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Apple MacBook Pro
Source: Apple

Before Monday, the last major redesign for Apple‘s larger MacBook Pros came in 2016, with several features that looked to the future.

The 2016 MacBook Pros sported universal USB-C connectors that could power displays and peripherals, a “butterfly” keyboard that allowed the devices to become even thinner, and a long, narrow touchscreen at the top of the keyboard called “Touch Bar,” in a device powered by an Intel processor.

Apple’s new MacBook Pro models, announced on Monday, conspicuously lack all of those features.

The MacBook Pro are strategically important for the company, because programmers can only make iPhone apps on a Mac, and picky programmers often choose the most powerful machine they can get. But Apple’s pro laptops are pricey, starting at $1,999 with some configurations costing more than $6,000.

The new machines address longstanding user complaints, revealing that Apple does listen to user feedback, especially from programmers and other professional users.

It turns out, Apple’s last redesign for the MacBook Pro wasn’t popular among picky users, leading to a period between 2017 and 2020 with eight out of 10 quarters of flat or negative annual growth in its Mac business.

It didn’t take long for problems to crop up with Apple’s pricey laptops after the redesign in 2016.

  • Users complained they needed pricey adapters to plug in mice or thumb drives, and missed Apple’s older MagSafe connector, which ingeniously disconnected if someone tripped over the power cord.
  • The butterfly keyboard was unreliable, with keys getting stuck due to crumbs or dust. Apple is still repairing butterfly keyboards for free, and even faced a class action lawsuit over them.
  • The Intel chips insider Apple’s MacBook Pros ran hot, making them uncomfortable to use on your lap.
  • Users and developers never embraced the Touch Bar, and touch typists complained you needed to look at it in order to pick a button.

The laptops that Apple announced on Monday look more like the pre-2016 MacBook Pro:

  • The new MacBook Pro models still use USB-C connectors, which have become an industry standard. But the three Thunderbolt USB-C ports also have an HDMI port alongside them for connecting monitors, and a SD Card slot for downloading photos from a professional camera. It now uses a magnetic MagSafe connector to charge.
  • They use Apple’s Magic Keyboard, which is a more traditional design that’s deeper and has garnered positive reviews.
  • Apple is no longer using Intel chips in its newest laptops, instead opting for its own silicon, which is designed to be power-efficient and not waste energy by giving off heat. The new design also has feet to prop up the laptop and improve airflow.
  • There’s no Touch Bar on the new Macs. It’s replaced by traditional function keys that can control screen brightness, media playback, and a big escape key, which is important for programmers.

The biggest advancement from Apple’s perspective is the chip inside the new 16-inch and 14-inch MacBook Pros. They use Apple’s own M1 chips, either in “Pro” or “Max” configurations, instead of the same Intel or AMD chips Windows PCs use.

An Apple employee points to the Touch Bar on a new Apple MacBook Pro laptop
Stephen Lam | Getty Images

Apple’s chips have led to improved battery life in computers they’ve shipped in, like the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air. While the ultimate laptop processor speed crown is contested, it’s clear that Apple’s chips are good enough to send emails, browse the web, and even get some light gaming in.

But users who care less about the guts and specs inside their computers may find the new design — which does not depend on technological improvements over the past half decade — to be more convincing reasons to upgrade than the number of transistors in the M1 Pro Max (57 billion, for the record).

Since Apple began to update its laptops with new keyboards and chips, the Mac division has been on a roll, selling $26 billion worth in the most recent three quarters, which Apple CEO Tim Cook says is the company’s “three best quarters ever” in the Mac’s 40-year history. Even before Apple released its new MacBook Pros, sales were up nearly 33% annually over that period.

That sales boost was partially due to the pandemic. But it was also partially driven by releasing new computers that had reliable keyboards and strong battery life. On Monday, Apple extended that strategy to its higher-end computers, and extended it by bringing magnetic charging and a port for connecting displays back.

Improvements aside, the 2021 MacBook Pro could still arouse controversy among Mac loyalists. The computer comes with a “notch” or an iPhone-like cutout to house the laptop’s improved 1080p webcam — a controversial design move that could distract users.

Expect Apple to continue to revamp its laptop lineup, especially in the lower-cost, higher-volume models. The MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro have Apple’s M1 chip, but neither current model has a magnetic charger or HDMI port, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro still comes with a Touch Bar.

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Bay Area commuters get free rides Tuesday morning due to Clipper card outage

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Bay Area commuters get free rides Tuesday morning due to Clipper card outage

Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) passengers walk off a train at the Richmond station on March 15, 2023 in Richmond, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Commuters in and around San Francisco rode into work for free on Tuesday morning due to an outage in the Clipper card system, which is used to handle payments for train, bus and ferry rides.

“ATTENTION: The Clipper system is experiencing an outage on all operators this morning,” the Bay Area Clipper account wrote in a post on X. “Please be prepared to pay your fare with another form of payment if required by your transit agency.”

Many buses were waving commuters on without asking for payment, and at Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train stations, the faregates were open, allowing travelers to walk through for free.

Clipper is owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which manages transportation for the nine-county Bay Area. The service is used by hundreds of thousands of tech workers in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

The MTC website said there were 1.35 million unique Clipper cards — physical and digital — used in May, the highest monthly toll for the year and the most since December 2019, before the pandemic. A fact sheet from the MTC says Clipper is used by 800,000 transit riders a day across the region.

BART fare gates open on July 1, 2025, due to Clipper outage

Kif Leswing

BART, in particular, has undergone dramatic changes in recent years, most notably installing fare gates starting in late 2023, with full deployment expected to be completed by the end of this year.

In the first five months of the year, average BART station exits totaled between 170,000 and 182,000 a month, according to its website. Those numbers are way down from the pre-pandemic days of 2019, when averages were generally above 400,000 a month.

The MTC has plans to roll out an updated system called Clipper 2.0, which it says will be a “customer-focused, cost-effective fare collection system” with a “flexible platform for future fare structures.” Features include use across the various mobile operating systems, updated communication and “expanded retail, online and mobile sales.”

The update, however, has been routinely delayed, leading to tense confrontations at recent Clipper executive board meetings.

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Public companies bought more bitcoin than ETFs did for the third quarter in a row

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Public companies bought more bitcoin than ETFs did for the third quarter in a row

Ozan Kose | Afp | Getty Images

Corporate treasuries have surpassed ETFs in bitcoin buying for a third consecutive quarter as more companies try to benefit from the MicroStrategy playbook in a more crypto-friendly regulatory environment.

Public companies acquired about 131,000 coins in the second quarter, growing their bitcoin balance 18%, according to data provider Bitcoin Treasuries. ETFs showed an 8% increase or about 111,000 BTC in the same period.

“The institutional buyer who is getting exposure to bitcoin through the ETFs are not buying for the same reason as those public companies who are basically trying to accumulate bitcoin to increase shareholder value at the end of the day,” said Nick Marie, head of research at Ecoinometrics. 

Public company bitcoin holdings increased 4% in April, a tumultuous month after the market was rocked by President Donald Trump’s initial tariffs announcement, versus 2% for ETFs, he pointed out.

“They don’t really care if the price is high or low, they care about growing their bitcoin treasury so they look more attractive to the proxy buyers,” Marie added. “It’s not so much driven by the macro trend or the sentiment, it’s for different reasons. So it becomes a different kind of mechanism that can push bitcoin forward.”

Bitcoin ETFs, whose collective U.S. launch in January 2024 was one of the most successful ETF debuts in history, still represent the largest holders of bitcoin by entity with more than 1.4 million coins held today, representing about 6.8% of the fixed supply cap of 21 million. Public companies hold about 855,000 coins, or about 4%.

Regulatory relief

The trend reflects the significant regulatory relief the crypto industry broadly is benefiting from under the Trump administration. In March, Trump signed an executive order for a U.S. bitcoin reserve, sending a strong message that the flagship cryptocurrency, which has long been a source of reputation risk among many investors, is here to stay. The last time ETFs outpaced public companies in bitcoin buying was in the third quarter of 2024, before Trump was re-elected.

In the second quarter, GameStop began buying bitcoin, after its board approved it as a treasury reserve asset in March; health-care company KindlyMD merged with Nakamoto, a bitcoin investment company founded by crypto entrepreneur David Bailey; and investor Anthony Pompliano’s ProCap, kicked off its own bitcoin purchasing program and is going public through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.

Strategy, recently rebranded from MicroStrategy, is still the main behemoth in the bitcoin treasury game. The company pioneered the strategy that more than 140 public companies globally are now emulating. It holds about 597,000 BTC, and is followed by the bitcoin miner Mara Holdings, which has almost 50,000 coins.

“It’s going to be very hard to catch Strategy’s scale,” said Ben Werkman, chief investment officer at Swan Bitcoin. “They’re going to be the preferred landing spot for institutional capital because of the deep liquidity around their equity, while these smaller equities are going to be really good risk returns for retail investors and smaller institutions that want more of that upside – that initial growth that comes in kicking off the strategy – because a lot of people missed it with MicroStrategy.”

A long-term case?

Marie suggested that 10 years from now, there probably won’t be so many companies committed to the bitcoin treasury strategy. Firstly, he said, the more that enter the category, the more diluted the activity at each firm becomes. Plus, bitcoin may be so normalized by then that proxy buyers are no longer constrained by rules and mandates around direct exposure to bitcoin.

“You can think about this wave as a bunch of companies that are trying to benefit from this arbitrage,” Marie said.

Werkman pointed out that most investors that are attracted to bitcoin treasury companies today already have a thesis around bitcoin. For them, leveraged bitcoin equities are likely how they try to outperform bitcoin itself, the foundational component of their investments.

“What people really like about these companies, and why they like to get into these smaller companies, is because they can do something that the investors holding spot bitcoin can’t do: go and accumulate more bitcoin on your behalf because they have access to the capital markets and can issue securities,” Werkman said.

There’s also likely to be a fair number of companies that convert their existing treasury holdings to bitcoin without pursuing leverage the way Strategy does, Werkman noted.

“They’ve got that ability to generate more and more value behind their shares, backed by bitcoin, plus whatever the operations of the company are generating. It’s a unique value proposition,” he said.

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AeroVironment stock drops 7% on offering plan to pay off debt

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AeroVironment stock drops 7% on offering plan to pay off debt

An image of a Quantix drone made by AeroVironment.

David Mcnew | Getty Images News | Getty Images

AeroVironment shares fell 7% Tuesday after the defense contractor said it plans to offer $750 million in common stock and $600 million in convertible senior notes due in 2030 to repay debt.

The drone maker said it would use leftover funding for general purposes such as boosting manufacturing capacity.

AeroVironment shares have soared 85% this year, ballooning its market value to about $13 billion.

Last week, shares of the Arlington, Virginia-based company rallied on strong fourth-quarter results, lifting higher as CNBC’s Jim Cramer called it the “next Palantir of hardware.”

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Last month, the company also closed its $4.1 billion acquisition of space-related defense tech company Blue Halo.

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to boost drone production in the U.S. and crack down on unauthorized uses.

The company also has a high short interest level, which may have contributed to some of the recent gains, creating a short squeeze. This phenomenon occurs when a stock price surges, forcing those shorting the stock to purchase shares to cover their positions and prevent losses.

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