This week we celebrated Earth Day with our annual coverage of Sustainability Week. We covered sustainable phone battery design, exciting EV developments and more.
We also saw the biggest Apple news in years: Tim Cook stepping down as CEO.
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7. We built a PC using artificial intelligence
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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 complete PC-building newbies put together a great rig – with ChatGPT and Gemini offering advice on buying parts as well as building guides to assemble our dream PC.
Spoiler alert: Our computer editor Matt Hanson had to lend a hand with some real expertise.
6. We hosted Sustainability Week 2026
Making the technology industry more sustainable is a difficult task; from hardware manufacturing to energy consumption and e-waste, there is a mountain of challenges to overcome. That’s why, just in time for Earth Day 2026, it’s TechRadar Sustainability Week again!
This year we’ve covered everything from exciting new EV technology to the circularity-focused Framework’s new Linux laptop to an exclusive look at Fairphone’s latest Impact report. It’s not just about hardware; software like Bottle It Back is helping to profile AI water waste, and Steam is holding its Earth Appreciation Festival to mark the occasion.
5. The EU wants replaceable batteries
Phone repair has been a big focus in the EU over the last few years, and new rules are set to land in 2027, which include that phone batteries must be easy to remove and replace – meaning you must be able to take them out without special tools, unless they’re included in the box.
Although these rules technically only affect the EU, the manufacturing changes they are likely to necessitate could force these repair rules into other regions for many products. Kind of like how the EU’s USB-C requirement prompted many global brands to adopt the charging standard worldwide.
This isn’t just 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 1,000 cycles – which interestingly includes iPhones from the iPhone 15 and up, so Apple fans may find their technology looks no different next year when the rules come into play.
4. ChatGPT’s new image generator went viral
It was another big week for ChatGPT upgrades, with OpenAI announcing its new GPT-5.5 model just days after its Images 2.0 upgrade flooded social media with AI-generated posters and cartoons.
It was the latter that really captured the imagination, primarily thanks to its ability to accurately generate images containing text – traditionally a major AI weakness. Instead, Images 2.0 has reasoning that makes it a much better personal art editor, although it’s still not clear what you can actually do with the results.
3. A robot broke the human half marathon record
Humanoid robots hit another worrying milestone this week – at the Beijing Half Marathon, the aptly named Honor Lightning flew past the human world record for the distance, clocking 50 minutes and 26 seconds for 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 long 0.95m legs to help it eat up the tarmac. And winning medals isn’t its ultimate goal, aiming to train humanoids for places like disaster zones, where their sprinting speed will be a much more welcome sight.
2. Spotify turned 20 — and gave us the scoop on its early days
Yes, Spotify is now 20 years old and launched the same year as Taylor Swift’s debut album. It’s been so long 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 get an insight into the streaming giant’s early days.
“The music industry was in freefall and it was kind of a terrible time,” Sten told us, before explaining how the shareable playlist became the addictive hook that eventually drew millions to Spotify. If you want to open the hood of the streaming service and take a look under its algorithms, our exclusive chat is worth reading.
1. Tim Cook resigned as Apple’s CEO
In what was easily Apple’s biggest non-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 head John Ternus will take over.
The choice isn’t surprising (there have been whispers that Ternus was the guy 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’s sticking around for the long haul. Perhaps Cook, as Executive Chairman, is letting the truth be told on both counts: he’s leaving a job to take on a new Apple role. How involved he becomes remains to be seen.
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