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The MacBook Neo has made traditional Windows laptops look ridiculous. This is great news for users.

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He MacBook Neo showed the way. Mid-range laptops seemed stuck in the past, with an unattractive price/performance ratio. The feeling was that once you were buying a laptop, it was better to invest 1,000 euros or more to be able to work and play comfortably. That seems to be finally changing, because we are seeing a lot of movement in the world of Windows laptops. Asleep on our laurels. Apple’s new model showed that there could be alternatives and caught manufacturers on the wrong foot. Everyone seemed comfortable with it. status quobut he MacBook Neo woke them up from slumberand soon we will see a deployment of modest but functional equipment. Above all, because three of the semiconductor majors already have their SoCs ready or almost ready to compete with the Apple A18 Pro of the MacBook Neo. Qualcomm Snapdragon C. The first alternative is this chip with ARM architecture that just announced by Qualcomm and according to the firm, it will allow equipment to be offered with starting prices of $300. It is very likely that these proposals are too limited (and have no more than 4 GB of RAM), but also that there are versions with higher configurations. The Snapdragon C promises remarkable efficiency, and Qualcomm is an old acquaintance of Windows for ARM equipment. Intel Wildcat Lake. In April we saw how Intel showed its great commitment to conquer this new era of mid-range laptops. I did it with his family Wildcat Lake in which, for example, the new Intel Core 3 304 are integrated. The fundamental advantage of these chips is that of using the traditional x86-64 architecture, which until now has proven to be the best option for Windows computers due to its completely native support for the OS and its applications. Nvidia waits its turn. A lot has been spoken how the duopoly of Intel and AMD on Windows computers could have an expiration date. Qualcomm has not managed to erode that reality, but who may have an important asset is Nvidia, which is preparing the launch of its Arm chips. There has been talk for months that there will be not one, but two based on the GP10 chip which Nvidia jointly developed with MediaTek. The names that are mentioned in the leaks are N1 and N1X, and although the details are unknown, the expectations are notable and already start to leak also Lenovo models that will integrate the N1X. But Windows on ARM has never caught on. The doubts with Qualcomm and Nvidia’s proposals are not due to them, but rather to Microsoft and its Windows operating system. Its version for ARM chips has been available for years, but the teams that have taken advantage of these chips were limited by some software conflicts. I’d better stay with Intel and AMD. There are hardly any problems in that sense anymore, but the promise of the efficiency of ARM chips was not so striking when the prices of such equipment were high. In the end, it was more worthwhile for most users to bet on “traditional” chips from Intel and AMD, and Qualcomm’s proposals—the only ones that appeared on the market—never quite conquered the general public, not even when Copilot+ PCs appeared. Windows 11, by the way, He didn’t make it easy either. with your list of requirements. Specs don’t matter (that much). We already saw yesterday how the specifications of the Wilcat Lake chips are superior to those of the Apple A18 Pro of the MacBook Neobut that doesn’t mean much. Above all, because the MacBook Neo have proven to be laptops that offer a fantastic user experience, but at the moment computers with Intel chips have not been analyzed and their performance is unknown. These same doubts affect future devices with Qualcomm or Nvidia chips: they will have to demonstrate that the user experience is as good (or better) than that of the MacBook Neo, or else these manufacturers (and Microsoft) will have a serious problem. It’s good news. Whatever happens, Apple’s move has caused manufacturers to finally move and develop solutions to try to compete with the surprising team from Cupertino. If the MacBook Neo had not been launched, we would probably still be stuck in the mid-range Windows laptop segment, but this is going to liven things up and revive competition between manufacturers. We all win. In Xataka | “We arrived too soon, but we were right”: The MacBook Neo is everything Microsoft dreamed of with the disastrous Windows 8

If you wake up tired on a regular basis, your rest is fragmented. The good news is that science knows how to fix it

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When the alarm clock rings in the morning, many of us ask to stay five more minutes between the sheets. But sometimes these five minutes are not for convenience, but for necessity, since there are people who wake up as if you haven’t slept at all. And this is a problem, since waking up tired on a regular basis is not normal. The myth of hours. Sleeping eight hours seems the standard that we must follow to be able to rest well, as occurs with the mantra of take 10,000 steps a day to have good cardiovascular health. The problem is that there are many people who can sleep eight or more hours and feel in the morning as if they had not slept at all, and here science suggests that real rest is given to us sleep phases and how time is distributed in each of them, not in the global calculation. The distribution. Sleep is not a linear state, although it may seem that way to us. The reality is that while we are with our eyes closed, we are going through a complex cycle of fragile architecture that passes through light phasesdeep stages and the well-known REM phase where dreams occur. But here what interests us most is deep sleep, which is responsible for physical restoration and the immune system, so when this cycle is broken repeatedly during the night, which is what It is known as fragmented sleep.the direct impact the next day is a decrease in cognition and an increase in fatigue, regardless of the hours we have spent lying down. Sleep or fatigue. For some they may be similar terms, but the truth is that they are quite different, since, while drowsiness is the biological and overwhelming need to sleep, fatigue, on the other hand, is a lack of physical energy or mental motivation. If what you feel when you wake up is fatigue, the origin may transcend the pillow and there may be a medical cause such as anemia, hypothyroidism, depression, chronic stress or the side effects of certain drugs that may be behind this lack of vital energy. Two culprits. Among the medical conditions, there are two that stand out above the others. The first of them is the sleep apneawhich is undoubtedly the great invisible saboteur, since it causes breathing to stop and restart repeatedly throughout the night. These drops in oxygen cause micro-awakenings that the brain uses to survive and breathe again, which we are not aware of. The problem is that these shocks prevent deep sleep from being achieved and result in extreme fatigue. The other culprit is sustained insomnia, since, beyond the difficulty in falling asleep, insomnia also manifests itself with early awakenings or constant interruptions, greatly reducing the restorative nature of rest. It can be corrected. Once medical causes are ruled out, there are several tips that can be followed to have a better quality of sleep. The first of them is to stay away from screens before going to sleep, since if we are already close to falling asleep and our body is preparing for it, exposure to blue light and stimulating content can cause it to take longer to fall asleep. Another very important tip is for dinner, which should ideally be as light as possible so as not to feel very heavy all night and also keep it as far away from bedtime as possible. This is where British time has a clear advantage over ours, as it means you don’t go to sleep with dinner food still in your stomach. The environment matters. In addition to removing any television from the room where you are going to sleep, the comfort you have is also important. This involves having a suitable mattress and ensuring that the temperature of the room is not uncomfortable, since this will cause awakenings that will cause you to not finish resting. This is also added to the need to have as little noise as possible. What is done during the day It matters a lot to sleep, and here exercising several hours before bed can make you sleep much better. But in the diet you also have to be very methodical, since you have to limit caffeine in the afternoon or at night, and limit alcohol consumption which, although it seems to put us into a very deep sleep, the reality is that it makes it not at all restorative. Images | jcomp in Magnific In Xataka | There are people who sleep four hours a day and are still functional. It’s the closest thing we have to genetic “superheroes”

Influencers have made it fashionable to give yourself cramps in your vagus nerve to cure stress. Science has bad news

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After a marathon day, what if the report doesn’t arrive, feed the kids, walk the dog, go to that Pilates class… And your brain refuses to turn off. You open TikTok or Instagram looking for a distraction and, between dances and recipes, a influencer. Wear a minimalist design device around your neck or clipped to your ear. It promises that with the push of a button and a few small electrical pulses, your anxiety will disappear, you’ll sleep like a baby, and your “brain fog” will lift. they call it “the great reset of the nervous system”. For centuries, the vagus nerve has functioned in complete anatomical obscurity, but today it has achieved an almost mythical status in the wellness ecosystem. According to The New York Timesthere are billions of social media impressions about this nerve. Celebrities like Kelly Ripa and podcasters like Andrew Huberman They praise their virtues. “A lot of this is being driven by influencers saying, ‘Just do this to stimulate your vagus nerve, and all the problems in your life will be solved,’” explains Dr. Kevin Tracey, a neurosurgeon and president of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research. It sounds like science fiction, but forecasts suggest that the stimulation of this nerve will generate a billion-dollar industry by 2030. The inevitable question that arises is: can we really “hack” our stress with neck cramps, or are we facing the umpteenth expensive internet placebo? To understand the phenomenon, you must first understand the biology. As explained by the Cleveland Clinicthe vagus nerve (whose name comes from the Latin “wanderer”) is the tenth of the twelve cranial nerves and the longest of all. It arises in the brain stem and winds through the neck, chest, and abdomen, connecting the brain to the heart, lungs, and digestive system. It is the main highway of our parasympathetic nervous system, the one in charge of the “rest and digest” function. Basically, it is the body’s handbrake. When we get stressed, the sympathetic system (the “fight or flight” response) is activated; When the danger passes, the vagus nerve should come into action to calm the pulse and relax the body. But why are people obsessed with electrocuting him? According to the magazine Women’s Healthwe live in an epidemic of chronic stress. The flood of emails, traffic jams and daily pressures cause what is known as “vagal dysfunction.” Our body gets stuck in survival mode and loses the ability to calm down.. The promise of a quick fix has led to the emergence of commercial devices. When faced with the idea of ​​using home electricity, it is normal to wonder if this is dangerous. Generally, the physical answer is no. According to Dr. Michael Kilgard, director of the Texas Biomedical Device Center, interviewed by The New York Timesthe batteries in these commercial devices are too small to burn the skin. The most you feel is tingling. However, the real danger is psychological and medical. “The strangeness of the sensations is annoying enough that people feel like the devices are doing something,” Kilgard warns. In most cases, these gadgets are “probably little more than a placebo disguised as neuroscience“. The risk lies in false hope: patients who spend hundreds of euros on devices that do nothing, delaying medical treatments that have been proven to be effective. To understand the true impact of this false hope, it is vital to separate the wheat from the chaff and define where scientific rigor ends. The line between medicine and marketing wellness The science of Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) is real, fascinating and very complex, but it is light years away from what the marketers sell. influencers. There are real medical devices, but as a comprehensive review article published highlights in the scientific journal Comprehensive Physiologyinvasive stimulation (iVNS) “remains the gold standard with well-documented efficacy.” That is, we are talking about small devices similar to pacemakers that are surgically implanted under the skin of the chest, with cables threaded directly to the nerve. According to Cleveland Clinicthe FDA (the US drug agency) has approved these severe implants to treat cases of resistant epilepsy and severe clinical depression. Medical research continues to advance. A pivotal clinical trial published recently in Nature Medicine (the RESET-RA trial), demonstrated that an implanted neuromodulator system targeting the vagus nerve significantly reduced inflammation in patients with rheumatoid arthritis who were unresponsive to conventional medications. On the other hand, as a review points out from the magazine Exploratory Research and Hypothesis in Medicinethe use of non-invasive stimulators (in the ear or neck) is being intensively studied in clinical settings for rehabilitation after stroke or to slow cognitive decline. But what about the devices that anyone can buy online to “de-stress”? The experts are blunt. Dr. Kristl Vonck, neurologist at Ghent University, warns that consumer devices They are “lightly regulated and do not have to prove to the FDA that they actually work.” Many companies hide behind vague claims about “wellness” to avoid medical controls and use the language of real clinical trials as a mere marketing tactic. Furthermore, as a clinical researcher explains in The Conversationmanipulating the vagus nerve is not a panacea and does not work the same for everyone. Some people in clinical trials experience headaches, worsening migraines, or even a drop in mood when receiving stimulation. “Most diseases involve multiple biological and psychological factors, and no single nerve explains or solves all of them,” he says. Misinformation is not limited to devices; It also covers home diagnostics. The magazine Bustle recently echoed a viral trend on TikTok: the “three drinks” test. Content creators claimed that if you are unable to swallow saliva three times in a row and quickly, your vagus nerve is seriously deregulated due to chronic stress. The therapists had to intervene. Chloë Bean, an expert somatic trauma therapist, clarified that swallowing does involve this nerve, but not being able to do it three times in a row “does not automatically mean that your vagus nerve is stuck.” It … Read more

Spain has broken records in youth employment. The bad news is that one in three unemployed people is already over 50 years old

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Unemployment in Spain has been chaining months of good news. In April, the number of unemployed fell to 2,357,044 people, falling below 2.4 million for the first time since June 2008. The story, seen from afar, is that of a labor market that has finally left its worst unemployment figures behind. However, that story has a blind spot. When the data is broken down by age, the initial optimism gives way to reality: the labor market is improving, yes, but not for everyone equally. The workers over 45 years they continue to fall behind, and the latest data of the State Public Employment Service (SEPE) confirm it. Senior unemployment is close to 60% of the total. Of the slightly less than 2.35 million unemployed counted in April 2026 in Spain, 1,376,550 unemployed were 45 years old. This represents 58.4% of all registered unemployment. In other words, six out of ten unemployed They are over 45 years old. The bad news doesn’t end there. Within this group of people over 45, one in three unemployed people is already over 50 years old. To put into perspective what that percentage implies, we must compare it with what happened in the same month among those under 25 years of age. Youth unemployment has improved its percentages with a drop of 10.2%, with 19,284 fewer young people on the SEPE lists. If we return to the data for those over 45 years of age, we find that only 19,990 people in this age group they found a job, but in this case the decrease has only meant a drop of 1.43%. That is, given the progressive aging of the active population in Spain, those over 45 years of age are the largest group, so although the number of people who have found employment are very similar, the weight as a whole is very different. Less unemployed, but more chronic unemployment. At the end of the first quarter of 2026, the segment of those over 55 years of age was close to 4.93 million employed people. This represents 22% of all workers in the country, with 242,500 more people than a year before. These are figures that reflect that, on the one hand, the active population is increasingly older and, on the other hand, he is retiring later and remains in the labor market for longer. The second bad news for those over 45 years of age is that those who lose their job at that age have enormous difficulties in recovering it. In March 2026, those under 25 years of age signed 308,094 contracts, compared to the 367,204 signed by the group over 45, which doubles the percentage of the active population in number. That leaves us with one conclusion: senior hiring is proportionally tiny. He Labor Market Report for People over 45 years of age 2026 prepared by the SEPE, indicates that this group will exceed 11 million employed during 2025, more than 50% of the total number of workers. Even so, this massive presence in existing employment does not translate into the same rate of access to new opportunities. This is an indicator that the barriers to the reintegration of those over 45 into the labor market continue to be insurmountable. once you lose your job. Proof of this is that 53% of the 755,500 unemployed people over 50 have been looking for a job for more than a year without finding it. Youth unemployment breaks its own record. The scenario for those under 25 years of age is diametrically opposite. unemployment among those under 25 years of age It closed April 2026 at 24.53% with a total of 169,693 people, the lowest figure in the entire SEPE historical series. In year-on-year terms, it represents a drop of 14.2% compared to April of last year, when there were 197,674 young people unemployed. A decade ago, in 2015, the youth unemployment rate in Spain stood at 44.4%. This sustained decline has no equivalent in any other age group, which makes youth employment one of the great successes of the Spanish labor market in recent years. In aging it is a determining factor. As the data show, age defines large differences in the impact of unemployment between the different segments of the active population, but this differentiation also means that unemployment punishes some communities more than others, with a special impact on emptied Spainwhere young people have moved to the large industrial hubs. By province, Zamora stands out strikingly because more than 62% of its unemployed are over 45 years old. Pontevedra and La Coruña also present very aging unemployment structures. In Xataka | There is a man who has been working for the same company for 85 years. And he has no plans to retire. Image | Unsplash (Hasan Mrad)

Their other news also has a lot to say

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Android 17 It comes with a word written in large letters: Gemini. Google has taken advantage of its Android Show to show how it wants to integrate more artificial intelligence into the system, but the update is not just about that. Under that umbrella of Gemini Intelligence We also find more earthly news, the kind that may not shine as much in a presentation, but that can end up being much more noticeable on a day-to-day basis. Let’s get to know the most interesting ones, one by one. Quick Share and AirDrop One of the most practical changes in Android 17 has to do with something as simple, and as common, as sending a file to another person. Google had already taken a first step at the end of last year by making Quick Share work with AirDrop on some Pixel and Galaxybut now it wants that compatibility to stop being a rarity limited to a few models. Support will be expanded this year to Xiaomi, Honor and OnePlus, in addition to OPPO and Vivo, which were already announced. For phones that are not compatible, Google now adds an intermediate way: generate a QR code so that an iPhone user can scan it and receive the file directly in iCloud. Migration from iPhone Changing mobile phones always seems easy until messages, contacts, the eSIM and that home screen that each user has organized in their own way come into play. That’s where Android 17 wants to reduce a very well-known friction for those coming from an iPhone. Apple already added in iOS 26.3 the necessary support to transfer that data wirelessly to Androidbut the process still does not work because it requires a device compatible with Android 17. That piece will arrive this year and the rollout will begin with Pixel and Galaxy. Pause Point Pause Point is based on a gesture that we know all too well: opening an app almost without thinking about it. Google’s idea is not to block access, but to place a short pause before entering the applications that we have marked as distracting. Android 17 will show a ten-second timer, with suggestions to do breathing exercises or open a more productive app. It will also allow us to set how long we want to use that application in each session, and here comes the nuance: to deactivate Pause Point we will have to restart the mobile. Security Android 17 also reinforces a less showy, but very sensitive part of the system: security. Google is preparing several small improvements that target very specific scenarios, from calls that try to impersonate banks to apps with suspicious behavior. In the first case, protection will depend on collaboration with certain entities and having their banking application installed. Additionally, the system will improve the detection of malware by analyzing signals such as SMS forwarding or running in the background, while Chrome will check APK downloads for known threats. In case of theft, Google will also allow you to activate biometric protection remotely by marking the phone as lost. On-screen reactions Screen Reactions, which we can understand as reactions on the screen, looks directly at an increasingly common use of the mobile phone: recording ourselves while we comment on what appears on the screen. Android 17 will allow you to capture the video from the front camera and the content we are viewing at the same time, whether photos, videos, web pages or other elements. The person will appear cut out over that content, with a process that Google describes as something that can be done in a few touches. New emojis There are new developments that do not change how the mobile works, but they do change how we feel it every time we write. Emojis fall into that category. Google has redesigned Android’s 4,000 emojis to give them a slightly more three-dimensional look, with more depth and detail than the flatter, more cartoonish versions they replace. Custom widgets Here Android 17 returns to the territory of Gemini Intelligence, but with an idea that is quite easy to understand: create custom widgets without having to design them by hand. Create My Widget will allow you to build widgets for your home screen using natural language instructions. The company gives very specific examples, such as a meal planner that recommends protein-rich recipes, a weather widget designed for cyclists that prioritizes wind and rain, or a view of upcoming concerts in a nearby venue. rambler Rambler is another of Gemini Intelligence’s functions, but here the AI ​​is applied to a very specific situation: dictating a message and making the result not look like a raw transcription. This tool will work in real time to remove fillers, correct errors, and make text more concise. In a demo, Google showed how it could turn a spoken request into a shopping list and even understand a subsequent correction, such as ordering bananas and then discarding them. You will also be able to switch between multiple languages ​​within the same message. Task automation Another block of Gemini Intelligence looks at automations. Task Automation is already available for food delivery and transportation apps on the latest high-end models from Samsung and Google, and will now expand its support to more services. The company offers examples such as ordering groceries from a list saved in notes or preparing a travel itinerary from a photograph. Chrome auto browse will also arrive on Android at the end of June and Gemini in Autofill to complete forms more quickly. Material 3 Expressive Google also wants this intelligence to be noticeable in the interface itself, not just in specific functions. In the information it has shared about Gemini Intelligence, the company explains that the new visual language is based on Material 3 Expressive and that it not only seeks to be more attractive, but also more functional. The animations will have a purpose: to reduce distractions and help maintain focus on the task at hand. Availability The fine print is … Read more

It’s bad news for Google

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If the question is which AI makes better images, the general answer would be Google’s Nano Banana 2. And if we talk about preparing reports rigorously, we would probably say that Claude is the one who takes the lead. But in the AI ​​race, just as important as being the best is appearing to be the best. And above all, make money with your model. And if the arrival of artificial intelligence to the labor market has felt like an earthquake in the shape of more or less related layoffs, barriers to entry to junior profiles and have to work more Against all odds, the reality is that in recent months the scenario of which AI is the favorite of companies has taken a turn. Visual Capitalist has published a graph that monitors month by month from January 2023 to March 2026 what percentage of US companies pay for each provider’s models. To prepare it, they used anonymized spending data from more than 50,000 companies on the platform. ramptaking only paid subscriptions, so free use is left out. The result is a clear picture of consolidation: the market is shrinking towards very few players at breakneck speed. The graph marks a clear winner from the start: OpenAI is the most widespread payment AI provider among US companies, reaching a share of 35.2% in March of this year. Just behind is Anthropic with a share of 30.6%. You have to look down a lot to find the others: Google, xAI and the rest of the providers are below 5%. But the most important thing when looking at the photo is not who the leader is but the trend: Anthropic’s is a meteoric rise. What AI model are companies paying for? The market closes and It only has room for two: OpenAI and Anthropic together account for nearly 66% of the AI ​​business payment market in the United States, meaning that two out of every three dollars that companies spend on AI models go to these two companies. The rest share the crumbs. This type of concentration is the fish that bites its tail: leading companies have more customers, more usage data and more resources to improve their products, so their pursuers have it increasingly difficult, although it is true that Google has muscle for a while. What AI models are companies paying for? Visual Capitalist with Ramp data January 2025 is a key date in the graph: OpenAI was present in 16.8% of companies and Anthropic barely had 4.1%, slightly below Google’s 4.2% share. In 14 months Anthropic has multiplied its presence sevenfold, while OpenAI has doubled it and Google has 4.3%. The takeoff coincides with the launch of Claude Code in February 2025, its scheduling assistant that became general availability in May of that year, and accelerates with the arrival of Cowork in January 2026, its workflow platform. That Claude be a rocket The graph has several explanations. Yes, it’s a good AI model, but Anthropic has been able to build concrete tools around that model that companies use every day and that make it difficult to switch vendors. According to Sacra estimatesas of October 2025, Anthropic had more than 300,000 business clients that represented approximately 80% of its revenue, which shows that those at Amodei were clear about their strategy from the beginning: their niche is the company and not so much the ordinary user. Google has been oscillating between 3 and 4.5% in business share for three years, a marginal advance compared to the budding duopoly and the investment made. Elon Musk’s xAI has gone from zero to 1.9% in March 2026, which means appearing on the map, but still very far from the competition. But the case of Google is the one that truly baffles: It has cutting-edge technology, one of the most powerful cloud infrastructures in the world and access to an amount of data like never before, but it doesn’t get companies to open their wallets. Everything indicates that the problem is in how it has packaged its products: dispersed among too many brands and platforms, which creates real confusion for the business customer. In Xataka | If the question is which of the big tech companies is winning the AI ​​race, the answer is: none In Xataka | The US’s problem in the AI ​​and humanoid race is not China: it is all of Asia and it is greatly disadvantaged Cover | Visual Capitalist

The PC market is mortally wounded because of RAM. Excellent news for Apple’s plans

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If there was something missing from Apple’s catalog, it was undoubtedly the cheap MacBook. The non-Pro MacBook died a long time ago, the last attempt at a MacBook without a surname did not work and that role of “affordable” laptop fell into the Macbook Air. That laptop was still missing to stand up to the 800-900 euro market that Windows dominated at will and it turns out that Apple had the answer at home: the iPhone. Its processor, rather. Because that’s what he is macbook neo: the guts of a iPhone 16 Pro in a laptop chassis. In our analysis We lowered a bit what was being said about the MacBook neo, but pointing out that it was not only a very interesting device for a wide range of users, but a blow to the PC market. This is something that Apple does not want to miss and it seems that they have bent MacBook neo orders. However, they now face the “neo dilemma.” Stop or pay more, the neo dilemma To no one’s surprise, The MacBook neo worked like a charm in its first week. 699 euros for a perfect laptop for students, or for those of us who want a second computer, is an option that is difficult to reject. Because there are cheap laptops, but not with these battery features, system speed and, above all, build quality. For find something similar in Windows You have to go to more expensive models. In the midst of a memory crisis, furthermore, those 699 euros for the basic version seemed even more appealing. And it seems like Apple expected it to do well in the market, but maybe not so well. Tim Culpan is a former Bloomberg reporter, based in Taiwan and has a very interesting newsletter. Most importantly, you have some sources at the heart of the factories that produce components for these equipment. On your speaker, Blame point that Apple had planned a total shipment of between five and six million MacBook neo. Tim Cook described the reception of the laptop as “a demand through the roof”, showing himself very satisfied with its performance, and Apple was at a time when it had to take a decision to ensure the future of the device. The reason is that this laptop uses A18 Pro chips… different. They are the processors of the iPhone 16 Probut they were not suitable for the high standards of the iPhone. In this case, it implies that instead of six GPU cores, they had five. This happens with many other processors that are renamed or derived from more affordable products. They had a lot due to leftover shipments and they converted them into the guts of the laptop. These processors were practically “free” for Apple, but now Culpan points out that those in Cupertino had to decide whether to let the inventory run out or ask TSMC to manufacture a new batch. They have chosen the second. in a new publicationCulpan claims that Apple now aims to have a base of 10 million unitsdouble that initial forecast. But of course, ordering TSMC to manufacture a new batch of A18 Pro would mean having to pay a significantly higher price to build the laptop. This would greatly narrow the profit margin they have per unit sold. Although Apple to be TSMC’s second customerthe Taiwanese foundry does not work for free, obviously. A few days ago, Tim Cook pointed out to investors that Apple had been able to avoid the first wave of the RAM crisis due to the amount of stock accumulated, but that is over. After loading memory options both from Mac Studio as of Mac Miniit is evident that not even Apple is untouchable. Here, Culpan points to two scenarios. One is to eliminate the basic option of 256 GB of memory, which costs 699 euros, leaving only the 512 GB option for 799 euros. It would be the move they have already made with other products. The second letter is raise the price of both optionsbut giving some extra to “compensate”, such as extended free storage in the cloud for a period of time. We have already seen this strategy in the PC segment. The problem is that it doesn’t just increase the memory. Aluminum is also increasing and, no matter how little it increases, anything that increases the cost of a manufactured unit is something that will have an impact on the sales price. And there is another question. Since the MacBook neo was being manufactured with those A18 Pros that were not the best, when ordering a new batch you enter a scenario in which it is possible that the new MacBook neo are “better” than the ones we had until now. Simply because they have all six GPU cores intact. TSMC is not going to make them limited on purpose. Apple has the option of software limit one of the GPU coresbut in the end that is the least of the company’s problems at the moment. All components, including processors, have increased in price since the initial order a few months ago. If we are seeing something in the industry, it is that, in case it was not already clear, It is the user who ‘eats’ the problems either due to price increases or due to the impossibility of acquiring products because they simply do not exist. And something that we are also observing is that Apple is in that “neo dilemma” because they are seeing that the consequences of launching a product with an attractive price and a good value on a daily basis translates into they take it away like hot cakes. And all this within the context of the brutal component crisis that we are experiencing. In Xataka | Tim Cook optimized factories and processes, John Ternus builds things: what we can expect from the “new Apple”

50 years later, the Soviet fire of the “Gates to Hell” is going out. And it’s not good news

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In 1971, in the heart of the Karakum Desert, a group of Soviet engineers observed how the ground was sinking under his feet after a failed drilling. What came next was not an immediate evacuation or closure of the area, but rather an improvised decision that, according to who witnessed itseemed like a quick solution to a specific problem. That choice, taken almost as another technical procedure, would end up having consequences that no one at that time was able to anticipate. The eternal fire goes out. During more than half a centurythe Darvaza crater has burned relentlessly in the middle of the desert, becoming an almost permanent image of inexhaustible fire that seemed to defy any natural logic. However, the most recent data show a clear change: the intensity of the flames has fallen drastically in recent years, losing more than 7% of its strength. What for decades was a constant spectacle begins to weaken, altering the perception of a phenomenon that many considered eternal. The origin between legend and Soviet heritage. The birth of the crater is still shrouded in all kinds of stories and uncertainty, although the most widespread and feasible version points to the accident. during Soviet drilling in search of gas in the sixties or seventies. According to this theory, the ground collapsed when it reached a pocket of natural gas and the engineers they decided to set fire to the site to prevent the release of toxic gases, convinced that it would be extinguished in a short time. Thus, what was going to last weeks lasted for decadesfed by an underground network of gas that never stopped flowing, giving rise to one of the best-known anomalies of the energy legacy of the former Soviet Union. From remote curiosity to global icon. Over time, the crater went from being a geological oddity to becoming a almost mythical destiny for travelers and explorers, despite the difficulties in accessing Turkmenistan. Its image, a gigantic burning cavity in the middle of nowhere, has fueled so much adventure tourism like internal propagandato the point of being used by country leaders as a symbol of power or control. The experience of approaching the edge and feeling the direct heat of the fire has reinforced its reputation as a unique place in the world. The attempt at control and doubts about its decline. For its part, the Turkmen government has years trying to control emissions from the crater, and attributes part of the recent weakening to new drilling nearby plants intended to extract gas. However, the independent analyzes They suggest that the loss of intensity could have begun before these interventions, which opens the door to natural causes that are not yet fully understood. This nuance introduces a key and dangerous uncertainty: it is not clear whether the end of the phenomenon responds to human action or to a change in the geological system itself. The unexpected twist: less fire does not mean less problem. Yes, because although At first glance, the reduction of the flames could seem like good news from an environmental point of view, the reality it is more complex. Fire acts as a mechanism that transforms methane (much more powerful as a greenhouse gas) into carbon dioxide, reducing its impact in the short term. If the flames subside, more methane could be released directly into the atmospherewhich would make progressive shutdown a potentially bigger problem. A fragile balance that is still active. Despite its weakening, the crater remains activewith visible flames and constant emissions that remind us that the phenomenon has not disappeared. The huge amount of gas accumulated underground suggests that the fire will not be completely extinguished in the short term, maintaining that strange balance between natural spectacle, industrial legacy and environmental problem. Thus, half a century later, the symbol of eternal fire begins to change, although its disappearance does not necessarily imply a more favorable end for the rest of the planet. Image | Stefan Krasowski, Tormod Sandtorv In Xataka | China’s first pipeline network is 4,000 years old and something revolutionary: it was built without the need for kings or nobles In Xataka | About to close, this remote mine in the Polar Circle has found a 2 billion-year-old yellow diamond that weighs 158 carats

Mistral has a new AI model. The good news is that it is absolutely European; the bad one, which is absolutely mediocre

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The French startup Mistral has just launched Mistral Medium 3.5an open-weight AI model that is the great European exponent in an industry absolutely dominated by China—which competes directly with this type of projects—and by the US. And if this is the best they can do, it seems Europe has a problem. Mediocre. This is a “dense” model with 128 billion parameters and a context window of 256,000 tokens. While models with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture only activate a subset of the total parameters to achieve enviable efficiency and capacity, Mistral activates them all. That makes it much less efficient, but theoretically it should make its performance promising. And that’s the problem. Which it is not. Benchmarks. Pedro Domingos, professor of deep learning at the University of Washington, he expressed it very well: “Mainstream AI companies brag about how their model is much better in benchmarks. Soo Mistral brags about how their model is much worse.” It is true that the models with which it is compared are larger in total number of parameters, but as we will see later, even taking that into account, they are cheaper and theoretically more efficient thanks to the use of that MoE architecture in many of them. The model, however, unifies the previous catalog and follows the market trend of being able to establish the desired level of reasoning (reasoning_effort) as a parameter. Bad results. And he is somewhat right: Mistral does not seem to have problems showing the results of various benchmarks in which it performs poorly, but it also performs poorly with models that are by no means the most recent or powerful on the market. Thus, it is compared with Claude Sonnet 4.5/4.6, with Kimi K2.5, with GLM-5.1 or with Qwen 3.5 397B. In almost all cases (except GLM 5.1) there are already more recent and powerful versions of all of them. Not so far from local models. In fact Medium 3.5 scored 77.6% in SWE-Bench Verified, a programming test in which Qwen3.6-27b It reaches 72.4% with a fundamental difference: you can run it “for free” (with the appropriate hardware, and you paying the electricity bill) with a relatively affordable machine. More expensive (and somewhat more restrictive). If we use it via API, Mistral Medium 3.5 costs $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.5 per million output tokens. GLM-5.1 costs 1.4/4.4 respectively, and Kimi K2.5 costs 0.5/2.8 respectively. Its recent successor, Kimi K2.6, costs 0.95/4, and it is significantly better than Mistral being cheaper. There is a curious fact: Mistral uses a “modified MIT license” instead of the traditional Apache 2.0, and indicates that this model can be used commercially or non-commercially except for “high-income” companies. Chasing Anthropic. In addition to the model itself, the company has presented the so-called remote scheduling agents using Mistral Vibe CLI to, for example, send pull requests to GitHub in an automated way. It also has the so-called “Work Mode” in LeChat, allowing multi-step tasks to be managed autonomously. These are tools clearly intended to strengthen Mistral’s role as a base for scheduling agents, which is the path that has worked fantastically for Anthropic. Your advantage: being European. The only great strength of this model is that it has been developed by a European startup, and that gives it clear visibility at a time when many EU countries they talk about digital sovereignty. It is the only Western model that seems to want to compete with China in the field of open weight models, which is good news, but the truth is that in terms of performance it does not seem that the Mistral Medium 3.5 is going to perform competitively. The geopolitical security network. That, together with the fact that it costs more than its competitors, makes the decision to use it difficult unless for those who prioritize clearly that European origin. That is Mistral’s ace in the hole, and they are taking advantage of perfectly. The company has recently obtained financing to create data centers in Europe, and is nourished and fed by this new obsession with minimize dependency of North American Big Tech. In Xataka | The CEO of Mistral sends a message to Europe: the end of being the technological vassal of the United States

While the news says that it is dying between solar panels and expropriations, the data says the opposite

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Solar panels that destroy olive trees, massive expropriations in Jaén, warnings that Spain will have to import oil… If we pay attention to the last few months of news about the world of olives, the conclusions are clear: these are bad times for the olive grove. And yet, the data does not confirm this. In fact, as they point out from Datadistathe surface area of ​​this crop has not stopped growing in the last 10 years. The olive grove does not stop growing. With the only exception of the small decline in 2022 (0.08% already recovered in 2023), the hectares of olive groves have grown every year. However, that does not mean that there is no problem. Almost the opposite. The olive grove grows, but it does so in a profoundly unequal way: irrigated land gains ground over dry land, the super-intensive olive tree in a hedge extends over land previously dedicated to cereal or cotton, and investment funds are concentrated in areas with more water. In this sense, the story is not about the disappearance of the olive tree. It’s about changing so much and so fast that it will soon be unrecognizable. What the data says. Apparently, the data is clear. According to provisional data from the Survey on Crop Areas and Yields (ESYRCE) 2025 From the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAPA), the olive grove area in Spain reached 2,873,396 hectares, 1.63% more than in 2024 and 5% more than in 2015. It’s just that if we look closely, that data tells a curious (and sometimes counterintuitive) story. For example: the olive tree is already the largest irrigated area in the country. And why does this change occur? Above all, because the irrigated olive grove is safer than the dry one. If it were possible, the entire Spanish olive grove would switch to irrigation regime overnight. Therefore, the interesting thing is to stop and think about why the accelerated change is occurring now. According to a February 2026 report from Datadistathe explanation has a first and last name: investment funds. In the last decade, these funds have gone from 45 to 1000, investment in “Iberian agribusiness” has tripled and this is converting many hectares into super-intensive olive trees (and abandoning the traditional one). And the situation feeds on itself. The growth of the super-intensive irrigated olive grove cushions the volatility of supply and, therefore, contains price spikes. That is, the sector becomes more attractive to investors. This is precisely what ensures the future of olive oil. Even if it is at the cost of changing it completely. Image | Vasilis Caravitis In Xataka | The very high prices of olive oil are just one symptom. The real problem is a sector on the way to disaster

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