This week we celebrated Earth Day with our annual Sustainability Week coverage. We covered sustainable phone battery designs, exciting developments in electric vehicles, and much more.
We also saw the biggest Apple news in years: Tim Cook resigns as CEO.
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7. We built a PC using AI
Look on it
Building a PC can be a daunting task. You need to find parts that can meet your gaming needs, put them all together, and somehow stick to a budget in the midst of a RAM and component cost crisis.
So this week we built an AI-planned PC to see if it could help some PC building newbies put together a great rig – with ChatGPT and Gemini offering parts buying advice as well as building instructions for putting together the PC of our dreams.
Spoiler alert: our IT editor Matt Hanson had to lend a hand with some real expertise.
6. We organized Sustainable Development Week 2026
It is difficult to make the technology industry more sustainable; From hardware manufacturing to energy consumption and e-waste, there is a mountain of challenges to overcome. That’s why, just in time for Earth Day 2026, it’s TechRadar Sustainability Week again!
This year we’ve covered everything from exciting new EV technology to the Framework’s new circularity-focused Linux laptop to an exclusive look at Fairphone’s latest Impact report. It’s not just about hardware; software like Bottle It Back is helping profile AI water waste, and Steam is holding its Earth Appreciation Festival to mark the occasion.
5. The EU wants replaceable batteries
Phone repairability has been a major priority for the European Union in recent years, and new rules are expected to come into force in 2027, including requiring phone batteries to be easy to remove and replace, meaning you must be able to remove them without specialist tools unless they are included in the box.
Although these rules technically only affect the EU, the manufacturing changes they would likely require could impose these repairability rules on other regions for many products. Kind of like how the EU’s USB-C requirements have caused many global brands to adopt the charging standard all over the world.
It’s not just about smartphones. Tablets, consoles like the Switch 2 and connected glasses would be impacted. The only devices that aren’t affected are those whose batteries can maintain an 80% capacity level after 1,000 cycles – which, interestingly, includes iPhones from iPhone 15 and later, so Apple fans might find that their technology won’t be any different next year when the rules come into play.
4. ChatGPT’s new image generator has gone 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’s the latter that has really captured the imagination, primarily due to its ability to accurately generate images containing text – traditionally a great weakness of AI. Instead, Images 2.0 has reasoning powers that make it a much better personal art editor, although it’s still unclear what you can actually do with the results.
3. A robot broke the human half marathon record
Humanoid robots reached another worrying milestone this week: during the Beijing Half Marathon, the aptly named Honor Lightning surpassed the human world record for the distance, recording a time of 50 minutes and 26 seconds for the 21.1 km course.
That’s almost seven minutes faster than the record set by Ugandan runner Jacob Kiplimo last month. To be fair, the Lightning robot has a custom liquid cooling system and 0.95m long legs to help it swallow tarmac. And winning medals isn’t his ultimate goal, the goal being to train humanoids for places like disaster zones where their sprinting speed will be much more appreciated.
2. Spotify turned 20 – and gave us some early gossip
Yes, Spotify is now 20 years old and launched the same year as Taylor Swift’s debut album. It’s so long ago that 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 some insight into the streaming giant’s early days.
“The music industry was in free fall, and it was a pretty disastrous time,” Sten told us, before explaining how the shareable playlist became the addictive hook that ultimately attracted millions of people to Spotify. If you want to open the hood of the streaming service and take a look at its algorithms, our exclusive chat is worth reading.
1. Tim Cook resigned as Apple CEO
In what was arguably Apple’s biggest non-product news in over a decade, Apple announced a major leadership transition: Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO in September and John Ternus, head of Apple hardware, will take over.
The choice isn’t surprising (there have been rumors that Ternus was the guy for a while), but the timing is. This comes just weeks after Apple celebrated its 50th anniversary and Cook told everyone who would listen that he would be around for a long time. Perhaps remaining executive chairman will allow Cook to tell the truth on both counts: He’s leaving a job to take a new role at Apple. It remains to be seen to what extent he will be involved.
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