This week we made a splash in the tech world by announcing the winners of the 2025 TechRadar Choice Awards, and it’s a veritable buffet of gadgets.
There was also the major AWS outage that shook the internet, and many other events have happened over the past seven days.
7. We found the new king of ANC headphones
Although they were a few years old, the 2023 QuietComfort Ultra headphones were a competitive player in the ANC game. This new generation wisely leaves a lot of things unchanged, and even more wisely, the few changes made only make the QuietComfort Ultra (2nd generation) headphones even more excellent than ever.
According to reviewer Simon Lucas, they’re “a must-have in our best noise-cancelling headphones guide and, honestly, they’re some of the most comfortable and best over-ear headphones overall.”
If you want the best premium noise-cancelling headphones on the market, here you go.
6. Strava dropped its Garmin lawsuit
Just three weeks after filing a patent infringement lawsuit against Garmin, Strava withdrew its complaint. The suit was solely about Garmin’s supposed development of rival heat map and segment technologies and a violation of its existing agreement with Strava, but it actually appears to be a response to Garmin forcing Strava to use its brand more.
Strava didn’t like this: it’s expected to be publicly traded in the near future, and rumor has it that having too many competing brands on its platform would drive down Strava’s stock price. However, Strava has now been overturned; expect to see more Garmin, Apple, Samsung, Suunto and other logos on the platform in the near future.
5. OpenAI took on Chrome
This week, OpenAI took on Google by launching its own browser called Atlas. Using Atlas is like having ChatGPT in the browsing experience. You can open a sidebar to ask questions about what you’re viewing in your tabs and also ask it to perform agent tasks, like using a website, filling out a form, or finding you a cheap deal.
But OpenAI is not resting on its laurels; after just a few days, he has already announced some upcoming improvements for Atlas. We have gathered the five best ones for you here. The big improvements for me are the addition of a model selector, which will give you the option to choose which version of ChatGPT you use, as well as speeding up the agents it uses. There will also be an opt-in ad blocker.
4. We reviewed the Apple MacBook Pro M5
According to our tester and IT editor Matt Hanson, “The Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch (M5, 2025) looks like a rather small update over last year’s M4 model, with the bulk of the improvements focused on AI performance. »
That means no new design, no Wi-Fi 7 support, but you still get great battery life and solid performance – thanks in large part to that new and improved M5 chip.
Plus, it costs the same as the last generation model, which is nothing to complain about, helping to make the MacBook Pro a superb workstation laptop, although users of M3 and M4 machines don’t need to ask for an upgrade.
3. Samsung delivered the Galaxy XR
The spatial computing market has been a pretty small… er… space until now. This week, Samsung finally unveiled its Samsung Galaxy XR (formerly Project Moohan) headset. It immediately stands out for its relatively favorable base price (only in this market could $1,799 be considered a bargain) and its weight. Both features are in stark contrast to the Apple Vision Pro (which received an M5 upgrade last week but without a price adjustment).
Perhaps more importantly, early experiences with the mixed reality wearable have impressed us. As the first Android XR-based wearable, the Galaxy XR shows a lot of promise. Does it beat the high-end and built Apple Vision Pro? We’ll see.
2. Amazon’s Big AWS Outage Broke the Internet
If you managed to miss this week’s massive AWS outage, we’re very jealous. A simple Amazon Web Services glitch (a DNS error) spread like wildfire across countless apps and services, with Snapchat, Ring, Alexa, Wordle, and Reddit among the most affected. There have also been some weird (read: hilarious) effects, like smart beds malfunctioning.
The confusion lasted for several hours as Amazon engineers grappled with some internal complications. In total, more than 1,000 businesses were affected, costing them tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue. So yeah, the next time you make a mistake at work, think about the October 2025 AWS outage – the biggest since Crowdstrike collapsed in 2024 – and you might start to feel a little better.
1. We have selected the best technology of 2025
It’s TechRadar Choice Awards 2025 week! Here, we crown the best tech and gadget releases of the last year – but we don’t do it alone. What makes the TR Choice Awards different is that almost every category is voted on by you, the TechRadar readers. We have over 100 categories spanning all the major product types we cover, from robot vacuums and OLED TVs to gaming headsets and drones.
The reason we take your votes into account when choosing these categories is because we want to make sure our awards not only reflect the opinions of reviewers, but also those of people who actually live with and love these products.
You can read the full list of all winners and know that everything that won a prize is approved by the two real users. And our expert judges.
