‘There’s less fragmentation in stablecoins than there is in any other area of blockchain regulation,’ says former Blockdaemon COO and current strategic adviser Amor Sexton.

Since their introduction more than a decade ago, stablecoins have grown from a niche solution for crypto traders, to acting as a middle ground between traditional and decentralised finance, facilitating around $33trn in annual transactions by volume in 2025.

While much of this volume results from trading and internal flows, last year the stablecoin market supported approximately $400bn in organic payment activity according to Artemis Analytics, up from less than $30bn in 2020, albeit a minuscule number in comparison to the trillions that move annual through global payment systems.

We’re in a period of rapid development in this area, with regulations coming in fast, blockchain infrastructure provider Blockdaemon’s former chief operating officer Amor Sexton told SiliconRepublic.com. But they’re only one part of the equation.

“Is it agentic payments? Is it cross-border payments? Is it real-time 24/7 liquidity management for corporate treasures?” she asked. “Regulation is one part of the puzzle, but you need to have all of the other components there and able to operate at scale for you to get adoption.

“So whether that’s looking at compliance processes that are digitised, treasury management functions, or even things like agentic workflows, money always moves as one part of the leg of a transaction.”

Sexton recently established her own consulting service for senior business executives and continues her work with Blockdaemon in an advisory capacity.

Stablecoins can be incredibly useful. Businesses and individuals use stablecoins for faster, cheaper international transfers, for decentralised finance and digital commerce, and to even transfer money internationally with lower fees and faster settlements.

These digital assets issued by private companies are generally pegged to fiat currency, with big-name examples including Circle’s USDC, Tether’s USDT and PayPal’s PYUSD.

In contrast, tokenised deposits are bank-issued digital representations of fiat deposits, recorded on a blockchain. These are minted and backed by regulated banks.

McKinsey recently noted that a larger transformation is unfolding within the traditional banking system, where tokenised deposits already facilitate trillions of dollars in annual transfers, far more than stablecoin payments.

Right where I thought we would be

The US maintains a heavily dominant position in the global stablecoin market, with USD-denominated stablecoins accounting for nearly all transactions. Parts of Asia, including business hubs such as Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore are also heavy adopters of stablecoin payments, according to McKinsey’s analysis.

Recently, the US Treasury Department proposed rules defining what counts as issuing, offering or selling stablecoins in the country, building on top of the Genius Act enacted last year. Effective starting 2027, this new legislation will make it unlawful to issue a payment stablecoin in the US without an appropriate federal or state licence.

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo announced that it would offer tokenised deposits to corporate and commercial clients, and BlackRock introduced two tokenised money market products.

“I personally have probably a different view to a lot of other people in the industry in that I think it’s happened quite quickly,” Sexton said when I asked her about the pace of development in the sector.

“I think a lot of other people in the industry would say it’s happened slowly. That’s probably because I came from an institutional banking background. I understand how long it takes for evolution in this space.”

Regulating stablecoins means taking an approach that balances innovation with appropriate safeguards. “Competing priorities, regulatory clarity – that’s needed. [So] we’re about where I thought we would be.

“The thing about programmable money is that you can program business rules into it. So, I think it’s about thinking through all of those workflows that are necessary in order to have agentic payments actually operate practically.”

Unsurprisingly, AI is playing a key role in fastening the pace of development in this space. “I think we’ll move quicker from here on now because when you have automated workflows.

“You need automated movement of value, and that’s where this technology really comes into play, whether it’s a stablecoin or it’s – you know – tokenised money that’s issued by a bank or even a central bank,” Sexton said.

“It’s a mixture of both the unprecedented proliferation of AI throughout society – not just business – on top of the actual evolution of the technology itself, which is also unprecedented.

“The fact that we’re even having this conversation now shows that there’s a lot of people talking about it and looking at it.

“I think we’re going to see rapid development in the next six to 12 months [in this space],” Sexton said in the interview which took place in May. “It’s a very short time. I wouldn’t have said that a few years ago.”

Rules not so fragmented

“I actually think there’s less fragmentation in stablecoins than there is in any other area of blockchain regulation,” Sexton said.

Over in the EU, the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCAR) began regulating stablecoins back in 2024, ahead of developments in this area elsewhere.

Euro-denominated stablecoins, however, have not been able to capture much of the market, though attempts are being made to change that.

Late last month, Revolut launched announced its first stablecoin, a euro-backed token called EURR, available to select customers in Denmark, Poland and Portugal. Meanwhile, Bank of Ireland and AIB recently joined a consortium of 35 other European banks to work towards issuing a euro-denominated stablecoin.

“Where you have a little bit of fragmentation is around questions of yields and things like that, but to me they’re important discussions to have – but they they’re not an absolute barrier to adoption,” Sexton said.

“What I think needs to happen from a regulatory perspective is recognition of stablecoins as legitimate payment methods that have been issued in other jurisdictions.

“It’s less about fragmentation of ‘how do we regulate the issuer?’ and more about ‘how do we actually treat the stablecoin itself as a means of payment?’”

The future of tokenised money isn’t going to be in just stablecoins, she explained. “You exchange your fiat for stablecoins, and to get out of a stablecoin you exchange the stablecoin for fiat too.

“We’re not talking about a world at the moment where people are necessarily staying in stablecoins for the entire time,” she said.

She believes acceptance is just around the corner. “I’m pro-programmable on-chain money. Stablecoins is one way of achieving that. So yes, I would like a world where we can have finance be more efficient.

“Not just tokenised money, but tokenised equities, tokenised identity.”

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John Ternus became chief executive of Apple on Tuesday. He is the eighth person to hold the job in the company’s 50 years, and the first engineer in the seat since Steve Jobs.

Tim Cook spent his last day writing to staff. Chance Miller obtained the memo for 9to5Mac on Monday, and Mark Gurman reported it for Bloomberg the same morning.

“Today is my last day as CEO of Apple,” it opens. “This is a moment I always knew would come one day, and yet it is still hard to believe it has arrived.”

What Cook actually wrote

The memo says almost nothing about products, AI, China or regulation. It is about culture.

“I am most proud of what an annual report could never capture,” Cook wrote. “This place is proof that culture triumphs over everything.”

He reaches once for a piece of company scripture. Apple has managed to leave its “dent in the universe”, he writes, quoting Jobs, “because of who we are and what we believe”.

On his successor, Cook is unambiguous. He takes “enormous comfort in handing the helm to someone as brilliant and wonderful and capable as John”, and adds that few people understand what it takes to build world-changing products the way Ternus does.

He also makes a point of saying he is not going anywhere. He is stepping away from a role, not the company, and he signs off looking forward to seeing everyone at Apple Park in his new one.

Then he posted on X. “My title changes tomorrow, but the love I have for the Apple community never will,” he wrote. The post has 24.2 million views. Elon Musk replied to congratulate him.

The numbers he leaves behind

Cook took over after trading closed on 24 August 2011. Apple was worth under $350bn. It is now worth about $4.6tn.

Revenue went from $157bn in his first full financial year to an expected $477bn when this one closes in September. Services, which barely existed as a category, brought in more than $109bn in fiscal 2025, over a quarter of the company.

Ryan Vlastelica put the share gain at 2,258% for Bloomberg, or 2,716% counting dividends. Published figures vary between roughly 2,250% and 2,750% depending on the basis used, and Bloomberg corrected its own during the day.

Bank of America worked it out another way. Apple added market value at roughly $32m an hour, every hour, for nearly 15 years.

Who Ternus is

Ternus is 51. He joined Apple in 2001 as an engineer, aged 26, in his second job out of university. He had a mechanical engineering degree from Pennsylvania and four years at a small firm behind him.

His first project was the Cinema Display, a plastic desktop monitor. He worked on the G5-era iMacs, became vice president of hardware engineering in 2013, and has since had a hand in every generation of iPad, the first AirPods, and hardware across the iPhone, Mac and Watch. The thin iPhone Air and the cheaper MacBook Neo are recent ones.

He is not a natural showman, but he is not new to a stage either. He has fronted product launches for years, and TNW reported in July that he wants to build on Apple’s film and TV run, one of the few areas where he had spoken about strategy before taking the job.

He told a room of graduates what he thinks

Ternus gave the engineering commencement address at his old university in 2024. Emma Burleigh pulled the speech for Fortune on Tuesday.

“Always assume you’re as smart as anyone else in the room, but never assume that you know as much as they do,” he told them. He described arriving at Apple at 26 and not being sure he belonged, surrounded by people who knew far more than he did.

He closed the speech by telling the graduates to go and make a dent in the universe.

Two years later his predecessor reached for the same phrase on his way out.

What he inherits

Kalley Huang reported for the New York Times that Ternus takes over amid unusual churn in the executive ranks, and has spent four months installing his own people.

Laura Legros, a hardware engineering vice president who retired in 2022, has rejoined and reports to him, three people familiar with the hiring told the Times. Nate Gatten arrived from American Airlines to run government affairs. Kate Adams and Apple Pay head Jennifer Bailey are both retiring this year. Nearly half the executive team is near retirement age.

Talent has gone the other way too. More than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI, according to Apple’s own lawsuit against the company. Apple’s smart home and mixed reality hardware leads left this year, for Oura and OpenAI respectively.

TNW reported in June that Apple’s design studio had lost nearly every Jony Ive-era designer, and that Ternus intended to rebuild it. In August it cut more than 200 jobs across Siri and Vision Pro. On Monday Phil Schiller handed the App Store to Eddy Cue.

The AI problem is the loudest one. Apple delayed its Siri overhaul, then leaned on Google’s Gemini for part of the next version. Whether that reads as thrift or as weakness depends on where the value in AI settles.

Cook is still in the building

Cook stays as executive chair, handling policymakers, which in practice means Donald Trump and Beijing.

David Yoffie of Harvard Business School told the Times the arrangement gets tested the moment the two men disagree. Ternus could invest harder in AI, revive the car, or end the Vision Pro. “Is Tim going to be comfortable with those changes?” Yoffie asked. Would John feel comfortable making them with Tim there?

So far there is no sign of daylight. TNW covered the farewell party Apple threw Cook a week early, and Cook has said the pair set out to make this the best handover ever.

Ternus gets eight days before the test. Apple holds its iPhone event on 9 September, where a foldable is expected.

Phil Schiller leaving the App Store made Monday’s headlines. The quieter fact underneath it is that Eddy Cue now runs more of Apple than anyone except the new chief executive.

Mark Gurman broke the reshuffle for Bloomberg on Monday, hours before John Ternus took over. Apple has not announced any of it, and declined to comment.

Cue already ran services. He has since collected the App Store, Apple Arcade and, at the end of last year, Health.

Nobody announced that as a promotion. It arrived in pieces, each one attached to somebody else’s departure.

What moved, and to whom

The App Store goes back to the division that had it until 2015, when Schiller and the marketing department took over. Cue gets it after an 11-year gap, and gets it at the moment the store is worth more and is under more legal pressure than at any point in its history.

Carson Oliver runs it day to day and reports straight to Cue. Oliver has spent his whole 14 years at Apple in that department. Ann Thai, who handles distribution tools and third-party marketplaces, now reports to Oliver rather than to Schiller. So does Alex Rofman, who runs Apple Arcade.

Events went somewhere else entirely. Nola Weinstein, Schiller’s deputy on launches since 2023, takes that team. She reports to Kristin Huguet Quayle, Apple’s vice president of communications and public relations.

That is a quiet reclassification. Apple product launches sat under communications until about 2019, then spent seven years as a marketing function under Schiller. They are going back to the press office.

For a company whose launches are its most-watched output, deciding they belong to PR rather than to product marketing is not a small call.

The size of what Cue holds

Services brought in more than $109bn in Apple’s last full financial year, over a quarter of the company. It is the fastest-growing part of the business and the highest margin.

The App Store alone facilitated more than $1.4tn in transactions last year, by Apple’s own count, and Bloomberg puts its direct revenue above $30bn a year.

Jacob Eiting, who runs the subscriptions firm RevenueCat, made the point about scale from the other end. Schiller started on the App Store when it had no apps and no revenue. It now pays developers on the order of $100bn a year.

Cue takes all of that on top of a services division he had already spent a decade building.

The bench emptied first

Cue’s rise is partly a matter of who is left. Apple has lost or is losing most of the executives who ran it alongside Cook.

Jeff Williams retired as chief operating officer in December after 27 years. Dan Riccio, who ran hardware before Ternus, has gone. So has finance chief Luca Maestri, and Lisa Jackson, who handled environment and government affairs. General counsel Kate Adams and Apple Pay head Jennifer Bailey both leave in October. Paul Meade, who ran Vision Pro hardware, left for OpenAI in June.

TNW covered Bailey’s exit in August, when the executive who launched Apple Pay announced her retirement after 25 years.

Schiller is 66 and joined in 1987, with a four-year break in the middle. Gurman was blunt about what the move means: it is part of a retirement plan, and Schiller no longer runs any departments at Apple. He keeps the Fellow title and an advisory role.

Apple has updated his leadership page, and Cue’s, to match.

He had not been coasting in it either. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2024 that Schiller was still working close to 80 hours a week in what was already meant to be a step back.

Cue inherits the legal file too

Whoever runs the App Store runs Apple’s most contested product. TNW reported in June that the Supreme Court would hear Apple’s appeal against the contempt finding in the Epic case, and in August that Apple had replaced its EU Core Technology Fee with a flat 5% commission to settle its Digital Markets Act dispute.

That second change landed 13 days before Schiller stepped back, as TNW noted on Monday, along with the US ruling that found Schiller had argued internally for compliance and been overruled by Tim Cook.

Tim Sweeney, who has spent six years suing Apple over the store Cue now owns, marked the change publicly. He said he hoped Apple would look at the future as optimistically as he does, and grow by bringing computing to people rather than extracting more from them.

“This will be a new age for Apple,” Sweeney wrote.

What it signals about Ternus

Ternus is a hardware engineer. Every account of his appointment framed it as Apple returning to product after 15 years under an operations chief.

His first structural move went the other way. He handed more of the company to the executive who runs the subscription business, the content deals and now the store, while events went to the press office.

Cue has been at Apple since 1989 and has spent recent years talking up its ambitions in entertainment. He now has the App Store, Arcade, Health, TV and the rest of services under him.

That may be a reading of where the money is rather than a change of heart about products. Services is the growth line, and the App Store is the part of it under the most legal pressure.

Apple holds its first event of the Ternus era on 9 September, where a foldable iPhone is expected. Weinstein produces it. Cue owns the store the apps will run on.

Emotiva has spent more than two decades building its reputation around a fairly simple proposition: offer serious audio hardware without requiring customers to liquidate part of their retirement portfolio to pay for it.

The new LXP-16 Immersive Cinema Processor and LXR-11 Immersive Cinema Receiver push that philosophy considerably further up the home theater ladder.

Both models will make their public debut at CEDIA Expo 2026 in Denver before their scheduled October release. The LXP-16 is priced at $4,799, while the LXR-11 will sell for $5,999.

What makes the new LX Series interesting is not any single specification. Emotiva is combining 9.4.6-channel immersive processing, four independently managed subwoofer outputs, HDMI 2.1, streaming, and the complete Dirac Live room correction package in two products priced below a number of established high-end alternatives.

And in the case of the LXR-11, Emotiva has thrown eleven channels of Hypex NCOREx amplification into the same chassis.

That is a rather serious amount of hardware for the money.

Related Reading:

What Does 9.4.6 Actually Mean?

Both LX Series models can process a 9.4.6-channel system with left, center and right front channels, a pair of front wides, side surrounds, rear surrounds, four independently managed subwoofers and six height channels.

In practical terms, that means up to 15 independently processed loudspeaker channels plus four independent subwoofer feeds, with support for Dolby Atmos and DTS Pro.

More important for elaborate theater installations, those four subwoofer outputs are not simply four connectors carrying the same signal. Each is a balanced XLR output that can be independently adjusted for level and distance before being integrated by Dirac.

That distinction becomes increasingly important as systems move beyond one or two subwoofers. Multiple subs can improve bass consistency throughout a room, but only when placement, timing, level, and frequency response are properly managed. Four outputs are substantially more useful when the processor actually knows that four different subwoofers exist.

Dirac Live ART Is Included

This might be the most consequential part of the LX Series specification.

Both models include licenses for Dirac Live Room Correction, Dirac Live Bass Control, and Dirac Live Active Room Treatment, along with the required calibrated measurement microphone. There is no additional software purchase required to unlock the more advanced Dirac features.

Dirac Live handles frequency response and impulse correction. Bass Control coordinates the loudspeakers and multiple subwoofers around their crossover regions, while Active Room Treatment, or ART, treats the speakers as a coordinated acoustic system and uses their combined output to reduce low-frequency decay within the room.

ART support is becoming increasingly common on premium AV products, but inclusion in the purchase price is not.

ARCAM’s new Radia home theater components support Bass Control and ART as paid upgrades, while compatible Marantz AV receivers and processors also require users to purchase Dirac licenses separately. That gives Emotiva a meaningful advantage before anyone has connected a single loudspeaker.

Emotiva LXP-16 Immersive Cinema Processor

The LXP-16 is the separates option and requires external power amplification.

Internally, Emotiva is using a balanced architecture with Analog Devices SHARC DSP processing and ESS Hyperstream DAC technology. Emotiva has not identified the specific ESS DAC chips, so there is no reason to guess.

The processor provides 15 balanced XLR preamp outputs and 15 unbalanced RCA preamp outputs, with both sets available simultaneously. Four additional balanced XLR outputs are dedicated to the subwoofers. Maximum published output is 8V RMS through the balanced connections and 4V RMS through RCA.

LXP-16 Key Specifications:

• 9.4.6 immersive audio processing
• Dolby Atmos
• DTS:X Pro
• 15 balanced XLR preamp outputs
• 15 RCA preamp outputs
• 4 independent balanced XLR subwoofer outputs
• Analog Devices SHARC DSP
• ESS Hyperstream DAC architecture
• Dirac Live Room Correction included
• Dirac Live Bass Control included
• Dirac Live Active Room Treatment included
• 4 HDMI 2.1 inputs
• 2 HDMI 2.1 outputs
• 8K/60Hz and 4K/120Hz passthrough
• Dolby Vision
• HDR10+
• HLG
• VRR
• ALLM
• Primary HDMI output with ARC/eARC
• Moving magnet phono input
• Balanced XLR stereo analog input
• 3 RCA stereo analog inputs
• 2 coaxial and 2 optical digital inputs
• USB-C PCM input up to 768 kHz
• Ethernet, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
• Bluetooth transmission to headphones or speakers
• 17 x 13 x 6.25 inches
• 14 pounds

Emotiva also publishes a frequency response of 20 Hz to 22 kHz within ±0.14 dB from analog sources, along with THD+N below 0.0008% at 1 kHz for line-level sources.

For $4,799, that specification puts the LXP-16 into some rather expensive company.

Emotiva LXR-11 Immersive Cinema Receiver

The LXR-11 takes essentially the same processing platform and adds 11 channels of Hypex NCOREx Class D amplification.

That is a notable choice. Hypex amplification has become increasingly common in serious two-channel and multichannel products because it can deliver substantial output from relatively compact, efficient designs.

Emotiva has also made the LXR-11 fanless, which matters in quiet rooms and enclosed equipment installations where mechanical noise is about as welcome as someone opening a bag of potato chips during 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The receiver provides 15-channel RCA preamp outputs, allowing external amplification to be added as the system grows. Emotiva also says the internal amplification can be completely switched off if the LXR-11 is eventually used primarily as a processor.

LXR-11 Amplifier Specifications:

Emotiva’s detailed power specifications are unusually useful because they specify how many channels are being driven:

• 140 watts per channel into 8 ohms, 2 channels driven, 20 Hz to 20 kHz, 0.02% THD
• 240 watts per channel into 4 ohms, 2 channels driven, 20 Hz to 20 kHz, 0.02% THD
• 140 watts per channel into 8 ohms, 5 channels driven, 0.1% THD
• 140 watts per channel into 8 ohms, 7 channels driven, 0.1% THD
• 100 watts per channel into 8 ohms, 9 channels driven, 0.1% THD

Emotiva has not published an 11-channels-driven power specification, so we are not going to invent one.

The rest of the LXR-11 specification closely mirrors the LXP-16, including four HDMI 2.1 inputs, two outputs, four independent balanced subwoofer outputs, MM phono, USB-C audio, network connectivity, and the complete Dirac package.

Emersa Brings Streaming Into the LX Series

Both models also include Emotiva’s Emersa streaming platform and Emersa Control app.

Published streaming support includes TIDAL Connect, Qobuz Connect, Spotify Connect, DLNA, Google Cast, Bluetooth, and USB playback. The app handles volume, source selection, listening modes, streaming access, and commonly used audio adjustments.

One competitive difference is worth noting: Emotiva’s published specifications currently do not list Apple AirPlay or Roon Ready support, both of which are offered by ARCAM’s newest Radia home theater products. Whether that matters will depend entirely on how a system is used.

There is also a more obvious hardware limitation.

The LX Series provides only four HDMI inputs. ARCAM and Marantz offer seven HDMI inputs on several of their closest competitors. Four will be enough for many installations, especially when eARC moves television apps back through the system, but owners with multiple consoles, disc players, streamers, and specialty video sources should count first and purchase second.

The Competition

Two brands stand out as the most relevant competition based on current technology, channel capability, and pricing: ARCAM and Marantz.

ARCAM Radia

ARCAM’s new AVP45 is probably the closest direct rival to the LXP-16.

Priced at $5,999.95, the AVP45 provides 16-channel processing, balanced outputs, seven HDMI inputs, Dolby Atmos, DTS, Auro-3D, extensive streaming, Roon Ready support, AirPlay, Google Cast, Bluetooth with Snapdragon Sound and Auracast, and Dirac Live. Bass Control and Active Room Treatment are supported but require paid upgrades.

The $6,999.95 ARCAM AVA35 is the more logical rival to the LXR-11. It processes up to 16 channels but provides nine channels of Class G amplification rather than eleven. ARCAM counters with more HDMI connectivity, Auro-3D, Roon, AirPlay, and its broader streaming feature set.

The Emotiva advantage is straightforward: more onboard amplifier channels in the receiver, four dedicated balanced subwoofer outputs and the entire Dirac suite already included.

Marantz

Marantz attacks the same market from two different directions.

The $8,000 AV 10 offers 15.4-channel processing, balanced outputs for every channel, seven 8K HDMI inputs, HEOS streaming, Dolby Atmos and a considerably more expensive premium chassis. It also supports Dirac Live, Bass Control and Active Room Treatment, but those features require separate licensing.

At $4,800, the Marantz CINEMA 30 costs less than the Emotiva LXR-11 and includes eleven channels of Class A/B amplification rated at 140 watts per channel with two channels driven. Its processing ceiling is 13.4 channels rather than Emotiva’s 15 speaker channels plus four subwoofers, while HEOS, AirPlay, seven HDMI inputs, Auro-3D and the broader Marantz ecosystem give it a different set of strengths. Dirac remains an optional upgrade.

This is not a case where one specification sheet automatically wins. Marantz has the more mature connected ecosystem and ARCAM offers excellent integration and streaming flexibility. Emotiva is putting more of the expensive acoustic processing into the purchase price.

There Is Another CEDIA Story Here

The hardware is only half of Emotiva’s CEDIA announcement.

The company is also launching a new Authorized Dealer Program and will be meeting with prospective dealers and integrators during the show. Emotiva has historically identified itself as a direct-to-consumer company, and its existing Integrator Program was designed primarily for professionals purchasing equipment for specific installations rather than conventional retail resale.
Emotiva has not yet published enough detail to determine exactly how broadly the new dealer structure will alter that business model.

But appearing at CEDIA with two considerably more ambitious home theater components while simultaneously building a dealer network is not difficult to interpret. Emotiva wants the LX Series specified into professionally designed theaters, not just ordered by enthusiasts already familiar with the brand.

That could ultimately be as important as another HDMI input.

The Bottom Line

Emotiva is not winning this fight simply by being cheaper.

The LXP-16 and LXR-11 combine 15-channel immersive processing, four independent balanced subwoofer outputs, modern HDMI 2.1 video support and the complete Dirac Live suite, while the receiver adds eleven channels of Hypex NCOREx amplification.

ARCAM offers more connectivity and a more comprehensive streaming platform. Marantz brings HEOS, seven HDMI inputs, a mature control ecosystem, and formidable competition at both ends of the price range.

But requiring customers to spend nothing extra for Dirac Live Bass Control or Active Room Treatment changes the value equation considerably.

If the LX Series performs as well as its specifications suggest and Emotiva can make its new dealer strategy work, CEDIA 2026 could mark the point where the company stops being viewed primarily as the direct-to-consumer value alternative and starts becoming a much bigger problem for established high-end home theater brands.

Price & Availability

Both are scheduled for release in October 2026, with further launch information expected before availability. They will make their CEDIA Expo debut at Emotiva Booth 2938 in Denver.

Related Reading:

More executive changes are happening at Apple as Ternus takes over, with former CFO Luca Maestri moving on from managing the company’s Corporate Services.

Luca Maestri was the chief financial officer at Apple under Tim Cook, but switched roles at the end of 2024 to become Vice President of Corporate Services. With Cook out, Maestri has also taken the opportunity to change his portfolio of work.

According to sources of Bloomberg, Maestri left his Corporate Services position in the last few weeks. He has not left the company, however, as he is still on the payroll.

Current CFO Kevan Parekh has now assumed the Corporate Services responsibilities.

It is unclear what his responsibilities now are, if anything, within Apple, beyond hosting a single class. That class is at Apple University, the company’s in-house program for educating executives and employees.

The report continues by saying Maestri is winding down his time at Apple, as he prepares for retirement. It is claimed he only comes into the office once a week.

With seemingly no remit, it seems that he won’t be reporting to new CEO John Ternus at all until Maestri’s eventual departure.

from the lots-of-staffing-for-‘field’-offices dept

As the Trump administration continues to chase away actual talent in order to staff federal agencies with loyalists and/or people who don’t know any better, it has had to lower hiring standards to keep the federal cupboards stocked.

ICE went on a hiring surge following the imposition of impossible arrest quotas and a few billion tax dollars. To keep ICE staffing at the level required to arrest 1,500-3,000 non-criminals a day, ICE had to lower its standards and drastically reduce the amount of training these new officers — many who were promised $50,000 signing bonuses — received.

The combination of bonuses and lowered standards not only saw ICE cannibalizing US law enforcement agencies, but also belatedly discovering that a lot of applicants weren’t even capable of meeting standards so low they had to trip over them.

The same thing is now happening at the FBI. Plenty of talent has fled/been bled since Trump took office for the second time. A large percentage of the remaining workforce has been tasked with providing support for Trump’s mass deportation efforts, which means there’s barely anyone left to do the work that still needs to be done by the FBI.

The standards have been lowered at the FBI. And the new standards are so low, they’d possibly even embarrass ICE HR personnel, as CBS News reports:

The FBI previously refused to hire job applicants if they admitted to hiring sex workers or stealing from an employer — or engaging in acts of bestiality.

[…]

In June, the FBI quietly lowered some of the standards it uses when it conducts background checks on would-be federal agents and other personnel. According to multiple sources briefed on the matter, the FBI did so to facilitate hiring in some cases, even if candidates acknowledged they engaged in sexually deviant activities or stole from an employer.

Um…

Well, I’m not going to insult sex workers or sex purchasers, so long as everything is consensual. That this remains a criminal act in most places in the nation is a failure of policy, rather than a leading indicator of criminal proclivity.

But then we have to move on to the other stuff. Stealing from employers tends to be a deal breaker for new hires across both the public and private sector. And you would think an agency with plenty of expensive/sensitive stuff in its possession would be more wary than most when it comes to admissions of theft from former employers.

And that’s probably going to be a problem for the FBI as it moves forward with these relaxed-to-the-point-of-comatose standards.

But it is weirdly specific that the FBI has decided to soften its stance on bestiality. I mean, the FBI wouldn’t be removing this standard if it was such a rare occurrence that it rarely prevented securing a new hire. That it’s being removed now strongly suggests the FBI is being prevented from hiring a lot of… shall we say… otherwise qualified candidates.

It also says something about the hiring pool, which must be loaded with bodily fluids and animal hair. I have never been asked specifically about my animal-fucking activities when applying for any job during my past 33 years of full-time employment. It says something about the FBI that this question even needs to be asked, even indirectly. And it says something else entirely about the FBI now that it’s decided being charged or convicted for bestiality is no longer worrying enough to take a hard pass on a candidate.

That being said, there’s something about the FBI’s new hiring standards that actually suggest it might be willing to forgive and forget, which isn’t a bad thing.

The new standards also specifically address applicants who have engaged in past acts of bestiality or animal cruelty – saying they may still be considered for the bureau as long as the incidents took place before the age of 18, the sources said.

So, it’s not as immediately disturbing as it first appears, although you’d still think the FBI would have enough qualified applicants that it could leave the “no bestiality” requirement in place, no matter what age the person was when they performed these acts. Also, it seems like a lifetime moratorium on animal cruelty convictions should probably remain in place, since those actions tend to predict future acts of violence and are generally (if not entirely factually) associated with, you know, serial killers.

The caveats make this less awful than my headline would suggest. But, on the other hand, we expect federal agencies to hire the “best of the best” because they’re supposed to be the ne plus ultra of law enforcement. Under this administration, though, we’re apparently willing to settle for anyone who can fog a mirror.

Filed Under: bestiality, doj, fbi, kash patel, lowering standards, moral turpitude ftw, party of law and order, trump administration

Before joining Sequoia Capital in 2020 as chief digital and information officer, Avon Puri spent over a decade running infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware. Three years ago, as large language models began showing their true potential, Puri, alongside another Sequoia IT leader, Sudheer Dhurjati, recognized that AI could help autonomously solve a major challenge for infrastructure engineers—preventing tech outages before they occur.

The two tech veterans realized that instead of reacting to system failures after the fact, they could build a tool to predict them. This insight led them to build Empirik, a product that tracks system changes and infers their potential ripple effects across the entire infrastructure.

Sequoia recognized that Empirik could be a new type of observability tool that helps prevent and resolve incidents. After incubating the startup in 2023, Sequoia recruited former Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce observability VP Kartik Chandrayana as CEO earlier this year.

Empirik announced Tuesday that it is spinning out as an independent company after raising $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures.

“There has always been a lot of money spent in keeping systems up and running,” Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky told TechCrunch, adding that most existing observability tools fail to understand complex system dependencies. Empirik, he claims, is one of the first dedicated tools focused on tracking changes across massive environments. It acts as an autonomous “traffic cop”—permitting low-risk changes, setting guardrails on larger ones, and flagging the most dangerous updates for human review.

By serving as an autonomous infrastructure engineer, Empirik allows busy DevOps and site reliability engineering teams to offload routine troubleshooting and focus on higher-value priorities.

Since launching earlier this year, Empirik has already brought on customers ranging from startups to several Fortune 500 players, including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a major consumer packaged goods (CPG) company.

Empirik’s goal is to do for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code did for software developers: automate certain tasks so they can work significantly faster.

As AI accelerates the pace of software development, tools that help infrastructure engineers keep up with constant system changes are more vital than ever, Chandrayana told TechCrunch.

“What agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering,” he added.

As for competition, Balkansky claims Empirik is in a category of its own for now, acting as a complementary layer to AI SRE platforms like Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal.

WTF?! Remember those halcyon days when the RTX 5000-series was announced and we were all shocked by the prices, especially the $1,999 RTX 5090. Now, the average price for the consumer flagship is pretty much $5,000, with one regular model hitting an actual $5,090.

As we noted in our recent graphics card pricing feature that shows just how quickly prices are rising, the RTX 5090 was around $4,900 in the US recently.

Prices for the card were up 20% over the past month and are now 41% higher than in February, by far the largest six-month increase of any card in the list. The massive increase since launch means it’s now 145% above MSRP.

Just days later, RTX 5090 prices have climbed even further. It’s at the point now where even regular cards have reached an apt $5,090 – the price of an Asus TUF Gaming OC.

There has already been a $5,090 RTX 5090 announced, but it’s far from normal: The special-edition MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z, a 1,000W card that some describe as essentially an RTX 5090 Ti. The spec list includes two 12V-2×6 power connectors, a 3 oz copper PCB, a 40-phase VRM, and a carbon fiber backplate. It also has an attached AIO liquid cooler and an 8-inch display panel.

Now, though, that price has become the standard for many RTX 5090 cards.

But there’s an even pricier RTX 5090: the Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 Edition 20. Another special edition card, Newegg lists it for $5,740. We recently covered the story of someone who paid $10,000 for an Asus anniversary bundle that included the card, only for the order to be inexplicably canceled, forcing them to pay an extra $500 for another one.

The question now is whether anyone even buying these cards? As we pointed out in our feature, the RTX 5090 is no longer fast enough, at least not when it comes to gaming at 6K on a monitor that supports the resolution.

What’s just as concerning is the prospect of the RTX 5090’s price, and that of pretty much every other graphics card, continuing to rise. It’s little wonder that the RTX 5000 Super series seems to have been canceled indefinitely. And who knows how much RTX 6000-series cards will cost. An RTX 6090 for $6,090, presumably.