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 major 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 couple of years old, the QuietComfort Ultra Headphones from 2023 were a competitive player in the ANC game. This new generation wisely leaves a lot unchanged, and even more wisely, the few changes made only serve to make the QuietComfort Ultra Headphones (2nd Gen) even more excellent than ever.
According to reviewer Simon Lucas, they’re “a shoo-in for our best noise-cancelling headphones guide and honestly, they’re some of the comfiest and best over-ear headphones in general.”
If you want the very best premium noise-cancelling headphones on the market, here you go.
6. Strava dropped its Garmin lawsuit
Just three weeks after filing a patent infringement lawsuit against Garmin, Strava has withdrawn its suit. The suit was all about Garmin’s supposed development of rivaling heatmap and segment technologies and a violation of its existing agreement with Strava, but it actually seems to be a response to Garmin forcing Strava to use more of its branding.
Strava didn’t like this: it’s set to trade on the stock exchange sometime in the near future, and rumor is that having too much competitor branding on its platform would lower Strava’s share price. However, now Strava’s rolled over; 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 head-to-head by releasing its own browser called Atlas. Using Atlas is like having ChatGPT inside the browsing experience. You can open a sidebar to ask questions about what you’re looking at in your tabs and also get it to perform agentic tasks, like using a website, filling in a form, or finding you a cheap deal.
But OpenAI is not resting on its laurels; after only a couple of days, it’s already announced some upcoming Atlas improvements. Here we’ve grouped together the top five for you. The big improvements for me are adding a model picker, which will give you the ability to choose which version of ChatGPT you’re using, and also speeding up the agents that it uses. There’s also going to be an opt-in ad blocker.
4. We reviewed the M5 Apple MacBook Pro
According to our tester and computing editor Matt Hanson, “The Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch (M5, 2025) feels like a rather small 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 do still get an excellent battery life and solid performance – in big part thanks to that new and improved M5 chip.
Plus, it costs the same as the last generation model, which is nothing to sniff at, helping to cement the MacBook Pro as a superb workstation laptop, even if users of M3 and M4 machines need not apply for an upgrade.
3. Samsung delivered Galaxy XR
The spatial computing market has been a pretty small..er…space until now. 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 wearable, the Galaxy XR shows real promise. Does it beat the premium-priced 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 huge AWS outage, we’re very jealous. A simple Amazon Web Services problem (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 strange (read: hilarious) effects like smart beds malfunctioning.
The confusion lasted for several hours as Amazon engineers wrestled with some internal complications. In total, over 1,000 businesses were affected, costing them tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue. So yes, next time you make a mistake at work, think about the AWS outage of October 2025 – the biggest since the Crowdstrike meltdown of 2024 – and you might start to feel a bit better.
1. We picked the best tech of 2025
It’s TechRadar Choice Awards Week 2025! Here, we crown the best technology and gadget releases of the last year – but we don’t do it alone. What makes the TR Choice Awards different is that nearly all the categories are voted on by you, the readers of TechRadar. We have over 100 categories across all the big product types we cover, ranging 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 that our awards don’t just reflect the opinions of reviewers, but also of 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 approved by both real users and our expert judges.
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hamish.hector@futurenet.com (Hamish Hector)
