Fitness equipment maker Peloton‘s CEO Peter Stern has said the company is exploring ways to expand its customer base by making its products available for use in gyms, and launching a peer-to-peer marketplace for used equipment.
Speaking at Bloomberg Tech Summit on Thursday, Stern said Peloton plans to distribute its machines to commercial gyms via its subsidiary Precor, a gym equipment supplier, and is working to add Peloton workouts to compatible Precor equipment.
The company this week also set out to grab a share of the market for used Peloton equipment, launching a peer-to-peer marketplace called Repowered. “Historically, [second-hand sales have] taken place, for example, on Facebook marketplace, and that’s absolutely fine for people who want to do that, but it means that you need to transact with a stranger on both ends, and potentially have that stranger come into your home. What we’re trying to do is streamline that and deliver a more premium experience for those second-hand customers,” he said.
Stern said the company aims to use AI to improve personalization for its members. “I want to find ways to scale coaching by creating individualized programs for each of our members so that they can get the right class from the right instructor that’s personalized for them,” he said.
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Tech giant Amazon plans to launch a new group within its consumer product division that will focus on agentic AI.
Amazon announced this new research and development group at an event on Wednesday, according to reporting from CNBC. This group will be based out of Lab126, Amazon’s hardware R&D division that is behind tech including the Amazon Echo and the Kindle.
The reason this agentic AI group is likely based at a hardware R&D center is that Amazon hopes this group will develop an agentic AI framework to use in the company’s robotics efforts and to give the company’s warehouse robots more skills.
TechCrunch reached out to Amazon for more information.
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WWDC 2025, Apple’s annual developers conference, starts at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET. Monday. Last year’s event was notable for its focus on AI, and this year, there is considerable pressure on the company to build on its promises.
As in previous years, the company will focus on software updates and new technologies, including the next version of iOS, which is rumored to have the most significant design changes since the introduction of iOS 7. But iOS 19 (or 26, if other rumors about the new naming system are true) isn’t the only thing the company will announce at WWDC 2025.
Here’s how you can watch the keynote livestream.
When Apple introduced a major overhaul to iOS back in 2013 with the launch of iOS 7, it felt jarring for many users with the shift from the prior skeuomorphic design with gradients and real-world textures to the more colorful, but flat, design style that reflected Apple’s then chief design officer Jony Ive’s taste for minimalism.
Now, new reports suggest that an upcoming redesign could provoke a similar level of reaction.
Reports suggest the new design may have elements referencing visionOS, the software powering Apple’s spatial computing headset, the Apple Vision Pro. If true, that means the new OS could feature a transparent interface and more circular app icons that break away from the traditional square format today.
This visual redesign could be implemented across all of Apple’s ecosystem (including even CarPlay), according to Bloomberg, providing a more seamless experience for consumers moving between their different devices.
According to Bloomberg, Apple will announce a change in the naming system for iOS at this year’s WWDC. Instead of announcing the next version of iOS as iOS 19, Apple’s operating systems will shift to being named by year. That means we could be set to see the launch of iOS 26 instead, alongside the OSes for other products, including adOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26, and visionOS 26.
While it might be challenging to top the news related to Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2024, the company is expected to share a few updates on the AI front.
The company has seemingly been caught flat-footed in the AI race, making announcements about AI capabilities that had yet to ship, leading even some Apple pundits to accuse the company of touting vaporware. While Apple has launched several AI tools like Image Playground, Genmoji, Writing Tools, Photos Clean Up, and more, its promise of an improved Siri, personalized to the end user and able to take action across your apps, has been delayed.
Meanwhile, Apple has turned to outside companies like OpenAI to give its iPhone a boost in terms of its AI capabilities. At WWDC, it may announce support for other AI chatbots, as well. With Jony Ive now working with Sam Altman on an AI hardware device, Apple is under pressure to catch up on AI progress.
In addition, reports suggest that Apple’s Health app could soon incorporate AI technology, which could include a health chatbot and generative AI insights that provide personalized health-related suggestions based on user data. Additionally, other apps, such as Messages, may receive enhancements with AI capabilities, including a translation feature and polls that offer AI-generated suggestions, per 9to5Mac.
Apple will likely make the most of a number of smaller OS updates that involve AI, given its underwhelming progress. Reports suggest that these updates could include AI-powered battery management features and an AI-powered Shortcuts app, for instance.
Bloomberg confirmed a 9to5Mac report that said Apple is developing a dedicated gaming app that will replace the aging Game Center app. The app could include access to Apple Arcade’s subscription-based game store, plus other gaming features like leaderboards, recommendations, and ways to challenge your friends. It could also integrate with iMessage or FaceTime for remote gaming.
Along with the new design, reports suggest that Apple’s other operating systems will get some polish, too. For instance, macOS may also see the new gaming app and benefit from the new AirPods features. It’s also expected to be named macOS Tahoe, in keeping with Apple’s naming convention that references California landmarks.
Apple TV may get a visual overhaul, but also , the new gaming app, and other features.
In addition to Messages getting a translation feature, Bloomberg reported that Apple could also bring a live-translate language feature to its AirPods wireless Bluetooth earbuds, allowing real-time translation during conversations. The iPhone will translate spoken words from another language for the user and will also translate the user’s response back into that language.
A new report from 9to5Mac also suggests that AirPods may get new head gestures to complement today’s ability to either nod or shake your head to respond to incoming calls or messages. Plus, AirPods may get features to auto-pause music after you fall asleep, a way to trigger the camera via Camera Control with a touch, a studio-quality mic mode, and an improved pairing experience in shared AirPods.
There haven’t been any rumors regarding new devices, because no hardware is ready for release yet, according to Bloomberg. Although it’s always possible that the company will surprise us with a new Mac Pro announcement, most reports are saying this is highly unlikely at this point.
Some reports indicate that Apple may also announce support for a new input device for its Vision Pro: spatial controllers. The devices would be motion-aware and designed with interaction in a 3D environment in mind, 9to5Mac says.
Bloomberg had reported in November that Apple was expected to announce a smart home tablet in March 2025, featuring a 6-inch touchscreen and voice-activated controls. The device was said to include support for Home Control, Siri, and video calls, but has yet to launch.
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Angelo Sotira started the online digital art platform DeviantArt when he was just a teenager, growing a formative community for millions of artists in the 2000s. Twenty-five years later, Sotira wants to change digital art again, but with a focus on the way it’s displayed.
On Thursday, Sotira revealed his new venture, Layer, a screen specifically designed to showcase digital art in the best quality possible.
“The way that the canvas needs to perform and behave in your life is quite different than other types of displays,” Sotira told TechCrunch. “It needs to blend into beautiful environments.”
The closest point of reference that the average consumer would have for a product like this is Samsung’s The Frame TV, which looks like a painting hung on the wall when it’s not turned on. But Layer takes that kind of feel to an even more premium level — unlike The Frame, Layer is not a consumer product, and it’s not trying to emulate static paintings or photographs.
“They’re $22,000, so that kind of tells you a lot about who that’s for,” Sotira said. “We spared no expense and we spared no effort. We made no compromise in producing what is actually, in our opinion, the very best way to display digital art on a wall.”
When Sotira talks about digital art, he isn’t talking about digital photography or videos.
Layer is working with hundreds of artists like Casey Reas, who makes generative AI art — no, not the kind of generative art you get from ChatGPT, which is created with LLMs that use other artists’ work without their consent. Instead, many of these artists are writing their own software to create digital AI artworks that change over time according to what the code says.
But these artworks, like most AI software, require a lot of computing power to execute. That’s part of why Layer is so pricey — it needs the technological capacity to display these new kinds of works.
“You’re looking at an over 35-year history of extraordinary artists developing the medium of code-based art and essentially, the pixels on the display are being governed by the code that’s been written that runs live on that GPU, rendering it in full resolution,” Sotira said. “It’s actually controlling every pixel, so it’s not going through any compression algorithms.”
Sotira is well aware that he’s not the first entrepreneur to try to create a better way to display digital art — when he was at DeviantArt, he was pitched on products like Layer all the time. But because of this, he knows what was missing from the products that were pitched to him in the past.
“One of the driving principles is that you can plug it in, turn it on, and leave it alone, and it should know how to sequence art for you,” he said.
In his experience, he enjoys tinkering with these devices for a few weeks, but then it becomes tedious to continue updating the display, so he wanted his own canvas to be more self-sustaining.
“It’s going to be on your wall for five years, so it has to play really, really well in your life.”
Layer seems like a highly expensive and very niche product, but some venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are betting on it. While in stealth, the startup raised $5.7 million in funding from Expa Ventures, Human Ventures, and Slauson & Co., plus angels like Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and Behance co-founder Scott Belsky.
The company’s ambitions extend beyond selling hardware to display art. With a Layer canvas, owners get subscription access to a collection of art from the digital artists that Layer partners with. Then, those artists are paid royalties based on the amount of time their works are on view.
“We put artists first, and that’s kind of the core mission and philosophy of Layer,” Sotira said.
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As Apple prepares to unveil iOS 19 at WWDC 2025 on Monday, several rumors have surfaced, including a potential new name for the operating system, an entirely new design inspired by the Vision Pro, and more.
Here’s a roundup of the most notable features rumored to be coming to iOS 19.
Sources told Bloomberg that Apple plans to rename its operating systems to reflect the release year rather than using version numbers. This means that iOS 19 will be renamed iOS 26, similar to how car model years are designated. This name change will also apply to other software updates, such as iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26, and visionOS 26.
Anticipated to be the most significant design change since iOS 7, the operating system may feature a complete visual overhaul, one that’s reportedly inspired by Apple’s Vision Pro headset, according to Bloomberg. This could include translucent panels for navigation and circular app icons. The visionOS-inspired design will be made across Apple’s entire ecosystem with the goal of creating a more cohesive experience.
Apple is also rumored to be releasing a gaming app that will integrate Apple Arcade and the App Store’s game offerings, featuring a central hub for achievements, leaderboards, and App Store content. This comes after the company acquired its first game studio, RAC7, according to DigitalTrends.
Apple may also be developing an AI feature to serve as a personal health coach. This new chatbot is expected to suggest lifestyle changes and provide health advice based on user data collected from the Health app. Additionally, the Health app may be revamped to include a food-tracking feature, allowing users to log their carbohydrate and caffeine intake.
Apple could improve iPhone battery health with AI-powered battery management. This new feature is reported to analyze device usage and make adjustments to conserve battery life. There may also be a new charging icon on the lock screen that gives an estimated time for when it’s fully charged.
Another rumor suggests that reverse wireless charging is being tested on the iPhone 17 Pro models, allowing users to charge accessories such as AirPods or the Apple Watch directly from their iPhone.
According to 9to5Mac, the Messages app is set to get an Apple Intelligence-powered translation feature that can automatically translate messages as soon as they hit users’ inboxes. 9to5Mac also reports that Apple Intelligence could power a polling feature that lets people in group chats vote and offers AI-generated poll suggestions.
One notable absence from all the rumors is the impressive Siri capabilities highlighted in Apple’s 2024 presentation, which featured a more context-aware assistant that can gather information and perform actions across different apps. The company stated in March that the new features are delayed.
While we can expect some AI-related announcements, the primary focus is likely to be on design changes. Reports indicate that improvements to existing Apple Intelligence features will also be introduced, along with some new additions.
This story was originally published June 3 and will be updated as more rumors come out.
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AMD’s latest acquisition could help reduce Nvidia’s market dominance when it comes to AI hardware.
Semiconductor giant AMD on Wednesday announced it acquired AI software optimization startup Brium. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Brium is a startup that appears to be in stealth mode. The startup builds machine learning applications to enable AI inference, the process a trained AI model uses to draw conclusions from new data, across a variety of different hardware options, according to a blog post on Brium’s bare-bones website.
Cutting through that jargon a bit, Brium can help retrofit AI software to work with different AI hardware than it might have been designed for originally.
In a press release, AMD said its acquisition of Brium will help its commitment to “building a high-performance, open AI software ecosystem that empowers developers and drives innovation.”
While AMD is saying that this acquisition helps create a more open AI ecosystem, which isn’t wrong, it seems clear that it’s also meant to help AMD overcome one of its biggest roadblocks: a large percentage of AI software is being designed for Nvidia hardware and chips.
Brium’s sole blog post, which came out in November 2024, talked about the industry’s reliance on Nvidia and called out AMD specifically.
“In recent years, the hardware industry has made strides towards providing viable alternatives to Nvidia hardware for server-side inference,” the blog post reads. “Solutions such as AMD’s Instinct GPUs offer strong performance characteristics, but it remains a challenge to harness that performance in practice as workloads are typically tuned extensively with Nvidia GPUs in mind. At Brium, we intend to enable efficient [model] inference across a range of hardware architectures.”
This is AMD’s fourth strategic acquisition in the past two years, with the company’s goal being to foster an open source AI ecosystem, according to the press release. The company previously acquired Silo AI (in July 2024), Nod.AI (October 2023), and Mipsology (August 2023).
TechCrunch has reached out to AMD for more information.
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