For years we entertained ourselves comparing whether Apple's new iPhones outperformed Samsung's new Galaxy, or vice versa. But the future plans of technology companies have always been seen best at their congresses for application and service creators: Apple's WWDC, Microsoft's Build, Google's I/O, or Facebook's (now Meta) Connect. It is where they present the programming interfaces (APIs), prices per use, access rules, and partner lists: that which will decide which products will exist two years from now. Now, artificial intelligence (AI) laboratories have joined in, and last Tuesday it was the turn of OpenAI's DevDay, the company behind ChatGPT.

Ten years ago, Zuckerberg announced that the future of Facebook was bots for Messenger; within a year, the bet had already collapsed. Then it was the turn of the cryptocurrency Libra, which also did not succeed, and a little over five years ago the company rebranded itself as Meta and promised a metaverse full of legless avatars. On Wednesday, in Menlo Park, the individual returned to the stage with a novelty that, he said, is "the center of our vision": Muse, an artificial intelligence agent that is barely three weeks old.

Last Saturday, the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, published on his website the article "We must pace the frontier", in which he asked the AI industry to slow down the pace of improvement of their models. Five days later, the rotating chairman of Huawei, Eric Xu, responded to him from Shanghai: Chinese AI providers "still do not have enough computing or model capacity" to perceive the same risks that are being discussed in the US, and perhaps "they need to accelerate the pace until they can notice them too". One proposes to brake because he already sees them (and also because he does not want any rival to get ahead of him); the other wants to run to get there. Underneath this debate lie two technically very different ways of building artificial intelligence.

We have seen it a thousand times, on TV and in the movies: a malevolent actor infiltrates the production and distribution of energy, telecommunications, air or road traffic control, healthcare, or the financial system that makes a city, a country, or the entire planet function, and contaminates or shuts it down until, on the brink of catastrophe, the good guys arrive and neutralize them. The villain, almost always, is a computer genius with monetary aspirations, little social life, and some pending grievance with the established powers, or is in the service of an adversary state. A comfortable archetype that is easy to stop in ninety minutes.

The iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable phone, took center stage at this Wednesday's presentation in Cupertino (California), and not because it represents any technological leap: Huawei, Motorola, Xiaomi, and especially Samsung have been exploring this format for years with increasingly refined models. What makes the Duo relevant is what it says about Apple's reaction to the threat from the aforementioned rivals. Just before the presentation, Samsung itself boasted that one in six buyers of its Z Fold8 were former iPhone users who wanted a foldable that Apple did not yet offer them. With the Duo, Apple makes it clear that it is not willing to give up without a fight a segment of buyers, those who barely look at the price, which it had held almost exclusively for years.

In the summer, when we very often travel to places we don't know, Google Maps becomes an ally for getting around. How do these GPS navigation services, which are already essential for our daily lives, work?

Summer is the season for concerts and festivals, and your mobile phone has become the tool that accompanies the entire process: before, during, and after each performance. It's not just about taking photos or recording vertical videos for social media of questionable quality. There's an ecosystem of applications specifically designed for music lovers that allow you to prepare for a concert, identify an unknown song, or keep a record of what you've seen and heard. Most are available as web applications and facilitate blocking the tracking codes included in apps for Android and iOS.

BlackBerry tried it before: in its final years, when it was still looking for a response to the onslaught of the iPhone and Android terminals, the Canadian brand explored phone formats that moved away from the conventional rectangular bar. The 2014 BlackBerry Passport had dimensions practically identical to those of a physical passport; I still keep mine. The format did not serve to save the brand, which ended up abandoning the terminal business, and for more than a decade no one has recovered it.

Television viewers are accustomed to seeing the familiar bug in a corner of the screen, the logo that reminds us at all times which channel we are watching. In mobile telephony, there is an equivalent: the Service Provider Name (SPN), the text that indicates which network the terminal is connected to and that appears in the top status bar, alongside indicators such as coverage or battery level.

This Friday marks 64 years since NASA put the Telstar 1, the first commercial telecommunications satellite, into orbit. Currently, 10,413 Starlink satellites, Elon Musk's company, fly over our heads. In contrast, the European Union, which has been talking about strategic autonomy in telecommunications for years, has not yet launched any from its flagship project. The difference explains where we are in 2026 in satellite connectivity.

We had gotten used to it: when changing mobile phones or computers, for the same price we got more: more memory, more speed, more storage. Price increases were reserved for truly new categories (foldable phones, to name one that hasn't convinced anyone yet), while the rest of the catalog offered more features for less. This cycle has ended, and the culprit has a name: artificial intelligence (AI) and its consumption of memory chips.

If the Passbook standard exists for show tickets and transport tickets, why do I so often have to install the concert promoter's app or the airline's app on my mobile to have the QR code that will allow me to enter a show or a flight? Why can't I load it directly into the wallet app (wallet) from my phone? And if any audio file uploaded on a website is accessible with a podcast player, why would someone force me to listen to them on Spotify? In the first case, the answer is that by making me install the app, it will be able to capture personal data from my phone and, moreover, try to sell me tickets for other shows. In the second, it's because the platform provides the creator with listening statistics that they wouldn't have if I downloaded the audio and listened to it in local mode. What both cases share is that they serve as examples of the hijacking of open internet technology by companies with commercial objectives, a hijacking that some of us have been denouncing for decades and which even has a name: "modification.

More than two decades ago, representatives of a very active Catalan-speaking internet community suggested to ICANN, the organization that regulates internet domains, the possibility of creating a top-level domain not linked to any state (.fr, .uk, .es) or any type of activity (.com, .edu, .org), but to a language and a culture. The response was one of skepticism. "'What do you want a domain for cats for?', they asked us," recalled Amadeu Abril, one of the three original promoters of the .cat, a few days ago, at an event commemorating the domain's 20th anniversary.

Two years ago, Apple dazzled us with the promise of a Siri capable of reading the user's email and calendar to answer complex questions about their life. That never materialized, and the company faced lawsuits for misleading advertising. Apple had crashed into a race in which OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia were already running at full speed.

Taipei and San Francisco have this week been the scenes of a trend change in personal computing. At Computex in Taipei, Jensen Huang announced Nvidia's entry into the PC processor market with the RTX Spark chip, shaking up a sector dominated for decades by Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple. In San Francisco, Microsoft held the Build 2026 conference at a particularly symbolic moment: exactly two months after formalizing its separation from OpenAI (which has just surpassed 1 billion users of ChatGPT), the company wants to demonstrate that it can walk alone in artificial intelligence.

Since I've been doing this, when someone asks me which computer to buy, I recommend a Mac: for the operating system and because it ages better and therefore takes longer to replace. And the answer is always the same: "Thanks, but they are too expensive." And they were right... until now. The MacBook Neo costs 699 euros, and for the first time a Mac can compete in price with Windows PCs.

The season of major technology conferences for application and service developers begins, setting the tone for what consumers will see in the coming months and years. Before Microsoft's Build (June 2nd) and Apple's WWDC (June 8th), Google kicked things off this week with its I/O, steeped in artificial intelligence (AI) and a total overhaul of the iconic web search engine.

A conventional data center and an artificial intelligence gigafactory (or gigafactory, the fashionable Anglicism, adopted by analogy with the name Tesla gives to its automotive factories) share the same exterior appearance: immense industrial warehouses surrounded by ventilation systems and electrical substations. But inside they are completely different. The first is a warehouse of bits: it stores data and serves it when requested. The second is a manufacturing facility, but instead of car parts or cookies, it produces responses generated by artificial intelligence (and the resulting "brain" from training the algorithm with millions of data).

Every time we ask an artificial intelligence bot to summarize, transcribe a meeting, or improve a text, what we write travels to the servers of companies like Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, and OpenAI, is processed in their enormous data centers, and is returned to us in the form of a response. It seems like magic, but it has a cost: economic, environmental, and, above all, privacy. Fortunately, a viable alternative already exists that changes this scheme: running the AI model directly on our own device, without anything leaving home.

From somewhere in the world, someone can know at all times where you are. Not because they have infected your phone with spyware, accessed your Google Maps history, or convinced you to install anything. They only need to exploit the loopholes of an architecture designed 50 years ago to interconnect the mobile telephony networks of different countries.