Mashable Tech – Spoken Edition

That's how almost everyone felt about the iPhone 7 before Apple even announced it. Before anyone even got to see it in person. And most importantly, before anyone even got to use it for any extended period of time. And yet, there I was, up until 3 a.m., Apple Store app all set up on my iPhone and iPad, ready to go, as soon as Apple's store went back online on pre-order day. I placed my order for a Jet Black iPhone 7 with 256GB of storage and went back to sleep. My iPhone 7 arrived on launch day.

Facebook's drive to digitally connect the whole world may have hit a road bump. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is reportedly investigating a June accident involving one of Facebook's massive drones. Known as Aquila, the unmanned aircraft is part of Internet.org, Facebook's at times controversial project to bring internet to remote communities. Bloomberg reported that a "structural failure" occurred during the drone's first test flight on June 28.

Apple is now offering to replace batteries for the iPhone 6S, if users find that their devices are abruptly shutting down. This is its second global repair offer, just days after the last one for the iPhone 6 Plus's screen issue. "Apple has determined that a very small number of iPhone 6S devices may unexpectedly shut down. This is not a safety issue and only affects devices within a limited serial number range that were manufactured between September and October 2015," Apple said in a statement.

Mark Zuckerberg is at last detailing a plan for Facebook to fix its fake news problem. Following a week of criticism in which even President Obama weighed in on the dangers of fake news spread through social media, Facebook's CEO shared a lengthy, but carefully worded, post on his platform laying out a series of steps the social network is taking to combat misinformation in News Feed.

SEOUL — Waterproof phones may be all the rage now, but people in Japan have been used to their devices being able to take a swim for over a decade already. Users in the country got used to having smartphones years before Western counterparts. Manufacturers had to make phones waterproof because Japanese women were so attached to their phones they brought them into shower. As a result, nearly every phone in for the Japanese market has been made waterproof, to meet standard expectations.

Sir Richard Branson is set to reveal plans that could change the travel game as we know it. On Tuesday, the founder of Virgin Group is joining forces with Boom — an aircraft production startup — to unveil the XB-1 Supersonic Demonstrator, a prototype supersonic passenger airliner. The aircraft will reportedly provide 3.5-hour flights between New York and London for the "affordable" price of $5,000.

Video calling apps have existed for at least a decade. Skype offered free video calls way back in 2006, Apple launched FaceTime in 2010, Facebook Messenger got video calling last year and Google has been dabbling with the feature in multiple avatars for a while, and now has Duo. Yet, WhatsApp's entry is a bigger deal, especially in emerging markets. The biggest thing going for WhatsApp is its sheer user base — over 1 billion monthly active users worldwide.

More people get their news on Facebook than ever before, but Mark Zuckerberg is still convinced fake news on Facebook was not that big a deal during the presidential election. Writing on Facebook Saturday, the CEO again responded to critics who have lambasted the social network for not doing more to combat the spread of misinformation. Instead, he wrote it was "extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other." "We don't want any hoaxes on Facebook.

The election is starting to make Silicon Valley very, very, nervous. As the race tightened Tuesday night, members of Silicon Valley's elite took to Twitter to freak out along with everyone else. Shervin Pishevar, cofounder of venture capital firm Sherpa Capital, an investor in some of the biggest names in tech, including Uber, Airbnb and Slack, tweeted that if Trump wins he would start funding a campaign for California to become its own country. Others were quick to chime in.

If you care at all about technology, you must vote for Hillary Clinton. Throughout the campaign, both candidates have done a pretty poor job of explaining their tech policies, so you could be forgiven for assuming neither one of them has one. (And no, the ability to wield social media is not a tech position. It doesn’t represent tech policy. It’s just marketing.) Tech is what underpins our lives, our infrastructure and our connection to the world.