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Trading on Wall Street was quietly mixed early Friday as markets near the end of another record-setting week ahead of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate decision on Wednesday.Futures for the S&P 500 were flat, while futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 0.2% and Nasdaq futures ticked up 0.1%.Following a mixed set of U.S. data on Thursday, markets are banking that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates next week, which should give the economy a boost.The Fed has been hesitant to cut interest rates throughout 2025 because of the threat that President Donald Trump’s tariffs could make inflation worse. Lower interest rates could exacerbate inflation. The Fed’s inaction has infuriated Trump, who has threatened to fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell and has escalated his attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, accusing her of mortgage fraud.On Thursday, the Trump administration asked an appeals court to remove Cook from the Federal Reserve’s board of governors by Monday, before the central bank’s votes on interest rates. Trump initially sought to fire Cook Aug. 25, but a federal judge ruled late Tuesday that the removal was illegal and reinstated her to the Fed’s board.In equities trading, RH shares slid 7% after the company formerly known as Restoration Hardware missed sales and profit targets and lowered its full-year guidance due to the impacts of tariffs.Microsoft rose modestly after European Union regulators accepted the tech giant’s proposed changes to its Teams platform, resolving a long-running antitrust investigation.The European Commission said in a statement Friday that Microsoft’s final commitments to unbundle Teams from its Office software suite, including further tweaks following a market test in May and June, are enough to satisfy competition concerns.Microsoft shares rose 1% before the opening bell.Elsewhere, in Europe at midday, Germany’s DAX edged down 0.3%, the CAC 40 in Paris fell 0.5% and Britain’s FTSE 100 added nearly 0.3%.Japan’s Nikkei 225 closed 0.9% higher to 44,768.12, with Japanese stocks hitting fresh records. Shares in semiconductor company Tokyo Electron, Sony Group and Fast Retailing were among the movers.In Chinese markets, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index rose 1.2% to 26,388.16. Tech shares led gainers on AI optimism, while property stocks climbed as Beijing moves to help cover unpaid bills of local governments. The Shanghai Composite index slipped 0.1% to 3,870.60.In Seoul, the Kospi climbed 1.5% to 3,395.54 while Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 added 0.7% to 8,864.90. India’s BSE Sensex rose 0.5% while Taiwan’s Taiex was up 1%.In energy trading early Friday, benchmark U.S. crude gained 1.5% to $63.29 per barrel. Teresa Cerojano and Matt Ott, Associated Press
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You dont have to be a gamer to know who Mario of Super Mario Bros. fame is. The plumbers presence has permeated popular culture since the Nintendo video games release in Japan on September 13, 1985. It reached the United States about a month later. Ahead of the game’s big 40th anniversary, Nintendo is hosting a Nintendo Direct live stream event today (Friday, September 12) at 9 a.m. ET. It’s expected to last around an hour. Lets take a look at the history of this popular gaming franchise before we get into how to watch Fridays event. Mario could have been Popeye In 1977 Marios creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, was hired by Nintendo when he was 24 years old, having recently finished a degree in industrial design, as the New Yorker reported. He started out working in the planning department. After a game called Radar Scope failed to be a commercial success, he was tasked with creating a new one. Miyamoto wanted to use the characters from the popular comic Popeye, but when Nintendo could not secure the rights, he was forced to get creative. Mario made his debut in ‘Donkey Kong’ Instead Miyamoto came up with characters of his own. His final product was called Donkey Kong, which was released in 1981. Players were transformed into the avatar of Jumpman, who was on a mission to get his girlfriend back from his pet gorilla. Eventually, Jumpman would evolve into the Mario that fans know and love today. Mario got his name thanks to American executives Nintendo executives in America were skeptical of Miyamotos platform game. They didnt think it would be a hit. They also couldnt help but notice that Jumpman looked similar to their landlord, so they started to call the character Mario. The execs might have been wrong about Donkey Kongit was a huge successbut the new moniker stuck. Miyamoto even gave his seal of approval. ‘Super Mario Bros.’ reinvigorated video games In 1985, the gaming industry was in shambles, due to a crash two years earlier caused by market saturation and too many lackluster games. Instead of getting out of the business, Nintendo doubled down by releasing the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Super Mario Bros. was the console’s calling card. About a year after the release of the NES, the Super Mario Bros. game was bundled with the system, meaning the two products were sold together. This only strengthened Marios popularity. Mario was now a plumber with a brother named Luigi on a mission to rescue Princess Toadstool, the ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom, from the evil Bowser. This one game has inspired over 200 spinoffs in the Nintendo catalog alone. There are also three movies with a fourth one set to be released on April 3, 2026. How to watch Fridays Nintendo Direct live stream Fans are already speculating about what Nintendo is going to announce during its live stream. It is safe to assume that there will be some Mario news ahead of the big anniversary. Its simple to catch Nintendo Direct and see for yourself. You can watch it on Nintendo’s YouTube or Twitch channels. It will also be available on the Nintendo Today app. Finally, we’ve embedded the stream below.
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E-Commerce
Hello again from Fast Companyand thank you for reading this edition of Plugged In. Last Tuesday, the world marked International Apple Day, a name I just made up to describe a very real annual ritual. Certainly, the annual unveiling of new iPhonesalong with updated Apple Watches and AirPodsis the biggest day on Apples product calendar. Its the moment when many people either decide a new iPhone is in their future or that they can eke another year out of the one theyve already got. The headline this week was the long-anticipated debut of the iPhone Air, a new phone whose selling point is that its an iPhone, except thinner and lighter. Much of the other announcements involved new Apple products that offer even more of what folks liked about predecessorslonger battery life, additional megapixels, improved noise cancellation. Apple gave the base iPhone 17 the ProMotion and always-on display technologies formerly reserved for the iPhone Pro and (finally!) decided to release an iPhone Pro in an exuberantly fun color, Cosmic Orange. It also gave all the new iPhones front-facing camera a square sensor, allowing you to shoot in landscape mode even if youre holding the phone vertically, a feature I never realized I wanted but now crave. Even when Apple doesnt have anything radically new to reveal (like, oh, a folding iPhone), its good at the kind of incrementalism that keeps its hardware progressing in logical directions with clear benefits. This weeks launch was dominated by that sort of news. But Apple didnt have much to say about AI, an area thats critical to the future of the companys products. For now, its quietly trying to regain its footing after a period of embarrassingly public failure with the technology, leaving the details of whats ahead uncertain. Lets recap. At its WWDC conference in June 2024, Apple introduced a portfolio of AI-powered features called Apple Intelligence. Among the most ambitious was the Siri voice assistants new ability to answer questions that involved seamlessly plucking bits of information from different apps on the flysuch as Siri, when is my Moms flight landing?; Whats our lunch plan?; and How long will it take us to get there from the airport? Apple stoked expectations: This year marks the beginning of a new era for Siri, explained the executive who demonstrated the mom-visit scenario in the WWDC keynote video. By the end of the year, however, the company hadnt shipped the most ambitious elements of its Siri improvements. Last March, it acknowledged, Its going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year. At this years WWDC, it didnt say anything about Siris AI future other than to reiterate the coming year timetable. A new twist developed last month when Bloombergs Mark Gurman reported that Apple was in early talks with Google to build a new version of Siri on top of Googles Gemini LLM. Given that more than 15 months had passed since Apples announcements at WWDC 2024, I did a double-take at Gurmans scoop. How could Apple still be in the process of assembling third-party ingredients to build something it had already demoed and claimed was an era-shifting step forward? Any Gemini partnership might have as much to do with Siris longer-term AI trajectory as implementing the specific features Apple announced and then failed to complete. Still, considering the companys instinctive preference to develop its own technologies rather than rely on others, even a whiff of Google AI becoming essential to one of the iPhones highest-profile features would be a big deal. Particularly given that Apple and Google are both long-time partners and fierce competitors. Clarity about Siris smarter, more personalized future is probably months off and wont arrive all at once. After burning itself with premature hoopla, Apple has every incentive to stay mum until its absolutely, positively certain its ready to deploy the features it announced at WWDC 2024. According to Gurman, its shooting for next spring. That would make them an off-cycle update before Apples standard round of OS upgrades for fall 2026, which will likely bring another round of AI enhancements to Siri. Meanwhile, Google has been bounding forward with its own AI game plan for Android. At its Pixel 10 phone launch last month, it showed off a feature called Magic Cue. Its not a precise counterpart to the new, unreleased Siri, but also relates to dynamically weaving together data from multiple apps to keep users informed about everyday life. Having lost time to its Siri mishap, Apple may still be scrambling to catch up with Googles version of this helpful AI vision a year from now. Now, Apple has hardly dug itself an AI hole it can never emerge from. For one thing, its not clear to me that most consumers are prioritizing AI when choosing which devices to buy. The new iPhones, Apple Watches, and AirPods Pro have plenty of other new features that should appeal to upgraders even if elements of their AI story remain fuzzy, giving Apple some breathing room to figure out whats next. Deciding to build a Siri experience on top of Gemini might be a healthy sign that Apple understands its own limitations and is willing to try new approaches to overcoming them. From the Apple II to the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad to the Apple Watch, Apple is legenary not for inventing product categories but for reinventing them. Once it shows up, its offerings are often so well thought-out that people forget it was late to the party. So far, nobody else has figured out how to build AI into smartphones and other consumer devices in a way thats so life-changing that Apple cant theoretically top it. Im not arguing that the new-and-improved Siris delayed rollout is a classically Apple-esque act of confidence. Instead, it reflects the enormous pressure the company is under to deliver tangible AI in its products, and its relative inexperience with the technology. But the company still has a shot at turning its misadventures in AI into a fresh start that works to its advantage. That might be the biggest challengeand opportunityit faces in 2026. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company Thanks to AI, this guy is running a Google rival from his laundry roomLarge language models aren’t just making mainstream search engines worse; they’re making the next generation of search engines easier to develop. Read More Millennials refuse to give up ‘lol’Once merely shorthand for laughter, ‘lol’ has become a new flashpoint in the online generation wars. Read More Why most AI wearables are still terribleAnd how beauty, privacy, and expression can fix them. Read More X has been CEO-less for months. Oddsmakers don’t believe that’s changingTwo months after Yaccarino bailed, Musk hasn’t picked a new chief. Polymarket bettors don’t anticipate he will anytime soon. Read More Ralph Lauren’s new AI app is paving the way for a shopping revolutionThe 58-year-old fashion brand partnered with Microsoft to create Ask Ralph, an AI agent that mimics the experience of speaking with a stylist. Read More This startup is bringing AI to an Excel-style spreadsheetSourcetable’s AI agents can fetch data from cloud services and databases, then write code to analyze itall from a familiar spreadsheet environment. Read More
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