Good morning. On this day in 1974, a clerk at a small Ohio supermarket scanned a pack of Wrigley's gum, the first item any barcode reader ever beeped at, and quietly invented the modern checkout line. Fifty-two years on, India skipped the barcode altogether and went straight to the laminated QR code taped behind the counter at the neighbourhood chai stall, scanned a hundred times a day by people who have never once owned a loyalty card.
In today's newsletter: Apple's hundred-year flood sends Mac and iPad prices climbing, Venezuela's twin earthquakes draw in New Delhi, and S&P just upgraded Bharti Airtel's credit rating.
Closing levels · 2026-06-25
SENSEX 77,072 +0.10% |
NIFTY 50 24,056 +0.14% |
USD/INR 94.47 Rupee -0.03% |
BRENT CRUDE $74.0 -2.1% |
A quiet Thursday by recent standards: both indices crept higher, the rupee barely budged, and crude kept drifting lower as supply fears out of the Gulf continued to fade.
Apple Just Had Its Worst Day in a Year, and Your MacBook Is Footing the Bill
Apple's stock fell as much as 6 percent on Thursday, its worst day since April last year, after the company raised prices across its Mac, iPad and HomePod lineup to cover what it calls an unprecedented memory chip shortage.
Tim Cook called it a hundred-year flood, the kind of component price spike he says he has not seen in more than 40 years in the business. The new MacBook Air now opens at $1,299, up from $1,099, and the 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,999.
Prices in India have jumped by as much as 20 to 42 percent on the same lineup, with the base iPad moving from Rs 34,900 to Rs 49,900 and the 14-inch MacBook Pro now crossing Rs 2.99 lakh. Chipmakers sitting on the other side of the same shortage, like Micron, are having the best week of their lives.
This isn't really an Apple story, it's an AI story wearing a MacBook's skin. Data centres training and running AI models are buying up memory and storage faster than the world can manufacture it, and every consumer electronics company is now paying the AI boom's grocery bill.
Apple held the line on iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods pricing, for now. Analysts reckon the same memory squeeze could add $150 to $200 to the next iPhone, which means this week's MacBook price tags might just be the trailer.
Venezuela's Twin Earthquakes, and India's Quiet Outreach
Venezuela was rocked by a magnitude 7.2 earthquake followed less than a minute later by a magnitude 7.5 tremor, among the strongest quakes to hit the country in over a century. Officials have confirmed dozens of deaths so far, with rescue teams warning the toll is likely to climb sharply as more buildings are searched.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi conveyed condolences to the government and people of Venezuela and said India stands ready to extend all possible assistance, a swift gesture toward a country with which New Delhi has limited ties.
S&P Just Gave Bharti Airtel a Promotion
S&P Global Ratings upgraded Bharti Airtel's long-term credit rating to BBB+ from BBB, citing strong subscriber and revenue growth across India and Africa along with years of steady deleveraging.
The agency expects Airtel's India subscriber base to keep growing 3 to 4 percent a year with average revenue per user rising 5 to 7 percent, and sees its funds-from-operations coverage nearing 60 percent by 2028. It is the kind of unglamorous balance-sheet story that quietly matters more than another spectrum headline.
Breaking.exe
Startups raise more, do less. Indian tech startups pulled in $7.2 billion in the first half of 2026, up 12 percent from a year ago, even as the number of funding rounds fell 43 percent to 652, a sign that money is concentrating in fewer, bigger bets. |
Airtel says back off. Bharti Airtel has formally opposed Reliance Jio's plan to repurpose 26 GHz spectrum for WiFi broadband, warning the telecom department that a rollout outside global 5G standards could interfere with its own network. |
Anthropic points fingers, Alibaba pays for it. Alibaba shares slid to a 16-month low after Anthropic accused the Chinese tech giant of running a 25,000-account scheme to copy Claude's outputs, a practice called distillation that Anthropic says it has now traced to several Chinese AI labs. |
Pangaea Revisited
SCOTUS sides with Trump, twice. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to let the Trump administration strip Temporary Protected Status from roughly 350,000 Haitians and Syrians, while a companion ruling lets border agents turn back asylum seekers on the Mexican side of the line. |
Rubio's parting warning. Wrapping up a Gulf tour, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Gulf allies that a lasting Iran deal would keep the Strait of Hormuz open, a route through which India ships most of its crude. |
Taiwan watches the coast guard. Western embassies in Taipei issued a joint protest after Chinese coast guard patrols near Taiwan were read by analysts as rehearsals for a future blockade. |
Europe is on fire, literally. France put 72 of its 96 mainland departments under a red heat alert as a record-breaking heatwave pushed temperatures past 42 degrees Celsius, with weather-linked deaths, mostly drownings, climbing past 48. |
Also, Also, Also
Shafali keeps India alive. A blistering 53 off 34 balls from Shafali Verma powered India to a five-wicket win over Bangladesh in the Women's T20 World Cup, keeping their semi-final hopes breathing ahead of a must-win clash with Australia. |
Ecuador's great escape. Ecuador came from behind to beat Germany 2-1 in their final Group E match, sending the four-time champions packing and sealing a spot in the World Cup's last 32. |
Action King goes streaming. Arjun Sarja's multilingual action thriller Blast began streaming on Netflix after a theatrical run that crossed Rs 70 crore worldwide, with English subtitles for the Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam cuts. |