Low cost MacBook 💻, Google AI data centers 🛰️, inside xAI 🤖

Apple is developing an entry-level budget Mac designed for students, businesses, and casual users. The low-cost laptop is currently in active testing ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR 2025-11-05 Goodbye low test coverage and slow QA cycles (Sponsor) Bugs sneak out when less than 80% of user flows are tested before shipping. However, getting that kind of coverage (and staying there) is hard and pricey for any team. QA Wolf's AI-native solution provides high-volume, high-speed test coverage for web and mobile apps, reducing your organization's QA cycle to minutes.  They can get you: 80% automated E2E test coverage in weeks—not years Unlimited parallel test runs 24-hour maintenance and on-demand test creation Zero flakes, guaranteed The benefit? No more manual E2E testing. No more slow QA cycles. No more bugs reaching production. With QA Wolf, Drata's team of engineers achieved 4x more test cases and 86% faster QA cycles. Schedule a demo to learn more 📱 Big Tech & Startups Apple Prepares to Enter Low-Cost Laptop Market for First Time (5 minute read) Apple is developing an entry-level budget Mac designed for students, businesses, and casual users. The low-cost laptop is currently in active testing at Apple and in early production with overseas suppliers. It will be priced well under $1,000. Apple plans to launch it in the first half of next year. The move is a strategic shift for Apple, which has previously vowed not to chase market share with lower-end offerings. Tesla Is Obsessed With Musk's Pay Package. Musk Is Obsessed With AI (14 minute read) Elon Musk spent most of his time at xAI after he left DOGE in May, even holding meetings for Tesla employees at xAI's offices. Musk has balanced his responsibilities between several fast-growing companies for years, but the potential of AI has led him to spend much more of his time at xAI. Tesla will soon announce preliminary results on a giant pay package designed to ensure that Musk focuses on Tesla for years to come. The package would increase his stake in Tesla over a decade from 15% to around 25% if he hits ambitious goals. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology Meet Project Suncatcher, Google's plan to put AI data centers in space (5 minute read) The cost of electricity on Earth is a problem for large data centers. Google plans to put data centers in space in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous low-earth orbit to ensure they get almost constant sunlight exposure. It will require solar panels that are up to eight times more efficient to get the job done. The project will only be successful if Google's TPUs can run for at least five years. Google plans to launch a pair of prototype satellites by early 2027. Amazon Equips Next Underwater Cable With 'Robust Armoring' to Prevent Cuts (4 minute read) Amazon is currently laying a new subsea cable across the ocean floor that will connect the US and Europe. It should be up and running in 2028. Dubbed Fastnet, the state-of-the-art fiber-optic cable system will be able to transport over 320 terabits per second. Amazon is investing heavily in the burial process to prevent Fastnet from being cut or damaged. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science Run open models at production scale (Sponsor) Meet Nebius Token Factory,the enterprise platform for running open-source models in production. Deploy Qwen, GPT OSS, Kimi, DeepSeek, Llama, and much more on dedicated endpoints with 99.9% uptime, zero data retention, and cost-efficient autoscaling. Optimize, fine-tune, and serve faster than ever. 👉 Explore Token Factory 🔗 Learn more pg_lake (GitHub Repo) pg_lake integrates Iceberg and data lake files into Postgres, transforming Postgres into a stand-alone lakehouse system that supports transactions and fast queries on Iceberg tables. It can create and modify Iceberg tables directly from PostgreSQL, and directly work with raw data files in object stores like S3. pg_lake can be set up using Docker for an easy, ready-to-run test environment. High-Performance Syntax Highlighting with CSS Highlights API (8 minute read) The CSS Custom Highlight API lets developers style arbitrary text ranges without modifying the DOM structure. Developers just have to define 'Range' objects that point to a specific character position in text nodes, group them by style type, and register them with the browser's highlight registry. The API is supported in all modern browsers. This post provides an example implementation of syntax highlighting using the CSS Highlights API. 🎁 Miscellaneous Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury (18 minute read) Huge bursts of productivity concentrated in one industry are great because they create a huge number of new jobs and new opportunities, but this has an interesting spillover effect: the more jobs and opportunities created by the productivity boom, the more wages increase in other industries. These industries still have to compete in the same labor market. As the AI supercycle plays out, some goods and services will become orders of magnitude cheaper, while others will become more expensive - but we'll consume more of them anyway. This effect will even be seen within a single job - some work will see 10x throughput at 10x the quality, while other work, which must be done by humans, will command a wildly high wage. How I use AI (15 minute read) AI has transformed how some developers work. We are just starting to see what the technology can achieve. We still haven't fully explored what current models can do. There are some concerning possibilities with the future of the technology, but for now, it is still in its 'wondrous' stage. ⚡ Quick Links Chat with a deepfake of your boss (Sponsor) Adaptive Security—backed by OpenAI and a16z—stops AI powered social engineering through deepfake simulations, training, and risk scoring. Want to chat with a custom interactive deepfake of your boss? Book a demo Architectural debt is not just technical debt (7 minute read) Architectural debt on business and strategy layers can do more damage than architectural debt on technical layers. How Brussels Broke the Apple Experience (10 minute read) EU tech regulations have fractured the once-unified, global Apple experience. Deploying to Amazon's cloud is a pain in the AWS younger devs won't tolerate (6 minute read) Younger developers will build on platforms that don't make them prove their worth through suffering. On AI Slop vs OSS Security (23 minute read) What matters in vulnerability reports is who submits them, what their incentives are, and whether they have actually verified their claims. In a stunning comeback, Jared Isaacman is renominated to lead NASA (4 minute read) The Senate still needs to vote to confirm Isaacman as NASA administrator before the end of the calendar year, otherwise, he will have to resubmit conflict-of-interest paperwork. Deepnote (GitHub Repo) Deepnote is a drop-in replacement for Jupyter that can scale to Deepnote cloud for real-time collaboration, Deepnote agent, and deployable data apps. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of tech executives, decision-makers and engineers, you may want to advertise with us. 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