Terrence O'Brien
50 Years of Apple startup sounds.
Enjoy this montage of 44 (by my count) Apple computers powering on, starting with a replica of the original Apple I from 1976 to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
Tech Archive
Archives for April 2026
A two-seater electric pickup with no paint, no radio, no power windows, not even a dang cell connection — who is this for?
Andrew J. Hawkins
David Pierce
Terrence O'Brien
Why the Artemis II crew is relying on decade old tech.
After liftoff, there was an issue with Outlook running on the mission’s Surface Pro. That left some wondering why NASA was still using such old tech. Well, devices need to be tested and certified. To save money, they went with tech that was already approved. Then the launch date got pushed back… repeatedly. Check out this thread from NASA’s Jason Hutt for the full breakdown.
Human creators want an ‘AI-free’ label, but can’t agree which one.
Jess Weatherbed
7
Verge Score
Jay Peters
A company that makes AI training data has been hit by a security breach.
Meta has paused work with the company, Mercor (which The Verge has profiled), while OpenAI is investigating the security incident, Wired reports.
Sean Hollister
Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs.
Did hell freeze over? Not quite: the driver belongs to Tiny Corp, not Nvidia, you’ll have to compile it with Docker rather than plug-and-play, and it’s designed for LLMs. But you no longer need to disable Apple’s System Integrity Protection (SIP), because Apple is letting that driver get signed, Tiny says.
Stevie Bonifield
Jay Peters
Windows 11 might give haptic feedback for things like closing a window.
Microsoft is testing a Windows 11 feature that would let users “feel haptic feedback effects on compatible input devices while performing certain actions, such as aligning objects in PowerPoint, window snapping, resizing, or hovering over the Close button,” according to the Windows Insider Blog. This could be really cool on a good trackpad.
Announcing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26300.8155 (Dev Channel)
[Windows Insider Blog]
Jay Peters
That’s one way to juice Grok’s numbers.
The New York Times reports that Elon Musk is demanding that “banks, law firms, auditors and other advisers” working on the SpaceX IPO buy subscriptions to Grok, which is technically now under the SpaceX umbrella.
Big Banks Seeking a Piece of SpaceX’s I.P.O. Must Subscribe to Elon Musk’s Grok
[The New York Times]
Sheena Vasani and Brandon Widder
Elizabeth Lopatto
“It’s ‘Fuck those guys.’”
A fascinating profile on litigator Jay Edelson, a longtime tech adversary who’s been filing cases against OpenAI and Google over their LLMs. “Courts are fed up with these companies, and juries are kind of sick of big tech for doing a lot of damage to society,” Edelson says. Sam Altman has called him a “leech tarted up as a freedom fighter,” and Edelson says Altman is “Lex Luthor.”
Emma Roth
Lawsuit accuses Perplexity of sharing conversations with Meta and Google.
A proposed class action lawsuit claims Perplexity “effectively planted a bug” on users’ computers by embedding trackers from Meta and Google inside its AI search engine, as reported earlier by Ars Technica. It also alleges that Perplexity’s incognito mode “does nothing” to protect user privacy:
Even paid users who turned on the “Incognito” feature still had their conversations shared with Meta and Google, along with their email addresses and other identifiers that allowed Meta and Google to personally identify them.