Welcome back to the Technology newsletter 🤖
Summer Game Fest wrapped a weekend of blockbuster game reveals, Wall Street is bracing for the largest IPO in history, and Meta gets caught red-handed with their smart glasses app that can recognize anyone’s face.
The long-promised, rebuilt Siri arrives tomorrow, and the brains behind it might just blow your socks off.
Let's get into it 👇
🚀 Elon Musk's rocket company kicked off the roadshow for its public stock offering last week, aiming to raise a record-shattering $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation, with shares set to start trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker "SPCX" as soon as June 12. Some Wall Street analysts warn the asking price may be wildly higher than the company is actually worth. Unusually, SpaceX is reserving about 30% of the offering for everyday investors through apps like Robinhood, Fidelity, and Schwab. Wall Street gets the other 70% of the offering. Whether that's democratization or distribution of risk depends on who you ask.
📉 Bitcoin slid below $61,000 this weekend (down roughly 13% on the week and well off its late-May record near $74,500) in what became its worst stretch since February. It broke below $62,000 on Friday, triggering about $1.5 billion in liquidations. Analysts blame a wave of money flowing out of bitcoin funds and a broader shift of investor cash into AI stocks, a reminder of just how quickly the crypto mood can turn. Two of the biggest narratives in finance are now competing for the same dollars.
😎 A new Wired report found unreleased code, labeled "NameTag," buried inside Meta's AI app that's built to recognize people's faces through the company's smart glasses and quietly remind the wearer who they're looking at. Meta says nothing has shipped and no decision has been made. The code disagrees. Either way, the discovery is reviving a long-running privacy fear: glasses that can identify strangers on the street in real time. But it’s not just a privacy fear anymore: it’s an unreleased feature.
🎮 The unofficial successor to E3, Summer Game Fest, closed out with a run of big reveals for the PS5, Switch 2, Xbox, and PC. The event was headlined by Final Fantasy VII Revelation, the finale of the beloved remake trilogy, due in 2027. Also in the mix: a Resident Evil: Code Veronica remake, a new Star Wars strategy game, and Tifa joining Street Fighter 6.
🆕 One of the most acclaimed video games of the decade is making the jump to Nintendo's new console: Elden Ring is set to arrive on the Switch 2 on August 28, bringing the massive, monster-filled fantasy adventure to a portable Nintendo system for the first time. It's another sign the console is muscling its way into "big console" territory, landing the kinds of blockbuster games it used to miss out on. Elden Ring on a handheld Nintendo console is something nobody predicted in 2022. It’s four years late for the release date surge, but the Switch 2 will take it.
On Monday, June 8, Apple kicks off its annual software showcase, WWDC, with a keynote led by CEO Tim Cook.
The headliner is rumored to be the release the company has been promising for two years: a completely rebuilt Siri.
After a rough stretch in which Apple loudly teased a smarter, more personal assistant in 2024, only to delay it again and again, Monday is shaping up to be the moment the company has to actually deliver.
Expectations are sky-high, and so is the pressure.
The new Siri reportedly won't run entirely on Apple's own technology. Instead, Apple is leaning on its longtime rival Google, paying a reported $1 billion a year for a custom version of Google's powerful Gemini AI to handle the heavy lifting behind the scenes, according to Bloomberg.
This is a striking departure from a company that prides itself on building everything in-house (and a sign of just how far behind Apple fell in the AI race).
For users, the upshot is that the assistant that's frustrated iPhone owners for years could suddenly get a lot smarter, almost overnight.
What might that actually look like on your phone?
Reports point to a standalone Siri app (much like ChatGPT or Gemini) where you can type or talk, scroll back through your full conversation history, and ask follow-up questions that build on what you said before.
Even more interesting, Apple is said to be letting you choose which AI brain sits behind Siri, whether that's Apple's own, Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Anthropic's Claude.
In other words, the assistant baked into a billion iPhones could become a genuine front door to the most popular chatbots on the planet.
None of this is official until Apple takes the stage, and the company has a recent habit of teasing AI features long before they're ready.
But if the reports hold up, Monday marks a real turning point: the moment Apple stops apologizing for Siri and starts competing again.
Whether the rebuilt assistant lives up to two years of hype (or becomes another "coming soon") is the question millions of iPhone owners will be watching for.
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