Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Disney’s new CEO wants Disney+ to stop acting like a digital cable box and start thinking like Netflix. Josh D’Amaro is reportedly plotting a tech-heavy overhaul built around sharper recommendations, smarter personalization, and a much bigger platform play.

The Mouse already owns the characters, the parks, and the screens — now it needs to master the recommendation algorithm.

In today’s tech rundown:

• Disney overhauls Disney+ to close Netflix gap

• Apple now leases iPhones for $18 monthly

• DJI’s vlogger camera gets global release (except U.S.)

• UK startup launches ‘world’s first’ painless tattoo

• Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

DISNEY

🪄 Disney overhauls Disney+ to close Netflix gap

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Disney’s new CEO Josh D’Amaro is plotting a radical overhaul of Disney+ to finally make the Mouse’s flagship streamer look and feel like it belongs in the same league as Netflix, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

The details:

• D’Amaro is reportedly signaling a more aggressive tech-first strategy for Disney+, pushing product, personalization, and data over legacy TV habits.

• The company is rethinking its content playbook, aiming to narrow the gap with Netflix on must-watch originals while better integrating Disney’s vast IP library.

• Back in May, Disney also said it was exploring a “super app” that would merge Disney+ with the company’s various park and cruise apps into a single platform.

• Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN cleared $20B in sales last year, third behind Netflix and YouTube, but subscriber growth stalled and the share price followed.

Why it matters: D’Amaro came up through the parks at Disney, where prices climbed steadily on his watch. Disney+ has already run that experiment with price hikes, ads, and password crackdowns. The recommendation engine is the harder problem, and Disney concedes that closing that gap is the whole point of the overhaul.

APPLE

🍎 Apple now leases iPhones for $18 monthly

Image source: Apple

The Rundown: Apple killed its own iPhone Upgrade Program this week and handed device leasing to Klarna, cutting the entry price for a new iPhone to under $18 a month as it tries to pull more upgrades away from the carriers.

The details:

• The program launched this week in the U.S.: iPhone from $17.99/mo, Watch and iPad from $11.99, and Mac from $24.99.

• Terms run 12 or 24 months on iPhone and Watch, 24 or 36 on Mac and iPad, with a soft credit check and no monthly leasing fee.

• The old iPhone Upgrade Program is dead; it cost north of $42/mo via Citizens Bank and bundled AppleCare, with AppleCare+ now a separate line item.

• The timing tracks the memory-chip shortage the industry calls "RAMageddon," which pushed Apple into price hikes on Mac and iPad while sparing the iPhone.

Why it matters: The price doesn’t drop, but it gets sliced thin enough to swallow, and a four-year replacement cycle starts looking like a two-year one. It also shows how tech companies are increasingly relying on financial plumbing, not just product design, to drive sales and lock in loyalty.

DJI

📸 DJI’s vlogger camera gets global release (except U.S.)

Image source: DJI

The Rundown: DJI’s new Osmo Pocket 4P is the kind of pocket-sized creator camera (priced at around $700) that makes old-school vlogging rigs look clunky — but it’s only available if you’re living outside the U.S.

The details:

• The 4P is a slick upgrade: a dual-lens pocket gimbal with a 1-inch main sensor, a 60mm telephoto lens, 17 stops of dynamic range, and 4K/240fps capture.

• DJI is positioning it as a more serious “pocket cinema” camera, with a built-in tele lens for talking-head shots, close-ups, and compressed portrait framing.

• The FCC added DJI to its Covered List last December, leaving the Pocket 3 the newest Pocket Americans can legally buy.

• The main U.S. rival is Insta360’s Luna Ultra, a $769.99 pocket gimbal camera co-engineered with Leica and sold in the U.S. now.

Why it matters: A national-security rule written for foreign drones is now keeping DJI’s creator cameras out of the U.S. Since December, the FCC has added three more categories to its Covered List in two actions — routers, power inverters, and “advanced robotic devices,” a definition wide enough to catch robot vacuums.

CIPHERX

🧜🏽‍♀️ UK startup launches ‘world’s first’ painless tattoo

Image source: CipherX

The Rundown: London’s CipherX has swapped the tattoo gun for a patch of dissolving, ink-filled microneedles — 15 minutes on the skin, permanent when it comes off, and the company says you won’t feel it.

The details:

• The patch sits on the skin for 15 minutes while ink-and-biopolymer microneedles dissolve below the surface.

• Designs cap out at a 15 mm circle in carbon black, with options like tiny hearts and stars at £50 a pop and aftercare running 48 hours instead of weeks.

• CipherX ran roughly 500 test tattoos before launching in London on July 23. Customers pick a design online and redeem it at a pop-up.

• Founder Ferdinand Kohle, a Cornell-trained materials scientist, built it around his own needle phobia after working on injection devices.

Why it matters: The microneedle patch isn’t new: Georgia Tech patented ink-loaded dissolving patches in 2017. CipherX’s news is that someone finally manufactured it in volume and sold it. Meanwhile, Blackdot has developed an AI-powered tattoo device it says is faster, more accurate, and less painful than traditional tattoos.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Satya Nadella told investors this week that Microsoft will fold Copilot chat, Code, Cowork, and Autopilots into a single “super app” for consumers and businesses.

Bryan Johnson, who has spent $2M a year reverse-engineering his own aging, posted on X that he wonders whether he’s taken “this whole longevity thing too far.”

LinkedIn is rolling out a “seems like AI slop” report button, new slop-detecting classifiers, and private dashboard flags for posts that read as inauthentic.

The U.S. Space Force handed SpaceX $1.6B across two task orders for 18 Falcon 9 launches out of Vandenberg through the end of 2027.

EU regulators plan to classify OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Roblox as “very large online platforms” under the bloc’s strictest digital rules, Bloomberg reports.

Google wired its Nano Banana image generator into Google Earth, letting users conjure AI reconstructions of historical sites and mock up real estate projects.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems raised another $1B, with $4B total, to finish Sparc, the reactor it says will produce more energy than it consumes by 2027.

Amazon’s and Walmart’s shopping bots can spot fake “Made in USA” labels and say nothing, according to the debut study from Lina Khan’s Columbia Law Center.

Airbus flew an A350-1000ULR nonstop from Melbourne to Toulouse in 24 hours and 24 minutes, covering 23,076 km to set a distance record for commercial aircraft.

A cancer vaccine that hijacks leftover COVID immunity to make tumors visible to the immune system just cleared mouse trials; human sarcoma studies are next.

A UCLA-led team turned unsorted mixed plastic into 90%-pure hydrogen with hot lye, locking most of the carbon into solid mineral instead of the air.

eBay will pay $55.7M to the Massachusetts couple its employees stalked with death threats, live insects, and a bloody pig mask over unflattering newsletter coverage.

Florida is redirecting nearly $200M in unspent federal EV-charger money into 32 eVTOL landing pads at golf courses, luxury apartment buildings, and airports.

Spotify is rolling out User Notes, letting listeners attach a caption to any track in a playlist, turning a playlist into something closer to a diary.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: OpenAI’s escaped AI claims another victim

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Meta glasses enter their creep era

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: U.S. bans humanoids from China

• Today’s AI tool guide: Turn any idea into an AI-powered site with Lovable

• RSVP to next workshop on Aug. 5: No-code product building

See you soon,

Rowan, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — The Rundown’s editorial team