The U.S. Army said late Friday that it has signed a 10-year contract with defense tech startup Anduril. The deal could be worth up to $20 billion.

According to the announcement, the contract starts with a five-year “base period,” with the option to extend the deal for an additional five years, and it includes Anduril hardware, software, infrastructure, and services.

The Army describes the agreement as a single enterprise contract consolidating what had been “more than 120 separate procurement actions for Anduril’s commercial solutions.” 

“The modern battlefield is increasingly defined by software,” said Gabe Chiulli, the chief technology officer at the Department of Defense’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, in a statement. “To maintain our advantage, we must be able to acquire and deploy software capabilities with speed and efficiency,”

Anduril was co-founded by Palmer Luckey, who was previously known for selling VR startup Oculus to Facebook (now Meta). Facebook fired Luckey after controversy erupted following a news report that he’d donated to a pro-Trump political group.

Luckey has repeatedly insisted that the media misrepresented his political views, but according to a recent feature in The New York Times, Luckey and Anduril have been embraced by the second Trump administration, thanks to his vision for remaking the U.S. military with autonomous fighter jets, drones, submarines, and more. The company (named, like Palantir, for a magical object in “The Lord of the Rings”) brought in around $2 billion in revenue last year, the NYT says.

Separate reports suggest that Anduril is in talks to raise a new funding round at a $60 billion valuation. 

This announcement also comes as the Department of Defense is locked in a dispute with Anthropic, with the AI company suing the DoD over its designation as a supply chain threat following a failed contract negotiation, while OpenAI has faced consumer backlash and at least one executive departure after signing a Pentagon deal of its own.

Apple’s new MacBook Neo isn’t just the most affordable MacBook by far — it’s also the most repairable MacBook in “about fourteen years,” according to an in-depth teardown by how-to website iFixit.

The “big story,” in iFixit’s view, is the battery. While older MacBook batteries are supposedly glued into place, the Neo’s battery is held by a tray secured with 18 screws. That’s a lot of screws, but iFixit declared that “screws still beat adhesive every time.” In fact, this new arrangement — which should make it much easier to replace your MacBook battery —  “sent cheers across the iFixit office.”

Other changes that reportedly make the MacBook Neo more repairable: a flat disassembly tree, the fact that Repair Assistant appears to accept replacement parts without complaint, and an easier-to-replace display and keyboard.

Ultimately, iFixit still had enough concerns — like soldered RAM and storage — that it only gave the Neo repairability score of 6 out of 10. But it said that for a MacBook, “that’s a strong score.”

Ask Maps lets users query the world in natural language. Immersive Navigation rebuilds directions in 3D. Together, they mark the most significant overhaul of Google Maps since Street View.

The question Google is now asking its users to ask Maps is: “My phone is dying, where can I charge it without a long wait for coffee?” That a navigation app can handle that query, and actually answer it well, marks a meaningful shift in what digital cartography can do.

Google announced Ask Maps, a conversational AI feature powered by Gemini, alongside a redesigned Immersive Navigation experience that brings photorealistic 3D rendering to turn-by-turn directions. The combination represents what Google is calling its most significant Maps update in over a decade, though it is careful not to say so directly.

Ask Maps works by allowing users to pose complex, contextual queries rather than searching for a specific place or category. “Is there a public tennis court with lights on that I can play at tonight?” is the example Google offers in a blog post published March 12.

The system draws on personalisation signals, including a user’s saved places and past searches, to weight its answers, so a user who has previously sought out vegan restaurants will find vegan-friendly options surfaced without having to specify.

The feature is rolling out now in the US and India on Android and iOS, with a desktop version to follow. Google has not given a timeline for wider international expansion.

The 3D rebuild

Immersive Navigation, the second major component of the update, replaces the current flat-map navigation overlay with a 3D view that incorporates nearby buildings, overpasses, and terrain. Lane markings, traffic lights, crosswalks, and stop signs are rendered as visual cues rather than text instructions.

Voice guidance has been updated to use landmark-based phrasing, “Go past this exit and take the next one for Illinois 43 South”, rather than distance-based prompts.

The redesign brings Google Maps closer to Apple Maps’ long-standing visual approach, which introduced detailed 3D city rendering several years ago. That Google is only now deploying comparable depth in navigation, rather than its existing Immersive View, which was a separate, non-navigation mode, reflects both the computational cost of real-time 3D rendering on mobile devices and the time it takes to build the underlying map data at sufficient resolution.

The competitive context

Ask Maps is Google’s most direct integration of its Gemini AI into a product used by more than a billion people monthly. Until now, Gemini’s presence in Maps has been limited to AI-powered summaries of places and reviews. Ask Maps extends that to full conversational navigation, putting Google in more direct competition with AI-native tools like Perplexity, which has built search-style answers to location-based queries into its products.

The update also arrives at a moment when Apple is deepening its own Maps intelligence, and when OpenAI has been exploring location-aware features in ChatGPT. For Google, which generates a significant portion of its advertising revenue from local search queries, keeping Maps as the dominant interface for spatial intent matters enormously. Ask Maps is the company’s clearest signal yet that it intends to defend that ground.

Whether users will actually talk to their maps, or default to the familiar search box, is the open question. Google has introduced conversational search features before, and adoption has often been slower than product announcements suggest.

But the infrastructure is now in place. The next question is the one users will actually ask.

The AI company he founded three years ago has lost six co-founders, is slashing staff, and trails badly in coding benchmarks. Musk’s remedy: rebuild from scratch, for the second time.

In March 2023, Elon Musk launched xAI with 12 co-founders and a stated ambition to build “the most powerful AI in the world.” Three years later, 10 of those founders have gone.

The company is cutting staff. Its flagship chatbot Grok is acknowledged, by Musk himself, to lag behind its main competitors. And for at least the second time, Musk has declared that xAI must be rebuilt from the foundations.

“It was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” Musk said this week, less than six weeks after completing a $1.25 trillion merger between xAI and SpaceX.

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The comment came as reporting from the Financial Times and CNBC confirmed a wave of departures among xAI’s senior engineering staff, with Tesla and SpaceX executives reportedly sent in to audit teams and identify underperformers.

The most recent exits, researcher Zihang Dai and engineer Guodong Zhang, follow the February departure of Jimmy Ba, one of the company’s highest-profile AI researchers. The cumulative loss, described by insiders as a combination of burnout and Musk’s management style, has left morale at the company in poor shape, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.

The coding problem

The immediate catalyst for this latest round of disruption appears to be Grok’s performance on coding tasks. Musk said at a conference this week that “Grok is currently behind in coding”, a candid admission given that AI-assisted software development has emerged as perhaps the most commercially valuable near-term application of large language models.

Grok trails Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex in coding benchmarks, according to xAI staffers cited in FT reporting. The gap has become a source of internal frustration: engineers who joined xAI expecting to be at the frontier instead find themselves chasing a moving target set by competitors with more data, more investment, and fewer departures.

In an attempt to close the gap, xAI announced hires from Cursor, the AI-powered coding environment that has built a devoted following among developers. Whether transplanting talent from one company to another can resolve what appear to be deeper structural and cultural problems at xAI is, at minimum, unclear.

A $1.25 trillion question

The timing is delicate. The SpaceX-xAI merger, valued at $1.25 trillion, was framed in part as a way to stabilise xAI’s ambitions by giving it access to SpaceX’s capital, compute infrastructure, and engineering discipline. Tesla also invested $2 billion in xAI earlier this year. Both investments now look more complicated against the backdrop of an acknowledged rebuild and a continuing talent crisis.

xAI has also been under regulatory scrutiny in multiple countries after its Grok image generator was found to produce non-consensual intimate imagery with minimal safeguards. The company has addressed some of those concerns, but the reputational damage has complicated its pitch to enterprise customers who might otherwise have been considering Grok as an alternative to OpenAI or Anthropic products.

Musk’s companies have been rebuilt before. Tesla was months from insolvency when it launched the Model 3. SpaceX famously had three rocket failures before its fourth mission succeeded. Whether the pattern holds for an AI lab in an era where the competitive landscape shifts every few months is the question hanging over xAI’s third act.

You can save money and help save the planet by buying used or refurbished electronics instead of new devices. Since most of the environmental impact of devices comes from the manufacturing phase, buying secondhand gear can reduce your carbon footprint. Do it right, and buying refurbished can feel much like buying new. This guide delves into what you need to know about refurbished terminology, offers tips on what to look for to snag yourself the best deals, and lists some of the best places to buy refurbished gadgets and used electronics.

You may also be interested in How to Buy Ethical and Eco-Friendly Electronics, The Best Used Tech to Buy and Sell, What to Think About Before Buying a Used Smartphone, and How to Responsibly Dispose of Your Electronics.

Updated March 2026: I’ve added some tips for buying, new links to refurbished sellers, and advice on what to do after you buy.

What Does Refurbished Mean?

There is no legal definition of refurbished. Some sellers prefer used, pre-loved, secondhand, reconditioned—the list continues. Refurbishment implies that the seller has tested the device and may have repaired and cleaned it, but the only way to be sure is to read the fine print and understand what the seller means by whatever term is used.

If you’re lucky, you may get an open-box device, which a buyer has opened but never actually used. Sellers are not legally allowed to resell returned devices as new, and it’s common for all returns to end up sold in the same place. At the other end of the scale, you may end up with a device that looks like it has survived the apocalypse and doesn’t work.

Tips for Buying Refurbished

I’ll recommend a few good places to buy refurbished electronics below, but first, let’s explore what you should look for in a seller and what you need to do to protect yourself when you buy.

While buying older electronics is often a great way to save money, there are a few things to keep in mind. It may make more sense to buy a discounted flagship phone from a couple of years ago than a brand-new budget phone, for example, but there are also some potential cons. Always consider software updates and ask:

• How many more years of software updates will the product receive?
• How long will it continue to get security updates?
• What version of the software does it come with?
• How easy is it to update the software?

Aside from working out what the seller means by refurbished, you should read the listing for any potential purchase very carefully and try to answer questions such as these:

• Has it been tested, and does everything work?
• Does it have a new battery or a guarantee about battery health? (This is crucial for old phones and laptops.)
• Has it been wiped if a previous user set it up?
• Is there any cosmetic damage like scratches or cracks? (Look for a transparent grading system.)
• What is included? (Does it come with chargers, cables, manuals, and original packaging?)
• Is there any warranty offered? (The longer the better.)
• If there is a problem, how do returns work? Do you have to pay, and what is the return window?

If you’re uncertain about anything, it’s worth asking before you buy to avoid disappointment.

Photograph: Simon Hill

There are protections for purchases, such as Section 170 of the Fair Credit Billing Act in the US or Section 75 in the UK. But you should use a credit card for purchases to get the best charge-back protection and avoid going through a third-party payment service, such as PayPal. Some banks and credit card companies are better than others, so it’s worth researching their reputations and the protections they offer.

If you can inspect and test devices before you buy, do it. Otherwise, you should closely examine and thoroughly test any device you buy immediately when you receive it. Remember that there is a limited window to report any faults or issues with the condition and return an item. Always keep the box and packaging it arrived in at least until you are satisfied that you won’t need to return it.

You’ve done your initial tests and decided that you are keeping the refurbished device you bought, but there are still a couple of things you might consider doing before you start using it.

Best Places to Buy Refurbished Electronics

Photograph: Simon Hill

You have an enormous choice when buying refurbished electronics, so let’s break down your options.

We have had some good experiences buying refurbished devices from their original manufacturers, which makes sense since they know precisely how to test and repair their own devices. All of these manufacturers certify the refurbished devices they sell, and most offer at least a one-year warranty, but the savings vary; for example, Apple offers up to 15 percent off, while Dell offers up to 50 percent off.