Personal Tech — Wednesday, October 21, 2026

Apple announces Oct 28 "Pro and tell" event in Los Angeles

• first touch-screen MacBook Pro (major reversal of no-touch-Mac stance), Dynamic Island + OLED, M5 Pro/Max chips
• new low-end MacBook Pro with M6 chip, refreshed iMac, revamped iPad mini (Bloomberg)
• iPhone Duo foldable goes on sale Friday Oct 23 — early reviews praise "astonishingly good first effort," nearly invisible crease, but heavy, expensive, app support gaps

Salesforce to acquire Braze for ~$5.66B ($47.50/share cash, close in Salesforce fiscal 2028)

• Braze ~2,770 customers incl. Canva, Dairy Queen, Instacart, Venmo
• complements all four Salesforce layers + Marketing Cloud personalization
• Braze CEO Bill Magnuson says company keeps building as Braze
• counterparty-change concerns for non-Salesforce CRM customers
• marketing-stack consolidation around AI agents

SpaceX Q3 2026 first profitable quarter since June IPO

• $14.6B revenue (+161% y/y), $4.4B net income ($0.35/share vs $1.1B loss a year ago), $8.8B adjusted EBITDA (+306%)
• Super Intelligence segment $7.6B revenue (+830%), >50% of total — AI compute now bigger than Starlink ($5.2B) and Space ($1.8B)
• $19.6B capex ($16.4B into SI)
• $51.3B cash + $38.6B securities
• $63B backlog
• Musk claims $500B–$1T ARR possible next year
• SPCX ~$154 after hours
• ~1.3B-share lockup expiry Oct 22

Funding

• ASI (Boston) $325M Series C at $3B (Spark Capital lead
• Citadel Securities, Meritech, Craft Ventures)
• simulation/monitoring AI for forecasting disruptions in air traffic, power grids, military
• founder Phillip Buckendorf on "managing physical assets"
• $99M 5-year US Army contract, $875M 12-year FAA contract
• YITA (Chinese robot hardware startup) >RMB 100M seed + seed-plus (Galbot, Fourier, Matrix Partners China, CCB International)
• force-controlled robotic arms + joint modules for embodied AI/humanoids

Rapid-fire

• Tesla earnings today (Oct 21), Meta after close tonight
• Netflix tumbling on revenue/profit forecast miss
• ThreatLocker launches Zero Trust AI Control for agentic AI governance
• joint government advisory — SafePay ransomware compromised 600+ critical infrastructure targets via VPNs/backups
• Oracle October update: 1,295 security patches
• Mercedes-Benz + NVIDIA expand autonomous driving alliance
• AuxoAI $20.7M Series A (NTTVC-led, forward-deployed enterprise AI)

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