Fox announced Monday that it has agreed to acquire Roku for $160.00/share in a combination of cash and Fox Class A common stock, giving Roku an enterprise value of about $22 billion. The companies expect the deal to close in the first half of calendar year 2027.

The deal would combines Fox’s sports, news and entertainment content and the Tubi service with Roku’s connected TV platform, the Roku Channel, first-party data and direct relationship with more than 100 million global streaming households.

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According to the companies, on a pro-forma basis, the combined company will become the third-largest player in U.S. TV by share of viewing.

Lachlan Murdoch sure knows how to strike while the iron is hot.

In the summer of 1999, the U.S. government put export restrictions on Apple’s newly launched Power Mac G4 desktop tower systems. Being capable of a claimed performance of “over 1 billion calculations per second” meant these stylish ‘graphite’ translucent designs were “classed as a weapon” and thus routinely banned from export to 50 nations worldwide.

Though Apple naturally sought to get the restrictions lifted, according to contemporary reports, its new interim chief executive officer, Steve Jobs, didn’t miss a great marketing trick.

I can’t believe I had never heard this story before. You can watch the commercial here.

Apple today introduced Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri, powered by Apple Intelligence. Unfortunately, due to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple will not be able to ship Siri AI in the European Union with the release of iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. Over the past several months, EU regulators did not accept any of Apple’s proposed solutions to bring Siri AI to the EU while safely supporting other virtual assistants.

“We’re deeply disappointed that our EU users won’t have Siri AI on iPhone or iPad when we share our new software releases later this year,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “Our hope is to eventually bring Siri AI to the EU, and we will continue to engage with EU regulators on a path forward. However, their refusal to engage constructively on solutions that preserve privacy and security means we do not currently have a timeline for Siri AI’s availability on iOS and iPadOS in the EU.”

This is the closest you will see the company come to giving the EU the middle finger. As you know from my past writings on the topic, I am fully on the side of Apple here. The DMA is crafted and enforced by a group of politicians who don’t know a damn thing about software development or the technical aspects of privacy and security.

Schmigadoon! officially made Apple TV an EGOT at Sunday’s Tony Awards, crowning the achievement by winning Best Musical.

The show led the field with 12 nominations and came away with four wins, including Best Book of a Musical, Best Original Score and Best Orchestrations along with the night’s big prize.

Another key takeaway for me was this revelation:

The feat for Apple TV required about half the time that it took Netflix to reach the milestone. Netflix completed the circuit in 2025 with a Tony win for Stranger Things: The First Shadow. Apple TV launched in November 2019, meaning it accomplished the EGOT feat in about six-and-a-half years, while Netflix took about 12 years from the time its original series became eligible for Emmys.

On Monday at 10am New York time, five old Bitcoin addresses each sent their entire balance to the network’s best-known burn address, 1111111111111111111114oLvT2.

The combined total was over 107 BTC, worth about $8.2 million at the time.

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Across more than 256,000 confirmed transactions stretching back to 2010, the address has received 385,811 outputs and spent exactly zero.

One would hope this is an act of selflessness, and not vengeance behind the scenes.

The Imperial data vault on Scarif contained thousands of datatapes, one of them being the plans for the Death Star. After the plans were broadcast to the Rebel fleet, they were transferred to a small datacard.

Now you can represent your disks and servers using these same data formats from Star Wars, including datatapes that feature faction symbols emblazoned on the surface.

These icons are color-matched with all twelve Star Wars faction wallpapers I made last year.

Even for a non-fan of the films it’s hard to argue that these icons aren’t beautiful representations. My mounted volumes have never looked so good.

Located off the coast of Shanghai’s Lingang Special Area, the $226 million data center was built and is managed via a direct partnership between the Chinese government and HiCloud Technology (the primary private engineering contractor specialized in subsea data centers), along with state-backed telecom providers like China Telecom.

The 24 MW facility houses nearly 2,000 servers (including GPU clusters from China Telecom and LinkWise), and is expected to process artificial intelligence, big data annotation, and 5G infrastructure workloads. Unlike conventional land-based data centers that rely heavily on industrial chillers and large HVAC systems to remove waste heat, the Shanghai UDC uses the surrounding seawater as a massive passive heat sink. The servers are sealed inside pressure-resistant subsea modules deployed roughly 35 meters beneath the surface, where stable ocean temperatures continuously absorb heat generated by the computing hardware.

The ball is now in your court, space data centers.

In an image released alongside the announcement, both leaders appear exactly as you’d expect if you’ve ever watched an Apple Product announcement video.

They’re walking together along the immaculate paths of Apple Park in dark button‑downs, unfussy jeans, and the relaxed body language of executives ready to reveal a decision that’s been years in the making.

But look down and one detail looks somewhat amiss. Framed against the manicured grasses and brutalist lighting of Apple’s campus, Tim Cook’s creamy white shoes jump out.

It turns out, Cook is wearing one of the most coveted Jordans of the past few years: the Fragment Design x Travis Scott x Air Jordan 1 Low OG “Sail Military Blue.”

It’s the kind of detail that, like Steve Jobs’ famously consistent rotation of Miyake, Levi’s, and New Balance, speaks volumes about Cook’s personal sense of style, as well as his connections beyond Apple.

👟

Apple announced that Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple’s board of directors and John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple’s next chief executive officer effective on September 1, 2026. The transition, which was approved unanimously by the Board of Directors, follows a thoughtful, long-term succession planning process.

Cook will continue in his role as CEO through the summer as he works closely with Ternus on a smooth transition. As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.

Well they finally made it official. There is a lot of unspoken weight on that “engaging with policymakers around the world” bit, and its inclusion by the company was very intentional.

Today, I’m very happy to introduce Apple Frames 4, a major update to my shortcut for framing screenshots taken on Apple devices with official Apple product bezels. Apple Frames 4 is a complete rethinking of the shortcut that is noticeably faster, updated to support all the latest Apple devices, and designed to support even more personalization options. For the first time ever, Apple Frames supports multiple colors for each device, allowing you to mix and match different colored bezels for each framed screenshot; it also supports proportional scaling when merging screenshots from different Apple devices.

But that’s not all. In addition to an updated shortcut, I’m also releasing the Apple Frames CLI, an open source command-line utility that lets developers and tinkerers automate the process of framing screenshots directly from the Mac’s Terminal. And there’s more: the Apple Frames CLI is also designed to work with AI agents, and it comes with a Claude Code/Codex skill that lets coding agents take care of framing dozens or even hundreds of screenshots in just a few seconds, from any folder on your Mac.

Apple Frames 4 is the result of an idea I had months ago that enabled me to remove more than 500 actions from the shortcut, going from over 800 steps down to ~300. I did all that work manually, but it was worth it; the improved shortcut is faster and vastly more reliable than before thanks to a more intelligent logic that adapts to the growing ecosystem of Apple screen sizes and display resolutions.

I’d started to become worried that Apple Frames had been abandoned since the last update was so long ago, and could not be happier to see this announcement.

The previous version wouldn’t work with the new Ultra 3 Watch so I had to switch over to Shareshot for the time being. That app has far more features than I actually require so I am fine with dropping the $15 per year subscription.

Since its launch in 2007, the Wii has seen several operating systems ported to it: Linux, NetBSD, and most-recently, Windows NT. Today, Mac OS X joins that list.

In this post, I’ll share how I ported the first version of Mac OS X, 10.0 Cheetah, to the Nintendo Wii. If you’re not an operating systems expert or low-level engineer, you’re in good company; this project was all about learning and navigating countless “unknown unknowns”. Join me as we explore the Wii’s hardware, bootloader development, kernel patching, and writing drivers - and give the PowerPC versions of Mac OS X a new life on the Nintendo Wii.

This very in-depth blog post is well worth a read. Most impressive to me was getting IOkit drivers running on the Wii’s custom SoC.

Developed by a research team led by Professor Chen Jiehua from Wuhan University’s Satellite Navigation and Positioning Technology Research Centre, the clock only loses a second every 30,000 years, according to the official newspaper Changjiang Daily.

The device measures just 2.3 cubic cm (0.14 cubic inch), less than one-seventh the size of the leading US models and about the size of a fingernail.

“Even if traditional atomic clocks are miniaturised, the minimum volume limit is still several hundred cubic centimetres and the minimum power consumption is at least several watts,” Chen told the newspaper.

According to Chen, the US has produced a 17 cubic cm product, but his team’s clock has a comparable performance even though it is much smaller.

“We have achieved mass production of chip-scale atomic clocks, successfully applying them to time synchronisation systems such as micro-PNT [positioning, navigation and timing], underwater BeiDou [China’s equivalent of GPS], low-orbit satellites and drone swarms.”

In recent years, my iPhone display was always covered in subtle scratches that you only really noticed in low lighting – like indoors. They were especially visible when the screen was off. I’m convinced this is why always-on display was invented.

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Apple changed the formula with the iPhone 17 line. The company says Ceramic Shield 2 cover glass is three times more resistant to scratching. That’s exactly what the iPhone has needed, and Ceramic Shield 2 is on every new model.

The improved formula for Ceramic Shield 2 has definitely followed through on its promise of being more scratch resistant. It normally takes about a month for the screen of my iPhone to become covered in small scratches. The same way Zac describes them, visible with the screen off but invisible with the screen on.

As of today I see absolutely none. The front glass of my iPhone 17 Pro Max looks as new as the day I received the device. Here’s to hoping that future iterations don’t result in a regression in this regard, as has been the case in the past.

In December, the Federal Communications Commission banned all future drones made in foreign countries from being imported into the United States, unless or until their maker gets an exemption. Now, the FCC has done the exact same for consumer networking gear, citing “an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States and to the safety and security of U.S. persons.”

If you already have a Wi-Fi or wired router, you can keep on using it – and foreign companies that have already gotten FCC radio authorization for a specific product can continue to import that product.

But since the vast majority – if not all – consumer routers are manufactured outside the United States, the vast majority of future consumer routers are now banned. By adding all foreign-made consumer routers to its Covered List, the FCC is saying it will no longer authorize their radios, which de facto bans new devices from import into the country.

Now, router makers need to A) secure a “conditional approval” that lets them keep getting new products cleared for US entry while they work to convince the government that they’ll open up manufacturing in the US, or B) make the decision to skip selling future products in the US, like dronemaker DJI already did.

Like with the foreign drone ban, the FCC has a National Security Determination that it says justifies these actions, one which claims that “Allowing routers produced abroad to dominate the U.S. market creates unacceptable economic, national security, and cybersecurity risks,” and that “routers produced abroad were directly implicated in the Volt, Flax, and Salt Typhoon cyberattacks which targeted critical American communications, energy, transportation, and water infrastructure.”

Today it’s widely acknowledged that the future of computing will involve the quantum realm. Companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and a few well-funded startups are frantically building quantum computers and routinely claiming advances that seem to bring this exotic, world-changing technology within reach. In 1979 all of this was unthinkable. But that summer, two scientists met in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Puerto Rico, and their aquatic conversation led to a body of work that created quantum information theory. In a larger sense, their contributions helped bring computer science into the quantum age.

Those water-logged scientists, Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard, are now the latest recipients of the ACM A.M. Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of the field.

Arizona filed criminal charges Tuesday against Kalshi, accusing the popular prediction market of hosting bets on state and federal elections.

“Kalshi may brand itself as a ‘prediction market,’ but what it’s actually doing is running an illegal gambling operation and taking bets on Arizona elections, both of which violate Arizona law,” said Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes. “No company gets to decide for itself which laws to follow.”

Kalshi is facing four counts of election wagering, a Class 2 misdemeanor, for taking bets on the 2028 presidential race, the 2026 Arizona gubernatorial race, the 2026 Arizona Republican gubernatorial primary and the 2026 Arizona secretary of state race. It faces 16 additional Class 1 misdemeanors for wagering on events like Arizona college sports, professional sports and whether the SAVE America Act — a collection of bills intended to crack down on voter fraud — will become federal law.

There are currently about twenty federal lawsuits against Kalshi, and you can expect more states to follow suit with Arizona. The idea that this company is allowed to operate an unregulated gambling website is just insane to me.

Technology journalist Joanna Stern will join NBC News as part of a new partnership between the reporter and the news organization, an arrangement that seems to be increasingly popular as more news personnel test out creator-driven ventures.

Stern, who recently departed The Wall Street Journal to pursue an independent business, will create what NBC News billed as “premium multimedia content” and also contribute reporting across NBC News platforms , as well as the NBCUniversal division’s its newly launched subscription product. Her efforts will include vertical videos, explainers and investigative stories, newsletters created by her own business; a new franchise series called “AI in America” that will appear across various NBC News outlets.

As traditional media outlets and linear broadcasters see their reach and revenues falling, individuals are realizing their name recognition and audience is more valuable. Joanna Stern is a perfect example. For years I paid for a Wall Street Journal subscription largely so I could access the articles and videos she published. There were rumors circulating that Bari Weiss offered her a seven figure contract to join CBS News, but thankfully we know now that isn’t happening.