Apple Pro and Tell, Genie 4, The Gurmanator Joins | Mark Gurman, Zach Rash, Ben Liu, Amiram Shachar, Jasper Zhang

Apple Launches Touchscreen MacBook Pro With OLED Display

Funding and deals

• Upwind. The cloud and AI security platform, founded in 2023, raised a $400m Series C.
• Instinct. The personal agent company is reportedly raising at a $30bn valuation, up from $100m in under a year.
• Hyperbolic. The GPU compute aggregation platform raised a $30m A1 round, with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan investing.

Guest interviews

• Mark Gurman, Bloomberg reporter covering Apple. Apple says a small number of iPhone Duo units have display cracks from a hinge manufacturing defect, and Gurman thinks that could mean tens of thousands of units. Apple moved M&A head Adrian Perica under Eddy Cue to run much of the services business. He says Apple's casino-style games bring in billions, more than the Mac.
• Zach Rash, CEO of Coco Robotics. Coco runs about 1,000 sidewalk robots and has a multi-year DoorDash partnership to bring them to the UK. It plans about 20,000 Coco 2 robots for 2027 and 40 to 50 cities next year. He says delivery platform volumes grow 20 to 30% a year.
• Ben Liu, CEO of Formation Bio. He says clinical trial cost, not drug discovery, is the bottleneck, so Formation Bio acquires discovered drugs and funds trials. A phase two trial costs $60m to $80m, and a $600m fund is reported. AI lets a few hundred people pursue 10 to 50 drugs.
• Amiram Shachar, CEO of Upwind. He says one platform covering development, deployment, runtime and AI lets Upwind compete with large security vendors, helped by his DevOps background from Spot.io. In Upwind's own team, AI cut coding time by 90% while review time rose 600%.
• Jasper Zhang, CEO of Hyperbolic. Hyperbolic pools varied compute into one platform where customers can also sell capacity back. He aims to raise revenue per GPU hour to $10 to $20, versus $4 to $5 for B300 offtake, and counts more than 300 neoclouds.

News

• Apple launches a touchscreen MacBook Pro with OLED. The 14-inch starts at $2,900 and the 16-inch at $3,400. Jordi Hays says the OLED display is the bigger upgrade and that touch will not drive his next Mac purchase.
• OpenAI plans to buy Google's chips. SemiAnalysis believes OpenAI holds a one-gigawatt TPU commitment. Dylan Patel says the news was already known to SemiAnalysis clients.
• Anthropic leases 1.7 gigawatts of compute in one quarter. The leases include 360 megawatts in Queensland, Australia, and a one-gigawatt Google backstop. John Coogan says every lab using every chip and data center is good for the market.