☕️ Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

🍎 Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down

💰 Amazon invests up to $25B in Anthropic

⚖️ California accuses Amazon of fixing prices with major retailers

🤖 Google builds elite team to rival Anthropic coding

✋ GitHub halts new Copilot signups amid soaring usage and rising costs

✂️ Apple reportedly cuts iPhone 18 manufacturing costs

Plus: 🎁 12 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 3 papers.

🍎 Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down LINK

Apple announced that Tim Cook will step down as CEO on September 1, 2026, moving into the role of executive chairman while John Ternus, the current senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, takes over.

Cook led Apple from a $350 billion market cap to $4 trillion since 2011, overseeing new product lines like Apple Watch, AirPods, and Apple Vision Pro, plus the shift to Apple-designed silicon.

Ternus joined Apple in 2001 and helped shape hardware across iPhone, Mac, iPad, and AirPods, including recent launches like the MacBook Neo, the iPhone Air, and 3-D printed titanium in Apple Watch Ultra 3.

💰 Amazon invests up to $25B in Anthropic LINK

Amazon has agreed to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic on top of a previous $8 billion, while Anthropic committed to spending over $100 billion on AWS technologies over the next decade.

The deal includes $5 billion now at Anthropic's $380 billion valuation, with up to $20 billion more tied to commercial milestones, and secures 5 gigawatts of capacity for Claude models.

Anthropic said growing enterprise, developer, and consumer demand for Claude has caused "inevitable strain" on its infrastructure, and the expanded Amazon partnership will quickly increase its available capacity.

⚖️ California accuses Amazon of fixing prices with major retailers LINK

California's attorney general has accused Amazon of price fixing by pressuring brands like Levi's and Hanes to push competing retailers to raise prices on certain products, according to a newly unsealed court filing.

The state originally sued Amazon in San Francisco Superior Court in 2022, claiming the company punished sellers on its marketplace for offering lower prices on other websites, harming competition overall.

A 16-page filing shows Amazon asked brands to intervene when it spotted a competitor's lower price or was losing money on an item, and prices on rival sites went up as a result.

🤖 Google builds elite team to rival Anthropic coding LINK

Google DeepMind has formed a specialized team led by engineer Sebastian Borgeaud to improve Gemini's programming skills, partly because Google researchers believe Anthropic's coding tools are currently better.

Co-founder Sergey Brin wrote in an internal memo that Google must "urgently bridge the gap in agentic execution," and he required every Gemini engineer to use internal agents for complex tasks.

Google is training models on its internal codebase, which differs significantly from public code, meaning those models can't be released but could help speed up development and improve future products.

✋ GitHub halts new Copilot signups amid soaring usage and rising costs LINK

GitHub is pausing new sign-ups for Copilot Pro, Pro+, and Student plans because rising costs from intensive agentic workflows have made the current pricing unsustainable for the company.

Opus models are no longer available on the standard Pro plan, and developers who want Claude Opus 4.7 must now pay for Pro+, while Opus 4.5 and 4.6 are being removed entirely.

Usage limits are getting tightened with session caps and weekly token ceilings, and hitting the weekly limit downgrades users to "Auto model selection" until the period resets.

✂️ Apple reportedly cuts iPhone 18 manufacturing costs LINK

Apple is reportedly planning to cut manufacturing costs on the standard iPhone 18 by downgrading certain components and processes to bring it closer to the cheaper iPhone 18e.

The changes span manufacturing processes, chips, memory, and other components, which could create a bigger gap between the regular iPhone lineup and the more premium Pro models.

Apple may also split its launch schedule, releasing Pro models and the foldable iPhone Ultra in September 2026 while pushing the iPhone 18 and iPhone 18e to spring 2027.

Other news you might like

• Musk bought $1.4 billion SpaceX shares last year, The Information reportsLINK

• WhatsApp is testing a premium subscription, put it is mainly cosmeticLINK

• Jeff Bezos' AI lab nears $38 billion valuation in funding deal, FT reportsLINK

• UK regulator investigates Telegram over child sexual abuse concernsLINK

• Yelp’s updated AI assistant can answer questions and book a restaurant or service in one conversationLINK

• OpenAI's Codex now watches your screen to remember what you're working onLINK

• Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people wantLINK

• Chipmakers on track to meet only 60% of AI memory demand by 2027LINK

• Tim Cook’s Impeccable TimingLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Dageno AI: monitors how AI models represent your brand and automates corrections to improve visibility in AI-generated search responses.LINK

Spectrum: open-source framework letting your AI agents communicate across iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Instagram, and other messaging platforms simultaneously.LINK

Magic Layers by Canva: converts flat PNG or JPG images into editable, layered designs where text, objects, and colors can be individually modified without starting over.LINK

RapidNative: turns plain English descriptions, sketches, or Figma files into fullstack apps with database, auth, storage, and real-time features included.LINK

Katzilla: unified API querying 250k+ government datasets across 30+ agencies, returning structured JSON with citations for reliable AI agent ingestion and change tracking.LINK

Pegkits: a Mac clipboard manager that stores text, links, and images with built-in AI actions for translating, rewriting, and fixing grammar instantly.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

LeWorldModel trains a stable world model directly from raw pixels using just two loss terms, runs 48x faster than foundation-model alternatives, and can reliably spot physically impossible events.LINK

Large language models failed to identify retracted scientific papers in over 80% of cases, but rarely wrongly flagged valid studies, showing they cannot reliably spot bad research without internet access.LINK

Agentic Context Engineering is a new framework that helps AI systems continuously improve their own instructions, boosting agent performance by 10.6% and finance reasoning by 8.6%, without retraining the underlying model.LINK

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