Emil Protalinski

Would you buy a MacBook powered by an iPhone chip?

Apple has unveiled the MacBook Neo, which features a 13-inch Liquid Retina display, an A18 Pro chip, 8GB of RAM, a 16-hour battery life, Dolby Atmos side-firing speakers, a 1080p webcam, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and two USB-C ports.

Do you want the M5 MacBook Air or M5 MacBook Pro?

They will cost you more than the M4 models.

OpenAI has announced the biggest funding deal yet, again.

The AI startup has raised $110 billion at a $730 pre-money billion valuation, up from its secondary sale that let current and former employees sell shares at a $500 billion valuation in October 2025.

Should Stripe acquire PayPal?

Honestly, probably not, but let’s take a look anyway. Stripe, which is privately held, has expressed preliminary interest in acquiring PayPal, which is publicly held, or buying some of its assets (www.bloomberg.com/news/article...).

Last week, Meta committed to buying millions of Nvidia Blackwell and Rubin GPUs in a multiyear deal (nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/meta-bu...). This week, Meta has agreed to acquire up to 6GW worth of AMD Instinct GPUs over the next five years (www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta...).

Amazon now makes more money than Walmart.

Amazon has dethroned Walmart as the world's largest company by revenue (www.bloomberg.com/news/article...). Earlier this month, Amazon reported $716.9 billion in 2025 sales, and today, Walmart reported $713.2 billion for the 12 months ending on January 31.

Would you buy an AI wearable from Apple?

Apple is reportedly ramping up work on three AI wearables featuring cameras and built around Siri, including AirPods, a pendant, and smart glasses (www.bloomberg.com/news/article...). In all three, Siri would rely on a camera system to carry out actions.

Inflation is getting out of hand.

Anthropic is gaining on OpenAI where it matters most: money.

Anthropic has raised a $30 billion Series G at a $380 billion post-money valuation (www.anthropic.com/news/anthrop...). While OpenAI was already valued at $500 billion in October 2025, Anthropic is clearly catching up.

talk about being out of touch because you've never personally experienced fearing for your life or being targeted by law enforcement

No.

end of an era

Paramount has sweetened its WBD offer, hurting Netflix’s chances.

Paramount Skydance has added a “ticking fee” that is equivalent to roughly $650 million in cash value each quarter for every quarter the Warner Bros. Discovery deal is not closed past December 31 (www.cnbc.com/2026/02/10/p...).

Will you keep using ChatGPT now that it has ads?

OpenAI says it has started testing ads in ChatGPT in the US for logged-in adult users on the ChatGPT Free and Go subscription tiers (openai.com/index/testin...).

Big Tech is blowing up AI spending in 2026.

Combined, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are forecasting about $650 billion in 2026 capital expenditures (www.bloomberg.com/news/article...). That’s an estimated 60% year-over-year increase, mainly driven by data center construction.

Google wants to keep inflating the AI bubble.

I don't blame them, but investors don't like it. Everything looked great in Alphabet’s Q4 2025 earnings report yesterday (www.linkedin.com/posts/emilpr...), from Google Cloud to Gemini to YouTube, until investors saw the capex 2026 figure.

Apple is embracing Anthropic and OpenAI for coding.

Apple has updated Xcode with agentic coding and has integrated Model Context Protocol support (www.apple.com/newsroom/202...) into its IDE. Starting with Xcode 26.3, developers can use Anthropic's Claude Agent and OpenAI's Codex directly in Xcode.

Anthropic could have to backpedal on this promise, but no ads in Claude feels more believable than no ads in Gemini.

Countless people who were not worried about OpenAI for Oracle's sake are suddenly worried.

SpaceX acquired xAI.

After rumors that SpaceX and xAI were in talks to merge and that SpaceX was also considering a potential merger with Tesla, SpaceX yesterday acquired xAI (www.spacex.com/updates#xai-...) “to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth.”

Should Elon Musk merge his biggest companies?

SpaceX and xAI are reportedly in talks to merge ahead of a planned IPO later this year (www.reuters.com/world/musks-...) and SpaceX is also reportedly considering a potential merger with Tesla (www.bloomberg.com/news/article...).

Apple’s CEO is playing PR games with Minneapolis.

It turns out that Tim Cook is a classic CEO coward.

Cook attended a private White House screening of the Melania documentary hours after a US Border Patrol agent killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti and days after an ICE agent fatally shot Renée Good.

Should Siri be an AI chatbot?

Apple reportedly plans to revamp Siri this year by turning it into the company's first AI chatbot, codenamed Campos, which will have both voice- and typing-based modes (www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...).

TikTok US is official, but who wins and who loses?

ByteDance has struck a deal with a group of non-Chinese investors to create a new TikTok US entity and avoid a federal ban (www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...).

Should ChatGPT know everyone’s age?

OpenAI says it is rolling out age prediction on ChatGPT consumer plans globally to identify users under 18 years old and apply automatic content protections (openai.com/index/our-ap...).

Netflix has sweetened its Warner Bros. offer, hurting Paramount's chances.

Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery say Netflix has revised its offer to an all-cash deal for $27.75/share. In other words, the total is still the same at $82.7 billion, but this time there's no $59 billion in debt financing.

Do you use Threads, X, or neither?

Meta’s Threads has surpassed Elon Musk’s X in daily active users on mobile. More specifically, as of January 7, Threads had 141.5 million daily active users on Android and iOS, while X had 125M daily active users, according to Similarweb.

Would you use ChatGPT if it had ads?

Well, they’re coming.

OpenAI says it plans to test ads below ChatGPT replies for users of the ChatGPT free and Go tiers in the US (openai.com/index/our-ap...).

Microsoft: See, people *are* using Copilot!

Would you rather pay once or monthly forever?

Elon Musk says that after February 14, Tesla will stop selling FSD, which stands for Full Self-Driving but of course isn’t actually full self-driving. Tesla will instead offer FSD only as a monthly subscription.