Over the past ten years, Apple’s iPhone has become the company’s most valuable —and recently, somewhat volatile— asset. Since its introduction in 2007, the iPhone helped to jumpstart the smartphone revolution, and with it came some big innovations. The App Store, touchscreen gaming, the mass adoption of social media, and protecting user data with biometrics. Its product lineup is enmeshed in Apple’s ecosystem, and the impact that it continues to have around the globe is vast.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says he asked CEO Tim Cook about how to make US-built iPhones happen (despite Cook’s explanations for why they won’t), per an interview with CNBC:
LUTNICK: He said, “I need to have the robotic arms ... do it at a scale and at a precision that I can bring it here. And the day I see that available, it’s coming here, because I don’t like to employ all these people foreign.”
Despite rumors that Apple’s iPhone 17 Pro smartphones would feature an anti-glare display similar to the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra / S25 Ultra, MacRumors is now pouring cold water on the possibility. Juli Clover reports that Apple has faced difficulties “scaling up the display coating process.” As a result, we’re not going to see this option for the iPhones 17 Pro.
With flagship phones all offering vibrant, bright screens nowadays, it would’ve been a nice differentiator.
That’s what The Financial Times’ sources are saying, with the goal of producing “the entirety of the more than 60mn iPhones sold annually in the US by the end of 2026.” But the real goal is to avoid the worst of Trump’s tariffs and to continue the diversification of Apple’s supply chain to places outside China.
So I guess “the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones” won’t be from the US? Shocking.
Says Luka Doncic, talking to ESPN’s Malika Andrews about the iPhone he threw after finding out he’d been traded from the Dallas Mavericks to the Los Angeles Lakers earlier this year. The back glass is cracked, but Luka is still using it.
Is “bar” even the right word to describe it? If this actually is what the iPhone 17 Pro looks like, I guess we’ll see what Apple calls it.
Three excellent pieces by Mark Gurman, John Gruber, and Ben Thompson recently published that explain why Apple can’t move iPhone production back to the USA. There is no tariff percentage that will result in a US-based “army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones.” As Steve Jobs told President Obama back in 2011, “those jobs aren’t coming back.”
Apple’s “short-term” solution to Trump’s tariffs may be upping its iPhone exports from India, where the 26 percent tariff is about half of China’s. The company is on track to make 25 million phones there this year, with 10 million for the local market, but might redirect more to the US.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple sees the situation as “too uncertain” to alter its manufacturing plans just yet though.
Attorney General Pam Bondi sent Apple a letter “telling the company it should follow President Donald Trump’s executive order” extending ByteDance’s deadline to sell TikTok by 75 more days, reports Bloomberg. The outlet had reported a similar letter sent to both Google and Apple prior to their decision to restore the app to their online marketplaces in February, too.
The automaker’s bigger EX90 EV got CarKey last year, and now Volvo is adding it to the smaller EX30. Volvo’s software rollout on the EX90 has been buggy, with features like CarPlay arriving slowly and owners complaining that their digital keys don’t work.
Sebastiaan de With from the Halide / Lux Camera team reviewed the iPhone 16e’s camera, and he captured some really great shots. Loved reading this.
After admitting that AI-powered upgrades to Siri are taking “longer than we thought,” Apple has added a disclaimer to its iPhone 16, 16E, and 16 Pro product pages warning that some features “will be available with a future software update.”
There was no disclaimer on the site last week, even though the features were just as unavailable then. Apple has also pulled an iPhone 16 ad focused on the unreleased upgrades.
A new batch of Apple security updates today that includes iOS 18.3.2 and macOS 15.3.2 might re-enable Apple Intelligence (again), but it also supplements an issue first addressed in iOS 17.2, where “Maliciously crafted web content may be able to break out of Web Content sandbox,” according to an Apple update note spotted by 9to5Mac.
In the now-private YouTube video, The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey is shown asking Siri “the name of the person they had a meeting with the previous month at a specific restaurant,” as 9to5Mac puts it.
That sort of capability isn’t coming soon after Apple delayed its Siri AI upgrade on Friday, with a Bloomberg rumor suggesting its features could get scrapped and rebuilt entirely.
