Tech
Apple was surprised by AI-driven demand for Macs
Apple’s iPhone sales and Services revenue were the stars of the show in the tech giant’s most recent quarter, but the Mac quietly outperformed — helped by growing demand for AI workloads.
Wall Street investors had expected to see Mac revenue in the low $8 billion range, but Apple reported $8.4 billion in the second quarter ended March 28 — a notable beat for a non-core segment of the tech giant’s business. In addition, investors ahead of earnings believed that Mac sales would be essentially flat year-over-year. Instead, Mac sales were up 6% on an annual basis, the company told investors. The company’s total revenue was $111.2 billion, a 17% increase from the same period last year.
Apple chalked up some of the Mac growth to recent product launches, including the well-received MacBook Neo. However, those fun, colorful computers were only on sale for a few weeks after the March 4th pre-orders began. Realistically, most units shipped mid-to-late March, and some demand may have been pushed into April as certain models sold out.
Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts on the company’s Q2 earnings call on Thursday that customer demand for the Neo was “off the charts” and higher than Apple had expected. He also noted that Apple set a record in the quarter for customers new to the Mac, partly due to the Neo.
Cook attributed the Mac sales growth to the use of the platform for running local AI models, like OpenClaw — something that took Apple somewhat by surprise as Mac Mini and Mac Studio devices sold out in recent weeks.
“Both of these are amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools, and the customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted, and so we saw higher than expected demand,” Cook said of these Mac sales. He also noted that the Mac Mini was top-selling desktop in China — a market that’s been in an OpenClaw frenzy as of late.
Still, Mac revenue was flat on a quarter-over-quarter basis, suggesting this new demand has yet to scale. Cook said it may take Apple “several months” to reach supply-demand balance on the Mac Mini and Studio models.
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“We’re not at the point where we’re saying this [constraint] is going to end anytime soon. And it’s not because of a problem, per se, other than we just under-called the demand,” Cook explained.
Enterprise demand for the Mac was also at play. Apple pointed to a couple of larger companies, including Perplexity, that had turned to Mac as their preferred platform for building enterprise-grade AI assistants.
He also said Apple was “supply constrained on the MacBook Neo,” and has even seen school systems, like Kansas City Public Schools, dropping Chromebooks for the Neo.
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Tech
Nvidia Adds Hardware Monitoring Design to AI Agent Safety Platform
Nvidia adds a Sentry hardware monitoring design to its AI agent safety platform. See what OpenShell offers now and what IT teams still need to verify.
The post Nvidia Adds Hardware Monitoring Design to AI Agent Safety Platform appeared first on TechRepublic.
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Tech
Shopify opens checkout to browser-based AI agents
While some retailers, like Amazon (and Adidas, apparently!), are blocking AI agents from making purchases on users’ behalf on their respective platforms, e-commerce platform Shopify has moved in the other direction.
On Monday, the company announced that browser-based AI agents can now complete purchases on Shopify merchants’ sites, extending their capabilities beyond just searching for products and adding items to carts.
Shopify previously supported WebMCP for its storefronts and carts, allowing browser-based AI agents to comb through a Shopify retailer’s inventory, search for products, and add them to a cart. The addition of WebMCP support for checkout, including Shop Pay, means these agents can now read the checkout screen, update it, and submit the transaction with the buyer’s authorization, without relying on screenshots or scraping webpages, the company said.

This update introduces three new tools — get_checkout, update_checkout, and complete_checkout — that allow agents to inspect a checkout, change things like the customer’s address or delivery option, and then place an order after the buyer authorizes it.
The feature is rolling out to all eligible Shopify merchants, said Gil Greenberg, a staff product manager who works on agentic commerce at Shopify, in a post on X.
Shopify already offers a hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which allows agents to work server-to-server. The proposed standard WebMCP, meanwhile, is designed for agents that work inside the buyer’s browser. Both leverage Shopify’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which provides a common way to search for and discover products, build carts, and check out.
Top AI agents like Muse and Instinct already have direct partnerships with Shopify for agentic commerce. The Instinct partnership was announced today.
“If your agent is operating in the buyer’s browser, use WebMCP tools provided on storefront and checkout to efficiently complete order placement, instead of navigating HTML built for humans,” Greenberg wrote on X. “These WebMCP tools provide structured and efficient APIs, purposely designed — via UCP — to ensure accurate commerce facts, required disclosures, and handoff requirements.”
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Tech
Tesla delays Roadster 2 event again due to bad weather
Tesla is pushing back the reveal of its redesigned, second-generation Roadster once again, this time due to a forecast of severe weather.
Originally slated for October 1 in Waco, Texas, the event is being pushed to October 15, Tesla said.
“We’ve been tracking the weather closely with local meteorologists, but given the severe conditions predicted & because this event can only be held outdoors, we’ve made the difficult decision to reschedule,” the company wrote in a post on X.
The event presumably needs to be held outdoors because Tesla has been working on integrating cold gas thrusters from SpaceX that are supposed to make the Roadster fly in some capacity.
This reveal has been delayed many times before, and Musk has pushed it for months altogether before this scheduled date. At one point, Musk even planned to hold the event on April Fools’ day of this year. He said during Tesla’s annual meeting in 2025 — the same one where he was awarded a $1 trillion pay package — that an April Fools’ day event would offer him “some deniability” if it got delayed again.
“Like, I could say I was just kidding,” he said at the time.
Tesla first showed off its concept of a second-generation Roadster in 2017 at an event where it debuted the Semi, the company’s electric big rig. The new-look roadster was supposed to be the first supercar the company designed from the ground up, as the original Roadster, which got the company its start in the early 2010s, was largely based on the Lotus Elise.
At the time, Tesla promised the new Roadster was just a few years away. It collected $50,000 deposits from prospective customers of the car, which had an estimated base price of around $200,000. Some people even paid the company $250,000 to reserve one of 1,000 “Founders Series” versions of the supercar.
The project languished for years, until Musk reportedly tasked the Tesla team with redesigning the second-generation Roadster, and committed to the idea of using the SpaceX thrusters.
The promise of something outrageous like a flying car hasn’t been enough to tame critics of Musk and Tesla. Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X that “7.5 years has felt like a long time to wait” for his own new Roadster, though Musk claimed Altman had gotten a refund.
Much like the Roadster will be at this event, the ship date for the vehicle is up in the air. Musk himself has said he expects it to take a year or more before the new Roadster goes into production after it is finally revealed.
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