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What’s up, Tech Squad? This week we met a Pixar-lamp-adjacent robot, watched GPT-5 land with less fireworks than everyone expected, and learned Meta would rather sell smart glasses than sell out. Let’s get into it.

Learn from this investor’s $100m mistake

In 2010, a Grammy-winning artist passed on investing $200K in an emerging real estate disruptor. That stake could be worth $100+ million today.

One year later, another real estate disruptor, Zillow, went public. This time, everyday investors had regrets, missing pre-IPO gains.

Now, a new real estate innovator, Pacaso – founded by a former Zillow exec – is disrupting a $1.3T market. And unlike the others, you can invest in Pacaso as a private company.

Pacaso’s co-ownership model has generated $1B+ in luxury home sales and service fees, earned $110M+ in gross profits to date, and received backing from the same VCs behind Uber, Venmo, and eBay. They even reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO.

Invest for $2.90/Share

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Apple’s 'Pixar Lamp' Robot Lands the Table (Aiming for 2027)

Apple is prototyping a tabletop robot: a 7-inch iPad-style display mounted on an articulated arm that can rotate and extend about six inches to “face” whoever’s talking. The company wants it to act like a person-like companion running a new, memory-capable Siri with a “visual personality” (Apple’s testing an animated Finder-style face). It’s built for back-and-forth conversations, suggesting nearby restaurants or planning trips, and will support FaceTime with Center-Stage-style tracking — possibly with a joystick option for manual framing.

• 7″ iPad-style display on an articulated arm (≈6″ reach)

• Memory-enabled Siri with conversational back-and-forth

• FaceTime tracking and possible joystick control

Apple’s aiming for a 2027 launch, though prototypes often shift. The company’s also building a mobile wheeled robot with a large arm for stores and factories.

GPT-5 Arrives: Faster, Cheaper — and Less Magically Human

Last week's GPT-5 debut felt more like a holiday buildup than a product rollout: Sam Altman's Death Star tease and non-stop hype had people expecting a seismic leap. What arrived was quieter — a practical bump, not a miracle. GPT-5 is faster, cheaper to run, and steadier on many tasks (especially code), with fewer hallucinations and a handy backend “switch” that routes queries to the best model automatically. But its prose landed colder, some factual flubs went viral, and users complained the new system sometimes sacrificed nuance for steadiness.

• Wins: lower cost, faster latency, fewer hallucinations

• Best at: coding benchmarks — top of leaderboards and enterprise tools

• Weak spots: creative writing feels blunt; odd factual errors persisted

Bottom line: not the revolution many wanted — but the kind of incremental, profitability-friendly progress that enterprises and investors actually buy.

Meta Ray-Ban Hypernova Glasses with Display to Ship at $800

Meta is gearing up to ship Hypernova, its first display-equipped smart glasses, and the strategy is blunt and boring - in a good way. Instead of chasing a jaw-dropping headset, Meta is testing the market with a single right-lens HUD for mini-apps and alerts plus an included wrist controller for input. Reports peg the starter price at about $800, low enough to push people to try spatial interfaces without breaking the bank.

• Right-lens microdisplay for glanceable info

• Wristband controller for discreet navigation and gestures

• Price: ≈ $800 (expect add-ons like prescription lenses to push final cost up)

Why this matters: Hypernova is less about replacing phones and more about teaching users new habits while collecting real-world usage data. That gives Meta cheap scale and developer signals ahead of pricier, full-AR headsets. The trade-offs are obvious: limited display real estate, unknown battery life, and privacy concerns tied to always-on sensors — but pragmatism wins when adoption is the goal. If Meta nails ergonomics and developer support, Hypernova could normalize tiny HUDs well before true AR arrives.

Pixel 10 Pro Fold Leak: Waterproof, Brighter, and Packing 10x Zoom

Google finally showed off the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, and a fresh WinFuture spec leak fills in the gaps before tomorrow’s Made by Google event. The big upgrades: a full IP68 rating (real dust and water protection), brighter screens both inside and out (now up to 3,000 nits peak), and a much-improved camera zoom that jumps from 5x to 10x optical. Wireless charging is supported via 15W Qi2 (no 25W fast wireless this time - although we should see it on the Pixel 10 Pro XL), and the external display grows slightly to 6.4 inches. Those tweaks sound iterative — but meaningful: better durability, brighter outdoors visibility, and a serious zoom boost.

• IP68 dust + water protection

• 6.4" external screen; internal + external peak brightness → 3,000 nits

• 15W Qi2 wireless charging; cameras now offer 10x optical zoom

Made by Google is tomorrow - expect final specs, pricing, and release dates then.

QUICK BITS

SpaceX hits mission #100 — and helps Amazon. A Falcon 9 launched on Aug. 11, marking SpaceX’s 100th mission of 2025 and carrying another batch of Amazon Project Kuiper satellites as the constellation grows past 100 spacecraft.

Anker’s Nebula X1 keeps projectors interesting. Reviews and week-roundups flag Anker’s new Nebula X1 as one of the standout, cinema-grade projectors — triple-laser brightness, built-in Google TV, and hefty audio that’s trying to make projectors the new living-room centerpiece.

Windows 12 gets teased as an ‘agentic’ AI OS. Microsoft executives are flagging the next Windows as far more than a UI tweak — think ambient, multimodal, intent-driven features where voice and AI become first-class ways to get things done. Privacy questions follow.

Switch 2 gets official accessories. Turtle Beach launched an officially licensed Airlite Fit headset for Nintendo’s Switch 2 (preorders open), a reminder that the accessory market always moves faster than the console cycle.