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Hundreds of investing and finance newsletters hit my (and maybe your) inbox every week. This is the best of the best of tech from the past week. Every Monday, we’ll tackle policy, and every Wednesday, we’ll recap finance.

This week, on Tech Wrapped, we’ve got…

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Apple spent 2025 getting roasted for missing the AI hype train. Siri became the AI unc, their engineers were defecting to Meta, and Tim Cook’s retirement rumors were swirling. Yet the stock has ripped 40% since June, hitting a $4 trillion market cap. Skipping the AI arms race might have been the smartest “lazy” move in tech.

Instead of torching billions on cloud compute, Apple built a cheaper on‑device AI framework that lets developers plug in with three lines of code. It’s private, fast, and already in the pockets of a billion iPhone users. That’s a moat no GPU cluster can buy.

At year’s end, Apple’s restraint looks like discipline. With a foldable iPhone and low‑cost MacBook on deck, plus a Services business printing $109 billion a year, Cupertino’s slow‑and‑steady act might keep outpacing the AI spenders who can’t prove their ROI. We’re keeping an eye on that Services line—it’s quietly becoming Apple’s real growth engine.

2025 was basically Christmas morning for cybercriminals. They walked away with a record $2.7 billion in crypto (up from $2.2 billion last year) with North Korea's government hackers personally responsible for $2 billion of that haul. (Turns out funding a nuclear program requires solid side hustles.)

The crown jewel? A $1.4 billion heist from Dubai's Bybit exchange. That's not a typo. One point four billion dollars, mostly in Ethereum, gone faster than your New Year's resolutions. Meanwhile, insurance giant Aflac just admitted hackers grabbed personal and health data from 22.6 million customers—nearly half their entire customer base.

But, good news: White knights are rising to the occasion (or market opportunity). ServiceNow just dropped $7.75 billion to buy Armis. That's a 27% premium over what Armis was worth literally last month. The company is growing revenue 50%+ annually, and ServiceNow decided that was worth paying up for. The value play is pretty straightforward: The bad guys are getting richer, but so are the companies paid to stop them. We’d be watching cybersecurity ETFs and names like Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and ServiceNow for the next leg up.

This episode of This Week in Tech dives into the chaotic landscape of 2025, exploring how major political dramas faded into headaches while AI evolved from hype into a costly global arms race.

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That’s all for today. Write us and let us know your thoughts on the market, the newsletter, or the weather—we’d just love to hear from you.

Till next time,
— Brandon and Blake