ICYMI: the week's 7 biggest tech stories from Texas accusing your TV of spying on you to iRobot finding a buyer
Here's your firmware update for December 20, 2025
· TechRadarNews By Hamish Hector Contributions from Mark Wilson, Lance Ulanoff published 20 December 2025
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It's almost the end of 2025, but the tech news shows no sign of stopping. We have seven more essential stories you need to catch up on from iRobot, Samsung, OnePlus, and more.
The biggest amongst our seven include Meta trashing its third-party VR headsets, and iRobot going bankrupt, and to catch up on both of those and five more stories, you simply need to scroll down.
When you're done, you might also want to catch up on some of the big streaming hits you missed, seven new movies and TV shows to watch this weekend.
7. iRobot went bankrupt, but isn’t dead yet
The iRobot Roomba was a pioneer of robot vacuums, with the first model launched in 2002. Sadly, hot competition in the robovac space forced iRobot to declare bankruptcy this week – but that isn’t the end of the much-loved brand.
It’s been acquired by Picea Robotics, a company that had already been building Roombas for iRobot. For now, iRobot says there’ll be no immediate changes for Roomba owners to worry about, and the vacuums will continue to work as usual. The future, though, is a bit more uncertain, and iRobot’s co-founder Colin Angle told us the bankruptcy is “a tragedy for consumers."
- Read more: iRobot has been saved from oblivion by a mysterious Chinese robovac giant – here’s what that means
6. ChatGPT finally got an app store
ChatGPT has been steadily gathering some handy plug-ins for the likes of Photoshop and Kayak over the past few months – and this week, OpenAI gathered them all in an app store for us to peruse.
The ‘Apps directory’, which is available in the app or on the web, already has a number of useful options, including Spotify and AllTrails. Once you’ve added them, you can call on the apps inside your ChatGPT conversations to create playlists or discover new hiking routes. We’ve rounded up our early favorites below.
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