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The CEO of a technology company has explained to his employees why he will not raise their salary: they will spend it on AI

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That AI doesn’t take your job It does not free you from suffering the consequences of its implementation. And if not, tell the Teradata employees who have seen how their salaries were frozen this year, not to balance somewhat tight accounts, but because they have decided that every available dollar should go to AI. what has happened. They tell it in Business Insider. In January of this year, Teradata CEO Steve McMillan sent an internal message to the company’s 5,100 employees telling them that they should not expect a salary increase in 2026. Teradata’s goal for this year was to “win in the market with AI,” for which they need to increase investment in AI talent and tools. In Xataka An Atlassian engineer was fired. He then published a video on YouTube explaining how the company works When AI takes your paycheck. According to two employees of the company with more than ten years of service, they normally received an annual raise of between 2 and 4%, but this year they have been left without it, although they were able to receive a performance bonus and shares. This measure affects countries where regulations do not require wage adjustments linked to the market. Teradata is not the only company that has preferred to invest in AI over people. The consultant TTEC also decided to pause its contribution to the retirement plan 401(k) because they are going to focus on AI certifications, tools and automation. A choice, not an inevitability. Speaking to Business Insider, the labor expert Jennifer MossHe affirms that cutting employees’ pockets is not the only way out. It is true that both Teradata and TTEC have recorded revenue declines (5 and 3.2% respectively), but there are options such as resorting to external financing to pay for the investment in AI, cutting non-essential expenses or adjusting senior management compensation. It also mentions alternatives such as staggering investments in AI over time, resorting to strategic acquisitions or accepting lower margins for a limited period, instead of loading the entire cost of the transformation on salaries. AI and augmentations. We recently talked about the logic of salary increases has been broken with the arrival of AI. Previously, raises were granted based on parameters such as experience, seniority and job category. However, in the technology sector this scale has changed and in 2026 many companies have frozen their salaries. Although AI is not directly responsible as in the case of Teradata, it has contributed to creating an elite of highly paid profiles and has amplified the gap: now the company you work for and how central AI is to its business matters more than your simple progression from junior to senior. {“videoId”:”x806n3d”,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”TECHNOLOGY and THE JOBS OF THE FUTURE – Insert Coin with Manuel Hidalgo”, “tag”:”employment”, “duration”:”1806″} Firing is expensive. Normally when we talk about the impact of AI on the labor market, we talk about layoffs. So far this year, it is estimated that 92,000 tech employees have lost their jobs with the excuse of compensating investments in AI. However, the reality is that the layoffs are costing them a fortune for compensation and exit packages. Oracle, for example, has reserved 2.1 billion to cover compensation after lay off 30,000 employees. To avoid legal disputes, giants like Microsoft or Google are betting on incentivized “voluntary layoffs”, assuming the enormous risk that their best AI talents will take the money and go to the competition. Image | Jakub ZerdzickiUnsplash In Xataka | These are not your imaginations: your CEO has developed delusions of grandeur with AI and it is part of a pattern (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news The CEO of a technology company has explained to his employees why he will not raise their salary: they will spend it on AI was originally published in Xataka by Amparo Babiloni .

Francisco Valencia, CEO of Secure&IT, on the challenge of AI attacks

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Yesterday morning I went to a new edition of the cybersecurity conferences of Secure&IT in Madrid with a fairly clear idea: to listen to how companies are using the artificial intelligence to better defend yourself and make life difficult for cybercriminals. It was a reasonable expectation. AI has become one of the great promises of the sector and it seemed logical to think that a good part of the conversation would revolve around its new defensive capabilities. But the day left a much deeper reading. What is moving is not just another technological layer on top of the usual systems. It is the mental framework of cybersecurity itself. The speed of change, the sophistication of attacks, and the entry of new algorithm-based tools are forcing companies to rethink everything from how they patch software to how they anticipate threats. The feeling there, listening to the speakers, was clear: we are not facing a simple update of tools, but rather a change of era. Francisco ValenciaCEO of Secure&IT, who I was able to interview a while agoput that idea on the table as soon as it began with a particularly graphic phrase: “We have always said that in cybersecurity we are one step behind cybercrime and we are now 10 steps behind cybercrime“The statement was surprising for its crudeness, but it also helped to organize the conversation. Looking at this disadvantage head-on, without selling false certainties, may be the first step to understanding what is coming. Cybersecurity was waiting for an ally, but cybercrime has also found one The key is that AI has not only changed the available tools, but also the balance of the game. Valencia put it crudely because, from his point of view, cybercriminals have taken off while many companies are still trying to decide how to use AI in a safe, useful and governed way. This difference in rhythm explains a good part of the diagnosis. Attackers don’t need to resolve every internal debate in an organization, justify every deployment, or wait for a perfect corporate policy. They just need to test, automate and exploit what works. The speaker began by addressing one of the most disturbing pieces of this new scenario: the Dark LLM. LLMs, or large language models, are the technical layer that powers applications such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini: systems capable of interpreting instructions, helping to program or solve complex tasks. The companies that develop them introduce limits, filters and guardrails to prevent harmful uses, both for safety and for the ethical criteria with which they design these systems. The Dark LLM, such as FraudGPT and WormGPTstart from a much more dangerous logic: offer similar capabilities, but without those barriers. The interesting thing is that this logic does not always depend on creating a new model from scratch. Valencia also spoke of jailbreaka way of trying to avoid the limits of conventional AI through carefully constructed instructions. It’s not simply asking a system to do something forbidden, but wrapping that request in a context that pushes it to respond where it should stop. In practice, the result can be similar: capabilities of a powerful model put at the service of uses that large companies try to block. This leap is very well understood when we move from the tool to deception. For years we have associated many fraud campaigns with clumsy, massive and easy-to-detect messages, but AI allows us to change the scale without giving up personalization. The CEO of Secure&IT summed it up with a very clear phrase: “I don’t need to send the Nigerian’s spam to 20 million people saying that I have fallen in love with 20 million people to see who will bite. I send the same email to 20 million, but I tell each one what they want to hear“That’s the difference: the attack can still be massive, but it no longer has to seem generic. The attack may still be massive, but it no longer has to feel generic. During the presentation a term also appeared that caught my attention: malware polymorphic. It may sound very technical, even more typical of a conversation between analysts than an article to understand what is happening, but it helps to land something important. We are no longer just talking about a malicious program that enters a computer and tries to repeat itself on other computers with the same behavior. It is something much more sophisticated: a threat capable of reaching a machine, reading the environment, identifying what defenses are in front of it and generating a version adapted to that specific scenario. The consequence for security teams is obvious: if each machine receives a different variant, detecting patterns, relating signals and reconstructing the attack becomes much more difficult. It is no longer just a matter of finding a malicious file and following its trail across the network. In a scenario where “the virus on each computer is different“, the campaign can have the same objective, but leave different traces on each team. And when the traces change, the analysis is no longer linear. Secure&IT dedicated its cybersecurity days this year to analyzing how AI is changing the sector Valencia’s message about automation was one of the clearest of the day: AI is taking time away from defense. For years, companies have had some margin between detecting a vulnerability, creating an exploit, and actually exploiting it. That margin could be imperfect, but it existed. It allowed you to organize analysis, prioritize patches and update systems every certain number of months. The phrase that best condenses the change is direct: “Until now time was a weapon to defend ourselves and now time is no longer a weapon to defend ourselves.” The consequence is very practical. If before an organization could carry out vulnerability analyzes every several months and plan updates with some calm, that scheme is beginning to fall short. According to experts, an AI tool can search for a vulnerability, identify it, prepare the attack path, and run it … Read more

The CEO of Ryanair is clear about why there are more and more drunks on its flights

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Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary has called for airports stop serving alcohol before early morning flights. According to their argument, bad behavior on board does not stop growing and they think that through this initiative they would not have to divert their flights due to the behavior of some passengers. A growing problem. “If I go back ten years, we had maybe one deviation a week. Now we are close to one a day,” counted O’Leary himself told The Times. According to data from the British Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), airlines record around 400 more disruptive incidents per year than before the pandemic. Why airports have wide beams. Unlike conventional bars and restaurants, establishments within the UK boarding zones are exempt from time restrictions that regulate the sale of alcohol in the rest of the country. That means they can open and serve drinks at any time, including five or six in the morning. “I don’t understand why anyone serves beer at that time. Who needs to drink at five in the morning?” continued O’Leary. What Ryanair asks for. The Irish airline has been demanding a limit of two drinks per passenger at airports for years, something that, according to O’Leary, the company itself already applies on board its planes. Now it goes one step further and requires that airports respect the same alcohol sales schedules that apply to other establishments. Their idea is that this limit be linked to the boarding pass, to make control more effective. “Those who do not act responsibly, those who profit, are the airports that have those bars open at five or six in the morning and that, during delays, are happy to serve all the alcohol they want because they know that they export the problem to the airlines,” counted the manager in the middle. Furthermore, O’Leary also points out drug use as the main aggravating factor. The most affected routes. According to account The Times, the flights with the highest incidence of problematic behavior are those that connect the United Kingdom with leisure destinations such as Ibiza, Alicante or Tenerife. Routes from Ireland and Poland also experience frequent problems. What the law says. Being drunk on a plane is a crime in the United Kingdom, punishable by fines of up to £5,000 and two years in prison. If things go further and force the airline to divert the flight, the economic consequences can reach 80,000 pounds (which is make a Melendi in every rule). Ryanair has already taken legal action against passengers who caused diversions. According to the media, in January of last year he filed a lawsuit in Ireland against a traveler claiming 15,000 euros for a diverted flight on the Dublin-Lanzarote route. The risks are real. “Until someone causes an accident that causes a plane crash with hundreds of deaths, no government will take this problem seriously. And the airlines are desperate,” counted O’Leary to The Times. Other companies such as Jet2 are also pushing to create a national database that would allow troublesome passengers to be banned from all British airlines. AirportsUK, the organization that brings together the country’s airports, defends that they already work together with the rest of the sector through awareness campaigns. Cover image | Niels Baars and BENCE BOROS In Xataka | European airlines are taking advantage of the Iran crisis to accelerate something old: making your trip even more complicated.

your CEO just clarified who should have the best

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The race for artificial intelligence is usually told through models, applications and the latest promises of automation. But beneath all that there is a less attractive layer and much more difficult to replace: the hardware. Without advanced chips, training massive models, deploying them at scale, and competing on the front lines becomes much more difficult. That is why NVIDIA continues to occupy such an important place for the United States and China. The question is no longer just who develops AI better, but who can access the most powerful chips first. Huang’s message. That debate landed this week in Los Angeles, during the Milken Institute Global Conferencea forum that brought together bankers, investors, policymakers and executives in Beverly Hills. Over there, according to Nikkei AsiaJensen Huang was asked directly about a particularly sensitive question: whether China should have access to NVIDIA’s “latest and greatest” chips. His response was as brief as it was forceful: “No.” The CEO later added that the company supports the United States having “the first, most and best” chips, a phrase that pretty much sums up the balance it is trying to defend. Sell ​​yes, but not the last. Huang’s position is not about removing China from the trade equation, at least not according to what he proposed in that same forum. The CEO defended that American semiconductor companies continue to compete in global markets, including China, because that also strengthens the North American country. Huang said that increasing exports helps raise tax revenue, improve economic security and contribute to national security. The message, therefore, has two layers: technological leadership first, and commercial presence under control later. The border is in the generation. Not all NVIDIA chips occupy the same place in this discussion. The H200, remember, is a high-end AI processor and places it above of the H20the chip the company designed for China after US export restrictions. But the agreement announced by Donald Trump in December did not include neither Blackwell nor the next-generation Rubin products, two families that represent a more advanced layer of NVIDIA’s roadmap. The regulatory framework still has several moving parts. Donald Trump said in December that he would allow NVIDIA’s H200s to be sold to “approved” customers in China, as long as the US Government received 25% of those income. The company obtained official export authorization this year, and Huang said in March that NVIDIA had already received orders from “many Chinese customers.” But that does not mean that everything is resolved: the final shipment will also depend on whether Beijing allows such sales and in what quantities. The bottleneck is not just political.Tom’s Hardware suggests that there may also be an industrial explanation behind the absence of recent shipments. According to the media, Hopper and Blackwell are manufactured in the same factories and production lines compatible with TSMC’s N4/N5, a capacity that is not infinite. If that reading is correct, NVIDIA would have reason to reserve more production for Blackwell, a more advanced and expensive family, especially for US customers, instead of using part of that capacity in H200 for China with a 25% commission to the US Government. According to that reading, Rubin’s arrival at N3 could free up margin later. A pending trip. Trump said he will visit Beijing this month and that trade issues could be on the table in his meeting with Xi Jinping. In that context, Huang’s words do not sound like a simple corporate reflection, but rather a way of marking a position in a debate that goes far beyond NVIDIA. The dispute not only revolves around which chip is more powerful, but also about who accesses it first, under what conditions and with what margin so as not to be left behind. Images | NVIDIA In Xataka | It doesn’t speak, it doesn’t climb stairs and it doesn’t even always obey: this is the robot that the creator of the Roomba has been wanting to develop for 30 years

With the Find X9 Ultra, OPPO has an ambitious plan to conquer the heart of Spain. And its CEO has told us what it is

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From the offices of OPPO In Madrid, at the top of a building very close to Plaza de Castilla, you can see an old water tank from the Canal de Isabel II. It is a huge concrete structure inaugurated in the middle of the last century that today, no longer in use, functions as one of the visual “landmarks” of the square. It is very big, about 40 meters high, but it is very far away. I take one of the OPPO Find X9 Ultra that’s on the table, I open the camera, zoom in 10x and take a photo. The result is impressive. The camera returns an image full of details: the contours of the concrete, already worn, the advertising signage that floods its dome, the brutalist curves that the tower draws. All this from inside an office and interrupted by a large window. I look towards the back of the room, where there are some boxes of snacks and pastries ready for breakfast. There are tiny inscriptions on the side, so I repeat the process: I open the camera, zoom in 10x and take another photo. The sharpness is extraordinary. There is no pixelation or noticeable distortion or digital zoom artifacts in the drawing of the letters, nor a great chromatic distortion with respect to what my eyes see. “What we want to do with the Ultra is not just another incremental improvement, we want it to be an alternative to your professional camera,” he explains to me. Kevin ChoCEO of OPPO in Spain since last summer. “It would be like buying a camera with a built-in phone and not the other way around, right?” I ask him. “That is, camera firstmore than a phone with an interesting camera.” Looking at the wide range of tools on the table, it’s hard not to agree. The launch of the Find X9 Ultra in Spain marks a milestone for OPPO: for the first time, the company launches its top-of-the-range phone in Europe, something reserved until now for Chinese consumers. OPPO has not spared any details: the Ultra incorporates an ambitious 300 mm teleconverter equivalent in 35 mm and 13x format that is attached to the phone’s gigantic lenses to multiply the camera’s possibilities. Why has OPPO made such a determined bet for photographyWithout a doubt the most notable aspect of a Find X9 Ultra full of attractive features and specifications? “There is a very marked polarization in the market,” explains Cho. “Around 30% or 40% of buyers continue to opt for devices under 200 euros, or even second-hand, but what we are also seeing is an expansion of the premium segments. It is the same trend month after month: premium sales are growing.” (Xataka) Cho introduces a key word: “premiumization.” The market polarization of the mobile phone is neither new nor surprising for anyone who has paid attention to the dynamics of recent years. Many consumers tend to hold on to their devices for longer, as a result of the large investments they must make, which is why they demand more performance and quality from their products. This gap, also present in markets such as the car, has forced almost all brands to recalibrate their strategies. OPPO’s ambitious plan “We don’t want transactional volumes,” Cho continues, “you know, competing on price. We want to make sure we bring products that can create value for the consumer.” According to Cho, OPPO is facing its second wave of expansion in the European market: after a consolidation of the brand and sales in recent years, it is time to grow not so much through raw numbers as through loyalty in the segments. more exclusive of the market. And for that you need a product up to the task, hence the arrival of the Find X9 Ultra. A landing that, however, has required adaptations. Since his arrival in Spain, Cho has promoted a change in OPPO’s methodology, especially regarding the consumer: “We are doing studies to understand consumer preferences and to define our strategies.” Refers to focus group and surveys with more than 4,000 respondents, a very large sample that exceeds those that the brand was doing until then. Cho is clear that the only way to compete in the premium segment is by going to the user, or, in his words, “winning the heart and brain of the consumer.” (Xataka) The approach is ambitious, as are its objectives. When I ask him where he would like to see OPPO in five years in Spain, he answers without much hesitation: “As the number one brand.” The Find X9 Ultra is the first stone of a long road ahead, a way to “test the roof” of OPPO in Europe. His first steps have consisted of relearning and readapting the lessons of the chinese marketwhere OPPO is a brand with a lot of penetration and experience in the premium segments, for Spain and Europe. Before the launch on the old continent, OPPO has had to make some adjustments in terms of operating system and memory to adapt them to local needs and preferences. Given the constraints of such a competitive segment Like the premium one, OPPO has two other arguments to win over the consumer: its operating system, ColorOS, and the battery. Cho boasts leadership in the second area and widespread user satisfaction in the first: “In China, our operating system has consistently been our main selling point for the past three years.” In Spain, the Ultra works on Android, like the rest of the market, but Cho highlights the interoperability and customization of OPPO: “We have been working on inter-device and inter-ecosystem interoperability for some time, so that you can use the phone with a Windows computer or a Mac.” (Xataka) Camera, battery, operating system… The elephant in the room that needs to be addressed is AI. Is there the definitive angle for a mobile phone brand to be more attractive than its competition? Cho’s answer is not direct but clear: OPPO’s strength is … Read more

The CEO of Nvidia believes that we are in a new industrial revolution where AI will not replace us: it will micromanage us

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Artificial intelligence has been available to users and companies for a few years now and we are at a point where they converge several ideas about AI and the future of work. There are several open fronts such as if AI will replace usif it will only be a tool or if, instead of freeing ourselves from the workload we carry, will add more to us. But the CEO of Nvidia, a Jensen Huang who has no trouble spilling his tongue, has another opinion. AI is going to micromanage us. Micromanager. A few days ago, Huang attended a talk at Stanford Business School. At these events, company CEOs usually leave motivational messages and talksbut I don’t know if in this case it would motivate someone who is looking for a job. During his panel, the Nvidia boss commented that, right now, “we are doing things faster, on a larger scale and we can think to do things we never imagined.” That part of the speech is fine, but he went on to note that “AI agents will harass you, micromanage you, and you will be busier than ever.” Like a good 1st century Roman baptisterywho wouldn’t like having an AI agent egging you on? Will create more jobs. Lately, Huang has chosen to blurt out headlines and vaguely elaborate. At the event, he also commented that these agents we have help us explore new avenues of work, do that work better and make it more profitable. He also addressed the great controversy, that of the supposed great replacement. On this, his opinion is that there will be some jobs that will be redundant because AI will be able to do the same as a human, but he considers that, in general, there will be humans with new jobs to adapt to. “I think we are going to create more jobs. There will be more people working at the end of this industrial revolution than at the beginning of it,” he says. Insecurity. It is curious that you compare it with the industrial revolution at a time when there is concern, above all, about the instability of the labor market. Huang ha commented that computer engineers are busier than ever and it makes sense, the problem is what happens next and what is happening with all those who are not dedicated to tasks strictly related to AI. In an article by Fortune published a few weeks ago, the issue of layoffs directly related to artificial intelligence was addressed. An example is Jerome Powell, president of the United States Federal Reserve, who warned that AI is quietly impacting the labor market as job creation is practically at zero. Another is that of Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, who believes that “entry-level” jobs will be reduced by half in the next 18 months. And then Microsoft’s AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman, predicting that AI will cause many white-collar jobs to collapse in that same time frame. AND Meta is going to do without 8,000 employees as it transforms into an AI company. All this while, on short video networks there is a lot of content of young people saying that they have a university degree and are rejected at Target or McDonalds. The AGI has already arrived. Well no. HE esteem that, during 2025, some 55,000 people in the US will lose their jobs directly due to AI. It is only 4.5% of all layoffs, but a significant number that, if forecasts are met, will multiply by several figures over the coming months. For now, so far in 2026, esteem that technology companies have laid off 92,000 people, not all of them must be related to AI, but a scary number if we take into account that, during 2025, the total was 120,000 people. Just 28,000 less in just four months. But, beyond that, the prediction that an AI agent will not take our jobs, but rather will be a tiresome second boss, is not the only thing that Huang has commented recently without going much further. A few weeks ago, on Lex Fridman’s podcast, he already commented on things like that workers must be clear about the purpose of their work and that the tasks and tools they use to do it are related, but they are not the same. Also He commented that we had already arrived at the AGI (artificial general intelligence) giving an example that it has nothing to do with an AGI that, for now, remains theory. A black hole of money. Byan Catanzaro is the vice president of deep learning at Nvidia and has commented that AI currently costs more than human employees. “For my team, the cost of computing far exceeds that of employees.” It must be taken into account in this that AI is not an abstract entity: it is a huge investment in hardware, data centers and energy. According to the calculations According to Keith Lee, professor of AI and finance at the Swiss Institute of Artificial Intelligence, AI expenditures will be $5.2 trillion by 2030 in a conservative estimate and $7.9 trillion in a more aggressive one. But more interesting is what he comments about the fact that fixed subscriptions are not making money for companies because they do not cover operating costs. And that, at a time when companies like OpenAI and Anthropic should not take long to go public, is something to take into account because they will stop receiving millions from other private companies to have to respond to investors with their product and benefits. In Xataka | There are programmers from Meta and Microsoft competing to be the one who uses the most AI and wasting millions of dollars along the way

For the CEO of Ford, the reference for the electric car is no longer Tesla, it is China

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The head of Ford has been studying Chinese manufacturers in depth for months and is clear about one thing: that to understand where the electric car is going, we must pay close attention to China. For some years now the country is leading a historic transition in the automobile, and the perfect proof of this reality is the fixation that brands as historic as Ford have with the Chinese electric car. And for Jim Farley, CEO of the company, Tesla is no longer the benchmark. China, not Tesla. The automobile industry has been at a crossroads for some time. Electric sales are not growing at the expected rate in the West, large manufacturers have had to rethink their strategies and convert their factories (energy storage for data centers), and in the United States the elimination of federal tax incentive It has made the purchase of a new electric car even more expensive. In this context, Ford CEO Jim Farley explained in the Rapid Response podcast that Tesla is no longer the benchmark, and that it is now China. Change of sight. In the interview, Farley explained why he has been testing a Xiaomi SU7 instead of an American vehicle. “If you’re an American and you want us to beat the Chinese in the car business, you’re going to want to pay attention, not necessarily to Tesla. Nothing against Tesla, they’re doing well, but they don’t really have an up-to-date vehicle,” he said. And his reference for Ford is not Elon Musk, but BYD: “The best thing in the business for us in cost, supply chain, manufacturing experience and innovation is BYD,” Farley said. in the same podcast. Concerning. BYD was born in 1995 as a battery manufacturer and today is the largest electric car manufacturer in the world by volume. having surpassed Tesla in global sales in 2025. In 2022 it was the first manufacturer to completely abandon pure gasoline cars. For Farley, what is relevant is not the market capitalization of each company, but rather who is defining what the consumer will want to buy in the next decade. TOGod to the expensive electric ones. Ford has learned its lesson through million-dollar losses. The company became the second brand that sold the most electric cars in the US after Tesla, but its models were, according to Farley himself, “designed in the wrong way.” In December 2025, Ford took over a $19.5 billion correction having to reformulate its entire electric strategy. He F-150 Lightningwhich was presented as the flagship of its electrical commitment, is converted into an EREV vehicle (with a small combustion engine that acts as a generator) because, as admitted Farley himself in December, “the $70,000 electric cars were not selling.” The new roadmap involves launching an electric pickup at $30,000 before 2027. The key is in the second-hand market. Farley has an unconventional way of reading the market. And it is that prefer look at the sales of used cars before those of new ones, because “the second-hand market is twice that of new ones, and since they are all sold at lower prices, they are a better predictor of consumer behavior.” And of course, in this market, affordable electric and hybrid vehicles are the ones that move the most compared to those in the premium segment. China is not just price. Farley recognize that each Chinese car incorporates about 4,000 or 5,000 dollars in government subsidies, direct and indirect. He is also aware that these vehicles incorporate up to ten cameras and advanced connectivity systems that, in his opinion, “should be reviewed by the US Department of Defense for reasons of national security.” However, Farley concludes that the correct response is not to ignore them, but to learn from them. “That is the gift that China has given us: that we are respectful enough of its progress not to settle for business as usual,” he said in the interview. Cover image | Hans and Rapid Response In Xataka | The longest straight road in the world is a mental challenge: 240 km without curves, in the middle of the desert and with truck traffic

Tim Cook has been a wonderful CEO for Apple investors. For the United States, not so much

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Filling the void left by a myth like Steve Jobs seemed like an impossible mission, and although Tim Cook has been a radically different CEO than his predecessor, his career has been equally prodigious. At least in financial terms, because with it Apple has become a four trillion dollar titan. That’s one way to look at it. There is another. Financially impeccable. Over the past fifteen years, this logistics genius has refined operational efficiency and managed to turn every iPhone into a ticket printing machine. An amazing fact: With Tim Cook, Apple’s value has grown by 682 million dollars on average per day for every day of the last three decades. The business runs like clockwork, but behind that economically impeccable facade there is an uncomfortable paradox. The factories do not matter, but the processes. Cook’s management has shown that to achieve maximum profit margins it is not enough to create iconic products: you must master the supply chain. And to achieve this, Apple preferred to own processes rather than factories. She delegated all production risk to external suppliers while she developed new hardware products and especially services that expanded the ecosystem and maximized profit. China as a great ally. The pillar of this entire strategy was unusual. Since arriving at Apple as vice president of operations in 1998, Cook opted for the massive scale and cheap labor of mainland China. This allowed Apple to manufacture in massive volumes and at a very low cost, but in doing so signed a blood pact with Beijing. Educating your rival. By fully focusing the manufacturing process on China, Apple invested billions of dollars in training millions of workers. The transfer and transfer of technical knowledge has been of such magnitude that it has elevated China’s economic and technological status compared to the West. Flexible principles. This relationship with China has also been controversial due to how the company has been folded to the demands of the Chinese government in the geopolitical sphere. The App Store removed thousands of applications following direct orders from Beijing, but even more revealing has been the iCloud data transfer of Chinese users to servers operated by a Chinese state-owned company. There is a moral duality that inevitably raises suspicions. Remembering Jack Welch. In The New York Times they remembered to Jack Welch, a manager who was described as “manager of the century” after his management at the General Electric (GE) company. Like Cook, Welch was a manager with a spectacular financial record. He achieved staggering annual returns, but over time he was shown to have turned GE into an overleveraged company that was about to collapse in the 2008 crisis. Hero or villain. Cook has systematically ignored a great existential risk: if the tension of the trade war between the US and China ends up exploding, the impact could be terrible for the North American economy. The threat that China ends up attacking Taiwan could come true and in that case Cook would be remembered as the CEO who handed over the technological sovereignty of his company to his country’s biggest geopolitical rival. It is true that Cook takes time reducing Chinese dependence in the manufacturing processes at Apple, but it is also true that “the damage has been done” and the transfer of knowledge has been enormous. Ternus and a very heavy legacy. Cook’s successor will be John Ternusbut your room for maneuver will be very limited at the moment. Tim Cook in fact is not retiring completely and will become CEO and supervise the management of his successor. That makes it difficult to chart a new course for Apple if that is what Ternus is proposing, which also seems unlikely. The iPhone has changed all of China. The truth is that every step that Cook took to reinforce his commitment to China It made undeniable financial sense. and generated huge sums of money for all of the company’s investors. That does not reflect the other reality, because the iPhone has contributed definitively for China to become the giant it is today. In Xataka | Apple has been giving in to China for years, but this time the price to pay is much higher. Your AI is at stake

If you were waiting for Xiaomi to launch cheap cars, its CEO encourages you to continue waiting seated

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Xiaomi has been in the automobile market for a couple of years (although it is still we are waiting for your arrival in Europe), and in contrast to what the brand offers in other areas such as smartphones, the company wants to position itself rather high in the price table of its cars. Lei Jun, CEO of Xiaomi, confirmed during a live broadcast on April 17 that the brand has no intention of launching electric vehicles below 100,000 yuan (about 12,500 euros) in the coming years. Here, as expected from the figures, he talks about the Chinese market. Communication. Lei Jun made these statements during a live autonomy test in which he drove a new generation SU7 Pro from Beijing to Shanghai (1,265 kilometers) with a single stop to charge. On the way, he took the opportunity to chat with the chat, a calculated communication strategy that has been noticed. Luckily, during the talk, we were able to find very interesting statements from the head of the brand himself and get an idea of ​​his roadmap. No to the cheap car. According to counted Jun during the broadcast, today’s competitive electric cars increasingly depend on intelligent driving systems, and that type of technology has a high cost that does not fit with a sales price below that barrier of 100,000 yuan in China. According to collect the media CarNewsChina, Lei himself recognized that the new generation of the SU7 It accumulates more than 100 improvements compared to the previous model, with an increase in material costs of almost 20,000 yuan, but its selling price only rose by about 4,000 yuan. For Xiaomi, the equation applied to an entry-level car simply does not add up. Where Xiaomi does want to be. The updated SU7 starts at 219,900 yuan (around 27,500 euros), and the brand’s direction points even higher, as the firm is ready to launch its SU7 Ultra which already competes in the high-performance segment, and in the not too distant future models such as the YU7 GT or a premium variant of the SU7 will also appear, according to they count from ChinaEVHome. We will have to see prices when the firm lands in Europe with its SU7, but everything indicates that Xiaomi wants to consolidate itself within the field of the mid/high range of automobiles. The Chinese car is not synonymous with cheap. Xiaomi is not the only one that avoids the price war in the entry segment. He Xiaopeng, president of XPeng, declared during the presentation of MONA M03 that his company also has no plans to go below that 100,000 yuan threshold. Among the reasons it gave were too tight margins, unsustainable investment in smart technology and real risk of a destructive price spiral. What the numbers say. Sales data in China reinforce this reading. And it is that according to figures collected by CarNewsChina, entry-level electric cars, such as the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV or the BYD Seagull (Dolphin Surf here in Spain), registered year-on-year falls of almost 58% in the first months of 2026, partly due to the end of tax exemptions on purchases. The sedan and utility vehicle segment as a whole also fell almost 20% year-on-year in March. The volume is there, but the profitability is not. Promises. All in all, Lei Jun left a door ajar in the long term. Their goal is for Xiaomi to be among the five largest car manufacturers in the world. Reaching that scale would, sooner or later, require greater price coverage. But for this scenario to come true, there still seems to be time. Cover image | Xiaomi In Xataka | Journey to the center of the Chinese motor (part 2): I have seen the future of cars in Beijing and yes, it is electric (and very cool)

The CEO of logistics gives way to the CEO of engineering

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Tim Cook has announced that will step down as Apple CEO on September 1. will replace you John Ternusits senior vice president of hardware engineering. This long-awaited generational change represents an important change in the DNA of the leadership of one of the most valuable companies in the world. Why is it important. Cook was a genius of logistics, supply chain and business diplomacy. Ternus is very different: we are talking about a mechanical engineer who has spent 25 years (half of his life) designing, testing and manufacturing Apple products. Apple goes from a leader who optimized how products are made and sold to one who decides how they are conceived and built. The sign that anticipated everything. In January 2026 we say that Cook had put Ternus in charge of Apple’s design teams. The move was not officially announced, but Mark Gurman made it public in Bloomberg. It was the definitive signal and Cook’s succession had been on the agenda for some time… and Ternus was the number 1 favorite. Until then, design at Apple had functioned as an independent fiefdom, a direct inheritance from the Jony Ive era. That it became dependent on hardware engineering meant that in Ternus’ Apple, technical execution rules over aesthetics. It’s not that design stops mattering. He is no longer the king as he once was. What Ternus has achieved and what he hasn’t. Its footprint is on practically all of Apple’s current hardware catalog: Apple Silicon on the Mac. Intel’s transition to its own chips has probably been Apple’s most important technical decision in the last decade. In chip architecture, the main merit is attributable to Johny Srouji, Ternus’ replacement. In product execution (a MacBook Air without a fan, sustained performance, record autonomy, coherent integration with the SoC…), the credit goes to Ternus. We are possibly in the best Mac cycle in history. iPhone. Not everything in the iPhone is yours, but the build quality, thermal management, choice of materials, and internal integration are. iPad, AirPods, Apple Watch. He has participated in the launch of several new generations and product lines. What is not his fault is the stagnation of the iPad as a platform. That is a software and strategy problem, not the hardware, which is excellent, so we have to ask Craig Federighi and Tim Cook about it. Between the lines. The best comparison we can make here is not so much between Cook and Ternus but between Cook and… Steve Ballmer. Steve Ballmer was a sales and operations CEO who multiplied Microsoft’s revenue but missed the mobile revolution. Cook has been an operations and services CEO who has multiplied Apple’s revenue, but whose tenure has not produced a game-changing new product on the level of the iPhone or iPod. The Apple Watch took several generations to find its place, AirPods are a resounding success almost ten years later, but conceptually they are not a new category. The Vision Pro are in a limbo from which we will see how they emerge. Ternus arrives with a profile closer to the product. And that, in a product company, matters. Besides, Apple has appointed Johny Srouji as Chief Hardware Officera new position that unifies hardware engineering and hardware technologies under his command. It is important for two reasons: Srouji was about to leave. Months ago it was learned that he had informed Cook that he was seriously considering leaving the company. Apple has retained him with more power and responsibility. Confirms that Apple Silicon is the central strategic bet. Ternus’s first big decision as incoming CEO has been to shield his most valuable piece. Yes, but. Ternus inherits a company with pending tasks that cannot be resolved with good hardware alone: AI. Apple Intelligence has arrived with a notable delay (in various senses) with respect to Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. AI is fundamentally software, models and services. Ternus comes from iron. Regulation. The App Store is more controlled than ever and not only in the EU. Commissions, alternative payments and third-party stores are going to define a good part of the coming years. Tariffs and supply chain. The manufacturing structure in China that Cook has built and optimized for many years is now threatened by the Trump administration’s trade policy. The need to surprise. Apple hasn’t launched anything that evokes the ‘effect’ for a while. wow‘so common in the Jobs era. And now what. Cook, as has happened several times with the old guard, is not leaving completely. He will be executive president, focused on the relationship with governments and regulators: the same diplomacy that he has managed with reasonable success for 15 years remains in his hands. Apple does not lose Cook. It relocates it where it can provide the most value now. Ternus is 51 years old. Cook was 50 when he took office.. If Apple maintains its pattern of long tenures, Ternus may be at the helm for a decade or more. Apple’s commitment is to believe that its difference compared to Google, Microsoft and OpenAI will not be in the most powerful AI model, but in how it integrates AI into hardware that people touch, carry and use every day. That’s where Ternus has an advantage that no one else has. If that bet is correct, Apple has chosen the perfect CEO. If the AI ​​battle is won in the cloud and in models, you may have a problem. In Xataka | The foldable iPhone is getting closer every day: this is everything we know about it so far Featured image | Xataka

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