A look at Apple's quiet pivot to India, where Foxconn now makes the iPhone 16 Pro; sources say China views Apple's growing business in India with suspicion (Financial Times)

Financial Times:
A look at Apple's quiet pivot to India, where Foxconn now makes the iPhone 16 Pro; sources say China views Apple's growing business in India with suspicion  —  As Donald Trump was preparing to take office for the first time in 2017, Priyank Kharge was busy making calls to Apple's headquarters in Cupertino …

X raises its Premium+ subscription to $40 per month, or $395 per year, after raising it to $22 per month in December 2024, following Grok3's launch (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
X raises its Premium+ subscription to $40 per month, or $395 per year, after raising it to $22 per month in December 2024, following Grok3's launch  —  Hours after Elon Musk's AI company, xAI released the latest version of its AI model, Grok 3, X has significantly hiked the price …

Baidu reports Q4 revenue down 2% YoY to ~$4.7B, above $4.6B est., and a ~$717M net income, above ~$540M est., as its search and AI businesses face competition (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg:
Baidu reports Q4 revenue down 2% YoY to ~$4.7B, above $4.6B est., and a ~$717M net income, above ~$540M est., as its search and AI businesses face competition  —  Revenue for the three months ended December shrank 2% to 34.1 billion yuan ($4.7 billion), versus an average estimate of 33.4 billion yuan.

An analysis of credit and debit card data shows TikTok Shop passed Shein and Temu in US sales in January 2025, growing 153% to Shein's 26% and Temu's 28% (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg:
An analysis of credit and debit card data shows TikTok Shop passed Shein and Temu in US sales in January 2025, growing 153% to Shein's 26% and Temu's 28%  —  The popular video app, which brought in-app shopping to its millions of American users in 2023, continued to surpass Shein …

Sources: Wall Street banks led by Morgan Stanley have offloaded almost all of Elon Musk's $12.5B in loans used to buy Twitter, and now hold $1B+ in X debt (Financial Times)

Financial Times:
Sources: Wall Street banks led by Morgan Stanley have offloaded almost all of Elon Musk's $12.5B in loans used to buy Twitter, and now hold $1B+ in X debt  —  Investor perception of debt has changed since Donald Trump's election victory  —  Wall Street banks have rid themselves of almost …

New junior developers are reliant on Copilot, Claude, and other AI tools, meaning foundational coding knowledge is now missing, creating problems down the road (Namanyay Goel/N's Blog)

Namanyay Goel / N's Blog:
New junior developers are reliant on Copilot, Claude, and other AI tools, meaning foundational coding knowledge is now missing, creating problems down the road  —  100k+ views 70+ votes 50+ votes  —  Something's been bugging me about how new devs and I need to talk about it.

Chinese President Xi meets with Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, and more, signaling Beijing's support for the long-marginalized sector (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg:
Chinese President Xi meets with Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, and more, signaling Beijing's support for the long-marginalized sector  —  - Meeting signals a more supportive stance toward private firms  — Xi's presence marks a potentially powerful endorsement

Tencent is testing DeepSeek for search in its messaging app Weixin, while Baidu plans to fully connect its search engine to DeepSeek and its own LLM Ernie (Reuters)

Reuters:
Tencent is testing DeepSeek for search in its messaging app Weixin, while Baidu plans to fully connect its search engine to DeepSeek and its own LLM Ernie  —  Tencent said on Sunday its (0700.HK) Weixin messaging app, China's largest, is allowing some users to search via DeepSeek's artificial …

Some Bolivians, frustrated with spotty internet from the state's China-built satellite, are smuggling in Starlink kits despite the country's ban in August 2024 (William Wroblewski/Rest of World)

William Wroblewski / Rest of World:
Some Bolivians, frustrated with spotty internet from the state's China-built satellite, are smuggling in Starlink kits despite the country's ban in August 2024  —  Bolivia, which relies on a Chinese-built satellite for some of its connectivity, banned Starlink — but that hasn't stopped people …

India's BharatNet program to provide broadband access to 650K villages by 2025 is set to fall short of its target, with only 199K having broadband as of January (Pooja Dash/IndiaSpend)

Pooja Dash / IndiaSpend:
India's BharatNet program to provide broadband access to 650K villages by 2025 is set to fall short of its target, with only 199K having broadband as of January  —  As of January 2025, only 1.99 lakh villages out of 6.5 lakh villages or 30.4% had broadband internet access

Romance scams may rise as isolation grows and generative AI helps scammers scale; the FBI says US victims lost nearly $4.5B to such scams over the past decade (Wired)

Wired:
Romance scams may rise as isolation grows and generative AI helps scammers scale; the FBI says US victims lost nearly $4.5B to such scams over the past decade  —  Romance scams cost victims hundreds of millions of dollars a year.  As people grow increasingly isolated, and generative AI helps scammers scale …

Argentina's president Javier Milei backtracks on an X post promoting a memecoin called Libra, which rose to a $4.4B market cap before plunging by 95%+ (Oliver Knight/CoinDesk)

Oliver Knight / CoinDesk:
Argentina's president Javier Milei backtracks on an X post promoting a memecoin called Libra, which rose to a $4.4B market cap before plunging by 95%+  —  Milei deleted his original promotional tweet and revealed that he wasn't aware of its details.  —  What to know:

CB Insights: a record 1,200 VC-backed unicorns have yet to IPO or get acquired; Carta: fewer than 30% of 2021 unicorns raised funding in the past three years (Katie Roof/Bloomberg)

Katie Roof / Bloomberg:
CB Insights: a record 1,200 VC-backed unicorns have yet to IPO or get acquired; Carta: fewer than 30% of 2021 unicorns raised funding in the past three years  —  The billion-dollar startup bubble is deflating, and more than $1 trillion in value is locked up in companies with dwindling prospects.

A profile of Watch Duty creator John Clarke Mills, who wants the fire-tracking app to become a one-stop shop for information during any disaster (Boone Ashworth/Wired)

Boone Ashworth / Wired:
A profile of Watch Duty creator John Clarke Mills, who wants the fire-tracking app to become a one-stop shop for information during any disaster  —  Watch Duty proved indispensable during the recent LA wildfires.  John Mills, the app's creator, wants it to be the one place to go for tracking disasters.

Sources: Mark Zuckerberg's overtures to President Trump have unsettled employees and are part of an effort to shift antitrust scrutiny off Meta and onto Apple (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

Jonathan Vanian / CNBC:
Sources: Mark Zuckerberg's overtures to President Trump have unsettled employees and are part of an effort to shift antitrust scrutiny off Meta and onto Apple  —  Mark Zuckerberg kicked off 2025 with an Instagram video that outlined his vision for what he called restoring “free expression” …