This week we made our own splash in the tech world by announcing the winners of the TechRadar Choice Awards 2025, and it’s a veritable buffet of gadgets.
There was also the big AWS outage that rocked the internet, and there was so much more that happened in the last seven days.
7. We found the new king of ANC headphones
Despite being a few years old, the 2023 QuietComfort Ultra Headphones were a competitive player in the ANC game. This new generation wisely leaves much unchanged, and even more wisely, the few changes that have been made only serve to make the QuietComfort Ultra Headphones (2nd Generation) even more excellent than ever.
According to reviewer Simon Lucas, they’re “a shoo-in for our best noise-canceling headphone guide, and frankly, some of the most comfortable and best over-ear headphones overall.”
If you want the very best premium noise canceling headphones on the market, here you are.
6. Strava dropped its Garmin case
Just three weeks after filing a patent infringement lawsuit against Garmin, Strava has withdrawn its lawsuit. The suit was solely about Garmin’s alleged development of competing heatmap and segment technologies and a violation of its existing agreement with Strava, but it actually appears to be a response to Garmin forcing Strava to use more of its branding.
Strava didn’t like this: it’s set to go public sometime in the near future, and rumor has it that too much competitor branding on its platform would depress Strava’s stock price. But now Strava has been toppled; expect to see more Garmin, Apple, Samsung, Suunto and other logos on the platform in the near future.
5. OpenAI took on Chrome
This week, OpenAI took on Google by releasing its own browser called Atlas. Using Atlas is like having ChatGPT inside the browser experience. You can open a sidebar to ask questions about what you’re looking at in your tabs, and also have it perform agent tasks, such as using a website, filling out a form, or finding a cheap deal for you.
But OpenAI is not resting on its laurels; after only a few days, it has already announced some upcoming Atlas improvements. Here we have collected the five best for you. The big improvements for me are adding a model selector which will allow you to choose which version of ChatGPT you are using and also speed up the agents it uses. There will also be an opt-in ad blocker.
4. We reviewed the M5 Apple MacBook Pro
According to our tester and computer editor Matt Hanson, “The Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch (M5, 2025) feels like a fairly minor update over last year’s M4 model, with the bulk of improvements focused on AI performance.”
That means no new design, no Wi-Fi 7 support, but you still get excellent battery life and solid performance – thanks in large part to the new and improved M5 chip.
Plus, it costs the same as the last-gen model, which is nothing to sneeze at, helping to cement the MacBook Pro as an excellent workstation laptop, although users of M3 and M4 machines won’t need to apply for an upgrade.
3. Samsung delivered the Galaxy XR
The spatial computing market has until now been a fairly small…eventual space. This week, Samsung finally unveiled its Samsung Galaxy XR (formerly Project Moohan) headset. It’s instantly notable for its relatively bargain basement price (only in this market could $1,799 be considered a bargain) and its weight. Both features stand in stark contrast to the Apple Vision Pro (which got an M5 upgrade last week, but no price adjustment).
Perhaps more importantly, early experiences with the mixed reality wearable impressed us. As the first Android XR-based laptop, the Galaxy XR really shows promise. Does it beat the premium price and built Apple Vision Pro? We’ll see.
2. Amazon’s big AWS outage broke the internet
If you managed to miss this week’s massive AWS outage, we’re very jealous. A simple Amazon Web Services issue (a DNS error) spread like wildfire through countless apps and services, with Snapchat, Ring, Alexa, Wordle, and Reddit among the worst hit. There were also some weird (read: funny) effects like smart beds that didn’t work.
The confusion lasted for several hours as Amazon’s engineers struggled with some internal complications. In total, over 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 meltdown of 2024 — and you might start to feel a little better.
1. We chose the best technology in 2025
It’s TechRadar Choice Awards Week 2025! Here we choose the best technology and gadget releases of the last year – but we are not doing it alone. What makes the TR Choice Awards different is that almost all of the categories are voted on by you, the readers of TechRadar. We have over 100 categories across all the major product types we cover, from robo vacs to OLED TVs to gaming headsets to drones.
The reason we take your votes into account when choosing these categories is because we want to make sure our awards reflect not only the opinions of reviewers, but also the people who really live with and love these products.
You can read the full list of all the winners and know that everything that won an award is endorsed by both real users and our expert judges.
