ICYMI: the week’s biggest tech news stories from Tim Cook stepping down to our Earth Day celebrations | Daily Reports Online
This week, we celebrated Earth Day with our annual Sustainability Week coverage. We covered sustainable phone battery designs, exciting EV developments, and plenty more.
We also saw the biggest Apple news in years: Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO.
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7. We built a PC using AI
Building a PC can be a daunting task. You have to find parts that can achieve your gaming needs, put them all together, and somehow stick to a budget in the middle of a RAM and component cost crisis.
So this week, we built a PC planned by AI to see if it could help some complete PC-building newbies put together a great rig — with ChatGPT and Gemini offering part-buying advice as well as building instructions to assemble our dream PC.
Spoiler alert: our computing editor Matt Hanson had to lend a hand with some real expertise.
6. We hosted Sustainability week 2026
It’s a hard ask to make the tech industry more sustainable; from hardware manufacturing to energy usage and e-waste, there’s a mountain of challenges to overcome. That’s why, just in time for Earth Day 2026, it’s TechRadar Sustainability Week once again!
This year, we’ve covered everything from exciting new EV technology to the circularity-focused Framework’s new Linux laptop to an exclusive look at Fairphone’s latest Impact report. It’s not all about hardware; software like Bottle It Back is helping to profile AI water waste, and Steam is running its Earth Appreciation Festival to mark the occasion.
5. The EU wants replaceable batteries
Phone repairability has been a major focus of the European Union over the past few years, and new rules are set to land in 2027, which include requiring phone batteries to be easy to remove and replace — meaning you have to be able to take them out without specialized tools, unless they’re included in the box.
While these rules technically affect only the EU, the manufacturing changes they’d likely necessitate could force these repairability rules on other regions for many products. Kinda like how the EU’s USB-C requirements saw many global brands adopt the charging standard all over the world.
This isn’t just smartphones either. Tablets, consoles like the Switch 2, and smart glasses would be impacted. The only devices not affected are those with batteries that can maintain an 80% capacity level after 1,000 cycles — which, interestingly, includes iPhones from the iPhone 15 and later, so Apple fans may find their tech doesn’t look any different next year when the rules come into play.
4. ChatGPT’s new image generator went viral
It was another big week for ChatGPT upgrades, with OpenAI announcing its new GPT-5.5 model just days after its Images 2.0 upgrade flooded social media with AI-generated posters and comics.
It was the latter that really caught the imagination, mainly thanks to its ability to accurately generate images containing text — traditionally a big AI weakness. Instead, Images 2.0 has reasoning powers that make it a much better personal art editor, even if it still isn’t clear what you can actually do with the results.
3. A robot broke the human half-marathon record
Humanoid robots hit another worrying milestone this week — at the Beijing half marathon, the aptly-named Honor Lightning flew past the human world record for the distance, clocking 50 minutes and 26 seconds for the 13.1-mile / 21.1km course.
That’s almost seven minutes quicker than the record set by Ugandan runner Jacob Kiplimo last month. To be fair, the Lightning robot does have a custom liquid-cooling system and long 0.95m legs to help it eat up the tarmac. And winning medals isn’t its ultimate goal, with the aim being to train humanoids for places like disaster zones where their sprinting speed will be a much more welcome sight.
2. Spotify turned 20 — and gave us the gossip on its early days
Yes, Spotify is now 20 years old, launching in the same year as Taylor Swift’s debut album. That’s so long ago, it’s easy to forget what the music world was actually like back then — so we sat down with Sten Garmark, Spotify’s Global Head of Consumer Experience, to get the inside track on the streaming giant’s early days.
“The music industry was in free-fall, and it was kind of a dire time,” Sten told us, before explaining how the shareable playlist became the addictive hook that eventually drew millions to Spotify. If you want to open the streaming service’s hood and take a peek under its algorithms, our exclusive chat is well worth a read.
1. Tim Cook stepped down as Apple’s CEO
In what was easily Apple’s biggest non-product news in more than a decade, Apple announced a major leadership transition: Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO in September, and Apple Hardware lead John Ternus will take over.
The choice is not surprising (there have been whispers that Ternus was the guy for a while), but the timing is. This comes just weeks after Apple celebrated its 50th birthday and Cook told anyone who would listen that he was sticking around for a long time. Perhaps staying on as Executive Chairman lets Cook tell the truth on both counts: he’s leaving one job to take on a new Apple role. How involved he’ll be remains to be seen.
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