Samsung has spent years making QLED one of the most recognizable names in the TV aisle. But if a new report is accurate, the company could be preparing for a future where that familiar label becomes a much smaller part of its lineup and eventually disappears altogether.
According to a report from Electronic Times, Samsung has dramatically reduced production of its quantum dot-based LCD TVs. The company produced around 10 million QLED TVs in 2025, but that figure is expected to fall to just 2 million to 3 million units this year — a drop of as much as 80%. That doesn’t mean your QLED TV is obsolete, of course. Instead, this appears to be a much bigger rethink of what Samsung wants its TV lineup to look like over the next few years.
QLED is getting squeezed from both ends
Part of the problem is that QLED isn’t the differentiator it once was. Chinese manufacturers such as TCL and Hisense have made quantum dot TVs available at increasingly aggressive prices, making it harder for Samsung to compete at the cheaper end of the market.
Nicholas Derio Palacios / Pexels
Samsung’s answer appears to be Mini LED. The company introduced a dedicated Mini LED range in 2026, including more affordable models below its premium offerings. In India, for example, Samsung’s Mini LED lineup currently starts at Rs. 42,990, while the company still sells Neo QLED models higher up the range. The important distinction is that Samsung’s new entry-level Mini LED models don’t rely on the same quantum dot layer that has defined its QLED branding. And the changes may not stop with Samsung’s cheaper TVs.
Samsung already has its QLED replacement waiting
Samsung is reportedly planning to shrink its Neo QLED lineup further in 2027 and could gradually phase it out as early as 2028. Neo QLED combines quantum dots with Mini LED backlighting, so its disappearance would be a much bigger departure from Samsung’s current TV strategy. The company has already given us a pretty good idea of what could replace it. Samsung has been investing heavily in Micro RGB, which uses microscopic red, green, and blue LEDs for its backlight instead of relying on a conventional LED backlight and quantum dot layer. Its 2026 Micro RGB range now stretches from 55 inches to 115 inches, and Samsung also showed off a massive 130-inch model at CES.
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Chris Hagan / Digital Trends
OLED isn’t going anywhere either. Samsung’s own 2026 strategy explicitly places Micro RGB and OLED at the premium end, with Mini LED serving as the more accessible option. If the reported roadmap holds, Samsung’s TV shelves could look very different within a couple of years: Mini LED at the affordable end, OLED and Micro RGB at the top, and QLED, once one of Samsung’s biggest TV selling points, squeezed out in between.
Super Valid Designs spent two months on a ski lift because mice had moved into the chicken coop and ordinary traps only opened a revolving door. Catch one batch and another arrives. Live relocation felt like a better bet than a pile of snap traps, so the plan became a pair of jobs in one machine: baited gondolas that work as traps, then a cable line that carries those cars 250 feet down a hill and dumps the passengers into brush without anyone walking the route every night.
Mice travel to the vehicles using a gravity feeder that drops them from the coop ceiling. Each automobile is 3D printed and contains a portion of clear acrylic for display. The bottom door is smartly constructed to open by itself, eliminating the need for any electronics to interfere. When a car reaches the bottom station, the floor collapses beneath them, and our little critters land on a mound of brush. The entire thing is popularly referred to as the Rodent Tram Express; whether you interpret this as a show of kindness or a sardonic joke about a peanut-butter-fueled ride to freedom is totally up to you.
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A lot of man-hours went into laying the cable work; over 500 feet of it cost around $100 and resulted in a loop that was only about 250 feet long. He utilized old bike rims for the pulley wheels, covered them in some old tire rubber to give the cable some grip, and then had to get a windshield wiper motor from an old family car to make it work. After the rope sagged slightly and the cars began to get trapped on the support rods, the towers were installed. After that, it was basically a lot of framework made from whatever scraps he had lying around and measuring? Measuring stayed optional. “Measure twice, cut once, or don’t measure at all” was the working rule, with the cars themselves getting the careful design time the lift never received.
Testing was a pain in the neck, literally, because he had to hike the hill several times until all the kinks were worked out. Cars would snag on objects, the acrylic windows messed up the cable, and we even had a tower shift on us. If that wasn’t enough, he had to cope with heat and wildfire smoke, which turned our treks into a second project, as well as a host of ticks that appeared in the brush we needed to remove for the cable. He started by running two cars at once, just in case a full load of cars pulled the cable straight off the pulley wheels, but after a few runs, he eventually got everything in order and the loop held together.
To be honest, findings are a little hard to come by, since he only managed to get a few visits in with video evidence by the time he posted it all online. Whether 250 feet is truly far enough is debatable; many people pointed out that mice have a nasty habit of simply walking home after a while, and 1/4 mile is probably about right for a commute rather than exile. Super Valid Designs is considering the lift as a temporary fix, and he isn’t thinking of it as a silver bullet answer just yet. Keeping the feed sealed and holes plugged remains the top priority; the Rodentram Express is more of a nice-to-have than a must-have, but hey, we now have a station in the coop and a line on the hill, and a few mice have had the dubious pleasure of taking public transportation without asking. [Source]
In context: The FAA has long suffered from a shortage of air traffic controllers, and many air traffic control systems are badly outdated, making the sector an obvious target for AI-powered automation. Although no one currently believes AI can replace air traffic controllers, the technology could help different airlines and the FAA pool data to increase efficiency.
Federal aviation officials aim to launch a new AI-based air traffic control tool next week in Washington, DC, one of the US’s busiest air travel corridors. The debut marks the beginning of a gradual nationwide rollout.
Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories (SMART) is a cloud-based system that analyzes schedules, weather patterns, airport capacity, and other operational factors to predict traffic flow and potential conflicts. While airlines, air traffic controllers, and the FAA currently often operate on different data sources and schedules, SMART aims to provide them with a shared intelligence stream.
Air Space Intelligence, the AI firm that developed SMART after receiving a $875 million grant from the FAA, hopes it will reduce fuel use, speed recovery following bad weather and congestion, raise situational awareness, and create space for new air traffic. Along with another system called Flow Management Data & Services, ASI aims to roll out SMART over the next one to two years. The initiative is part of the Trump administration’s plan to update US air traffic control, which has struggled with staffing shortages and outdated technology for years.
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A 2023 FAA risk assessment found that 37% of systems were unsustainable and 39% were potentially unsustainable. While plans to update some systems could take a decade or more, others – some over three decades old – were not scheduled to be modernized. ASI is promoting SMART as a faster way to update some of the FAA’s tools.
AI proponents also often cite the technology as a path to reducing the workloads of overburdened employees (though many claim it does the opposite), and air traffic controllers could be among those who benefit. While the FAA hopes to eventually employ 12,563 controllers (down from a prior target of 14,633), it currently employs only around 11,000. The shortage has contributed to flight delays and made one of the world’s most stressful jobs even more taxing. The FAA has even resorted to video games to boost recruitment, but the job’s mental requirements are steep.
Fresh iPhone 17 and iPhone Air owners are already asking the same thing. If battery is the only reason to spend more, do the new iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max actually earn the upgrade. Tech Chap tried to answer that by running those two new Pros against last year’s 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, and the thin iPhone Air until every phone died, then he ran the whole thing a second time with a Galaxy S26 Ultra in the mix.
Each phone in the room was a worldwide model with a removable SIM tray. The North American eSIM-only variants have somewhat larger batteries, about 6% more on the 18 Pro and 4% more on the 18 Pro Max, so they should last a little longer, but we won’t see those results here. Tech Chap had purchased new units, ensured that the battery health was 100%, completed all of Siri’s indexing, and upgraded them all to the latest iOS 27 release. He mixed up the drain by using cellular data, video recording, on-phone video editing, regular web surfing and app usage, and occasional gaming. He utilized an iPhone 13 mini as the timer to avoid any timing concerns with the phone itself.
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The iPhone Air went first, lasting approximately 7 hours and 10 minutes. The iPhone 17 was about 30 minutes behind, which was an acceptable performance given the price differential, even after the new phones were released. The iPhone 17 Pro took another 10 minutes to catch up to the 17, and then shut down at 4 or 5 percent charge when the cheaper phone ran out of juice. That was a tight stretch, but the iPhone 17 Pro Max still had more than 20% charge when the Air died. The new iPhone 18 Pro reached 7 percent charge before last year’s 17 Pro died, providing an additional 45 minutes of runtime in that portion of the test. Apple had stated that the 18 Pro should be comparable to last year’s 17 Pro Max. In this physical SIM test, however, last year’s Pro Max maintained a significant lead.
The iPhone 17 Pro Max died just after 10.35 hours. The iPhone 18 Pro Max still had 8 percent charge and lasted another 45 minutes before dying, bringing the total time to 11 hours. The relative increases appeared to be similar across both sizes: 17 Pro to 18 Pro and 17 Pro Max to 18 Pro Max. You could sense the improvement, but it wasn’t a great leap. A second run was completed for good measure. The Air died four minutes earlier than before, at 7 hours. The iPhone 17 lasted around 8 minutes longer than the first time. The iPhone 17 Pro was barely 3 minutes off its previous time. The iPhone 18 Pro had a 5% charge when the 17 Pro died and lasted 8 hours 35 minutes, coming within 10 percentage points of last year’s Pro Max without actually catching up. For comparison, the Galaxy S26 Ultra, which was around 8 months old at the time, died after just 9 hours. The iPhone 17 Pro Max lasted 10 hours and 11 minutes, whereas the iPhone 18 Pro Max was still 11% charged when the older Pro Max died.
Bigger cells always seemed to come out on top, as the Pro Max phones just kept going compared to the rest, and Tech Chap summed it up quite well by noting the major reason to pay more for the larger body is that they simply last a lot longer. However, the Air to 17 is a significant step up, as is the Pro to new Pro from one year to the next, and last year’s Pro Max appears to be able to compete with this year’s smaller 18 Pro, at least on our worldwide SIMS and the mix of work I’ve been doing.
Let’s be honest, once you start adding all the variables together, signal strength, screen brightness, and which apps you end up utilizing, it’s a marvel his statistics don’t vanish totally, giving you a true image of battery life rather than a rosy promise for every situation. If battery life alone was enough to persuade you to go with a new 17 or Air, the 18 Pro Max is the phone that keeps going long after everything else has shut down.
The platform aims to give employees greater clarity and insight when it comes to planning for retirement.
As part of its plans for Pensions Awareness Week 2026, Pensions Awareness Ireland has launched what it claims to be Ireland’s first AI retirement coach.
The aim of the model, which has been named Ali, is to empower employees to gain greater control over their financial future. Primarily it can help workers to see if their pension pot is on track to support the lifestyle they intend to have post-employment.
Employees can then explore their options and start to implement any necessary changes they need to make, in order to improve their long-term financial outlook.
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The model will require data such as the user’s current age, their planned retirement age, annual gross income and monthly pension contributions to enable its AI tools to build a dashboard breaking down their retirement income forecast and pension details.
From there dashboard users will receive an invitation to join a conversation with Ali, which has been trained on the Irish pensions system and is programmed to provide tailored responses based on the user’s dashboard.
Feargal McKenna, the head of corporate at Ireland’s best pension plans, investments and advice said, “Most people understand that they need to save for retirement. The hard question is whether they are saving enough to give them the lifestyle they want. That lack of visibility can make retirement planning feel complicated and offputting.
The AI Retirement Coach is designed to change that. Ali enables people to explore what their forecast means for their own circumstances and the changes they could make in a judgement-free digital space. The aim is to turn retirement planning from something abstract and uncertain into something people can understand, talk about, and take action on.”
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In early July, the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment brought into effect the Employment (Contractual Retirement Ages) Act 2025, which introduces significant new rights for employees in Ireland and also places new legal restrictions and responsibilities on employers.
The new rules mean that eligible employees, who wish to do so, can now choose to remain employed at their place of work for a period of time beyond their contractual retirement age, where that age is below the State Pension age of 66.
Employees may choose to stay on at an organisation for a range of reasons, including to work towards a better retirement.
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Photo credit: Sara Tan | RMIT Researchers at RMIT University’s Centre for Additive Manufacturing have printed a titanium lattice that floats while remaining open so water can pass straight through. Lead researcher Dr Jordan Noronha and project leader Distinguished Professor Ma Qian worked with Professors Andrey Molotnikov, Milan Brandt and Martin Leary, along with partners at France’s Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. Their hybrid starts with Ti-6Al-4V, an alloy that normally sits around 4.43 grams per cubic centimeter, more than four times the density of freshwater.
Laser powder bed fusion resulted in simple cubic lattices of 4 by 4 by 4 stacks of 10 mm cells, all neatly stacked. Instead of thick solid beams, we used hollow struts with walls that were only 0.2 mm thick and interiors that measured 2.5 to 4 mm across. We next filled those hollows with expandable polyurethane foam, allowing it to swell, lock onto the rough inner walls, and form a combination of tiny closed cells ranging in size from 10 to 200 microns. This resulted in a small 5.9 to 7.3 percent increase in bulk density while still trapping a lot of gas inside the metal.
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Metallic lattices have a bit of a problem in that they can achieve bulk densities lower than water while still sinking because liquid fills all of the gaps. Researchers at RMIT developed a new concept called skeleton density, which counts only the titanium walls and sealed-foam filled insides while ignoring all of the empty space on the outside. If the skeleton density in freshwater remains below around 0.997 grams per cubic centimeter, the entire thing will float, even if water only seeps in through the exterior gaps.
They kept them in freshwater aquariums for over two months to test how long they could stay afloat. After only two weeks, seawater from Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay lost 0.15 percent of its mass and less than 1 percent of its strength. Compression tests revealed that lattices with foam within had almost the same yield strength, ultimate compressive strength, and stiffness as hollow strut equivalents without foam. Interestingly, in terms of specific strength, they outperformed both high-density polyethylene and 316L stainless steel. At the same overall density, our hybrid design was around 70% stronger than steel or HDPE, placing it close second.
Even after tiny cracks, fissures, and the removal of an entire layer of lattice, these hybrids remained buoyant. They only sank toward the end, at the last densification step, when the pressure was high enough to compress the volume and raise the skeleton density above water. They tested an 85 x 100 mm printed buoy in a turbulent seawater tank, allowing it to swing up to 45 degrees without the need for a sealed outer shell.
Jobs such as maritime buoys, floating sensors, piers, and offshore platforms are likely to profit from hardware that can withstand wave impacts and resist corrosion better than typical plastics or steel of comparable weight. Distinguished Professor Ma Qian mentioned that the same titanium structure may be used for other fillers to absorb energy, manage heat, or minimize vibration. The Australian Research Council and the RMIT School of Engineering provided funding for this work. They’re now looking to create larger sections and test them in real-world sea conditions for a few years. [Source]
The Financial Times reported that the company is seeking ‘a valuation of up to $35bn’.
UK AI infrastructure developer Nscale has filed for a US initial public offering (IPO) through a statement of registration to the country’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The number of shares to be offered and their price range have not yet been determined, according to the company, which has applied to list its ordinary shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ‘NSCL’.
The Financial Times, however, reported on Friday (18 September) that Nscale is seeking “a valuation of up to $35bn” in the IPO, citing people familiar with the matter.
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Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley will act as lead bookrunners for the proposed offering.
RBC Capital Markets, Deutsche Bank Securities and TD Securities, among others, will act as other bookrunners, while Citizens Capital Markets, Loop Capital Markets and Roth Capital Partners, among others, will act as the offering’s co-managers, Nscale said.
According to its SEC filing, the London-based AI start-up had a net loss of $1.02bn on revenue of $140.6m for the six months ending on 30 June; for the same period in 2025, it had a net loss of $368.9m on revenue of $10.4m.
“As of 31 August 2026, our infrastructure portfolio included approximately 25,000 active GPUs and 461,000 active and contracted GPUs, five active and 12 contracted data centre sites (including seven wholly-owned sites, nine colocation sites and one leased site) and approximately 1.37GW of active and contracted capacity (representing 1GW at owned sites, 200MW at leased sites and 165MW at colocation sites)”, Nscale’s filing read.
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It added that the company’s footprint “is concentrated in renewable-rich, low-cost power regions such as Norway, Portugal, Iceland and select locations in the United States and APAC”.
The company raised $2bn in Series C funding at a valuation of $14.6bn in March of this year. At the time, it said the money would be used to accelerate its global development of vertically integrated AI infrastructure – including GPU compute, networking, data services and orchestration software – across Europe, North America and Asia.
Nscale has AI infrastructure deployment deals with Microsoft and Nvidia; its founder, CEO and chair – 32-year-old Josh Payne – received total compensation in 2025 of $23.2m, according to last week’s SEC filing notice.
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Meta’s promotional images show Muse comparing strollers and asking for approval before placing an order. (Meta Images)
Amazon says it has cut off Meta’s new Muse personal AI agent from shopping on Amazon.com on behalf of customers, after attempting unsuccessfully to get the Facebook parent company to voluntarily exclude the e-commerce site from the experience.
The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn’t tell Amazon that Muse would access its store, the agent doesn’t identify itself when it browses, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which the company says could create privacy and security risks.
As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon were seeing the popup, “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.”
“We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
The message Amazon is showing people who use Meta’s Muse agent to shop on its site. (Amazon Image)
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday night.
The company said previously that Muse “has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods,” and that credentials a user shares “go into secure storage, so Muse can use them without seeing them, including passwords a person types into the browser themselves.”
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Business partners: The standoff between the tech giants is especially notable because the two companies work together: Amazon products have been purchasable inside Facebook and Instagram since 2023, and Meta signed a multibillion-dollar deal in April to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon’s cloud.
It’s part of a larger debate over who controls the online shopping experience and the customer relationship when AI agents buy items on behalf of consumers.
On Sunday night, Amazon said it is in direct conversation with Meta about the issue. Asked whether it would consider taking legal action, the company declined to comment.
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The business stakes are high for Amazon. In addition to operating its flagship e-commerce site, Amazon generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year — a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products.
Security implications: Muse can reach account pages and order history if a customer prompts it to do so, Amazon says. Because the agent doesn’t identify itself, the company says, that amounts to an undisclosed third party moving through customer accounts, processing transactions and handling sensitive data without Amazon’s knowledge or consent.
Amazon said agents that operate openly help keep the customer experience safe and reliable, and that other services buying on a customer’s behalf typically do so with the merchant’s agreement. It cited food delivery apps and the restaurants they take orders for, and online travel agencies and the airlines they book tickets with.
“Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we’ve requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience,” Amazon’s spokesperson said in the statement.
The court denied Amazon’s petition for rehearing on Sept. 10. However, the ruling left one avenue open for Amazon: claims built on contracts and terms of service. The message Muse users are now seeing doesn’t accuse anyone of hacking but cites Amazon’s Conditions of Use.
How Muse works: Meta launched Muse on Sept. 8 as a personal agent that carries out multi-step tasks rather than answering one-off questions, connecting to services including email, calendar, payments, dining and shopping.
It’s free, with paid subscription tiers, and available on iOS, Android, muse.ai and WhatsApp.
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Meta says the agent runs on a secure virtual machine, with its own browser, and checks with the user before sensitive actions like sending an email or making a purchase. A separate monitoring agent called Sentinel has to approve anything Muse sends to the internet.
The Muse launch materials describe the mechanism now at the center of the dispute: If a service has a public API, Muse can connect to it using credentials the user provides. If it has no API at all, Meta says, the agent “can use the service through a browser the way you would.”
Muse has caught on fast. A week after launch, it became the No. 1 free app in Apple’s U.S. App Store, ahead of ChatGPT. Early users have described it switching an auto insurance policy, hunting down discount codes at checkout, and loading an online grocery cart.
Amazon launched Alexa for Shopping in May, an AI agent that researches products and makes recommendations. Its own agentic shopping feature, Buy for Me, finds items on external brands’ sites, but the company points out that Buy for Me identifies itself and lets brands opt out.
Elon Musk recently claimed that his tunneling startup The Boring Company is working on “a simple precursor Hyperloop” between Austin and San Antonio that will reduce the journey between the two cities to less than 30 minutes.
The Boring Company account shared Musk’s statement and said it “would be excited and honored to build this massive infrastructure project.”
Many of The Boring Company’s announced projects — including tunnel systems in Chicago, Los Angeles, and between New York City and Washington, D.C. — have not materialized. However, it does operate a transportation system combining tunnels and surface routes in Las Vegas, and it recently raised a $3 billion round led by the United Arab Emirates.
Musk’s comments about a potential Austin-San Antonio Hyperloop were actually in reply to an AI-generated video depicting a generic science fiction future with human colonies on other worlds. Musk re-posted the video and declared, “This is the future we shall bring into being”.
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Musk’s critics have argued that his vision of the future is apparently inspired by pulp science fiction and comic books; historian Jill Lepore recently told me that he seems to favor sci-fi that “completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs.”
In a nutshell: Two senators are urging the Federal Trade Commission to examine how Amazon’s and Walmart’s shopping chatbots handle questions about products labeled “Made in the USA.” Sens. Tammy Baldwin and Rick Scott said Amazon’s Alexa and Walmart’s Sparky may fail to clearly indicate whether products are made domestically. In a letter to the FTC, the senators said the systems could “obscure and suppress” information about US-made goods and products falsely advertised as American-made.
The request follows a July report from Columbia University’s Center for Law and the Economy. The report said the two AI systems did not consistently surface information about domestic-origin claims, even though they could provide information on goods made in other countries.
The concern is not simply whether product data exists on a retailer’s website. It is whether a chatbot can find and present that information when a shopper asks for it. As retailers put more AI tools between consumers and product listings, the quality of the chatbot’s response can shape what shoppers see and buy.
The report’s authors tested Alexa and Sparky using prompts about US-made products. Alexa initially said it could not access that information. But when the wording of the request changed, the assistant returned products labeled as made in the US.
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Sparky initially said it could not determine whether “Made in USA” claims were accurate. After more detailed prompts, it ranked products in a shopping cart based on the apparent reliability of their labels. The chatbot described its first response as “overly cautious.”
Baldwin said the results could put domestic manufacturers at a disadvantage. “If Americans want to buy products made in America, Amazon and Walmart should be helping them, not giving away their business to foreign knockoffs,” she said in a statement.
Amazon rejected the suggestion that it deliberately withholds country-of-origin information. The company said it provides manufacturing-location details when manufacturers or third-party sellers supply that information. It also said country-of-origin information is shown on product-detail pages when available.
Amazon said it is working to improve Alexa for Shopping’s ability to provide that data. Walmart declined to comment.
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The FTC has previously warned both companies about origin claims made by third-party sellers. Last year, the agency wrote to Amazon and Walmart stating that some sellers on their marketplaces appeared to be falsely marketing goods as made in the US. The agency said those claims could violate federal standards and the companies’ own terms of service.
Baldwin and Scott said the newer report suggests the issue may not be limited to inaccurate product listings. They said chatbot behavior could make the problem harder for consumers to detect if the systems do not clearly identify products with credible domestic-origin claims.
“We all share the goal of strengthening American manufacturing and small businesses through initiatives such as Made in USA labeling, all while ensuring consumers receive accurate information about where the products they buy are made,” the senators wrote.
The request comes as the FTC continues to enforce its Made in USA Labeling Rule. The rule, which took effect in 2021, allows the agency to seek civil penalties against companies that falsely label products as made in the US.
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The FTC brought 11 enforcement actions after the rule took effect under the Biden administration, including a case that resulted in a multimillion-dollar judgment against home-goods retailer Williams-Sonoma. The agency has continued taking action over national-origin claims during the Trump administration and has issued warning letters to other businesses.
President Trump also signed an executive order in March calling for truthful advertising and suggesting that the FTC require e-commerce platforms to develop procedures for verifying country-of-origin claims from third-party sellers.
Erie Meyer, a senior fellow at the Center for Law and the Economy and a co-author of the July report, said the bipartisan support for an FTC investigation was notable. “Seeing Sen. Baldwin and Sen. Scott sign the same letter gives me hope that supporting American businesses is still a bipartisan issue,” Meyer told The Wall Street Journal.
Investment firm Evercore believes that upgrade demand for the iPhone 18 Pro range and new Apple Watch Series 12 is higher than predicted, prompting a target rise of $15.
Back in May 2026, Evercore raised its price by $35 to $365, arguing that investors were ignoring Apple’s long term prospects. Now it’s raised the price again, but this time because of what appear to be short term issues.
Specifically, the company reports that its survey of consumers suggests that the new iPhone range will prompt more upgrades than expected. The improvement is slight, but clear, and also focused on the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max.
In a note to investors seen by AppleInsider, Evercore says, for instance, that 32% of its survey plan to buy the iPhone 18 Pro Max. That’s up from 29% who intended to buy the iPhone 17 Pro Max.
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The company maintains that while there are impressive new features in the latest models, most upgraders are driven by their current iPhone aging. Some 67% of respondents said this, compared to 48% in 2025.
For Apple’s earnings, Evercore further notes that buyers are continuing to prefer higher storage capacity models. This tends to benefit Apple which charges heavily for those configurations.
It’s a similar story for the new Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4. The analysts report that 38% of respondents intend to buy, compared to 34% in 2025, with an unspecified majority favoring the Apple Watch Series 12.
Evercore’s reasoning does run counter to many recent analysts who have focused on what appeared to be a comparatively slow start to iPhone 18 Pro pre-orders online. But this year’s launch is significantly different with fewer models plus a new foldable, so much of the analysis appears to be guesswork.
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iPhone Duo outlook
One area that Evercore does not yet expect to do well for Apple is the new foldable iPhone Duo. At present, its survey suggests 14% of respondents expected to buy it.
That is, though, an improvement on the 9% who in 2025 said they would be buying an iPhone Air.
Plus Evercore cautions that iPhone Duo demand could improve once it has actually launched and buyers can test it out. Plus its analysts also note that its survey was confined to the US and although they don’t mention this, foldables have traditionally done significantly better in China.
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