This week we celebrate Earth Day with our annual Sustainability Week coverage. We cover sustainable phone battery designs, exciting electric vehicle developments and much more.
We also saw the biggest Apple news in years: Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO.
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7. We build a PC using AI
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Building a PC can be a daunting task. You have to find parts that can meet your gaming needs, put them all together, and somehow stick to a budget in the midst of a RAM and component cost crisis.
So this week, we built an AI-planned PC to see if it could help some PC-building newbies put together a great rig, with ChatGPT and Gemini offering tips for purchasing parts as well as build instructions for assembling the PC of our dreams.
Spoiler alert: Our IT editor Matt Hanson had to lend a hand with some real expertise.
6. We organize Sustainability Week 2026
It is a difficult task to make the technology industry more sustainable; From hardware manufacturing to energy use and e-waste, there are a mountain of challenges to overcome. That’s why, just in time for Earth Day 2026, it’s TechRadar Sustainability Week once again!
This year, we’ve covered everything from exciting new EV technology to Framework’s new circularity-focused Linux laptop and an exclusive look at Fairphone’s latest Impact report. It’s not just about hardware; Software like Bottle It Back is helping profile AI water waste, and Steam is hosting its Earth Appreciation Festival to mark the occasion.
5. The EU wants replaceable batteries
Phone repairability has been a major focus of the European Union in recent years, and new rules will come into force in 2027, including requiring phone batteries to be easy to remove and replace, meaning you must be able to remove them without specialist tools unless they are included in the box.
While these rules technically affect only the EU, the manufacturing changes they would likely require could impose these repairability rules on other regions for many products. Something like the EU’s USB-C requirements caused many global brands to adopt the charging standard around the world.
This isn’t just about smartphones either. Tablets, consoles like the Switch 2, and smart glasses would be affected. The only devices not affected are those with batteries that can maintain an 80% capacity level after 1000 cycles, which, interestingly, includes iPhones from the iPhone 15 and later, so Apple fans may find that their technology will not look any different next year when the rules come into play.
4. ChatGPT’s new image generator went viral
It was another big week for ChatGPT updates, with OpenAI announcing its new GPT-5.5 model just days after its Images 2.0 update flooded social media with AI-generated posters and comics.
It was the latter that really caught the eye, mainly thanks to its ability to accurately generate images containing text, traditionally a major weakness of AI. Instead, Images 2.0 has reasoning powers that make it a much better personal art editor, even if it’s still unclear what you can actually do with the results.
3. A robot broke the human half marathon record
Humanoid robots reached another worrying milestone this week: At the Beijing Half Marathon, the aptly named Honor Lightning smashed the human world distance record, clocking 50 minutes and 26 seconds over the 13.1 mile/21.1 km course.
That’s almost seven minutes faster than the record set by Ugandan runner Jacob Kiplimo last month. To be fair, the Lightning robot has a custom liquid cooling system and 0.95m long legs to help it devour the asphalt. And winning medals is not their ultimate goal, rather the goal is to train humanoids for places like disaster zones where their running speed will be much more welcome.
2. Spotify turned 20 and told us gossip about its early days.
Yes, Spotify is now turning 20 years old and was released the same year as Taylor Swift’s debut album. That was so long ago that it’s easy to forget what the music world was really like back then, so we sat down with Sten Garmark, Spotify’s global head of consumer experience, to learn about the streaming giant’s early days.
“The music industry was in free fall and it was a pretty scary time,” Sten told us, before explaining how the shareable playlist became the addictive hook that ultimately drew millions to Spotify. If you want to open the hood of the streaming service and take a look at its algorithms, our exclusive chat is worth a read.
1. Tim Cook resigned as Apple CEO
In what was easily the biggest non-Apple product news in more than a decade, Apple announced a major leadership transition: Tim Cook will step down as CEO in September and Apple hardware leader John Ternus will take over.
The choice isn’t surprising (there have been rumors that Ternus was the one for a while), but the timing is. This comes just weeks after Apple celebrated its 50th birthday and Cook told anyone who would listen that he was going to be around for the long haul. Perhaps staying on as CEO will allow Cook to tell the truth on both counts: He’s leaving one job to take on a new role at Apple. It remains to be seen how involved he will be.
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