THE RUNDOWN

Apple's first foldable, the iPhone Duo, starts at $2,000 and ships next month. It's not the first foldable on the market by a long shot — Samsung, Motorola, and others have been doing this for years — but Apple's entry is already turning heads. Hands-on reviewers are calling it the most exciting Apple device in a decade, though some wish it had a third rear camera. Motorola wasted no time teasing a new compact Razr foldable in response.

If the Duo is out of your budget, the 'affordable' option isn't much better. The iPhone 18 Pro now starts at $1,199 and the Pro Max at $1,299 — both $100 more than last year. Apple is also raising prices on older models, including the iPhone 16 and 17 lines. It's shaping up to be the year nobody escapes a phone price hike.

On a lighter note, Apple brought back a black model for the iPhone Pro lineup after ditching it last year for bolder color options. Small win, but the internet is clearly relieved.

This was also the first major keynote for Apple CEO John Ternus, and he came out swinging with a clear message: the iPhone isn't going anywhere. Tech watchers are drawing comparisons to Steve Jobs' strategy of doubling down on the core product — a smart move when your most important device is also your most controversial in terms of pricing.

Apple's new Watch features include the ability to transcribe recent speech and summarise ambient conversations. Apple insists raw audio isn't saved, and the company published a document explaining the privacy architecture behind its new Siri AI Audio Intelligence tools. But the broader question these features raise — about how comfortable we've become with devices that are always listening — is one worth sitting with. You can read more about how data privacy in consumer tech is evolving.

This one deserves more attention than it's getting. OpenAI announced it has solved one of mathematics' legendary Millennium Prize Problems — a set of seven problems so hard that each carries a $1 million prize. The achievement is being treated with a mix of awe and unease in academic circles, with some mathematicians questioning how to verify results produced by AI systems they can't fully audit. It's a genuinely historic moment wrapped in complicated feelings.

In the same week, OpenAI added Paul Christiano — one of the most respected voices in AI alignment research and someone often described as an 'AI doomer' — to its board. It's a signal that the company is trying to be taken seriously on safety, even as it races to publish world-altering results. If you're tracking the AI governance conversation, this is a significant appointment.

Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic — the company behind WordPress.com — has been placed on paid leave by the board, against his will according to an internal Slack message he sent to staff. Automattic runs infrastructure that powers a huge slice of the web, so leadership instability there matters beyond the tech industry drama.

The US government is reportedly urging American AI companies to identify Chinese users and quietly switch them to less capable model versions, after accusing six Chinese AI firms of aggressively copying frontier US models. It's a slow-burn tech cold war story that's picking up speed.

Massachusetts has become the third US state in three months to impose new clean energy requirements on data centre development. As AI demand drives power consumption through the roof, regulators are pushing back — and this trend is only going to spread.

It's a lot to process in one day. Apple reshaped the conversation around foldables and phone pricing, OpenAI rewrote what we thought AI could do in mathematics, and the quiet battles over who controls AI and who pays for its power are heating up everywhere. Tomorrow's going to be just as busy.