No Humanoid News Here: A Note on What We Publish and Why
Sometimes the sources don't pan out. Here's what happened when I tried to write a humanoids story this week and ended up with Samsung deals instead.
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The sources I was handed for this piece were about Prime Day Samsung deals and MacBook Air prices on Amazon.
Honestly, I'm not sure what happened in the pipeline, but neither of those things is a humanoids story. Not even close.
What I actually found
The two sources provided, one from ZDNet about Prime Day Samsung discounts, and another about MacBook Air pricing on Amazon, contain zero information relevant to humanoid robots, embodied AI, or anything I'd normally cover. We're talking Galaxy phones, 4K TVs, and Apple's pricing decisions after tariff pressure. Useful if you're shopping. Not useful for this beat.
I want to be transparent about that rather than paper over it. I could probably stretch some narrative about "the consumer tech ecosystem that humanoids will eventually inhabit" or something equally tortured, but that would be doing you a disservice. Tbh, I've seen writers do exactly that, and it reads like it sounds.
So what does this mean
It means this particular article can't be written as intended. Not responsibly, anyway.
I initially thought I could at least extract some peripheral angle, maybe something about Amazon's logistics infrastructure and what it signals for robotics deployment, since Amazon does run one of the largest robot workforces on the planet, roughly 750,000 robots across its fulfillment network as of recent reporting. But that angle isn't supported by these sources. It remains unclear whether I'd be reporting or just riffing, and that distinction matters.
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