This Week in Snark: AI Glasses, Corporate Avatars, and Klarna’s Phone Grift
From AI glasses for gymfluencers to Fujitsu's deck-reading robots and Klarna’s new phone hustle, here’s your satirical breakdown of the week’s weirdest tech news.
Welcome back to This Week in Snark, your favorite digest of tech absurdity, startup delusion, and corporate overreach, now with 25% more sarcasm and 100% fewer performance metrics.
While the rest of the world was out touching grass, tech kept pumping out announcements nobody asked for. Meta made glasses for jocks who want to livestream their gains. Fujitsu gave your PowerPoint a ghostwriter. Klarna decided “buy now, pay later” wasn’t stressful enough without also managing your phone bill. Meanwhile, Apple backflipped out of a $300M lawsuit like it was just another Tuesday, and NTT built a signal so fast it finished this sentence before I typed it.
So grab your overpriced wearable, dodge your AI-presenting avatar, and brace yourself—because this week in tech, the dystopia is arriving in luxury packaging.
🕶️ Hey Meta, Make Me Look Cool: Oakley and Meta Drop $499 AI Glasses for Sporty Show-Offs
Meta and Oakley have teamed up to answer a question no one asked: What if your gym buddy could livestream their entire workout through a pair of Oakleys? The Oakley Meta HSTN “Performance AI Glasses” come equipped with open-ear speakers, a camera, and just enough tech to make you look like a walking Terms & Conditions popup. Designed for athletes but purchased by tech bros who think hydration is a business model, these $499 goggles scream “sweaty surveillance but make it fashion.”
Naturally, Team Oakley athletes will front the campaign, because nothing says “authentic” like paid endorsements from people genetically engineered to never break a sweat. It’s all about performance, style, and making sure your followers never miss a single squat.
🧍♂️ Fujitsu’s New AI Will Present Your Deck, Dodge the Q&A, and Probably Replace You by Q4
Fujitsu’s latest announcement is less of a product and more of a quiet corporate coup: an AI avatar that delivers presentations, answers questions, and does it all in 30+ languages. It’s like Clippy got an MBA and now wants your job. Built into Microsoft 365 as a Copilot agent, this AI will turn your PowerPoint into a TED Talk—minus the charisma, insight, or reason for existing.
The tech uses RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), which in this case stands for “Really About to Get you fired.” Expect to see entire sales teams replaced by avatars in lanyards reading from scripts while HR insists “your role is evolving.”
📱 Buy Now, Regret Later: Klarna Expands Into Mobile Plans
Because late fees weren’t existential enough, Klarna now offers mobile phone plans. That’s right: your favorite “buy now, panic later” fintech just launched a mobile carrier called Klarna Mobile, where your next dropped call might come with a payment plan and a gentle email reminder.
It’s a move so aggressively millennial it might as well come with avocado toast and crippling debt. The real question: if you miss a payment, does your phone start showing you ads for phones you almost could’ve afforded?
🍏 Apple’s Legal Kung Fu: $300M Patent Case Reversed (Again)
In another dazzling display of corporate martial arts, Apple flipped the legal script and got a $300 million patent verdict overturned—again. The tech giant successfully convinced a U.S. appeals court to yeet the decision back to Texas, presumably because nothing good ever happens in patent court there.
It’s a reminder that Apple’s most powerful product isn’t the iPhone—it’s a well-oiled legal team with more reversals than a Tesla on autopilot. While startups pitch Series A decks, Apple just pitches courtrooms.
📶 While You Buffer, NTT Built the World’s Fastest Wireless Signal
NTT just casually dropped a 280 Gbps wireless signal using 300 GHz frequencies, because who doesn’t want to download an entire Netflix library in less time than it takes to close a pop-up ad? Their secret sauce? A wideband amplifier and high-precision distortion compensation, also known as "reasons the rest of your Wi-Fi still sucks."
This isn’t just a tech flex—it’s a whole powerlifter’s deadlift of a demo. And while most of us are still rebooting our routers in rage, NTT is busy inventing 6G. The future is fast, furious, and probably not available in your ZIP code.
