A July 21, 2026 recap highlights Apple's testing of an AI note-taking system for Genius Bar use, scrapped Intel Mac Pro plans, legal letters to ex-employees at OpenAI, and up to 11% iPhone price hikes in Japan. These stories reflect ongoing AI development, hardware strategy shifts, talent retention efforts, and market pricing dynamics.

Apple is testing a Live Notes AI system to record Genius Bar sessions.
https://x.com/9to5mac/status/2078973322897895931
Apple has sent legal letters to former employees now working at OpenAI.
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Volkswagen's supervisory board has unanimously approved the Future Plan 2030, which includes an additional 50,000 job cuts worldwide to reach a total of around 100,000 and leaves four German plants without secured future vehicle production after 2031-2034. The move aims to reduce costs and improve competitiveness against Chinese rivals, with alternative uses for the factories to be examined by June 2027.
OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra has posted state-of-the-art scores of 62.7% and 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3 depending on the harness used. The results narrow the measured gap to human-level agentic intelligence on a benchmark designed to track progress toward AGI.
Claude, ChatGPT/Codex, and Grok suffered a widespread outage on September 3, 2026 with elevated errors confirmed by OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. Services began recovering after about 30 minutes though Grok lagged, coinciding with OpenAI teasing its GPT-6 Astra launch.