Nearly seven years after Tim Cook first visited India as CEO of Apple, he reportedly plans to return next week for a headline occasion: Opening the country’s first two Apple stores.

• The first store should debut on Tuesday in Mumbai, with the second opening Thursday in New Delhi.

The news comes after the iPhone surpassed competitors in Q4 2022 for top billing as the country’s best-selling smartphone and set an all-time iPhone revenue record in India, according to Apple’s February earnings call.

Zoom out: The retail news also marks a shift in Apple’s corporate strategy. Amid complicated US-China trade relations and pandemic-era supply-chain issues, the company is reportedly looking to lessen its reliance on China and amp up its representation in India.

Keep reading here.—HF

Panera Bread is seemingly all-in on implementing emerging technologies at its restaurants. Or maybe it’s just all-in on its partnership with Amazon.

Toward the end of March, the chain became the first national restaurant to use Amazon’s biometric scanning software, Amazon One, rolling out palm scanning for users of the MyPanera loyalty program. Less than two weeks later, Panera announced it had teamed up with Amazon’s Alexa Skills team to offer improved AI-powered voice ordering.

Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant technology, has long powered voice ordering for retailers (including Domino’s and Dunkin’). But the latest update to Amazon’s Food Skills API offers a smoother, more conversational ordering experience, and only recently became possible, thanks to major advances in artificial intelligence.

Keep reading here.—MA

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

Android 14 Beta: Google released the first Android 14 beta to the public this week. The beta, which is generally for developers to test their apps on, features improved gesture navigation and enables developers to add custom actions to the system sharesheet. The beta is expected to be the first of four betas for Android 14.

Green gaming: Microsoft rolled out energy-saving features for its Xbox Series X/S consoles this week, including an “active hours” feature that enables fast start-up time during specified hours and longer ones when the system isn’t in use, and a “carbon-aware update” feature that doesn’t turn the system on for automatic overnight updates, instead downloading when it can use “the most renewable energy on your local grid.”

Stat: Tech companies based in Miami raised $5.39 billion in 2022, reflecting a growth of 278% between 2020–2022.

Quote: “For us, it’s really the right place, right time…The sheer market opportunity is what’s giving us the opportunity to lean into Terran R. If that market opportunity was not there, this would not be the right move.”—Relativity Space CEO Tim Ellis to Ars Technica about the company’s pivot to larger rockets

Read: “How AI is helping historians better understand our past” (MIT Technology Review)

Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• The Super Mario Bros. theme enters the annals of history as the first video game music to be inducted into the Library of Congress.
• Universal Music Group has reportedly asked streaming services, including Apple Music and Spotify, to clamp down on AI-music services’ access to copyrighted music on the platforms.
• The NYPD is experimenting with two egg-shaped autonomous robots to help patrol city streets.
• Apple is partnering with Amazon to create an AI-powered shopping assistant.

Catch up on the top Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Virgin Orbit’s bankruptcy may offer lessons for other launch companies
• What businesses can learn from this year’s Stanford AI Index
• Vetting startups in ag tech? Here’s how Astanor Ventures does it