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Apple's outgoing CEO, Tim Cook, bade an emotional farewell to analysts and shareholders on Thursday as the company announced a record June quarter. His successor, John Ternus, takes over at the beginning of September with the company seemingly in solid shape.
The results were impressive, though some worrying challenges were confirmed. Apple managed to set a new June quarter record, but acknowledged slowing services growth and an unexpected mishap in forecasting future demand. Mac sales jumped an absolutely astonishing 28.7%, as the MacBook Neo grabbed consumer imagination, and overall the company saw growth everywhere except the iPad.
Apple's fiscal Q3 2026 results saw the company generate $109.4 billion in revenue, up 16% year-over-year for a net quarterly profit of $29.8 billion. Gross margin for the quarter was 50.1%, compared to 46.5% in the year-ago quarter (though two points of this was attributed to tariff returns).
More specifically:
iPhone sales were up 21.7%, an unusually high number for what is traditionally a slower quarter.
Wearables increased 6.5%.
Services revenue increased 12%.
And the iPad declined 5.9%.
The Mac is out the bottle
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Google briefly added Nano Banana 2 to Earth for generating imagined cities and historical scenes, then pulled it after users shared images that appeared to violate its policies.
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Google is expanding Gemini Spark to India and other markets, bringing background task automation and Chrome browsing to eligible Pro and Ultra subscribers.
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It's a sign of the times: Security conference DefCon has added smart glasses to its list of banned audio- or video-recording devices.
The organizers have said that, with no consistent way to understand whether smart glasses are recording or not, they have taken the step to ban them in their entirety on the grounds that they erode trust and invade people's privacy.
Putting corrective lenses in the smart glasses will be no excuse: DefCon insists that visitors bring a pair of glasses without the smarts instead.
The smart glasses ban has been added to DefCon's already strict rules on photography, which among other things ask visitors not to take group shots and to use "portrait" mode (or a low F-stop for those with old-fashioned cameras) to focus on the foreground, so that people in the background appear blurred.
The smart glasses market has gone up a notch lately. Google and Samsung have both announced Gemini powered eyewear running on Android. Apple is looking to launch its new generation of smart glasses next June, citing privacy concerns as the reason for the delay.
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The U.S. Justice Department proposed on Wednesday that Congress take up legislation to curb protections big tech platforms like Alphabet's Google and Facebook have had for decades, a senior official said, following through on President Donald Trump's bid to crack down on tech giants.
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