Beyond Tech: Your Weekend Upgrade | Newsletters

Stop bogging yourself down with those high-interest credit card payments. It seriously limits your spending power. If your monthly interest payments are starting to creep out of control, you might need to take a look at changing things up with your current credit card by finding a card with a 0% intro APR.

Editors at FinanceBuzz have done their research, and they’ve identified some of the best options to help you take back control. These cards offer a generous 0% intro APR on purchases and balance transfers into nearly 2028, which means you could get the breathing room you need to tackle your debt or make a new purchase without being hamstrung by high interest for over the whole year.

On top of that, you can earn up to 5% cash back on everyday purchases with these cards and enjoy a $0 annual fee. It’s really a no-brainer when you consider you could save on interest and earn rewards on everyday purchases.

Get rid of your high-interest payments. Learn more about these cards today.

BYD’s Altior — BYD’s ultra-luxury sedan takes on Rolls-Royce with coach doors, 1,000+ km CTLC range, 1,000V fast charging, and a 24K gold emblem. Price TBA. + Honda’s Wild EV Outlier Concept electric motorcycle for beyond 2030.

Siri Goes Agentic — Apple is pressing to speed up Siri. iOS 27.3 adds first-party app control, with 3rd-party apps like Grubhub due in spring. Also: It Preps ChatGPT for HomeView hub via a Conversational Apps category.

Amazon’s Next Home Robot — Amazon formed a home robotics team hiring for a “new-to-world robot product” after the Astro never left beta. Also: Amazon’s Ring launched a home security drone, its first flying consumer product.

Android XR Gemini glasses via Samsung, Warby Parker, Gentle Monster. $395, ship Dec. 10. + Tabletop Google Groups with AI agent. + Pixel Tag $30 Bluetooth/UWB tracker tags to take on AirTags.

Alexa Gets Text Shopping — Amazon is rolling out text-based Alexa shopping to millions of users for recommendations, comparisons and purchases.

Instagram Effect Builder — Instagram’s new AI tool lets US users 18+ build custom AR filters for Stories from text prompts, with reference images for style and previews.

Drops Music App — Harman, a Samsung subsidiary, launched Drops on iOS and Android in the US. The TikTok-style app lets users swipe 10-to-30-second song clips.

Amazon has rebuilt the team behind its failed $1,450 Astro and bought humanoid maker Fauna. Apple’s $1K robotic display has slipped to 2027 or 2028. Both companies are also racing to make their assistants act on their own.

Amazon has assembled a new Personal Robotics Group, redeployed the engineers behind its failed $1,450 Astro, and bought New York humanoid maker Fauna Robotics. Apple’s own home robot, a $1,000 display mounted on a swiveling arm, has slipped to 2027 or 2028 because the software is late. In the same week, both companies pushed their voice assistants to start taking actions without being asked step by step. The two biggest consumer hardware franchises in America have landed on the same answer to the AI question, and neither can ship it yet.

Amazon shipped Astro to a few thousand customers in 2021 and never took it out of beta. A business version arrived in 2023 and was killed inside a year. The device mapped a house well and did little else. Ken Washington, Amazon’s VP of consumer robotics until 2023, said he pushed for a robot that walked and was overruled. “It was such a big, massive leap that I felt like we had the right to own the home,” he said.

The second attempt is better funded. Amazon bought Fauna Robotics in March, folded it into the Personal Robotics Group, and hired an MIT roboticist. Fauna’s Sprout is a 3.5-foot humanoid that has mostly gone to developers and university labs. Job posts describe a “new-to-world robot product” built for “autonomous operation alongside family members.”

Another part of Amazon did ship. Ring, bought for over $1B in 2018, launched two autonomous security robots this week. The home product is a drone that lifts off a charging dock, flies toward whatever set off an alert, and steers around furniture on the way. Ring calls it a flying security guard. The second is a rolling unit for businesses with outdoor navigation and two-way audio, aimed at work security guards do now. Both use computer vision to separate ordinary household movement from a real problem. The drone needs a Ring Protect subscription for cloud storage and the better AI features. Ring already takes criticism over police data sharing, and a camera that follows a noise into the next room widens that fight.

Apple’s HomeView Ultra, known inside the company as J595, is a nine-inch touchscreen on a robotic arm that rotates 360 degrees to follow you around a room. The Information reports the hardware has sat finished for roughly two years while software teams catch up, pushing launch to 2027 or 2028. Engineers have reportedly cut features back toward FaceTime and basic home control. The price lands near $1,000 and could climb on component and memory costs. Apple is also said to be working on a wheeled robot that follows people between rooms, an indoor drone, and a laundry-folding machine, all far from shipping.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that CEO John Ternus is pressing AI chief Craig Federighi to speed up Siri. iOS 27.3 gives Siri fine control of Apple’s own apps, letting it crop a photo or tidy Safari tabs. Control of outside apps is expected in the spring, so Siri could place a Grubhub order or book an OpenTable table. Gurman says true agent behavior, where the assistant holds a goal across many steps, could arrive next year.

Code in the same beta points to a “Conversational Apps” category on HomeView, which would let ChatGPT and Claude run on Apple’s hub alongside Siri. Amazon moved the opposite way, blocking Meta’s Muse from its platform in the same week it launched text-based Alexa shopping to millions of users.

Venture investors put $33.4B into robotics and physical AI in the first half of 2026, beating the $28.7B spent across all of 2025, according to PitchBook. Barclays values the humanoid market at $2B to $3B today and projects roughly $40B by 2035, with an optimistic case near $200B. Agility Robotics, which Amazon backs, went public through a SPAC last week. Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for almost $13B in September. Colin Angle, co-founder and former CEO of iRobot, said the tooling has changed completely. “The toolkit that the Astro team had when they did it was clubs with nails in them,” he said.

Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, has watched the industry for 45 years. “Children, pets, grandparents, stairways. Nobody’s home is set up exactly the same,” he said. Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser acknowledged the gap between what works in a lab and what works in a living room.

Owners put it more bluntly. Emily Lugo Velez has kept an Astro since 2023 and now calls it a party trick and a “trip hazard.” Most days she sends it back to its dock.

The money is loudest right now and the products are thinnest. Amazon has a million warehouse robots and one expensive consumer failure. Apple has finished hardware and software that cannot drive it. What decides the race is whether an assistant can complete a multi-step task in a real house without supervision. Until that works, the arm, the wheels and the drone are packaging.

Dems Fight FCC Pick — Senate Democrats oppose Trump’s nominee Danielle Thumann Severs, Carr’s senior counsel, over Jimmy Kimmel threats.

Elvis, Eminem vs. Suno — Elvis Presley’s rights holders and Eminem’s publisher sued AI music firm Suno over cloned voices and lyrics, citing Tennessee’s ELVIS Act.

Disney-Adobe AI Alliance — Disney inked a multi-year deal for early access to Adobe’s AI tech and custom Firefly models, spanning theme parks and ESPN content.

Paramount CEO Bets on AI — David Ellison told investors AI could be the “biggest creative unlock in modern history,” likening it to the CGI leap behind Jurassic Park and T2.

NYT Eyes Letterboxd — The New York Times is in exclusive talks to buy film social platform Letterboxd for about $330M, over 20x projected earnings, with 30M users.

GTA 6 Miami Festival — Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto VI: The Festival hits Mana Wynwood on Nov 21 with Travis Scott, Cardi B and a Justice DJ set.

Robopocalypse Series — Oscar winners Ron Howard/Akiva Goldsman to adapt Daniel H. Wilson’s 2011 bestseller on rogue-AI, stalled since DreamWorks bought it.

Regenerative Ag, Locally — The Nature Conservancy and General Mills scientists say regenerative agriculture must fit each place, citing Kansas wheat, sinking land.

Fast Food’s Humanity Problem — Chef Robert Irvine says chains put profit over people as prices are up 24-25% since 2020. McDonald’s US comps fell 0.2%, while Burger King rose 8.4%.

Electric Ice Cream Truck — The British maker Whitby Morrison delivered its first electric ice cream van, built on the Mercedes eSprinter. It ran 100+ miles daily and takes orders.

altM’s Farm-Waste Chemicals — The Indian industrial biotech startup raised $10.3M in Series A funding to turn agricultural waste into specialty chemicals, with Rainmatter backing.

Eater Awards 2026 — Now in its 17th year, the awards honor the nation’s best new restaurants, bakeries, chefs, dishes, and bars, with winner dining perks through Jan. 31, 2027.

CMU Teaches AI Football — A new NFL partnership gives Carnegie Mellon researchers Chenyan Xiong and Ron Yurko game film and tracking data to train AI models on football.

LeBron vs. Bron AI — LeBron James sent a cease-and-desist to Bron AI, a YC-backed betting app, over a lookalike avatar and voice. The CEO now plans a name change.

NFL Fund — NFL owners approved a fund with General Atlantic ($130B AUM) via 32 Equity ($250M across 42 companies); owners keep GP carry that needn’t be shared with players.

CFP Expands to 24 — The CFP and ESPN agreed to a five-year, nearly $1.7B deal, per ESPN sources. It expands the playoff to 24 teams in 2027 and ends Power 4 title games.

Ellison’s Sports Dilemma — After Skydance’s $110B Warner Bros. Discovery deal, David Ellison holds nearly every top U.S. league but the NBA, with $6.6B in yearly rights fees.

HRL Lands on USA — The team-based Horse Racing League, co-founded by ex-Liberty CEO Greg Maffei, will air its 2027 debut live on USA Network, with 10 teams chasing $10M+.

College All-22 Film — Sports tech firm Catapult launches a $15/month service with 100+ schools, including ACC and SEC teams, offering 1,300+ games from the 2025 and ’26 seasons.

AI’s Cyber Dark Age — Cognition CSO Alex Stamos warns AI-boosted hacks from Russia and North Korea are overwhelming defenses, shrinking time to respond.

AI in Chemistry — The Ohio specialty chemicals maker Lubrizol uses AI and cloud tools so chemists can test ideas virtually first, with fusion teams pairing scientists/IT.

One AI Simulates Physics — MIT and the University of British Columbia built one transformer-based simulator that models sand, fluids and protein movement.

Muscle-Like Robot Legs — University of Tokyo researchers built a life-size robotic leg with 3D-printed structures inspired by human muscle, getting flexible movement.

CAT’s Diesel-Electric Digger — Caterpillar’s biggest underground loader yet, the R3200 XE, borrows century-old locomotive tech: a diesel engine feeds electric motors to haul 25 tons.

Flying Beside Rockets — The single-person electric aircraft Jetson ONE hovered beside Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket stage at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

Lasers Make Mice Hallucinate — Scientists at Seoul National University zapped a tiny cluster of neurons in six mice, making their brains “see” phantom shapes.

Nvidia Opens 6G Toolkit — Nvidia open-sources its Aerial wireless software, pairing it with the Sionna simulator so researchers can test 6G ideas .

FDA Weighs AI Rules — The FDA drew 500+ comments on generative AI devices: a medtech lobbyist wants current rules kept, physicians and patients want monitoring.

AMA Spreads AI Liability — The AMA says physicians, AI developers and health systems each share duties for clinical AI safety, arguing doctors need support.

Virtuoso Robot Cleared — FDA grants de novo authorization to Tennessee surgical robotics firm Virtuoso for a urethral robot enabling en bloc bladder tumor removal.

Bird Flu Threat — A Washington State resident died of H5N1, which has spread since 1996 and now infects mammals; experts fear mutations could spark outbreak.

Safi’s Lab-Made Blood — Safi Biotherapeutics, a biotech making stem-cell red blood cells, won a $4.7M Defense Health Program extension.

AI Skips Lab Work — British startup Potential Sciences raised seed funding from SovAI to train AI on physics-simulated chemical data for drug discovery.

Heart Pump Funding — Blackstone will provide up to $455M to co-fund Boston Scientific‘s Vitalyst miniature heart pump for cardiogenic shock.

Life Sciences Deals Rebound — Baker Tilly’s sponsored monitor says life sciences M&A hit a record $218.3B in 2025, plus $156.6B in H1 2026, as VC favors bigger, later-stage bets.

Novocure Denied — The FDA rejected Novocure’s Optune Mya for lung cancer brain metastases over unclear clinical benefit despite a positive Phase 3 METIS trial.