Mobile Tech & Gadgets

Three chains are devouring the supermarket business in Spain year after year: Mercadona, Lidl and Aldi

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From ugly duckling to goose that lays the golden eggs. The white label revolution seems to find no ceiling in the retail Spanish. Until not so long ago, the brands associated with supermarkets carried a stigma in Spain compared to items from manufacturer brands clearly recognized by customers. It was not even strange for words like “Estandado” to be used in a pejorative way. Buying white was synonymous with buying ‘poor quality’‘option B’. Not anymore. Spanish families are increasingly betting on white label. And that is making gold for some of the country’s big chains. What has happened? That the white label is experiencing his particular revolution in it retail Spanish. And that is still striking if you take into account that until not so long ago, firms like Hacendado or Auchan carried a certain stigma compared to their competitors, the brands associated with manufacturers. It’s nothing new. For a long time we have been confirming how the white label is driving some chains of “short assortment”supermarkets that are committed to offering customers a limited selection of items. That is, instead of including a dozen different brands of cookies (or other items) on their shelves, they offer only two or one, among which they include their own brand. Chain Market share in value Difference (PP) compared to the 2024 quota Mercadona 37.0% 0.9 Carrefour Group 12.3% -0.2 Lidl 8.0% 0.5 Day Group 4.7% 0.1 Consum Group 4.5% 0.0 Eroski Group 4.4% -0.1 Alcampo Group 3.6% -0.3 aldi 2.5% 0.4 Bon Preu Group 2.4% 0.0 You save 23% 0.1 Gadis Group 1.7% 0.0 Magnifying glass 1.1% -0.1 El Corte Inglés Group 1.0% -0.2 dinosol 0.9% 0.0 Froiz 0.8% 0.0 Alimerka 0.8% 0.0 Rest of Modern distribution 12.0% -1.1 Why is it news? Because the latest data from 2025 reveal that this strategy is driving some brands to catapult them to unprecedented market shares. This is suggested by at least one recent report from Algori on consumption prepared with data from the first ten months of the year. The study shows that at the end of October the three chains that were gaining the greatest market share (in terms of value) in Spain were Mercadona (0.9 percentage points), Lidl (0.5 pp) and Aldi (0.4). Between the three, they also held a market share of 47.5%, a share clearly led by Juan Roig’s company, which alone holds 37%. DIA and Ahorramás are also growing, while others like Carrefour, Alcampo or Eroski are stagnating or decreasing. Chain % of white label sales 2023 % of white label sales 2024 % of white label sales 2025 Lidl 79.7% 81.9% 80.7% Mercadona 72.9% 74.5% 77.8% aldi 68.8% 69.1% 74.5% Day 54.2% 56.3% 65.1% consumption 33% 35.9% 37.4% Carrefour 29.3% 31.4% 33.3% Eroski 25.6% 28.4% 31.2% Alcampo 21.5% 24.3% 23.8% Why is it important? Because Mercadona, Lidl and Aldi are not just any chains. They are precisely the ones that give the greatest prominence to their own brands. At least according to another recent study from Worldpannel by Numerator, which shows that if we talk about the weight of private labels in total sales, Lidl heads the list with 80.7%, followed by Mercadona (77.8%) and Aldi (74.5%). In summary: the chains that gained the greatest market share in 2025 were the ones that most clearly opted for their own products, a strategy that often arrives backed by aggressive price differentiation. elEconomista.es precise Furthermore, Mercadona, Lidl and Aldi have increased their market shares to record figures. Their 47.5% share is more than two percentage points higher than last year, when they accounted for a total of 45.2% of the market. Everything, they explain from Algori, while the entire sector experiences growth both in terms of volume and value. And what are the forecasts? The sector is optimistic. AECOC, the consumer association, states in one of its latest reports that 44% of companies expect to close 2025 with growth data above 5%. 28% expect to increase their activity, although to a lesser extent, and 11% expect to fall. They are led by Lidl and especially Mercadona, which has been expanding its market share until it approaches or even surpasses 30% thanks to a strategy based on white label, territorial dispersion and ready-made foods. Images | Wikipedia and Vitaly Gariev (Unsplash) In Xataka | Mercadona has found a vein to grow beyond its white label and prepared food: tourism

In 1957 the BBC explained that Italians picked their spaghetti from “pasta trees.” And millions of Britons believed it

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On April 1, 1976, Patrick Moore He entered the BBC Radio 2 morning show to comment on a curious astronomical phenomenon that was about to take place. He explained that, just at 9:47 that morning, Jupiter and Pluto would align with the Earth, producing a gravitational effect that would predictably be noticed throughout the planet. According to Moore, the most (re)known astronomer in England at the time, those who jumped at that precise moment would notice a brief but significant sensation of weightlessness. Just after 9:47 the BBC lines were jammed with people saying that, indeed, they had observed this decrease in gravity. The only problem is that it was all a joke. On April 1 (‘april fool’s day‘) is the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of our April Fool’s Day and Moore’s action was, indeed, an April Fool’s joke. A very successful prank: a woman even claimed that she and eleven other friends had been “dragged from their chairs and orbits gently around the room” as a result of the gravitational phenomenon. In 2008, the British network announced that a colony of flying penguins on King George Islandvery close to Antarctica. In fact, they made a video as you may have seen above. Another very funny one was the ’57 documentary about the “pasta trees” from which the Italians collected spaghetti. the dragons return The BBC has a long history of dabbling with pranks and science, but they’re not the only ones: to the now traditional BJM joke numberwe can add very funny jokes like NASA’s cow spacesuit, the Stonehege forgery by Martínez Ron or the one Nature published in 2015 about the existence of dragons. “Emerging evidence indicates that dragons can no longer be dismissed as creatures of legend and fantasy, and that anthropogenic effects on the global climate may be paving the way for the resurgence of these beasts,” they said in Nature. And, hey, it sounded like a great argument against climate change. In ’96, Discover Magazine published a long report about a new fundamental particle in physics, the bigon, and it was the size of a bowling ball. According to scientists, the only factor that prevents us from identifying them is that they only exist for a millionth of a second. The article ended on a wonderful note: “Is there any chance that bigon is just some kind of ridiculous April Fool’s Day joke, as almost every other physicist says? ‘People are so cynical,’ Zweistein replies. ‘Science,’ he notes, ‘routinely produces findings that seem too wonderful to be believed, and yet turn out to be true.’” But without a doubt my favorite joke was from CERN in 2015. That April 1st, they released a press release with a bang: they had found the “first unequivocal evidence of the Force.” Finally, so many millions invested were useful for something! As the researchers explained, many details were unclear and much remained to be investigated, but the preliminary results They indicated that this new physical phenomenon could be used for “long-distance communications, influencing minds, and lifting heavy things out of reservoirs.” The research was carried out by a research team led by the prestigious Professor Ben Kenobi from Mos Eisley University on Tatooine. So that later they say that scientists are not doing well. In Xataka | “It’s a little scary, but it’s normal”: in Sweden anyone can know how much their neighbor earns and it has been a success In Xataka | I asked the AI ​​any nonsense and now I’m writing a news story about it

War is a video game and the US has the best command

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He US assault to Venezuela has not only been a demonstration of force (above the law), but the confirmation of an intuition that had been floating in the air for years and that the invasion of Ukraine has multiplied: Modern warfare, at least for those who master the technology, increasingly resembles a video game screen. And, in that scenario, whoever has the best command, has the game. War as an interactive spectacle. The capture of Nicolás Maduro was the result of months of surveillance obsessive precision, millimetric rehearsal, and such precise coordination that it allowed Washington to execute one of the most complex operations in its recent history with an almost surgical level of control. From the observation of their routines daily to the exact recreation of their shelter in a full-scale model, everything was designed to reduce uncertainty to a minimum. When Trump gave the final order, he did so knowing that he was not launching his forces into the unknown, but rather activating a script rehearsed to the last second, with cameras, sensors and data links turning the battlefield into an interface controllable from thousands of miles away. The invisible board. The later satellite images The attack on complexes such as Fuerte Tiuna or the La Carlota air base reveal the essence of this new way of fighting. There are no carpets of bombs or indiscriminate devastation, but concrete buildings reduced to rubblespecific warehouses neutralized and air defense systems dismantled without large visible craters. The combination of prior intelligence, precision munitions and mastery of airspace allowed the United States to eliminate critical nodes of the Venezuelan military apparatus as if it were turning off icons. on a digital map. From stealth fighters to strategic bombers and swarms of drones, each platform served a defined function within a plan that was developed in multiple simultaneous layerswithout significant interference and with almost total knowledge of the terrain and the enemy. Images before the US attack Images of the destruction of buildings after the US attack Synchronization to the millimeter. As airstrikes blinded defenses and plunged parts of Caracas into darkness, the videos and analyzes that have been made public have revealed that the US special forces were advancing as perfectly coordinated pieces. Helicopters of elite units entered the city at low altitudesupported by electronic warfare, in-flight refueling and constant surveillance from the air. The assault on Maduro’s refuge, described as an authentic urban fortress, was the climax of a choreography in which every second counted. Even the possibility of having to open armored doors with blowtorches was integrated into the plan, in Trump’s own words. Before the attack After the attack No casualties. The result was a fulminant irruptionresistance neutralized in minutes and the extraction of the objective before the Venezuelan defensive system could react coherently. For Washington, the balance was revealing: no dead soldiers, complete control of the situation and an orderly withdrawal, as if a perfect mission in a digital campaign had been completed. Venezuela, for its part, has reported that the operation left at least 80 dead. The best controls in the game. The episode explains better than any speech why the United States and a few powers play in a league of their own. The key is not only to have more planes or ships, but to absolute integration intelligence, command and control, secure communications, space sensors and rapid intervention forces. Washington is able to gather in real time information from satellitesagents on the ground, drones and reconnaissance aircraft, process it in distributed command centers and translate it into immediate orders for units operating thousands of kilometers away. That ability to “see it all” and act instantly reduces the margin of error to levels that few can match today. Russia or China can deploy brute force or deny entire areas, but executing a capture operation of that caliber, in a foreign capital, with such precision and without assuming significant losses, remains a privilege. almost exclusive of the United States. The final message. If you want, the attack on Venezuela has left an uncomfortable lesson for the rest of the world. The war of the 21st century is not always decided in large battles or long fronts, but in control roomsdata flows and decisions made in front of screens that condense chaos into understandable symbols. For those who master this technology, combat becomes a succession of calculated actionswhere one’s own human risk is minimized and the adversary barely has room to respond. In other words: the attack on Caracas has shown that, when it comes to this type of war, the great powers not only play another game, but also have the best controls, the complete map and the saved game before even starting. Image | Vantor In Xataka | For 150 aircraft to bomb Venezuela, the US used one of the most lethal tactics of the war: gunboat diplomacy In Xataka | Someone bet $30,000 that Maduro would fall the night before he fell. He has won $400,000

has become the Bet365 of geopolitics without any regulation

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The prediction markets like Polymarket or Kalshi They operate in a legal gray zone that allows betting on coups d’état and military interventions with insider information. A market without sheriff. The capture of Maduro has brought to the table the great problem of prediction markets: there is no mechanism to prevent insider information trafficking. On traditional stock exchanges this is a crime that is severely prosecuted, but these types of platforms operate in a regulatory limbo where betting with privileged or classified information is not punished, and in fact it is assumed to be part of the business model. The account that won more than $400,000 He invested 30,000 when the odds were around 6%. That movement occurred on Friday night, hours before Saturday’s operation. He timing Perfect is not a coincidence: it is the signature of someone who knows what is going to happen. Between the lines. The disturbing thing is not that someone has enriched themselves with classified information. It’s perfectly legal. Joe Pompliano, investor and podcaster, summed it up in X: “He insider trading “It’s not just allowed in prediction markets, it’s incentivized.” A perfect ecosystem has been created there to monetize confidential information without leaving a trace: Anonymity through Blockchain. Absence of identification requirements. Cryptocurrency transactions. The threat. The Maduro case opens up disturbing scenarios: What happens when a Pentagon adviser can make hundreds of thousands of dollars betting on military operations he himself plans? Or when a congressman gets rich anticipating legislation that he is going to promote? In traditional financial markets, the answer begins with ‘c’ and ends with ‘arcel’. At Polymarket this is just another day at the office and is even encouraged by the design of the system itself. Yes, but. Democratic Representative Ritchie Torres has announced a law to prohibit elected officials from participating in these markets. It’s a first step, for now nothing more than that. The elephant in the room is whether a society can allow markets where betting on coups or military interventions is carried out without any oversight. For years, these markets were niche. And when they got the 2024 presidential election right better than all the polls, They gained credibility (and attention) at once. Now the Maduro case shows that this newly gained prestige is based on a model that rewards having privileged information and allows speculation with life or death decisions without any limits. At stake. If prediction markets consolidate themselves as reliable thermometers of geopolitical events, and at the same time allow those who make these decisions to profit by betting on them, conflict of interest will be routine. The account that bet on Maduro has not bet on anything again at the moment, but the problem remains: as long as these markets operate without supervision, each international crisis will also be a business opportunity for whoever has the appropriate information. And that has consequences that go far beyond winning or losing money: An official could delay a diplomatic intervention so that his bet matures. A military advisor could push to advance an operation to get paid sooner. When geopolitical decisions are also opportunities for personal speculation, incentives are no longer aligned with the public interest. In Xataka | I don’t bet, I invest: Polymarket and company have sophisticated gambling addiction to the point of making it indistinguishable from “investing” Featured image | Polymarket, Xataka with Mockuuups Studio

A Spanish streamer dies after taking six grams of cocaine

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The viral challenges of live substance use have claimed their first victim: it is the first documented death in Spain during a live broadcast. The macabre and significant thing about the matter is that the deceased streamer leaves the Simón Pérez circleof whom he was a kind of “protege”, and whose fall into the pit of indiscriminate consumption is being documented in chilling detail. Death live. In the early morning of December 31, 2025, Sergio Jiménez Ramos lost his life, streamer 37-year-old Barcelonan who acted under the alias “Sancho” or “Sssanchopanza”. He consumed six grams of cocaine and a bottle of whiskey in less than three hours, while a group of paying spectators watched the scene. When his brother entered the room and found the lifeless body, on the other side of the screen several users remained connected to the private video call. The Simón Pérez phenomenon. When in 2017, Simón Pérez became a viral phenomenon after starring alongside Silvia Charro in a video promoting fixed rate mortgages while evidently were under the influence of narcotic substancesit was impossible to foresee what their lives would become. Overexposure on networks and, in search of extreme monetization, a business model based on donations in exchange for increasingly dangerous challenges: throwing appliances off the balcony, ingesting one’s own urine and, of course, substance abuse. The Diplomats. The escalation of content ended up causing his expulsion from platforms such as Kick, Dlive and Pump.fun for drug violations and promotion of illegal casinos. The last step in search of a corner of the internet beyond all control is Los Diplomáticos, a private group accessible through memberships between 40 and 120 euros. In these video calls closed by Google Meet, Pérez performs degrading acts that include collective masturbation or smearing himself with excrement. Sergio Jiménez entered this orbit in October 2025, despite being under psychiatric monitoring, as confirmed by El País through sources close to the deceased. The tip of the iceberg. What happens in private video calls is just the beginning. An entire clandestine infrastructure has flourished around these closed broadcasts. According to El País, Telegram groups like “AviatorVip IV”with more than three thousand members, function as meeting nodes where viewers not only comment on what they see, but actively organize challenges, sometimes even contacting substance suppliers. The contents of these supposedly private groups are disseminated on YouTube channels dedicated to the phenomenon, which ensures the continuous arrival of new curious people. The Graven case. The death of Sergio Jiménez is the first in Spain, but not in Europe. Just a few months earlier, in August 2025, French streamer Raphaël Graven, known as Pormanove, He died after enduring twelve consecutive days of humiliation and physical attacks broadcast live. Two men subjected him to a spectacle of continuous degradation while his audience watched without intervening. It also broadcast on Kick, the same platform that would expel Simón Pérez and Silvia Charro after this death. Both deaths share the same pattern: individuals in a vulnerable situation (economic or psychological, as in the case of Jiménez) who agree to expose themselves to mortal risks in exchange for immediate money. The fundamental difference with controversial television formats lies in immediacy: here there are no producers, medical insurance or prior controls. Just a direct transaction between those who pay to see suffering and those who need the money enough to risk their lives, with the consequent lack of control. And both cases occurred after regulated platforms closed their channels, taking refuge in digital spaces without any type of supervision. Zero responsibilities. Simón Pérez’s reaction after learning of death illustrates the moral complexity of this matter. In a live video on YouTube, he stated: “I have a clear conscience, it could have happened to me, it happened to him.” He claimed to have warned Jiménez about the dangers, recommending that he leave Telegram… and immediately promote memberships to his own private groups. The Mossos d’Esquadra keep the investigation open and a series of questions literally unprecedented to date must be resolved: was there incitement or necessary cooperation on the part of those who financed and specifically requested the challenge? Where does the responsibility lie? Private video calls, by their very nature, escape the control of the platforms and although Jiménez’s family is considering taking legal actionthe dispersion of responsibilities makes it very difficult to point to a clear culprit. In Xataka | Reality shows were falling into domestication. Until this brutality arrived on social networks, canceled in nine hours

The new Qualcomm chip for PC is a declaration of intent: more intelligence than power

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Qualcomm has taken advantage of the CES 2026 to present the Snapdragon NPU reaches 80 TOPS and it proclaims itself as the world’s fastest for laptops. Why is it important. This launch does not specifically confront anything that Intel or AMD have, but rather it is a positioning play: Qualcomm is betting on energy efficiency and integrated AI as its differential weapons, not on dethroning anyone in benchmarks. This is the chip that wants to colonize the mid-high range of Windows laptops, not the 17-inch clunkers for gamers. Between the lines. The figures are curiously contradictory: Qualcomm talks about a 35% jump in CPU but a 78% improvement in the NPU. There is the implicit message: Qualcomm knows that part of the future does not involve winning in traditional processing, but rather mastering computing. Local AI. In other words, Qualcomm has decided that one of the next PC battles will not be fought in Photoshop, but in applications that run LLMs or generate images offline. The 3nm node and memory LPDDR5X up to 152 GB reinforce this narrative: Qualcomm is building machines to work all day without a plug, not sedentary workstations, so to speak. It is an explicit commitment to the user profile that values ​​autonomy and instant response over sustained power. Yes, but. The problem continues to be the ecosystem: Windows on ARM It has improved, but it still has incompatibilities with professional software. Adobe works, yes, but the market goes further. Qualcomm can have the best chip on the market for efficiency… and still be irrelevant if developers don’t optimize for its architecture. Apple managed to overcome the latter in 2020 because it controls the silicon, the operating system and the hardware: without transition there was no business with the new Macs. Qualcomm has to convince third parties. The context. This release arrives while Intel tries to recover lost ground and AMD consolidates its dominance in high-performance laptops. But neither has the mobile DNA that Qualcomm does. It is a company that comes from the world of the smartphone, where efficiency is not optional but existential. That background is their advantage: they have been making powerful chips that don’t fry eggs in your pocket for decades, not to mention modifying the phrase slightly and making it sound worse. The threat. For Intel and AMD, the danger is not that Qualcomm will take market share from them tomorrow, but that it will normalize ARM on Windows. If the average user begins to associate “laptop with a good battery” with “it has a Qualcomm chip”, the x86 architecture is at risk of losing its last stronghold of absolute dominion. And that is a structural change, not a temporary one. In Xataka | The amazing history of ARM, the architecture that triumphs in mobile phones and that was born more than 30 years ago at Acorn Computer Featured image | Qualcomm

Getting hold of Venezuela’s immense oil reserves seems like a “bargain.” It’s actually an engineering nightmare.

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The geopolitical board has been blown up with the establishment of the “Donroe Doctrine.” According to energy analyst Javier Blasthis movement seeks to consolidate an energy empire from Alaska to Patagonia to control 40% of world production. Trump has not hesitated, making it clear that his objective is oil, recovering “stolen” assets and executing a lightning reconstruction led by American oil companies. However, Washington’s optimism clashes with technical reality. Analysts consulted by The Wall Street Journal They warn that there will not be an immediate miracle in the wells. In fact, the market has stopped fearing shortages and has begun to discount a future saturation of crude oil that is already pushing prices down. It’s not “black gold”, it’s asphalt. The narrative of easy success collides with geology. Venezuela It has 303,000 million barrels of proven reserves, but the vast majority is located in the Orinoco Belt and is extra-heavy crude oil. Unlike light oil, it is viscous, dense and does not flow naturally; It is more like tar than fuel. Added to the geological complexity is an alarming degradation of quality. A Reuters investigationbased on internal PDVSA documents, reveals that refiners in India (Reliance) and China (CNPC) have canceled orders or demanded drastic discounts because the crude oil arrives “dirty”, with excessive levels of water, salt and metals. These impurities corrode distillation towers and refining equipment, making processing an expensive and risky process. According to the researcher Luisa Palaciosthe country does not even produce the diluents (gasoline) necessary to transport this crude oil through pipelines, which forces it to depend on imports or inefficient mixtures. Low profitability. Despite the magnitude of the reserves, Venezuelan oil is far from being a profitable business. Its current low profitability is based on three critical pillars that any investor must consider. First of all, geology works against us. According to Forbesextracting this heavy crude oil requires massive and constant technical investment in steam injection and “upgrading” plants to transform the bitumen into a marketable product. Without this expensive technology, the resource is simply inaccessible. Added to this are the structural discounts in the market. As Al Jazeera explainsDue to its high density and sulfur content, this crude oil always trades below markers such as Brent or WTI. With a barrel that could fall to 50-60 dollars in 2026, the profit margin for Venezuela would be reduced to a minimum. The bottleneck: logistics. As an analysis in Bloomberg points outthe infrastructure is literally in ruins because loading a supertanker now requires five days, compared to just one day seven years ago. The collapse is such that the state oil company itself has gone so far as to dismantle oil pipelines to sell them for scrap, while key complexes such as Paraguaná are dying due to lack of maintenance. The rescue recipe. Venezuela dreams of the 4 million barrels per day that marked its rise in the 70s, but the financial reality is a bucket of cold water. Francisco Monaldi, director of energy policy at Rice University, calculates that the energy rescue demands 10 billion dollars a year for an entire decade. A goal as ambitious as it is expensive. However, money is not everything when human capital is lacking. CBCNews remember that In 2003, 23,000 skilled professionals were laid off, many of whom ended up in the Canadian tar sands. Without this talent, American cutting-edge technology has no hands to operate it. Furthermore, giants such as ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips will not move a single drill until legal certainty is guaranteed and settlements are made. billionaire debts of the expropriations of the Chávez era. But why Venezuela if Canada already exists? If crude oil is so “bad” and expensive, why Trump’s interest? The key is a necessary technical symbiosis. Gulf Coast refineries (Texas and Louisiana) They are like “stomachs” Designed for heavy food. Ironically, the oil that the US extracts through fracking is “too good” (too light). To optimize your plants and produce diesel, they need to mix its light crude oil with Venezuela’s heavy crude oil. Rory Johnston and Lino Carrillo they explain thatAlthough Canada’s crude oil is identical to Venezuelan crude, the latter has an unbeatable advantage: it is three days away by ship and has access to deep waters, while Canada suffers from “geographic confinement” due to saturated oil pipelines. Furthermore, by controlling this flow, the US cuts off the supply to “teapot” (independent refiners) of China, which until now bought Venezuelan crude at a discount, thus eliminating a competitive advantage for Beijing. There was a small pulse. Behind Trump’s mobilization, as the New York Times emphasizesChevron has positioned itself as a key player in the entire equation. This desire to go after Venezuelais also explained because it had a single major oil company that has maintained its presence in the country since 1923, surviving nationalizations and crises while competitors such as ExxonMobil left the board. There is a hidden treasure. Beyond oil, Venezuela is a “gas station” that wastes its own product. Luisa Palacios and The Kobeissi Letter The 200 billion cubic feet of natural gas stand out (the largest reserve in the region). Due to pure technical negligence, PDVSA today burns or vents an amount of gas equivalent to the consumption of all of Colombia, losing 1 billion dollars annually in smoke. Added to this is the potential of Mining Bow with critical minerals (nickel, coltan, bauxite) essential for the defense and technology industry. The paradox of the “gas station without hoses.” Trump has taken control of the largest reserve on the planet, but he has found himself with a facility that has no hoses, whose electrical grid is collapsing and whose fuel requires intensive processing so as not to destroy the engines. Although the flow of exports can be redirected quickly from China to the US in a matter of months—benefiting refineries in Texas and Louisiana—the actual reconstruction of the sector is a long-term project. The real battle has not been the capture of Maduro, but the management … Read more

features, price and technical sheet

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When just a few months ago we tried the Eufy Omni E28 We were left with our mouths open. Not so much because of its excellence but because of Anker’s daring when designing a transformer robot vacuum cleaner that is as imperfect as it is recommendable. Well, at this CES 2026 the Chinese firm returns to its old ways with the Eufi Omni S2, a less versatile robot but which seriously presents its candidacy for best robot vacuum cleaner of the year judging by its technical sheet. Rug Master. Because for vacuuming, this robot vacuum cleaner has the DuoSpiral rubber and bristle roller, which is essentially a brush divided into two, the CornerRover side brush that has a small arm to better reach the corners and impressive suction capacity figures: 30,000 Pascals or up to 100 AW. And the brush configuration is identical to that of the Omni E28, but it is 50% more powerful. The combination looks good overall, but Anker has put its efforts into carpet cleaning, considerably improving what it offered. Thus, it is capable of climbing textiles up to five centimeters high and once up, suck up visible and embedded dirt. And be careful, because on paper it has everything it needs to swallow everything that comes its way, the brand promises that the filter will last in good condition and without clogging for 90 days. A robot vacuum cleaner that can handle thin and thick carpets. Image: Eufy Say goodbye to mops and hello to rollers. But what a roller. For some time now, many manufacturers have left behind the radial sander-type rotary mops in favor of rollers, something that is not new in the Eufy. In fact, as in the Omni E28, it has a fairly long roller (29 centimeters) to scrub by applying a force against the floor of 15 N (something like 1.5 kg) and leaving its axis a little to better reach the corners. One of the problems with mopping with a vacuum cleaner is that you can clean the floor and remove stains, but the mop gets dirty and as you go, it is no longer very hygienic. This Eufy solves this with continuous self-cleaning (360 times per minute, that’s nothing), ensuring that it offers a sterilization rate of 99.99%. Image: Eufy A 12 in 1 foundation. That it has a self-cleaning base is no longer a surprise, what happens is that this is a 12-in-1 base: from emptying the solids tank to supplying soap for scrubbing to drying the mop in a long list of operations to reduce maintenance to the essential minimum. A basis to reduce maintenance to a minimum. Image: Eufy An all-terrain robot. For navigation, the Eufi Omni S2 combines a system with an RGB camera, ToF 3D and algorithms for object recognition that claim to identify 200 types of elements and 40 types of dirt. We have already seen that it can climb carpets of up to five centimeters, but also overcome unevenness of up to 3.5 centimeters. For connectivity, there will be no need to worry if we have a smart home with Alexa or with SmartThings from Samsung, since it is compatible with the Matter protocol. Price and availability. The Eufi Omni S2 will be officially launched on June 20 through the official website and Amazon at a price of $1,599, although pre-sale will begin on June 6 with a promotional discount of $200. We will update with Spain prices as soon as we have more information. Images | Anker In Xataka | Best robot vacuum cleaners in quality price. Which one to buy based on use and five recommended models

Wallpaper TV returns to become the world’s thinnest ‘wireless’ TV

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During these days the CES is being held in Las Vegas, and therefore we will find a good number of new developments from multiple manufacturers to face this 2026. In the case of LG, among all the announcements it has prepared, it has surprised us with the return of one of its most iconic televisions: the Wallpaper OLED. This line was discontinued in 2020, but now the Korean company has presented at this fair the LG OLED evo W6a renewed model that recovers the concept of an ultra-thin screen. The best part is that it is also a wireless TV. Super fine and with improvements According to the company, the television offers a thickness of only 9 millimeters. In addition, the screen attaches magnetically and remains completely attached to the wall from edge to edge thanks to a renewed support. It is true that the previous model, the W7 of 2017was even thinner at just 2.57mm thick. However, this increase in thickness has an explanation: the additional space has been used to house the wireless receivers and the cooling technology necessary for the system to operate. To put it in perspective, we are still talking about a thickness that is lower than that of most current smartphones. Goodbye to cables (but not all of them) The main problem with the original model was the need to have a thick flat cable connected to the screen and a sound bar Dolby Atmos mandatory that housed all the connections. Since the sound bar was mandatory, users who wanted better sound and wanted to invest in better sound equipment had to also have the mandatory sound bar connected to the cables, which made the whole set impractical. LG has solved this weak point with the Zero Connect Box, an independent box that manages all entries video, audio and peripherals, transmitting everything wirelessly to the screen. In fact, it is the same technology used in your first wireless television which we saw years ago. According to LG, this hub can be placed up to 10 meters away from the TV. Of course, you will still need a cable: the power supply. Image and performance improvements Image: LG The W6 incorporates LG’s new Hyper Radiant Color technology, which promises improvements in black level, color reproduction and brightness. LG assures that this model reaches luminance levels up to 3.9 times higher to a conventional OLED panel, thanks to Brightness Booster Ultra technology. Another interesting detail is that we are talking about the first television to achieve the ‘Reflection Free Premium’ certification from Intertek laboratories. Since it is a television that is practically attached to the wall, the issue of reflections is important and LG claims that it is the panel with the lowest reflectance in its entire rangewhich means that it will not end up becoming just another mirror in our living room. On the other hand, the brain of the television is the new Alpha 11 AI Gen3 processor, whose neural processing unit is, according to LG, 5.6 times more powerful than previous versions. Also ready to play The most gamers also have their space in the W6. And the television is compatible with Refresh rates up to 165 Hz in 4K resolutionin addition to having compatibility NVIDIA G-Sync and FreeSync Premium from AMD. LG also promises a pixel response time of 0.1 milliseconds. And if you’re not using the TV, you can invest part of your electricity bill on a digital wall with the Gallery+ function, which according to LG allows you to display more than 4,500 images. The company assures that in this collection we will find everything from cinematographic moments to video game scenes, also including personal collections or even images generated by AI. Price and availability The LG OLED evo W6 will be Available in 77 and 83 inch sizes. LG has not yet revealed the price or the exact launch date, although everything indicates that it will be placed in the ultra-premium segment. For reference, the previous model cost up to $20,000, so it would not be strange to see similar figures. We will have to wait to find out more information about it. Cover image | LG In Xataka | TCL has entered the television market by doing what seemed impossible: democratizing the Mini-LED

In a chaotic 2025 of cancellations and delays, Renfe does have good news: record number of travelers

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Renfe has had one of its most chaotic years in 2025. The company has had to face more competition than ever, it has suffered delays due to its own trains and infrastructure, it has seen Talgo trains crack or how fires blocked its most profitable line. And, despite everything, he has achieved a new record. 37.3 million. They are the people who have traveled on AVE and long-distance Renfe trains. And in 2025 the company has managed to move more people than ever on these trains. The figure is 6% higher than that achieved a year ago when it added 35.2 million trips. According to data provided by the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, the bulk of these trips are made up of the AVE, which has set a new record with 21.5 million trips. That’s a million more travelers than last year. Although AVLO is the company that has had the best performance, growing from 4.55 million in 2024 to 6.2 million travelers in 2025. Where? According to Transport, the corridor that continues to receive the most passengers is the Madrid-Barcelona route ending in Figueres. In total, Renfe has attracted 8.1 million passengers to this corridor. The figure is almost identical to last year’s. The Levante and Mediterranean corridor (which connects Madrid with the Valencian Community and Murcia) is where the impact on passenger growth has been felt most. Here, trips have increased from 5.5 million to 7.7 million. Andalusia has also experienced growth from 6.9 million travelers to 7.2 million. Although the corridor that has added the most passengers is the Madrid-Castilla y León-Galicia one. Adding its routes and the connection with Asturias has gone from 2.5 million travelers in 2024 to 4.6 million. Doubts. What Renfe leaves up in the air is how much passenger volume has been lost on other lines. In his statement It is not explained, for example, how many passengers there are in the Extremadura corridor. And if the data is well transmitted, there are lines that have had to lose the number of passengers. The text mentions, as we said, an increase of 2.1 million passengers in the sum of high-speed and long-distance lines. However, there is talk of increases of 2.2 million passengers in the Mediterranean corridor, 2.1 million in the northwest area and 300,000 more passengers in Andalusia, without mentioning the inevitable drops in passengers on other lines. A chaotic year. Although it is the year in which it has moved the most passengers, 2025 has been a chaotic year for Renfe, marked by the following milestones: And some good things. In addition to increasing the number of travelers, 2025 has also had some good things for Renfe. To begin with, it has been confirmation that the train can fight the plane as long as high-speed trains work with guarantee. And the fact is that Madrid-Galicia has made the airlines retreat. The company, Renfe points out, continues to be the most used in all corridors (although it is not specified that it is the one that works the most frequencies) and its travelers will be able to benefit from the new flat rate ticket of 60 euros to take all medium and long distance trains and that is pending the addition, potentially, of municipal or regional public transport. Furthermore, and although this is not so good for Renfe but for the user, travelers we should be able to receive refunds partial or total delays of more than 15 minutes this year. Photo | Xataka In Xataka | Renfe is obliged to compensate for delays of more than 15 minutes starting January 1. The Government wants to prevent it

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