This week on the podcast:

Apple has announced new accessibility features coming to iOS, Google has announced … a lot of things… at IO, and Federico has announced Shortcuts Playground. (Myke and Stephen don’t have anything to announce.)

CNBC is breaking the prospectus down, but a few things jumped out at me right away.

First, this bit from Lora Kolodny:

The company breaks down its business into three units: Space, Connectivity and AI. Connectivity includes the Starlink satellite internet service, which is sold directly to consumers, as well as to government and military agencies.

According to the filing, Starlink generated $3.26 billion in revenue in the latest quarter, accounting for 69% of the total. The company now boasts about 10.3 million Starlink subscribers.

Connectivity is also the only profitable part of the company. The space business lost $619 million in the quarter on an operating basis, and AI unit lost $2.5 billion. Connectivity recorded a profit of $1.19 billion.

Ashley Capoot has more about how Memphis plays a part in this:

Anthropic will pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 as part of the compute deal the companies announced earlier this month, according to the filing.

The AI company will use all of the compute capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, the companies announced previously. Anthropic will get access to more than 300 megawatts of compute capacity, and also “expressed interest” in working with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of capacity in space.

Depending on how the IPO goes, the combined enterprise could be worth trillions of dollars, even though it lost a casual $4.9 billion last year. Those are not even the wildest numbers in the paperwork, as spotted by Thomas Ricker and Emma Roth:

It’s also telling them that SpaceX has “identified the largest actionable total addressable market (TAM) in human history,” potentially worth $28.5 trillion, with $370 billion from space, $1.6 trillion in connectivity with Starlink Broadband and Starlink Mobile, and $26.5 trillion in AI, which includes AI infrastructure, subscriptions, advertising, and $22.7 trillion in enterprise applications.

Asa Fitch at the WSJ:

The number isn’t too far off from the U.S.’s gross domestic product last year and would be about a quarter of 2025 global GDP.

Maybe after going public — as soon as next month — SpaceX could afford to restart that water treatment plant that xAI promised to build.

The folks behind the Pocket 8086 are back with a new machine:

The BOOK II is a portable Apple II (Plus) compatible computer, redesigned using standard TTL chips and equipped with ROMs from early Apple II compatibles or clones. Beyond its core Apple II functionality, it integrates several built-in enhancements: an 80-column video card, a 16KB Language Card, a Z80 Softcard, a printer controller, and a Disk II compatible controller.

As a portable computer, the BOOK II features a built-in lithium battery, an RGB LCD, and a low-profile mechanical keyboard. It supports original Apple Disk II floppy drives as well as floppy drive emulators.

Oh mama:

The feature list is pretty great:

• CPU: 6502
• SRAM: 48KB (+16KB)
• Z80 Softcard
• 80 Column Video Card
• 16KB Language Card RAM
• Disk II controller
• Printer Interface
• RGB Display
• Mechanical keyboard
• Lithium battery (4x18650)
• Expansion Bus Support (Slot 5)

At $550, this is an expensive little machine, but one that I very much want.

Yesterday, I joined Jason on Upgrade to talk old Macs, binned chips, and Apple AI. Then Jason discusses the darkest part of Steve Jobs’s career with the author of " Steve Jobs In Exile", Geoffrey Cain.

My copy of the book arrives today and I couldn’t be more excited to read it.

This week on the podcast, Gurman has details on iOS 27, Google has new laptops, and Myke has an obligation to skip the third topic.

Joe Wilkins, writing at Futurism:

In the AI world, there are what the tech scholar Kate Crawford has called the “Great Houses of AI.” These are Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta — giant tech monopolies which happen to also be four of the six top US corporations by market value.

Then there are the lesser houses, the lower fiefdoms squabbling over the crumbs that fall from the big kids’ table. This is where we find Elon Musk’s xAI. Though the world’s richest man has pumped billions of dollars into his pet AI project, it seems all the money in the world can’t buy customers — or even respect, for that matter.

According to the Wall Street Journal, new data shows the growth of xAI’s two-year old chatbot, Grok, has stagnated. Though Musk succeeded in giving Grok a temporary boost after integrating the thing into his social media site X, formerly Twitter, new monthly downloads have fallen from over 20 million in January to just 8.3 million in April.

Here’s a bit from that WSJ piece, written by Georgia Wells:

“In a survey of more than 260,000 U.S. consumers and workers who use AI, the percent of respondents who said they paid for Grok remained mostly flat at 0.174% in the second quarter of 2026 versus 0.173% a year ago, according to research firm Recon Analytics. More than 6% of respondents said they paid for ChatGPT.”

“OpenAl is Coke, Anthropic is Pepsi and Grok is RC Cola,” said Ben Pouladian, an engineer and tech investor based in Los Angeles. “I never really saw people drinking it.”

Pouladian, as the WSJ reports, “drives a Tesla and is active on X.”

The bubble may yet burst, but even if it doesn’t fully pop, I think these smaller companies are clearly in trouble. Between content and environmental issues, I’m all for xAI going first. Other companies could take over its remaining property in Memphis, hopefully being better stewards of the natural resources that make the Mid-South such a desirable location for data centers.

This is exactly why xAI was merged into SpaceX. The former may be bleeding money and losing users, but SpaceX generates enough cash that a lot of the bad can get washed away.

Tim De Chant, TechCrunch:

Elon Musk’s xAI is running nearly 50 natural gas turbines at its Mississippi data center, power plants that the state is currently not regulating thanks to a loophole.

The power plants are considered “mobile” by the state of Mississippi because they are sitting on flatbed trailers, thus allowing them to dodge to air pollution regulations for one year. The NAACP, which has filed a lawsuit on behalf of residents in the area, says the unchecked emissions from the turbines is worsening air quality in an already polluted region. This week, it asked the court for an injunction against xAI.

These turbines power xAI’s second data center in the Memphis area. The first was recently leased to Anthropic.

Currently, xAI has a permit for 15 turbines at the site, but as Alex Rozier writes, the company is running a lot more than that:

XAI now has 46 “temporary-mobile” turbines at its Mississippi facility, according to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, up from 18 turbines when it first arrived last year.

I don’t keep text-based social media apps installed on my phone, but if I did, this would be this one I’d use for Mastodon and Bluesky.

Logan Kugler, writing in early April:

The computer system aboard the current Artemis II lunar space mission is from a different world that the one from the Apollo era. Apollo astronauts navigated to the lunar surface using a computer with a 1-MHz processor and roughly 4 kilobytes of erasable memory, supported by a larger store of fixed “rope” memory. While it was a marvel of 1960s engineering, the Apollo Guidance Computer’s functional scope was focused and not in the control loop for every system. Critical environmental and power controls were managed through manual or electromechanical means, such as switches and relays.

This month’s Artemis II mission carrying a crew of four around the Moon for the first time in over 50 years is supported by one of the most fault-tolerant computer system built for spaceflight. Unlike Apollo, the Orion capsule’s computing architecture manages nearly all of the vessel’s safety-critical functions, from life support to communication routing.

When a mission is 250,000 miles from Earth, failure is unrecoverable. There are no runways for emergency landings and no technicians to swap out a fried motherboard. Every subsystem must be designed to survive cosmic-ray bit flips, radiation-induced latch-ups, and hardware faults without a single second of downtime.

I love stories about computers in space.

With today’s update to its Developer app, Apple released a new sticker of Clarus the Dogcow. I am all for that, but seeing her walk is weird.

As far as I know, this is the first time the Dogcow has even been shown with more than two legs. This feels wrong.