Technology

Apple helped kill netbooks. Will it bring them back?

Published

3 months ago

November 8, 2025

Apple helped kill netbooks. Will it bring them back?

Rumor has it, Apple is working on a low-cost MacBook. And not “low-cost for a Mac,” but a proper cheap laptop, possibly as low as $599. For a company that traditionally targets the more premium end of the market, this would be something of an about-face.

Of course, Apple takes great pride in its design and aesthetics. So the company isn’t going to simply take the innards of a MacBook Air, slap them in a cheap plastic case, and call it a day. Instead, Apple is supposedly building a smaller laptop, with a lower-resolution screen and an “entirely new design” around an iPhone processor.

That chip could be some version of the A19 found in the current iPhone lineup, but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed earlier this year that the company was working on a laptop powered by last year’s A18.

If the idea of a small, low-cost laptop running on an ultralow-power chip feels familiar, well, it should — we used to call them netbooks. Netbooks erupted on the scene at a weird time in the late aughts, when we were transitioning to a web-first computing world.

What set netbooks apart from other laptops was their pursuit of portability, battery life, and rock-bottom prices at almost any cost. The original netbook, the ASUS Eee PC, came in two sizes (7-inch or 10-inch) and ran on Intel’s budget Celeron M processor. But even that slow, low-powered CPU was too demanding for the tiny Eee PC, and so ASUS underclocked it to just 630 MHz. (Yes, back in the halcyon days of 2007, we measured CPU speed in MHz, not GHz.)

Intel saw this emerging trend and built CPUs just for the netbooks called Atom. In many ways, Atom chips were Intel’s answer to the growing might of ARM, and even formed the basis for its tablet and smartphone efforts. It’s essentially the reverse of what Apple did, which took its mobile A-series processor and turned it into a powerful laptop chip. (And, now back again, it seems.)

As we all know now, netbooks were not long for this world. A number of things helped spell their demise. For one, most of them were just never particularly good. And the ones that weren’t awful tended to be a bit pricer. Sure, you could get a 7-inch Eee PC for around $200. But something more capable, like an HP Mini 210 HD, could set you back about $385 in 2010, depending on the configuration. When adjusted for inflation, that’s a hair over $577. As the prices of regular laptops came down, this didn’t seem like a particularly good deal anymore.

But two of the biggest culprits are undoubtedly the emergence of the Chromebook and the iPad. (We’ll save the discussion of the Chromebook for another day.) The iPad was introduced in 2010, and it immediately started eating into the netbook’s market share. By 2012, tablets had overtaken netbooks, and by 2013, netbooks were effectively dead. Sure, some still lingered around, and you had a spiritual successor in the Chromebook, but the iPad helped kill off the netbook in swift and spectacular fashion.

Many of the things that one might have used a netbook for — browsing the web, checking email, shouting into the void of what was then called Twitter — were now being handled better by the iPad. And, when paired with a Bluetooth keyboard, the iPad was actually a decent productivity machine, so long as your expectations were low.

And so, the netbook vanished.

But this new, cheaper MacBook, at least on paper, sounds like it might be borrowing a bit from the netbook blueprint. Some people will just never be able to adjust to the workflow of a tablet and keyboard combo. So Apple might be giving them a proper laptop form factor.

While we don’t know what the screen size will be, we do know it will be smaller than the current 13.6-inch MacBook Air. That could mean 13.3 inches, but perhaps Apple will bring back the 12-inch format or even revisit the 11-inch realm of its smallest Air model. That’s inching into netbook territory.

Pair all that with a mobile-first SoC that will handle everyday tasks and browsing with aplomb, but certainly won’t cut it for heavier tasks like video editing or gaming, and you have something that sounds like the original pitch for a netbook if you ask me. Apple will obviously never call its new affordable MacBook a netbook, but maybe by avoiding the name, it can make them cool again.

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Terrence O’Brien

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Technology

Uber Eats adds AI assistant to help with grocery shopping

Published

2 hours ago

February 11, 2026

Press Room

Uber Eats adds AI assistant to help with grocery shopping

Uber announced a new AI feature called “Cart Assistant” for grocery shopping in its Uber Eats app.

The new feature works a couple different ways. You can use text prompts, as you would with any other AI chatbot, to ask it to build a grocery list for you. Or you can upload a picture of your shopping list and ask it to populate your cart with all your favorite items, based on your order history. You can be as generic as you — “milk, eggs, cereal” — and the bot will make a list with all your preferred brands.

And that’s just to start out. Uber says in the coming months, Cart Assistant will add more features, including “full recipe inspiration, meal plans, and the ability to ask follow up questions, and expand to retail partners.”

But like all chatbots, Uber acknowledges that Cart Assistant may make mistakes, and urges users to double-check and confirm the results before placing any orders.

It will also only work at certain grocery stores, with Uber announcing interoperability at launch with Albertsons, Aldi, CVS, Kroger, Safeway, Sprouts, Safeway, Walgreen, and Wegmans. More stores will be added in the future, the company says.

Uber has a partnership with OpenAI to integrate Uber Eats into its own suite of apps. But Uber spokesperson Richard Foord declined to say whether the AI company’s technology was powering the new chatbot in Uber Eats. “Cart Assistant draws on publicly available LLM models as well as Uber’s own AI stack,” Foord said in an email.

Uber has been racing to add more AI-driven features to its apps, including robotaxis with Waymo and sidewalk delivery robots in several cities. The company also recently revived its AI Labs to collaborate with its partners on building better products using delivery and customer data.

Technology

Humanoid robots are getting smaller, safer and closer

Published

3 hours ago

February 11, 2026

Press Room

Humanoid robots are getting smaller, safer and closer

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For decades, humanoid robots have lived behind safety cages in factories or deep inside research labs. Fauna Robotics, a New York-based robotics startup, says that era is ending.

The company has introduced Sprout, a compact humanoid robot designed from the ground up to operate around people. Instead of adapting an industrial robot for public spaces, Fauna built Sprout specifically for homes, schools, offices, retail spaces and entertainment venues.

“Sprout is a humanoid platform designed from first principles to operate around people,” the company said. “This is a new category of robot built for the spaces where we live, work, and play.” That philosophy drives nearly every design choice behind Sprout.

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ROBOTS LEARN 1,000 TASKS IN ONE DAY FROM A SINGLE DEMO

Sprout is designed to operate safely around people, even in shared spaces like homes and classrooms where close interaction matters. (Fauna Robotics)

Why Fauna believes humanoid robots belong beyond factories

Fauna Robotics’ founders started with a simple idea. If robots are going to become part of daily life, they must move naturally around humans and earn trust through safety and reliability. Most humanoid robots today focus on industrial efficiency or controlled research environments. Fauna is targeting a different reality. Service industries now make up the majority of the global workforce. At the same time, labor shortages continue to grow in healthcare, education, hospitality and eldercare. Sprout is designed to explore how humanoid robots could support those spaces without creating new safety risks or operational headaches.

HUMANOID ROBOT MAKES ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY BY DESIGNING A BUILDING

The robot uses onboard sensing and navigation to move confidently through indoor spaces without needing safety cages or fixed paths. (Fauna Robotics)

Sprout is a safety-first humanoid robot built for people

Standing about 3.5 feet tall, Sprout fits naturally into human spaces instead of towering over them. At roughly 50 pounds, it carries less kinetic energy during movement or contact, which makes close interaction safer by design. Lightweight materials and a soft-touch exterior further reduce risk. The design avoids sharp edges and limits pinch points, allowing the robot to operate near people without safety cages. Quiet motors and smooth movement also reduce noise and help Sprout feel less intimidating in shared spaces.

Rather than complex multi-fingered hands, Sprout uses simple one-degree-of-freedom grippers. This approach lowers weight and improves durability while still supporting practical tasks like object fetching, hand-offs, and basic shared-space interaction. Flexible arms and legs allow the robot to walk, kneel, and crawl. Sprout can also fall and recover without damaging sensitive components. In everyday environments, where conditions are rarely perfect, that resilience matters.

Under the hood, Sprout uses a highly articulated body with 29 degrees of freedom to support smooth movement and expressive gestures. Onboard NVIDIA compute provides the processing power needed for perception, navigation, and human-robot interaction without relying on external systems. A battery that supports several hours of active use makes Sprout practical for research, development, and real-world testing in shared human spaces.

Built for natural human-robot interaction

Sprout’s expressive face helps it communicate in a way people can quickly understand. Simple facial cues show what the robot is doing and how it is feeling, so you do not need technical knowledge to follow along. The robot can walk, kneel, crawl, and recover from falls, which helps it move naturally in everyday spaces. Because its motors are quiet, and its movements are smooth, Sprout feels less startling and more predictable when it is nearby. Behind the scenes, Sprout supports teleoperation, mapping and navigation. These tools give developers the building blocks to create interactions that feel intuitive and human, not stiff or mechanical.

ELON MUSK TEASES A FUTURE RUN BY ROBOTS

Instead of complex hands, Sprout uses simple, durable grippers that prioritize safety while still handling everyday tasks like hand-offs and object pickup. (Fauna Robotics)

A modular software platform for rapid development

Sprout runs on a modular software system that is built to grow over time. Developers get stable controls along with tools for deployment, monitoring, and data collection, so they can focus on building new ideas instead of managing the robot itself. As new abilities improve, Fauna can add them through software updates rather than redesigning the hardware. This keeps costs down and helps Sprout stay useful longer as technology evolves. Fauna also kept sensing simple. Sprout uses head-mounted RGB-D sensors instead of wrist cameras, which reduces complexity and maintenance. At the same time, it still gives the robot a strong perception for moving and working safely in shared spaces.

Who Sprout is designed for

Fauna positions Sprout as a developer-first humanoid platform rather than a finished consumer product. It is designed for developers who want to build and test applications on accessible hardware with full SDK access and built-in movement, perception, navigation, and expression. At the same time, enterprises can use Sprout to create next-generation AI applications that operate safely in places like retail, hospitality, and offices. Researchers can also use the platform to study locomotion, manipulation, autonomy, and human-robot interaction without building a robot from scratch. Together, these uses point to real-world deployments across retail and hospitality, consumer and home settings, research and education, and entertainment experiences.

What this means for you

Even if you never plan to build a robot, Sprout signals a shift in how robotics companies think about everyday life. Humanoid robots are no longer being designed only for factories and labs. Companies like Fauna are betting that the future of robotics depends on safety, trust, and natural interaction in human spaces. If successful, platforms like Sprout could lead to robots that assist in classrooms, support hospitality staff, help researchers move faster and create interactive experiences that feel less robotic and more human.

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Kurt’s key takeaways

Sprout is not trying to replace workers or flood homes with machines overnight. Instead, Fauna is laying the groundwork for a future where humanoid robots earn their place through careful design and responsible deployment. By prioritizing safety, simplicity, and developer collaboration, Sprout represents a quieter but potentially more meaningful step forward in humanoid robotics. The real test will be how developers and researchers use the platform and whether people feel comfortable sharing space with robots like Sprout.

Would you trust a humanoid robot to work beside you in a school, hotel, or office if it were designed for safety first? Let us know by writing to us at Cyberguy.com.

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Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson is an award-winning tech journalist who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better with his contributions for Fox News & FOX Business beginning mornings on “FOX & Friends.” Got a tech question? Get Kurt’s free CyberGuy Newsletter, share your voice, a story idea or comment at CyberGuy.com.

Technology

Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter is stepping down after six years

Published

14 hours ago

February 10, 2026

Press Room

Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter is stepping down after six years

Robert Playter, CEO of Boston Dynamics, announced on Tuesday that he is stepping down from his role effective immediately and leaving the company on February 27th, as previously reported by A3. Under Playter’s leadership, Boston Dynamics navigated its way through an acquisition from Softbank that brought it to Hyundai in 2021, and it launched a new all-electric version of its humanoid Atlas robot in 2024. Just a few days ago, the company posted another video of its research Atlas robots attempting tumbling passes and outdoor runs as more enterprise-ready editions start to roll out.

Boston Dynamics announced at CES last month that Atlas robots will begin working in Hyundai’s car plants starting in 2028, as the robotics field has become increasingly crowded by competitors like Tesla and Figure, as well as AI companies with “world model” tech built for robots.

Playter has been at Boston Dynamics for over 30 years and has served as CEO since 2020, replacing the company’s original CEO, Marc Raibert. Boston Dynamics CFO Amanda McMaster will serve as interim CEO while the company’s board of directors searches for Playter’s replacement.

“Boston Dynamics has been the ride of a lifetime. What this place has become has exceeded anything I could have ever imagined all those years ago in our funky lab in the basement of the MIT Media Lab,” Playter said in a letter to employees, which was shared with The Verge. He also highlighted the company’s successes with its Spot, Stretch, and Atlas robots.

“From the earliest days of hopping robots, to the world’s first quadrupeds, to spearheading the entire humanoid industry, Playter made his mark as a pioneer of innovation. He transformed Boston Dynamics from a small research and development lab into a successful business that now proudly calls itself the global leader in mobile robotics,” Nikolas Noel, VP of marketing and communications at Boston Dynamics, said in a statement to The Verge, adding, “He will be sorely missed, but we hope he enjoys some well-deserved time off. Thanks Rob.”