A new security feature rolled out to select models of the latest iPhones and iPads this week will make it more difficult for law enforcement, spies, and malicious hackers to obtain a person’s precise location data from their phone provider. According to Apple, the new feature, when enabled, limits the precision of location data that iPhones and cellular-enabled iPads share with the customer’s cell carrier. Sharing a less-precise location, such as the general neighborhood rather than a street address, will help to protect the device owner’s privacy, the company claims.  Apple said switching on the feature does not affect the…

After launching a messaging feature last August, Spotify is now rolling out group chats. The company announced this week that users can now share the podcasts, playlists, and audiobooks they’re listening to with up to 10 people. You can only start a chat with someone you’ve previously shared content with. For example, if you have a collaborative playlist with someone or have joined a Jam or a Blend together, you can start a conversation with them. The move comes as Spotify continues to invest in making its streaming app more social. Over the years, the company has gradually added social…

Tesla’s energy storage business saved a dismal earnings report from turning into a horrible one. Last year, the company’s profit fell 45% compared with 2024, driven in large part by falling sales of its electric vehicles. Investors anticipated the decline in sales, but Tesla still beat Wall Street earnings and revenue estimates thanks to its energy storage business. Tesla deployed a record 46.7 gigawatt-hours of energy storage products in 2025, a 48% increase from last year, according to the company’s official filings. Big, stationary batteries like the Megapack and Powerwall, along with solar installations, now drive nearly a quarter of…

A new AI lab called Flapping Airplanes launched on Wednesday, with $180 million in seed funding from Google Ventures, Sequoia, and Index. The founding team is impressive, and the goal — finding a less data-hungry way to train large models — is a particularly interesting one. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I would rate them as Level Two on the trying-to-make-money scale. But there’s something even more exciting about the Flapping Airplanes project that I hadn’t been able to put my finger on until I read this post from Sequoia partner David Cahn. As Cahn describes it, Flapping…

After rapidly hitting the top of the App Store in October, OpenAI’s video-generation app Sora is now struggling. New data suggests the app is seeing declines in both app downloads and consumer spending, as the early hype about the AI video social network wears off. Powered by OpenAI’s video generation model Sora 2, the iOS version topped 100,000 installs on day one, despite being an invite-only experience. It soon hit the No. 1 spot on the U.S. App Store, and it reached the 1 million downloads milestone faster than ChatGPT. At the time, Sora’s app was iOS-only and still required…

Apple, Meta, and Google are locked in a fierce battle to lead the next wave of AI, and they’ve recently increased their focus on hardware. With its latest acquisition of the AI startup Q.ai, Apple aims to gain an edge, particularly in the audio sector. ​As first reported by Reuters, Apple has acquired Q.ai, an Israeli startup specializing in imaging and machine learning, particularly technologies that enable devices to interpret whispered speech and enhance audio in noisy environments. Apple has been adding new AI features to its AirPods, including the live translation capability introduced last year.  The company has also…

Microsoft this week deployed its first crop of its homegrown AI chips in one of its data centers, with plans to roll out more in the coming months, it says.   The chip, named the Maia 200, is designed to be what Microsoft calls an “AI inference powerhouse,” meaning it’s optimized for the compute-intensive work of running AI models in production. The company released some impressive processing-speed specs for Maia, saying it outperforms Amazon’s latest Trainium chips and Google’s latest Tensor Processing Units (TPU).   All of the cloud giants are turning to their own AI chip designs in part because of…

Hustle culture may be the norm at tech companies in the AI era, but the work will stop tomorrow at publishing platform Medium. Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine is giving the company’s employees permission to take the day off to participate in tomorrow’s nationwide general strike protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Activists behind the general strike are calling for “no work, no school, and no shopping” amid a push to defund ICE, which has escalated raids in U.S. cities, killing several people, including two U.S. citizens earlier this month in Minneapolis. In a Slack message shared today with…

Apple exceeded expectations when it reported its quarterly earnings on Thursday, revealing that it made $143.8 billion in revenue for a 16% year-over-year increase. As analysts peppered CEO Tim Cook with softball questions during Apple’s earnings call, one analyst dared to ask the question that seemingly no one in Silicon Valley is willing to ask. “When I think about your AI initiatives, you know, it’s clear there are added costs associated with that… Many of your competitors have already integrated AI into their devices, and it’s just not clear yet what incremental monetization they’re seeing because of AI…,” started Morgan…

Ethos Technologies, a San Francisco-based provider of software for selling life insurance, debuted on the Nasdaq on Thursday. As one of the year’s first major tech IPOs, the insurtech platform is being closely watched as a bellwether for the 2026 listing cycle. The company and its selling shareholders raised approximately $200 million in the offering, selling 10.5 million shares at $19 each under the ticker symbol “LIFE” — one of the more on-the-nose choices in recent memory. The name fits. Ethos runs a three-sided platform where consumers buy policies online in 10 minutes without medical exams. It says over 10,000…