deleting social media apps? Read the full story behind the news on TechCrunch.
Meta is back in court
The topic is the same: social media’s illegal harm to children and teens.
Social media companies have spent years perfecting the art of keeping us glued to their screens. Now it’s time to pay. Meta and Snap are facing a landmark trial in Los Angeles over allegations that endless scrolling, notifications, and Snapchat streaks encouraged compulsive use and contributed to serious mental health problems in young users. Meta has already lost in several trials, paying billions in penalties, and is still denying that their products were designed to be addictive. The addiction is, unfortunately, real not only for teens but also for millions of adults who have lost themselves in virtual reality. Read more about the case at Euronews.
110 humanoid robots dance in sync
China just put 110 humanoid robots on the dance floor and set a Guinness World Record for their synchronized performance. The full-size Expedition A3 robots developed by AGIBOT performed synchronized movements with jumps, flips, and formation changes, and even arranged themselves into the number 2026. They are dancing, and it looks cute. But what if they are warming up before something serious? Catch the full story at Interesting Engineering.
Binance lost $6.3 billion
The end of the week could have been more positive, but it is what it is. Hackers stole approximately $6.3 billion from Binance, the largest cryptocurrency platform. As soon as the news spread and the users couldn’t find their deposits, Bitcoin and Ethereum prices fell, and Binance temporarily suspended withdrawals.
The main suspects are the North Korea-linked hackers who may have used a compromised employee laptop. There are no official announcements from Binance about the hackers, but the platform has assured that customer funds are safe and has promised to cover the losses. Read the full article here.
Anthropic’s IPO paperwork is more about a warning from the future
Most companies warn investors about competition, rising costs, and market uncertainty when going public. Anthropic has something extra: the possibility that its own AI could blackmail people and pose an existential threat to humanity.
The 93-page paper published just recently outlined multiple scenarios we have occasionally been warned about, and they sound more like science fiction than financial paperwork. We still don’t understand what is behind the strategy of spelling out how its own technology could become dangerous in a document meant to attract investors.
Nothing says invest in our future quite like an explanation of how that future could go wrong.
Read the whole story at Ars Technica.
The new Apple MacBook Pro has “surprisingly” high prices
And yes, rumors have been confirmed. Apple officially presented the new MacBook Pro with a touchscreen, and this device is beautiful. Of course, I remember that Dell had touchscreen laptops in 2007 and Samsung had them in 2012, but this is a totally “new” touchscreen. Jokes aside, Apple presented the new 14- and 16-inch devices with PROLED XDR Display at the ‘Pro and Tell’ event. We will have Dynamic Island and a glowing Apple logo. Preorders are already open with $2,899 for the 14-inch M5 Pro chip device and $3,399 for the 16-inch model.
MacBook M5 Max chip prices are $4,499 for the 14-inch and $4,799 for the 16-inch. Reddit discussions are quite contradictory; some are excited, and the rest claim they will keep their devices or even downgrade. More about the news on CNET.
Photo by Traxer / Unsplash
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