Good morning. Yesterday I gave you robot fail videos, today I give you drone delivery fail videos. (This is what the Internet is for, yes?)
Back to more serious fare tomorrow, promise. The news follows. Have a productive day. —Andrew Nusca
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Apple unveils M6 chip and revamps its Macs
Lotsa product news outta Cupertino yesterday, perhaps the most important being a pair of new chips.
Apple on Tuesday introduced the newest members of its homegrown silicon family: M5 Ultra and M6. The former is the company’s first quad-die architecture; Apple says it’s “its most powerful chip ever.” The latter is the company’s first two-nanometer chip.
Both are critical to Apple’s AI ambitions and will end up in Mac products. The brawny M5 Ultra will first be available in a revamped Mac Studio; the nimble M6 will be available in a new Mac mini. And if history is any indication, they may eventually find their way to MacBooks and iPads, too.
Speaking of new Macs: The new mini touts “up to 4X faster AI performance” thanks in part to 16 gigabytes of memory (32GB configurable), which pushes its price up over the M4-powered previous generation by a hundred bucks, to $899.
It’s the same story for the new Mac Studio. An M5 Max-equipped model with 36GB of memory (configurable to 256GB) starts at $2,499 and one with the M5 Ultra and 96GB of memory (configurable to 512GB) will set you back a staggering $5,499, two hundred bucks more than the previous M3 Ultra model.
The pain from the ongoing global memory shortage won’t stop there. Most local storage upgrades for each new Mac model come with four-figure penalties. Add it all up and a maxed-out Studio will set you back the same amount as a Nissan Versa, but if you’re really in the market, you’re surely not fazed.
Things to watch while you wait for your pre-order to ship next month? How Apple continues to manage its supply chain. Earlier this year, outgoing CEO Tim Cook said product price increases were “unavoidable” given surging component costs; fulfilling orders also poses a challenge given those components’ high demand. —AN
Anthropic’s potential revenue could total $30 trillion
Ask any business chief about the hottest corporate acronyms and a likely answer after EBITDA and ARR is TAM—total addressable market. It’s the perfect performance metric for the sky’s-the-limit AI category. How much money could we make, really?
No surprise, then, that it’s an attractive figure for a highly valued tech company flirting with going public. Back in 2019, Uber told IPO investors its TAM was $6 trillion; it’s now No. 102 on the Fortune 500 with $52 billion in annual revenue. This year SpaceX outlined a mind-boggling TAM of $28.5 trillion en route to its June debut; it’s currently hoping to end the year with $100 billion in annual revenue.
Well, if you haven’t heard, a little San Francisco AI outfit called Anthropic is on the fast track to a record IPO. And as you might expect, the numbers involved are head and shoulders above most that came before it…including its TAM.
Anthropic believes its total addressable market is north of $30 trillion, according to a new Wall Street Journal report. That figure—just shy of the nominal GDP for the U.S.—is meant to encompass “the full scope of work that could be completed with AI models,” the paper notes. (The mind reels.)
Will investors buy what Anthropic’s selling? Even if they figuratively don’t, they may very well on a literal basis when it’s time for that all-important market debut. Anthropic hopes to raise as much as $100 billion in its IPO. The company more than doubled its revenue in Q2, to $11.6 billion, and hopes to log its first profitable quarter any minute now.
Whether Anthropic’s TAM is a scam, as critics of the metric like to say, may very well be beside the point. If the AI soothsayers are to be believed, there are new kinds of work and businesses emerging—and that spells opportunity, TAM be damned. —AN
Instagram didn’t slow-roll a teen safety feature, chief says
In 2021, Meta-owned Instagram deployed a feature called “Take a Break” that would send pop-up notifications to users to step away from the app after a continuous period of use.
The idea? Address growing mental health concerns about social media by encouraging kids to log off, take a break, and touch grass.
It took three years for Instagram to turn on the feature by default for teen users—despite less than 2% adoption by that age group, according to Instagram’s top executive.
Adam Mosseri was called to the stand on Tuesday as part of a 2026 federal trial against Meta in which 29 state attorneys accuse the company of designing its wares to addict minors. The Instagram chief said early tests showed that more than 90% of teenage users who turned on the feature kept it that way.
“Most teens didn’t want it,” Mosseri said in a federal courtroom in Oakland, California. “We decided to push forward with it anyway.”
Under questioning, Mosseri said Instagram consolidated people working on sensitive research about teenagers to a single team. The company also reduced access to that information, he added, in the wake of the 2021 leak of internal documents by whistleblower Frances Haugen, which showed that Meta was fully aware of the negative impacts of Instagram on teenage users.
Before Mosseri’s testimony, an Instagram product design director, Francesco Fogu, testified that Instagram knew fewer people would use “Take a Break” by not making it the default setting.
The trial could last six weeks. The states told the presiding judge that they could seek some $200 billion in civil penalties. —AN
More tech
—OpenAI’s Jalapeño chip brings the heat, apparently. More AI work per watt and lower latency than Nvidia chips, the company claims.
—White House proposes a $103,000 fee for H-1B visas, all but relegating them to big business.
—Intuit shares drop 8%, despite a Q4 revenue beat, thanks to a softer full-year 2027 forecast.
—The Chinese tech wave flooding global markets is bad news for American companies, Apollo’s chief economist says.
—Skild AI takes the wraps off S1, a “robotics foundation model” allowing the learning of unseen tasks. (Tank, load the jump program.)
—Waymo plans to launch in Germany next year. Its third international market and first one in the EU.
—Kalshi strikes deals with five MLB teams. A separate league partnership isn’t off the table.