This week, we made our own stir in the tech world by announcing the winners of the 2025 TechRadar Choice Awards, and it’s a veritable gadget buffet.
There was also the major AWS outage that shook the internet, and a lot more happened in the last seven days.
7. We found the new king of ANC headphones
Despite being a couple of years old, the 2023 QuietComfort Ultra headphones were a competitive player in the ANC game. This new generation wisely leaves many things unchanged, and even more wisely, the few changes made only serve to make the QuietComfort Ultra (2nd Generation) headphones even more excellent than ever.
According to reviewer Simon Lucas, they’re “a sure bet for our guide to the best noise-canceling headphones, and honestly, they’re some of the best and most comfortable over-ear headphones overall.”
If you want the best premium noise canceling headphones on the market, this is it.
6. Strava dropped its lawsuit against Garmin
Just three weeks after filing a patent infringement lawsuit against Garmin, Strava has dropped its lawsuit. The lawsuit had to do with Garmin’s alleged development of rival segment and heat mapping technologies and a violation of its existing agreement with Strava, but actually appears to be a response to Garmin forcing Strava to use more of its branding.
Strava didn’t like this: it’s scheduled to go public in the near future, and it’s rumored that having too much competing branding on its platform would drive down Strava’s stock price. However, now Strava has flipped; Expect to see more logos from Garmin, Apple, Samsung, Suunto, and others on the platform in the near future.
5. OpenAI took over Chrome
This week, OpenAI took on Google by launching its own browser called Atlas. Using Atlas is like having ChatGPT within the browsing experience. You can open a sidebar to ask questions about what you’re seeing in your tabs and also have it perform agency tasks, like using a website, filling out a form, or finding a cheap deal.
But OpenAI is not resting on its laurels; After just a couple of days, some upcoming Atlas improvements have already been announced. Here we have grouped the five best for you. The big improvements for me are adding a model selector, which will give you the ability to choose which version of ChatGPT you are using, and also speeding up the agents it uses. There will also be an optional ad blocker.
4. We review the Apple MacBook Pro M5
According to our tester and computing editor Matt Hanson, “The 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro (M5, 2025) looks like a fairly minor upgrade over last year’s M4 model, with most of the improvements focused on AI performance.”
That means there’s no new design or Wi-Fi 7 support, but you still get excellent battery life and solid performance, largely thanks to that new and improved M5 chip.
Plus, it costs the same as the last-gen model, which is nothing to sneeze at, helping cement the MacBook Pro as an excellent portable workstation, even if users of M3 and M4 machines don’t need to request an upgrade.
3. Samsung delivered the Galaxy XR
The spatial computing market has been a pretty small space…uh…until now. This week, Samsung finally unveiled its Samsung Galaxy XR (formerly Project Moohan) headphones. It instantly stands out for its relatively affordable price (in this market alone $1,799 could be considered a bargain) and its weight. Both features are in stark contrast to the Apple Vision Pro (which received an M5 update last week but without a price adjustment).
Perhaps most importantly, early experiences with the wearable mixed reality device impressed us. As the first Android XR-based wearable, the Galaxy XR shows real promise. Does it outperform the premium-priced and built Apple Vision Pro? We’ll see.
2. Amazon’s big AWS outage affected the Internet
If you managed to miss this week’s big AWS outage, we’re super jealous. A simple Amazon Web Services issue (a DNS error) spread like wildfire across countless apps and services, with Snapchat, Ring, Alexa, Wordle, and Reddit among the worst affected. There were also some strange (read: funny) effects, like the smart beds malfunctioning.
The confusion lasted for several hours as Amazon engineers struggled with some internal complications. In total, more than 1,000 businesses were affected, costing them tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue. So yeah, the next time you make a mistake at work, think about the October 2025 AWS outage (the biggest since the Crowdstrike crisis of 2024) and you might start to feel a little better.
1. We choose the best technology of 2025
It’s TechRadar Choice Awards Week 2025! Here we crown the best technology and gadget launches of the last year, but we don’t do it alone. What makes the TR Choice Awards different is that you, TechRadar readers, vote on almost every category. We have over 100 categories across all the major product types we cover, from automatic vacuum cleaners to OLED TVs, gaming headsets and drones.
The reason we take your votes into account when choosing these categories is because we want to make sure our awards not only reflect the opinions of reviewers, but also the people who actually live with and love these products.
You can read the full list of all winners and know that everything that won a prize is approved by both real users. and our expert judges.
