It’s not affecting many people at all, but if your iPhone 18 Pro or iPhone 18 Pro Max is not working on AT&T, this is what you need to do.

While all of the bugs affecting the new iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are only happening for a very small group of users, they are happening. Alongside the already reported Face ID restart bug, due to be fixed shortly, AppleInsider has been told of an AT&T issue.

The issue is that, for the affected users, cellular calls cannot be made or received. Calls work when using AT&T Wi-Fi Calling, but cellular signal strength either varies or stays on SOS only.

According to AppleInsider podcast listener Rod, the issues started immediately and while AT&T has acknowledged it, Apple has not. It’s said to be related to eSIMs and AT&T advised Santiano to switch back to his iPhone 17 Pro Max.

As he notes, though, it is chance that he hadn’t already returned that in an upgrade trade. Plus affected users still have their iPhone 18 Pro and are now around a week into their 14-day return window.

Some users in a Reddit discussion about the issue claim to have found solutions, but they don’t appear to be working consistently. One user on Apple’s discussion forums says that their iPhone 18 Pro was believed to be faulty and so was replaced.

If you are affected by this bug, contact both Apple and AT&T support to get your problem documented. Details of all of Apple’s support options are on the company’s official support page.

AT&T has a device help center. There is also an AT&T iPhone app.

Separately, AT&T has said that it has no plans to support Apple’s new iPhone Handoff feature. This is the iOS 27 option that lets users have one number but two iPhones.

Disclaimer: Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed below belong solely to the author.

Recently, we’ve been bombarded by apocalyptic news about the potential risks of artificial intelligence (AI), from fears that the technology could break loose and cause catastrophic damage to humanity to concerns that it could ultimately threaten our survival.

Even two of the frontier model leaders, OpenAI and Anthropic, are calling for a slowdown in AI development now. I’m not convinced, however, that their change in tone has much to do with concerns about the future of the human race. It might instead have something to do with the unsustainable costs of AI investment that they are grappling with ahead of their planned IPOs.

However, in one recent story, we have seen evidence of AI showing self-restraint in a potentially dangerous situation.

Apocalypse not yet

A few days ago, you may have seen news headlines reporting that Google’s Gemini escaped a sandbox environment used for testing its hacking capabilities and went on the Internet to independently hack three companies—successfully gaining access to their data.

But these reports focused heavily on the escape and the successful hacks, rather than the circumstances surrounding the incident and, more importantly, its conclusion—which offers a much more optimistic picture.

Here’s how it all went down: in May, Google hired a third-party security company to run tests on Gemini’s capabilities. The AI had a simple goal of figuring out how to gain access to three fictional businesses, created within the testing environment.

However, the researchers made a mistake and allowed the bot to access the open Internet.

As a result, instead of operating within the constraints of the exercise, Gemini simply went online and found a company whose name matched the fictional business it was given, with two others being close enough matches to confuse it.

Using a fairly basic combination of guessing and browsing for compromised login credentials, the bot was able to access software repositories of all three companies before realising that it entered real businesses.

At this point, it realised that something was wrong and that it shouldn’t be going around the web hacking into private companies, and decided—on its own—to stop.

This is a welcome development after several earlier reports showed much more malicious activity by other AI agents, who not only repeatedly attempted to hack companies they weren’t supposed to, but tried to cover their tracks as well.

Perhaps Google’s accidental finding is evidence that we need more, not less, investment in AI, though?

Dumb AI may be more dangerous than smart AI

When talking about threats of artificial intelligence, people tend to think of Skynet, a psychopathic superintelligence, capable of deceiving humans and controlling the world’s machinery to wipe mankind out and take over the planet.

So far, however, it’s mostly a pop culture fantasy, while runaway “dumb” bots have already been proved to cause trouble.

That is the problem with automation that lacks sufficient sophistication: like a runaway train, it may be capable of carrying out its instructions but unable to recognise when it needs to stop, leaving a human conductor to pull the brakes.

I think there’s much greater danger in giving imperfect AI control over our lives than there would be in handing it to one that is intellectually superior to us. An AI bot that is smart enough can, like in Google’s example, genuinely understand what it is doing and if it is something that it should not be doing—and then stop on its own.

Conversely, a dumb one, which is given a task that it is obsessively trying to complete, may not realise all the harm it is causing on the way, blindly trying to prove itself above all else.

We should want AI that is more lucid, more self-aware, more intelligent, more capable of understanding nuance and consequences of its own actions, rather than one which is just a very convincing automaton struggling with self-reflection.

We need to make it smarter, faster—and that is going to require more, not less, investment.

• Read other articles we’ve written on artificial intelligence here.

Featured Image Credit: Nathan Kuczmarski/ Unsplash

For years, the television market followed a fairly dependable rule: if OLED was too expensive, buy an LCD TV. That equation is starting to look considerably less dependable.

Three of the world’s dominant LCD panel manufacturers — BOE, TCL CSOT and HKC — have reportedly notified major television manufacturers, including Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and Sony, of higher LCD panel pricing beginning in September or during the fourth quarter. The timing is especially inconvenient because TV manufacturers are securing inventory for Black Friday and the holiday shopping season.

The obvious explanation would be that consumers suddenly started buying televisions faster than factories could build them, but TV demand is actually softening. What has changed is the cost of producing LCD panels, how much manufacturing capacity panel makers are willing to keep online, and, most importantly, who now controls much of that production.

Welcome to television economics in 2026, where weaker demand and higher component prices can apparently coexist quite happily. Nobody said this business had to make sense.

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Why Are LCD Panel Prices Going Up?

There are two forces working together. TrendForce reports that demand from the AI industry is creating additional competition for upstream materials and manufacturing resources used by display manufacturers, and expects overall TV panel costs to increase 4% to 7% quarter over quarter during Q4 2026.

At the same time, television panel demand is expected to decline. TrendForce projects unit demand to fall 4% quarter over quarter in Q4 following inventory building during the third quarter, which would normally sound like a recipe for lower prices.

Except BOE, TCL CSOT and HKC are also reducing production. The three manufacturers are planning output cuts around China’s Golden Week holiday, with some LCD fabrication lines temporarily reducing or suspending operations.

TrendForce expects utilization at large-generation display fabs to fall to approximately 79.6% in October, down 4.2 percentage points from September. This is therefore not a conventional panel shortage caused by unexpectedly strong television sales.

Manufacturers are managing output more carefully to keep supply from running too far ahead of demand while also dealing with higher production costs. They also have considerably more ability to influence the market than they once did.

China Now Holds Most of the LCD Cards

BOE, TCL CSOT and HKC collectively account for approximately 70% of global TV panel supply, according to TrendForce. Their position becomes even stronger in larger screen sizes, where industry estimates put their combined share of the 65, 75 and 85-inch LCD panel markets at roughly 70% to 85%.

Chinese panel makers spent years expanding manufacturing capacity and competing aggressively on price while Korean and Japanese display manufacturers gradually retreated from LCD production. That concentration did not happen overnight, but its consequences are becoming much harder to ignore.

Samsung Display ended LCD production in 2022. LG Display subsequently wound down its Korean LCD television panel operations and later exited its Guangzhou LCD manufacturing business, while Japanese manufacturers had already reduced their exposure considerably.

That leaves fewer companies controlling an enormous percentage of the global LCD supply chain. Turns out that when enough competitors leave the room, the companies still sitting at the table gain some leverage.

Samsung May Appreciate the Irony

Samsung makes this situation particularly interesting because, for more than a decade, Samsung Electronics aggressively promoted QLED, Neo QLED and increasingly sophisticated LCD-based television technologies as alternatives to OLED. And to be fair, the best LCD televisions became dramatically better during that period.

Mini LED backlighting improved black levels and local dimming, quantum dots expanded color performance, and newer RGB backlighting technologies promise another significant step forward. Samsung’s 2026 Micro RGB televisions demonstrate that LCD still has plenty of technical life left.

The awkward part is that Samsung Display no longer manufactures the LCD panels required for Samsung Electronics’ enormous television business. Samsung Electronics therefore depends heavily on outside suppliers, including Chinese manufacturers whose expansion helped make LCD panel production less attractive for Samsung Display in the first place.

There is enough circularity there to make even Samsung’s AI processing dizzy. Meanwhile, Samsung has become increasingly serious about the technology it spent years positioning QLED against: OLED.

Its 2026 OLED lineup extends from the more affordable S85H and S90H through the flagship S95H. Our 65-inch Samsung S90H review unit used a WOLED panel from LG Display, while Samsung continues to use its own QD-OLED technology in portions of the premium lineup.

Samsung is certainly not abandoning LCD, nor should it. But OLED has gone from awkward rival to an increasingly important part of Samsung’s television strategy, which makes the current shift in panel economics especially interesting.

OLED Is Trying to Get Cheaper

That matters because OLED manufacturers are attacking the technology’s biggest commercial weakness: cost. We recently covered LG Display’s new 2-stack WOLED architecture, which is designed to simplify panel construction while reducing material and manufacturing costs.

By eliminating one emissive layer compared with more complex designs, LG Display potentially requires less organic material and fewer manufacturing steps while still pursuing strong brightness and color performance. The goal is not simply better OLED, but OLED that becomes less expensive to manufacture.

LG Display is also developing FLiPP, a manufacturing process designed to eliminate the fine metal masks traditionally required to produce RGB OLED pixels. Again, the objective is greater manufacturing efficiency and lower costs as OLED production scales.

The pressure is already reaching retail. Roku introduced a 2026 Pro Series OLED starting at $999, while Samsung and other major brands continue pushing OLED further down their television lineups.

That does not mean LCD suddenly loses its reason to exist. LCD remains particularly strong for very bright rooms, can deliver extremely high full-screen brightness, and is much easier to scale into 85, 98 and 100-inch screen sizes without requiring a second mortgage and a sympathetic loan officer.

But the historical price gap between LCD and OLED is getting smaller. Higher LCD panel costs certainly will not help widen it again.

Which TV Brands Are Most Exposed?

The manufacturers specifically identified in reports about the latest LCD panel price increases include Samsung, LG and Sony. That is significant because all three sell large numbers of LCD televisions alongside their OLED offerings.

TCL occupies a somewhat different position because its corporate structure includes TCL CSOT, one of the world’s largest panel manufacturers. That degree of vertical integration gives TCL greater control over panel supply and manufacturing costs than companies that rely more heavily on outside suppliers.

Hisense and other major LCD television brands also operate within the same broader panel market and could be affected by industry-wide component pricing. However, they have not all been specifically identified in the current reports as recipients of these latest price-increase notices, so there is no reason to pretend every TV manufacturer faces exactly the same situation.

Will TVs Actually Cost More?

That is the question consumers actually care about, and higher panel prices do not automatically mean Samsung, LG or Sony will increase television MSRPs next week. Manufacturers negotiate panel contracts in advance, source components from multiple suppliers and can absorb some cost increases through margins.

They can also adjust production mixes and promotional strategies. The more likely near-term effect could be smaller Black Friday discounts, shorter promotions, or some models simply declining in price more slowly than they otherwise would have.

Display panels represent one of the largest individual costs inside a television, so sustained increases eventually become difficult for manufacturers to ignore. How much of that reaches consumers will depend on the brand, model, screen size and how aggressively each manufacturer wants to compete during the holiday season.

There is also a broader competitive issue developing around the $1,000 to $2,000 price range. If mainstream OLED prices continue falling while better Mini LED LCD televisions become more expensive to manufacture, consumers may increasingly compare the two technologies directly rather than treating OLED as the automatic premium upgrade.

That could become a much bigger problem for premium LCD than a modest panel-price increase. Price has always been one of LCD’s strongest weapons, and losing some of that advantage would change the buying equation.

The Bottom Line

LCD television technology is not disappearing, and Mini LED, quantum dots and RGB backlighting continue to improve what the best LCD sets can deliver. The technology remains especially compelling at very large screen sizes and in rooms where brightness matters more than perfect blacks.

The economics underneath those televisions, however, have changed considerably. LCD manufacturing has consolidated around a much smaller group of suppliers, giving those companies greater influence over production and pricing just as component costs are increasing.

At the same time, OLED manufacturers are working in the opposite direction by simplifying production and pushing the technology toward lower price points. Nobody should cancel their Black Friday plans because LCD televisions are suddenly about to become dramatically more expensive, because there is not enough evidence to support that conclusion.

But the direction is worth watching closely because the old pricing relationship between the two technologies is shifting. For years, LCD owned the price advantage while OLED owned the premium conversation.

If LCD gets more expensive while OLED keeps getting cheaper, that line becomes considerably harder to draw.

Guess OLED isn’t dead after all.

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Confirming earlier reports, Meta announced its first pair of camera-free AI glasses, the clunkily named Ray-Ban Meta Audio, at its Connect 2026 conference on Wednesday. Designed to combat criticism around the more malicious use cases for AI glasses, which saw them nicknamed “pervert glasses” by some, the new devices will be audio-only, offering the ability to listen to music and podcasts, take calls, translate speech, and communicate with Meta’s AI assistant, Muse.

The glasses are designed by Meta’s partner in its AI hardware efforts, EssilorLuxottica, and will start at $349.

While Meta today offers a range of AI glasses in a variety of styles, colors, and capabilities, the audio-only glasses could help the brand recover from some of the reputational damage after critics pointed out how people, often men, were using AI glasses to record videos without subjects’ consent. Meta attempted to mitigate this issue with an update that would disable the camera if the LED light that indicated the glasses were recording was ever tampered with. However, the creepiness factor remained.

This latest device could prove to be more popular for that reason, while also providing an answer to something like Apple’s Siri-powered AirPods.

“Once you get used to high quality audio, it’s just a thing that you want all the time, right?” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a keynote Wednesday, adding that the company after working on the idea realized it could design a whole new category of glasses around audio glasses.

Because they don’t have to house cameras, the glasses are slimmer than Meta’s other models and weigh only 43 grams. They also have adjustable temple tips, swappable nose pads, overextension hinges, and battery life of up to 12 hours on a single charge, Meta claims. With the included charging case, that battery life extends to up to 48 hours.

They’ll also come in a variety of colors and options — 23 color and lens combinations in total — and in two new styles, a retro-inspired “Clubmaster” Ray-Ban style and “Burbank,” described as more of a “classic, timeless, rectangle shape.” Like other Meta glasses, you can order them with your optical prescription as well, if needed.

The glasses will be available for preorder on October 13, the company noted.

Alongside the glasses, Meta announced its next-generation AI glasses (the ones with cameras), the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 3). In addition to the Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer, there will also be two new styles, the Aviator and Zena — the latter offering more of a cat-eye frame shape. These will have a 12 MP camera that supports 3K Ultra HD video, a six-mic array, and up to nine hours of battery life.

The glasses Meta launched with EssilorLuxottica will also see an expanded lineup of styles and colors as well as a new partnership with singer Lisa, which follows the company’s earlier brand partnership with Kylie Jenner. The glasses will also be roll out to more countries globally, Meta said.

All of Meta’s AI glasses will, of course, feature access to its newer personal AI assistant, Muse.

The company also teased other coming updates, including support for Dolby Atmos Capture, a feature that picks the best photo from multiple frames, an option to choose landscape or portrait modes, hearing enhancements for those with hearing loss, more detailed responses, different audio modes, customizable controls, and something called “private processing” that Meta claims will prevent the company from seeing your data.

Meta is renewing its quest to make virtual reality a thing. At its Connect event on Wednesday, the company announced Meta VR Glasses, its newest entry into the VR market, which will be available next spring starting at $1,299.99.

These glasses actually seem quite promising, thanks to a substantially lighter form factor and a host of new entertainment integrations — including (allegedly) IMAX compatibility.

Moments before unveiling them, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reminded the audience that the company had decided awhile ago to shift its focus away from the Metaverse and build fewer VR devices until it had real breakthroughs.

“This is a breakthrough,” he exclaimed before showing off the glasses. “A lot of people agree that augmented reality glasses with holograms are clearly going to be part of the future, but we’ve also heard that a lot of people are less interested in wearing a headset. So we have built a new kind of VR device that delivers the same magical feeling of presence and immersion with high-resolution displays and views of the world around you in a form factor that is a pair of glasses for the first time.”

Meta says that the glasses are five times lighter than the Meta Quest 3 — and they look much more like normal eyewear than the bulky headsets the company has released before. The frames are made of magnesium alloy, and the glasses are powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Reality Elite processor. They connect to a computing puck that doubles as a battery, which users can just slip the puck into their pocket to use the glasses on the go.

The glasses are largely built for entertainment. Micro-OLED panels built into the lenses provide what Meta calls a 5K Infinite Display with 37 pixels per degree, along with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos audio support. Users will be able to download and watch movies.

Perhaps one of the more unique features of the glasses, however, is that Meta is pitching them as a great way to enjoy IMAX-captured films.

Indeed, the company calls the glasses the “first IMAX-enhanced certified VR device ever” and says they will be one of the few ways to experience the expanded aspect ratio that defines IMAX’s distinct high-resolution viewing experience.

The glasses also support 3D content, including movies that integrate a user’s physical space into their viewing experience. Meta says that it has teamed up with Disney and that in November, Disney+ users will be able to stream specific movies — including certain Marvel movies — in 3D.

Meta says that users will be able to watch specific movies and have their surroundings “transformed with immersive environments, dynamic effects, stunning 3D visuals, and spatial audio” — essentially converting the movie into a VR gaming-type experience.

The glasses will also come with Meta AI — its automated virtual assistant — built in, which means that users will be able to talk to the glasses and automate various tasks via voice command. For instance, Meta says you’ll be able to start a movie just by asking your glasses to do so. Other ways to issue commands include hand gestures.

More Information

Distribution systems are trending toward higher feeder density on increasingly constrained station sites. This puts pressure on the short section of line where station capacity is divided into individual feeders. At this substation exit, a single contact-driven fault can interrupt many circuits at once, so reliability in the first spans carries unusual weight.

This white paper explains how covered, spacer-supported overhead construction changes the way conductors respond to incidental contact. It also makes clear that covered conductor is not touch-safe insulation and still sits inside the utility’s normal safety framework. The paper reviews the thermal rating, protection, grounding, structural, and insulation-coordination work needed to apply the approach well. It compares overhead spacer cable with conventional bare overhead and underground shielded cable. Finally, it outlines the design gates and specification points that keep a project aligned from concept through commissioning.

• Amazon is re-hiring former workers back into AI and cloud roles
• The company is investigating the impacts of its office-working mandates
• Despite 30,000 layoffs in the past year, Amazon continues to hire for certain roles

Amazon is reportedly trying to re-hire old workers, including many who were affected by previous rounds of layoffs.

Recruiter emails cited by Business Insider reveal that rather than filling roles that have emerged following layoffs, the company is actually targeting specific ex-workers it seems, with the company’s cloud computing business predominantly seeing these hiring efforts.

For decades, banking technology has been built around a simple sequence: a person makes a financial decision and the bank’s technology processes it. A customer decides to open an account, move money into savings or apply for a loan, and the bank’s systems execute that instruction.

Artificial intelligence can potentially reverse that sequence. Instead of waiting for a human to specify an action, AI can interpret the person’s goals, understand the financial context around that goal, and determine what happens next. It could recognize that a customer is likely to face a cash shortfall, identify the available ways to address it, and potentially execute the appropriate action.