512 Pixels

Garmin has joined the likes of Fitbit and Whoop, and is now offering a screen-free fitness tracker, named the Cirqa.

Andrew Liszewski at The Verge:

The smart band can track more than 80 different activities such as running or yoga that are selectable through the accompanying Garmin Connect app or using its single side button as a shortcut to your favorite. Through the app, you can monitor your training progress including the effectiveness of a workout and whether your body is ready for your next training session or would benefit more from a rest day.

In addition to workouts, the $199 band can track heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, sleep, and menstrual cycles via skin temperature. Notably, the Garmin Cirqa doesn’t require a subscription. Orders open on July 24.

If you use Grok to make CSAM,
xAI will sue you.

(There are no good guys in this story.)

This week on the show:

Myke has a new laptop, Federico has thoughts on Siri AI, and Stephen has been graded. Also: Apple vs. OpenAI and a big day for Mario fans with feet.

Google is building an AI data center in West Memphis, Arkansas, across the Mississippi River from Memphis. (I know, it’s a very original city name.) Google joins SpaceXAI and others in the Mid-South for cheap land and abundant water, but it faces the same core challenges — mainly, how to feed its huge collection of power-hungry hardware.

When the project was announced, details about power generation were sparse. Today, we know a bit more. Will Conkling and Christopher Scott at Google:

Today, alongside local leaders, community members, and our partners at Cypress Creek Energy, we broke ground on what will be the largest solar facility in the United States — Steel River Energy Center in Mississippi County, Arkansas. While this landmark facility will be the largest solar and storage project across Google’s global portfolio to date, this historic milestone belongs first and foremost to the community in Mississippi County. The Steel River Energy Center will reinvest local workforce talent and industrial innovation right back into the state’s economy, creating lasting clean energy and economic benefits.

By working closely with local leaders and residents, we are ensuring that our growth directly supports our neighbors and strengthens the grid that powers Arkansas’ industrial steel manufacturing,¹ data centers and households alike.

Ground was broken this week on the solar site, complete with blue shovels:

Steve Dent at Engadget has more:

Google has struck a deal to purchase a major solar project’s entire electrical output to offset its fossil fuel emissions, The Financial Times reports. The search giant will take 100 percent of the initial output from Steel River Energy Center in Arkansas once it comes online in 2029, amounting to 1.6 gigawatts (GW) of solar power and 2GW of battery storage — enough to power 315,000 homes. 

Google will pay a fixed cost for the electricity from the solar plant, but won’t use it directly. Instead, it will draw from the grid powered by a mix of coal, nuclear, renewables and natural gas, along with its own on-site power (typically gas turbines and engines).

Energy from the Steel River Energy Center solar project will form part of that grid mix. Once completed, the project will supply 2.45GW of solar power and 2.9GWh of battery energy storage. The first two phases (out of three) received $3.5 billion in financing and prioritized US-manufactured steel and solar panels.

The final mix of power generation isn’t known, but I am glad to see Google investing in such a large renewable energy source to help offset its footprint in the region. Hopefully, this means Google will be much less reliant on gas turbines for power than its neighbors, but time will tell.

This news comes on the same day that folks in 13 states and the District of Columbia are seeing their electricity rates increase due to data center usage, as Ivan Penn reports:

PJM, the nation’s largest electrical grid operator, on Tuesday released results of an electricity auction that would add $6.3 billion in costs to the bills of millions of households and businesses within the next three years, an increase driven by the power demands of data centers.

[…]

In a statement, PJM said data centers were increasing electricity demand throughout the region.

“These auction results show that demand for electricity continues to grow faster than electricity supply,” David Mills, president and chief executive at PJM, said in an announcement of the auction results. “We are working with government and industry leaders on multiple fronts to restore that balance by bringing on new generation as fast as possible and managing the growth of new load on the grid.”

Alexandria Mansfield, writing for the Jacksonville Florida Times-Union, via Yahoo Finance:

Elon Musk has acquired Jacksonville-based APR Energy, according to a Federal Trade Commission filing that surfaced the deal weeks after it closed with no public statement from either side.

The FTC’s early termination notice, transaction number 20261350 and dated May 14, lists Elon Musk as the acquiring party and CF APR Super Holdings LLC as the acquired party, with New APR Energy, LLC listed as the acquired entity.

It also shows the transaction was granted early termination, meaning no further antitrust review was required before the deal could close.

No terms were disclosed in the FTC notice itself, but the price tag came into focus through a separate filing.

That separate filing comes from Duos Technologies Group Inc, which recently disclosed a $50 million sales price for its 5% equity stake in APR Energy.

That puts the deal at roughly $1 billion. As far as I can tell, APR Energy has not confirmed its change in ownership.

That is a bunch of money, so what is APR Energy? Let’s turn to its website, which says:

You want reliable power today – we have the assets available to meet your needs, including one of the world’s largest mobile gas turbine fleets, comprehensive and customizable balance of plant equipment, and a team of experts ready to handle your build from end to end.

From emergency power for compromised utilities to bridging-to-permanent power for data centers, we’re ready to rapidly deploy the turnkey power solution you need, when you need it, and to your specifications.

Bridging is the phase in which SpaceXAI’s data centers are currently operating. The grid can’t supply the sites with all the power they need, so these turbines are installed to keep things running. In the case of SpaceXAI’s second site in Memphis, it’s hard to see how the grid could supply enough power any time soon, if ever.

As you can see in these photos, they are built on large trailers and are therefore considered mobile.

This is the same technology at the heart of many debates — and lawsuits — concerning SpaceXAI’s presence in Memphis, as Fred Lambert sums up at Electrek:

APR doesn’t run a traditional power plant. It deploys trailer-mounted gas turbines and reciprocating diesel and natural gas engines that can reach full power in under 10 minutes and be installed in days rather than the years it takes to permit and build a fixed plant. The fuel is natural gas and diesel. This is fossil-fuel combustion, packaged to move.

It’s the same technology Musk has already been running — controversially — to keep Grok online.

At various times over the last couple of years, SpaceXAI has been accused of running more gas turbines than allowed. The company points out that they are mobile and thus temporary, claiming they are exempt from a bunch of pesky environmental regulations.

That was shot down by the EPA back in January, but the company has continued to rely on a fleet of turbines to keep its data centers¹ running.

It is unclear whether any of APR’s hardware is in use by SpaceXAI. The company is not listed on the company’s projects page, and the turbine models called out in a 2025 report by Samuel Hardiman don’t seem to line up with the GE TM2500 and Mitsubishi FT8 turbines listed on APR’s website.²

Regardless of what companies are currently on the ground, this is a clear sign that Musk and SpaceXAI continue to view gas turbines as an acceptable means of powering AI data centers.

Mark Gurman, writing at Bloomberg:

OpenAI’s much-anticipated push into consumer devices is slated to begin with a mobile, screen-free smart speaker designed to be a new type of home computer for the AI era, according to people familiar with the matter.

The product — still under development — is meant to serve as a humanlike AI companion that lives in the home, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the project hasn’t been announced. It will help control smart-home appliances, play media, answer questions, respond to messages and tap into the range of capabilities offered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, they said.

Mark Gurman, writing on social media:

Amid Apple’s trade secret lawsuit, the iPhone maker has nothing like it on the market.

A smart speaker. Why did it have to be smart speakers?

macOS Golden Gate and iOS/iPadOS/watchOS 27 are out in Public Beta. Jason Snell and Dan Moren have more over on Six Colors. At MacStories, Jonathan Reed wrote up watchOS, and Devon Dundee took on visionOS.

This week on the podcast:

Federico is at the beach, Myke questions his iPhone’s future, and Stephen wears watches. Then: a whole stack of Q&A items.

Apple, in a new support document:

In macOS 28 and later, the Mac OS Extended file system format will be supported only for volumes (disks and other storage devices) that aren’t encrypted. For future macOS compatibility, either decrypt or reformat any encrypted Mac OS Extended volumes.

macOS 28 and later will continue to support unencrypted volumes that use Mac OS Extended format. Mac OS Extended is also known as HFS Plus (or HFS+).

Time goes marching on.

When the first Golden Gate beta shipped, the most obvious wallpaper was missing. With Developer Beta 3 today, Apple has made that right, with this beauty joining the earlier wallpaper:

Sean Malseed over at Action Retro has shipped something pretty cool: a Markdown editor for 68k Macs named ArtfulType:

A distraction-free Markdown writing app for classic 68k Macintosh computers (System 6/7), built to run from a BlueSCSI device on a Mac Plus or similar compact Mac.

He has a video walking through it, including how it was built (with the help of Claude Code) and how you can move data on and off older machines:

Jeff Geerling is living the dream: