Apple seems determined to leave a persistent gap between the cameras of its Pro iPhones and the regular ones, but most other features—the edge-to-edge-screen design with FaceID, the Dynamic Island, OLED display panels, Apple Intelligence compatibility—eventually trickle down to the regular-old iPhone after a generation or two of timed exclusivity.

One feature that Apple has been particularly slow to move down the chain is ProMotion, the branding the company uses to refer to a screen that can refresh up to 120 times per second rather than the more typical 60 times per second. ProMotion isn't a necessary feature, but since Apple added it to the iPhone 13 Pro in 2021, the extra fluidity and smoothness, plus the always-on display feature, have been big selling points for the Pro phones.

This year, ProMotion finally comes to the regular-old iPhone 17, years after midrange and even lower-end Android phones made the swap to 90 or 120 Hz display panels. And it sounds like a small thing, but the screen upgrade—together with a doubling of base storage from 128GB to 256GB—makes the gap between this year's iPhone and iPhone Pro feel narrower than it's been in a long time. If you jumped on the Pro train a few years back and don't want to spend that much again, this might be a good year to switch back. If you've ever been tempted by the Pro but never made the upgrade, you can continue not doing that and miss out on relatively little.

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Amazon has agreed to settle a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit accusing the e-commerce giants of tricking customers into signing up for Prime and then making it frustratingly hard to cancel.

In a press release Thursday, the FTC confirmed that, pending court approval, Amazon will pay a $1 billion civil penalty and provide $1.5 billion in refunds to an estimated 35 million customers "harmed by their deceptive Prime enrollment practices." Former FTC chair Lina Khan initiated the lawsuit, accusing customers of trapping customers in a “labyrinthine” Prime cancellation process the company named after Homer’s Iliad .

The civil penalty, the FTC noted, is "the largest ever in a case involving an FTC rule violation," and the refunds to customers are "the second-highest restitution award ever obtained by FTC action."

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Generative AI systems that create text, images, audio, and even video are becoming commonplace. In the same way AI models output those data types, they can also be used to output robot actions. That's the foundation of Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics project, which has announced a pair of new models that work together to create the first robots that "think" before acting. Traditional LLMs have their own set of problems , but the introduction of simulated reasoning did significantly upgrade their capabilities, and now the same could be happening with AI robotics.

The team at DeepMind contends that generative AI is a uniquely important technology for robotics because it unlocks general functionality. Current robots have to be trained intensively on specific tasks, and they are typically bad at doing anything else. "Robots today are highly bespoke and difficult to deploy, often taking many months in order to install a single cell that can do a single task," said Carolina Parada, head of robotics at Google DeepMind.

The fundamentals of generative systems make AI-powered robots more general. They can be presented with entirely new situations and workspaces without needing to be reprogrammed. DeepMind's current approach to robotics relies on two models: one that thinks and one that does.

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iOS 26 came out last week, bringing a new look and interface alongside some new capabilities and updates aimed squarely at iPhone power users.

We gave you our main iOS 26 review last week. This time around, we're taking a look at some of the updates targeted at people who rely on their iPhones for much more than making phone calls and browsing the Internet. Many of these features rely on Apple Intelligence, meaning they're only as reliable and helpful as Apple's generative AI (and only available on newer iPhones, besides). Other adjustments are smaller but could make a big difference to people who use their phone to do work tasks.

Reminders attempt to get smarter

The Reminders app gets the Apple Intelligence treatment in iOS 26, with the AI primarily focused on making it easier to organize content within Reminders lists. Lines in Reminders lists are often short, quickly jotted-down blurbs rather than lengthy, detailed complex instructions. With this in mind, it’s easy to see how the AI can sometimes lack enough information in order to perform certain tasks, like logically grouping different errands into sensible sections.

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Apple has demanded Brussels scrap its landmark Big Tech legislation, marking a step up in US tech giants’ fight against European oversight.

The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which entered into force in 2022, aims to curb the power of Big Tech and level the playing field for smaller rivals, with fines of up to 10 percent of global revenue for companies that do not comply.

Apple’s call to repeal the law comes at a time of transatlantic tensions over the EU’s digital rule book, including the DMA.

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There are plenty of rivalries in the US launch industry. People who build big and brawny machines tend to have egos to match. And if you chat up the senior executives of these rocket companies off-line, they are often more than happy to say derogatory things about their competitors.

But rarely are such sentiments expressed in public, without filter.

Chris Kemp, the chief executive officer of Astra, apparently didn't get the memo about playing nice. Kemp made some spicy remarks at the Berkeley Space Symposium 2025 earlier this month, billed as the largest undergraduate aerospace event at the university ( see video of the talk ). He provided an overview of Astra's successes and failures, and generally sought to make a good impression on prospective interns at the company, and future employees. The university is only a few miles away from the company's Bay Area headquarters.

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As many as 2 million Cisco devices are susceptible to an actively exploited zeroday that can remotely crash or execute code on vulnerable systems.

Cisco said Wednesday that the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-20352, was present in all supported versions of Cisco IOS and Cisco IOS XE, the operating system that powers a wide variety of the company’s networking devices. The vulnerability can be exploited by low-privileged users to create a denial-of-service attack or by higher-privileged users to execute code that runs with unfettered root privileges. It carries a severity rating of 7.7 out of a possible 10.

Exposing SNMP to the Internet? Yep

“The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) became aware of successful exploitation of this vulnerability in the wild after local Administrator credentials were compromised,” Wednesday’s advisory stated. “Cisco strongly recommends that customers upgrade to a fixed software release to remediate this vulnerability.”

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Formula 1 might be riding high these days on a wave of interest not seen since the 1960s, but the Drive to Survive effect has been felt elsewhere in the world of motorsport. Endurance racing like the 24 Hours of Le Mans or the Rolex 24 at Daytona has seen record crowds over the last few years, and a large part of that is down to the sports prototype class, exemplified by cars from the likes of Ferrari and Porsche . And soon, we can add Ford to the list.

Currently, eight different manufacturers are competing against each other in the World Endurance Championship's Hypercar class: Alpine, Aston Martin, BMW, Cadillac, Ferrari, Peugeot, Porsche, and Toyota. More are on the way— Genesis arrives next year, and at the beginning of the year , Ford announced that it, too, was joining the fray, in 2027. Today, the Blue Oval revealed some more details about the project.

What’s a hypercar?

Compared to the road car-derived machines that race in the GT3 category, the vehicles that contest for overall victory in the Hypercar class are purpose-built prototypes, just for racing. Because endurance racing often has to be needlessly complicated for the sake of being complicated, the Hypercar class is actually made up of a mix of vehicles designed to two different technical rule sets that are performance balanced to create a level playing field .

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A lot of the stuff we use today is largely made by robots—arms with multiple degrees of freedom positioned along conveyor belts that move in a spectacle of precisely synchronized motions. All this motion is usually programmed by hand, which can take hundreds to thousands of hours. Google’s DeepMind team has developed an AI system called RoboBallet that lets manufacturing robots figure out what to do on their own.

Traveling salesmen

Planning what manufacturing robots should do to get their jobs done efficiently is really hard to automate. You need to solve both task allocation and scheduling—deciding which task should be done by which robot in what order. It’s like the famous traveling salesman problem on steroids. On top of that, there is the question of motion planning; you need to make sure all these robotic arms won’t collide with each other, or with all the gear standing around them.

At the end, you’re facing a myriad of possible combinations where you’ve got to solve not one but three computationally hard problems at the same time. “There are some tools that let you automate motion planning, but task allocation and scheduling are usually done manually,” says Matthew Lai, a research engineer at Google DeepMind. “Solving all three of these problems combined is what we tackled in our work”.

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