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Greetings! Your latest quick tech update is here:
☀️ On this day: On August 13, 1889, William Gray of Hartford, Connecticut was granted US Patent 408,709 for a coin-controlled telephone, the first payphone that worked without an attendant collecting money. He had filed the application exactly one year earlier, on August 13, 1888, and the idea came after he was refused the use of a factory telephone to call a doctor for his sick wife. By 1902 there were 81,000 payphones across America.
What’s happening:
🌐 Claude Cowork now runs in Chrome's side panel
🚀 Grok 4.6 nearly matches top models at 60% lower price
📱 Google launches Pixel 11, Watch 5, and Pixel Tag
📈 Gemini is now Google's fastest growing product ever
📰 Apple in talks to license news content for Siri
+ 📊 Daily poll and results
+ 📈 Trending tools and resources
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Hand-picked news:
🌐 Claude Cowork now runs in Chrome ↗️LINK
Anthropic turned the Claude in Chrome side panel into a full Cowork session. Conversations now save to your account history, and your existing skills and connectors work in the browser without setup.
Sessions live with the account rather than the device, so you start a task in a tab and finish it in the desktop app. Max and Team plans get it today, Pro follows soon.
Anthropic flags prompt injection as the main risk, since websites can hide instructions that hijack the agent. The company says its safeguards reduce that risk but cannot remove it.
🚀 Grok 4.6 ties GPT-5.6 Sol at lower price ↗️LINK
SpaceXAI, the company formerly called xAI, released Grok 4.6 on August 12. Artificial Analysis scored it 61 on its Intelligence Index, tying GPT-5.6 Sol and trailing Claude Opus 5 and Fable 5.
Price carries the pitch. Grok 4.6 charges $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output, more than 60% under Opus 5 and Sol. Cursor usage data fed its training.
Musk called the model objectively number one on intelligence, speed and cost. The benchmark he cited ranks it third, and he already promises Grok 4.7 will exceed everything within a month.
📱 Google launches Pixel 11, Watch 5, and Pixel Tag ↗️LINK
Google unveiled the Pixel 11 lineup, the Pixel Watch 5, and its first AirTag rival at Made by Google 2026, plus a wave of new Gemini features across its devices.
The Pixel 11 starts at $899, a $100 jump over the Pixel 10. Google dropped the 128GB tier, doubled base storage to 256GB, and cites the ongoing RAM supply shortage.
Google finally shipped a tracker tag at $29, years after AirTag. Pixel Tag runs on the Find Hub network, and Pixel Buds users can ask Gemini to ring it.
📈 Gemini app passed 1 billion users ↗️LINK
Google said the Gemini app passed 1 billion monthly active users, its 14th product to clear that bar. Sundar Pichai called it the company's fastest growing product ever in a post on X.
The app counted 400 million users in May 2025 and 950 million at July earnings. Google says 63% of users talk to Gemini by voice, and it generates 150 million images daily.
Google skipped one number: how many of those billion pay. Subscriptions run $7.99 to $100 a month, and Alphabet now guides 2026 capital spending to as much as $205 billion.
📰 Apple in talks to license news content for Siri ↗️LINK
Apple has approached publishers in recent months about licensing their content so the revamped Siri can pull current news and information, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Apple proposed paying publishers each time their content gets used instead of a fixed licensing fee, and the report says it has weighed a nine-figure budget for those payments.
Publishers usually get guaranteed money tied to broad content access. A pay-as-you-go model shifts that risk onto them, right as Apple races to ship Siri AI later this year.
Today’s Poll:
Do you think letting an AI agent click around your Chrome tabs is more helpful or more risky?
Vote and find out about the result tomorrow.
Yesterday’s Poll Result:
Do you think you can still tell a real photo from an AI one with your own eyes?
A) Yes - 38%
B) No - 62% 🏆
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