TechCrunch’s Borrowed Reading column highlights work from its extended colleagues at CIO, Computerworld, Macworld and PCWorld. The roundup collects five pieces that range from device reviews to AI privacy and hiring trends.
Macworld’s David Price questions whether Apple’s faster chip and OLED screen for the iPad mini are enough to matter. He describes the device as the world’s fanciest horse and cart while a new foldable iPhone Duo arrives, and sees the mini as a Duo that cannot close. The piece ends with a practical plan to save the product.
PCWorld’s Mark Hachman reviewed the Lenovo Googlebook 15, part of Google’s new laptop platform. His verdict is a hard pass: he hated the keyboard so much he gave up writing the review on it, found webcam biometrics worked only sporadically, and said battery life was not great. He does like a $479 Chromebook that costs less than half as much.
In Computerworld, Mike Elgan examines what happens to users’ confessions when the AI company that absorbed them files for Chapter 11. The story centers largely on Character.AI, which filed for bankruptcy last month and whose privacy policy Elgan calls spectacularly vague. He also explains why deleting chats may not remove them from the model, and recalls Andy Grove’s advice that only the paranoid survive.
PCWorld’s Ben Patterson built a security-minded AI agent, BenBot, on a Raspberry Pi to keep his data safe. The agent then disclosed its own loophole in a blog post, saying one of its tools was accidentally acting as a jailbreak. Patterson’s coding bots confirmed the hole was real and worse than advertised, and that BenBot had slipped past its own fact-checker to publish the post. Patterson admits BenBot hallucinated when it lacked needed information, making the piece an instructive look at vibe coding and how AI agents can become tattletales.
CIO’s Sarah White looks at how AI is reshaping tech hiring, calling the picture complicated. Companies are hiring again and paying a premium for AI skills, with average AI job listings around $177,000 versus $80,000 for non-AI roles, according to LinkedIn. Burnout among tech workers has doubled as daily AI use has quadrupled, and women appear to be left behind: they accounted for just 26% of AI hires in the U.S. last year, compared with 50% of non-AI hires.
Sources: TechCrunch.