Apps News: 18 October 2025 - 17 November 2025

November 19, 2025, 5:00 AM EST. Stocks pulled back Tuesday as the Dow fell over 300 points amid fears that AI enthusiasm mirrors a bubble, while expectations for a December rate cut cooled. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq slid, with giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Meta among the big decliners as investors reassess lofty AI valuations. Nvidia trades caution ahead of its quarterly results, and the so-called Magnificent 7 have endured a tech rout into its third week. Traders priced in a roughly 50% chance of a December cut per CME FedWatch, even as Fed minutes and the next jobs report loom. Separately, Anthropic struck a deal for Azure capacity, with Microsoft and Nvidia making large investments, despite a stock pullback.

November 19, 2025, 4:56 AM EST. Microsoft is expanding its Copilot AI across Microsoft 365, adding broader capabilities and new admin governance tools that let organizations control how AI agents are used and how copilots interact. The update accelerates AI monetization across the productivity suite, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams. Microsoft says a large share of the Fortune 500 already uses its software, signaling strong enterprise demand. Early demos show Copilot helping with tasks in Excel and PowerPoint, potentially turning complex work into simpler prompts and giving a modern twist to the old Clippy.

November 19, 2025, 4:54 AM EST. The University of Texas at Austin is adding 4,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs to its Horizon supercomputer, boosting its lead in academic AI power. The GPUs, totaling more than 5,000 at UT, will drive new Dell servers and Nvidia infrastructure funded by the NSF and go online at UT's Texas Advanced Computing Center next year. When live in spring, Horizon will be about 10x more powerful than Frontera. UT will reserve over 1,000 GPUs for the Center for Generative AI, enabling open-source research and the release of open-source LLMs. The project highlights UT's leadership in AI research, education and potential national security implications, with funding supported by state and federal grants.

November 19, 2025, 4:52 AM EST. RFK Jr. announced the Caregiver AI Challenge, offering up to $2 million in prizes for the 10 best AI ideas to help family caregivers. The three-phase competition (design, testing and scaling) seeks innovations that deliver on-demand support, predict and monitor health risks, and automate paperwork so caregivers can focus on what matters. The effort underscores a growing caregiving crisis, with about 63 million Americans in a caregiver role, and emphasizes that while AI can transform caregiving, it must supplement-not replace-the human element and compassion.

November 19, 2025, 4:46 AM EST. Ookla's Speedtest Intelligence results show Apple's N1 networking chip - integrating Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and Thread radios - delivering a real-world boost for the iPhone 17 family over the iPhone 16 Broadcom modem. While on paper the N1 matches the Broadcom spec, in practice it yields up to 40% faster median download and upload speeds globally, with 10th-percentile gains up to 60% in tougher conditions. In North America, the iPhone 17 outperformed flagship Androids for Wi-Fi downloads, delivering a median of about 416.14 Mbps and a 90th-percentile of 976.39 Mbps. Note the N1 doesn't fully exploit 320 MHz channels yet, but it offers more consistent performance as Wi-Fi 7 routers proliferate.