INTERVIEW Gregory Kurtzer, CentOS’s founder, tells the story of how the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone was born of a small group of rebuild hackers and Linux fans who were angry that Red Hat Enterprise Linux had replaced Red Hat Linux and convinced they could do better.

Back in 2003, Linux fans were ticked off at Red Hat because they were replacing the end-user-friendly Red Hat Linux with the business-oriented Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It was a smart move for Red Hat, but users were pissed when then Red Hat CEO, Matthew Szulik, said that for home users, Windows was probably “the right product line.” Yeah. That went over about as well as you’d expect. 

In the meantime, Gregory Kurtzer had no plans to start building a Linux distribution, he says. He came out of biochemistry and genomics, where compute‑hungry (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) (BLAST) jobs were chewing through early SGI systems. One day, his business partner suggested they try Linux.

“He said there was this thing called Linux, he wanted to try, and I thought he was mispronouncing Unix,” Kurtzer tells The Register. They drove to Fry’s, “bought a ton of hardware,” and discovered that a free operating system downloaded off the internet could run serious scientific workloads.

It wasn’t the price that blew his mind, says Kurtzer. What hooked him was realizing that “many, many thousands of people [were] collaboratively working all over the world on a common software project… actually creating something of massive amounts of value.” He became “enamored with open source in general, but Linux as a platform,” and started looking for ways to contribute.

When he landed at the Department of Energy’s Berkeley lab, the environment was standardized on Red Hat. He says he missed Debian’s ecosystem and apt so much that he began asking why there was “no community around the Red Hat type ecosystem or the RPM-based ecosystem.” The answer he kept hearing was that Red Hat owned that space. His answer was Caos [Community Assembled Operating System].

The idea was “to be basically a Debian-like alternative for RPM-based distributions of Linux.” Caos used Red Hat as a base. “Glibc came out of Red Hat, for example, right, but we used the upstream kernel and then extended it with a community‑driven package universe.” He formalized the effort as the Caos Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non‑profit. 

Caos might have stayed a small Linux distro like so many others, but when Red Hat ended the classic Red Hat Linux line in favor of RHEL, it picked up steam.  Kurtzer recalls that the community had grown up on free Red Hat Linux CDs, and the move landed badly: “Linux is a community project, it’s freely available, and it should remain freely available, so a lot of people didn’t like that notion at the time.”

By then, there was already a Red Hat “rebuild” mailing list where multiple groups were experimenting with re‑compiling Red Hat’s source packages into community distributions.uKurtzer tell is: “VA Linux was doing this, along with an HPC company called Atipa, which is where early CentOS developer Rocky McGaugh worked… and there were a few others.” 

Rocky, later immortalized in the name Rocky Linux, was part of that loose coalition, maintaining his own rebuilds. The list also included John Morris, who’d create White Box Enterprise Linux, and David Parsley, who would launch Tao Linux.

The first RHEL clone to break out wasn’t CentOS; John Morris’s White Box Enterprise Linux, not CAOS or CentOS, was first. “He released White Box Enterprise Linux, and Slashdot went crazy for it,” Kurtzer remembered.

Sudden success became a burden. Morris “got way more visibility and attention and responsibility than… he was ready to take on” and didn’t want to “take on the weight of the world in terms of infrastructure.” The Caos folks, by contrast, already had build and mirror infrastructure: “we already have our own builders, we already have our own infrastructure… we were already ingesting packages from… Red Hat Linux [and] Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

“So a couple members of the Caos team said, well, we’re already kind of doing a lot of this… It’s like, well, this actually makes sense, because we can then leverage those same binaries… and let’s start this project, and so CentOS kind of came out of everything that was happening at the time.”

Then the Red Hat clones were more collaborative than competitive: “We were generally all very collaborative… we were all kind of on the same IRC list, so when any of us had a bug on rebuilding a package or issue, we all kind of worked together.”

Where Caos had an edge was scale. “We actually had a number of people already associated with it. We already had a critical mass… so it was not that big of a lift for us to properly support this,” Kurtzer says.

Parsley ultimately “ran Tao Linux… for quite a while before finally retiring the project, and then telling his users basically to go… over to CentOS,” complete with a “nice transition plan.” White Box and Tao quietly funneled users and expectations into the emerging CentOS brand.

Even the version numbers reflect CentOS’s pragmatic roots. “CentOS 3 was developed almost completely by Rocky,” Kurtzer adds. “We started CentOS version 3 before version 2, and there was never a 1, right, because… There was never a version 1 of RHEL either.” CentOS 3 arrived on stage on March 19, 2004.

The community went where the demand was. “We identified that the first and most pressing need was around version 3, so Rocky started with version 3. That focus, combined with Caos’s infrastructure and the consolidation of smaller rebuilds, turned CentOS into the RHEL clone that stuck.”

For its early life, CentOS lived under the Caos Foundation umbrella. By the CentOS 4 timeframe, in 2005, the projects split. Kurtzer says, “At about the release of… CentOS four… the CentOS project left the Caos Foundation, and it moved on… and we kind of ended up going different directions.”

He ceded control. “I was no longer the project lead of CentOS at that point, so it was taken over by a guy named Lance Davis,” he tells The Reg. Caos continued until around 2007–2008, including a “Node Server Appliance” variant focused on “lightweight high-performance computing systems,” but the market was voting with its feet. “Most people wanted the compatibility… that one-to-one compatibility… was incredibly important,” he says. CentOS became the canonical RHEL clone; Caos faded into history.

How CentOS simply had to exist

From the outside, CentOS often gets cast as Red Hat’s free rival. Kurtzer sees it differently. Red Hat’s subscription model, he contends, practically required something like CentOS to exist. “This choice in the business model has made it very difficult for organizations, and so this is the whole reason why… There was even a need for CentOS,” he says.

Kurtzer explains that enterprises evolved a two‑tier pattern. “Organizations started running a bisected environment where they ran CentOS on the majority of it, and then they ran Red Hat on a sliver of it, where they needed the most support, where they needed validation, where they needed to know that it’s going to work.” 

Without CentOS, he bluntly says: “I believe that most organizations probably would have gone to a Debian and Ubuntu model because nobody’s going to pay for support… across their whole environment for a free product.” Running Debian or Ubuntu everywhere and RHEL on a small slice doesn’t work well, he argues, because “it’s an incompatible operating system, so the tooling would be different depending on what side of the infrastructure that they’re looking at.”

With CentOS, they could “run the free product where they can and then only pay for the support where they need to.” His conclusion: “I actually truly believe CentOS was very helpful to RHEL overall, given the choice of that particular business model.”

Asked when CentOS stopped being a niche rebuild and became a default choice, Kurtzer points to a supercomputing conference in Phoenix in the mid-2000s. “I remember being at a supercomputing conference… and I was talking with a vendor… and I remember somebody came up next to me and interrupted the conversation to ask the vendor: ‘Why don’t they support CentOS?’”

It was a turning point. “This is the first time I actually even heard somebody outside of my circle of people actually now start demanding CentOS… and it was somebody I didn’t know, and I’m just kind of like, ‘wow, that was kind of cool.’” Around the same time, Kurtzer says he and early collaborators met IBM executives there to pitch Caos and CentOS. “Interestingly enough, there was no interest at the time. Another metric of success was seeing technology appear on resumes and in job descriptions. By the mid‑2000s, CentOS was on its way to being more popular than RHEL.”

By the early 2010s, CentOS was everywhere, but still maintained by a small, unpaid team. When Red Hat moved to sponsor the project in 2014, some read it as a hostile capture. Kurtzer didn’t.

“The CentOS team was fairly small at this point… and the developers were basically doing heroic feats for the entire community, and not being paid for it.” Some things never change in open source, do they? 

Kurtzer says he thought the deal was fair. “They’re giving up their home lives and whatnot… and there were companies out there that were doing very well, basing their infrastructure on it, but also making a ton of money on that, so I thought that this was a really fair option for them to now get hired by Red Hat… and now get paid, and now be… not having to give up their home life.” 

Vendors began calling to ask if CentOS was going away and whether he’d recreate it. “I even had two people from fairly large companies at fairly high rankings… basically say, ‘Greg, do you want to recreate CentOS?’ And I said, ‘no… let’s give Red Hat… the benefit of the doubt… and see what happens,’” he recalls. For years, he thinks, Red Hat did “a phenomenal job”: release latency improved, documentation and community interaction got better.

That’s why the CentOS 8/CentOS Stream pivot in  2021 hit so hard. Kurtzer thinks that Red Hat’s messaging “was just a complete cluster… nobody, including the people at Red Hat, really knew what they were saying.” The community’s “general consensus at the time was that CentOS is end of life, and there’s this new thing that’s replacing it, which is some rolling beta.” The blog post announcing the change “got more press… and more comments than any other blog that Red Hat has ever posted… mostly people in the community yelling at Red Hat,” and “it was… nasty.”

By then, Kurtzer was running CIQ, a young high-performance computing (HPC) company building a computing platform on CentOS. They had already asked themselves what would happen if “something happens to CentOS.” Their answer was to be ready to help rebuild a RHEL‑compatible distro if needed.

Within two hours of the CentOS blog going live, as comments piled up, Kurtzer says, he replied publicly: “Hi everybody, I’m… original founder of CentOS. I’m going to go… recreate CentOS, and I’m hanging out over in this Slack over here… and if anybody wants to join me, I’ll be hanging over there, kind of thinking about how to do this.”

The response was immediate. “Within four to six weeks, we had over 10,000 people join… it took off,” he says. The free tier of Slack couldn’t cope, “that 10,000 message limit goes in a matter of hours,” but it was enough to bootstrap a new community. Teams coalesced around release engineering, testing, development, branding, web work, and even merchandise. “We had T‑shirts, swags, and memorabilia that you can get before we had any code,” he laughs. Early shirts read “Rocky Linux” with “early supporter” in brackets underneath.

Rocky Linux wasn’t the only successor; AlmaLinux and others joined the field, and the usual distro tribalism followed. Kurtzer compares it to sports rivalries: “We just do it around our Linux distribution choices,” he says. But he insists the diversity is healthy. “If something happens to Alma, Rocky’s here; if something happens to Rocky, Alma is there; if something happens to both of us, Oracle is there; and we have all of these other options to guarantee the stability in the ecosystem.”

That may be CentOS’s real legacy. It proved that a community could rebuild an enterprise OS from source and sustain it long enough for enterprises to standardize on it, and that doing so could actually reinforce, not undermine, the commercial platform it tracked.

The clones that followed, from Scientific Linux to Rocky and Alma, are part of the same lineage that began when a few people on a rebuild mailing list decided that Red Hat’s sources shouldn’t just sit on a server; they should become a truly community Linux again. ®

Sound significantly influences your sleep quality — positively or negatively — depending on the scenario. Here are examples of each:

Negative impact: Recent studies have shown that environmental noise (especially cars, city or transportation sounds) can decrease your deep and REM sleep while increasing your awake time. Those annoying extraneous noises keeping you up at night provoke a biological stress response in your body, which is detrimental to your sleep quality. As a result, those who sleep in noisy environments are at greater risk of feeling groggy the next day, often experiencing mood changes, annoyance and decreased brain functioning.

A lack of sleep from sound disturbances at night has long-term health consequences, which is why using a pair of sleep headphones can be beneficial in this scenario. Canceling or blocking out those unwanted sounds can help you fall and stay asleep longer.

Positive impact: Listening to audio for sleep — particularly relaxing music or soundscapes — affects our brain and body. Soothing music can shift the focus in your brain from stress-inducing thoughts to a more relaxed state, which helps to lower your heart rate and blood pressure. This makes it easier to fall asleep.

When listening to music at around 60 beats per minute (the same as the average relaxed human heart), “entrainment” can occur when your body synchronizes with its environment (in this case, the beat of the song), which promotes relaxation.

It doesn’t have to be slow-tempo songs; listening to any music you enjoy can release dopamine in the brain, promoting pleasure and reducing stress and anxiety. Adding music or soothing soundscapes to your bedtime routine can be a great way to mask unwanted extraneous noises and train your body and brain that it’s time for sleep. 

Expansion in Japan will enable Midnight to operate in a country that is ‘uniquely vulnerable to AI-generated copyright infringement’ due to ‘sophisticated digital piracy syndicates’ operating at ‘unprecedented scale’.

Dublin-based AI-powered copyright protection platform Midnight Labs is to benefit from investment by Sony Innovation Fund.

The investment for an undisclosed amount would be used to expand Midnight Labs’ agentic ‘Enforcement Engine’ to protect high-value entertainment intellectual property (IP) from mass piracy, deepfakes and AI-generated infringement in the US and Japanese markets, the company said.

Midnight’s technology uses “automated enforcement workflows” to fast-track the scanning, detection, analysis, verification and removal of IP-infringing content in minutes, rather than weeks, according to the company, which forecasts that “video piracy alone will drive an estimated $125bn in annual revenue leakage by 2028”.

“Generative AI has industrialised piracy, exposing IP holders to both financial loss and real-time reputational damage,” said Dan Purcell, CEO and co-founder of Midnight Labs. “Traditional digital rights management built on manual processes simply cannot keep pace with AI-generated infringement, leaving legal and content protection teams overwhelmed.

“We make enforcement autonomous by scanning, detecting, proving and removing stolen content faster than it can spread, returning control to IP holders over their content, reputation and revenue. The backing of Sony Innovation Fund accelerates that mission.”

Midnight, founded in 2025, said it has removed more than 2.8bn pieces of infringing content across gaming, anime, manga, film, sports, music and live streaming, and works with “the world’s largest streaming platforms, entertainment studios, podcast networks, talent agencies and Fortune 100 executives”.

According to the company, its platform integrates legal-grade evidence collection directly into an automated pipeline, with “every takedown” supported by a “forensic evidence bundle, including time-stamped screenshots, cryptographic hashes, HTML source archives and full network records”, enabling the next steps towards litigation and court proceedings following content removal.

The company claims that its internal AI platform continuously scans more than 75m sources – including on the dark web and non-compliant platforms –  and identifies threats in real time to automate takedowns, filings and compliance workflows.

Expansion in Japan through Sony’s funding will enable Midnight to operate in a country that it said is “uniquely vulnerable to AI-generated copyright infringement” due to “sophisticated digital piracy syndicates” operating at “unprecedented scale” there.

“Midnight Labs is tackling an important and increasingly complex problem for the creative industries,” said Antonio Avitabile, managing director at Sony Ventures EMEA. The company is also backed by Airbridge Equity Partners, Earlybird VC and Upside VC.

Midnight also offers a “creator-focused” product named Ceartas, which the company said is aimed at “protecting the world’s biggest content creators and creator-economy brands from impersonation, piracy and deepfakes”, and was “founded to fight exploitation and protect victims of non-consensual content”.

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It’s already been five years since BGMI came to the Indian market. And if you’ve been playing for long, chances are you remember a very different gaming landscape. Gaming creators were rare, eSports was still finding its footing, and convincing someone that gaming could be a career was almost impossible. Fast forward to 2026, and things look very different. BGMI has moved from just being a fun pastime to leading the Indian gaming sector, with thriving eSports and collaborations with real-world brands that were once impossible.

Speaking to Fossbytes, Srinjoy Das, Director – Marketing & BGMI Product Management at KRAFTON India, explained how both BGMI and the Indian gaming audience have evolved over the years, and why the company increasingly sees BGMI as more than just a battle royale game.

Indian Gamers Have Grown Up

I’d be the first to admit that I downloaded PUBG Mobile on the very first day. It was a quiet afternoon, and I was bored, scrolling through my phone, when I saw it launch in India. I got my friends to download it, too. We used to play together, sitting in the same room for hours before our parents called us back. It’s been many years since that, and we’ve all grown up, pursuing careers in different parts of the world. Still, there’s one way we all keep in touch, and that’s BGMI. It’s the place we hang out virtually, turning the experience from simply grinding through a game into a way to stay in touch with friends while having fun.

When asked what had changed more over the years, the game or the audience, Das had a simple answer: both. Gaming is one of the fastest-moving forms of entertainment today. Unlike movies or TV shows, which evolve gradually, games and the communities around them can change dramatically in just a few years.

According to Das, one of the biggest shifts has been the seriousness with which people now take gaming. He pointed to KRAFTON’s BGMI Career Mode campaign as an example, saying the response showed that many players now see gaming as more than just a hobby. “People are seriously thinking about a career in gaming now,” Das said. “They think gaming gives them real-world skills, and it’s not just about becoming a streamer or an esports player anymore.”

That broader acceptance is something he believes has transformed the industry. Gaming is no longer something people do only in their spare time. Instead, it has become a mainstream form of entertainment that competes directly with movies, OTT platforms, and social media for people’s attention.

BGMI Is Bigger Than Gaming Creators Now

One of the more interesting changes over the last few years has been the creator ecosystem surrounding BGMI. When the game first exploded in India, gaming YouTubers were the primary way new players discovered the game. Today, however, KRAFTON’s strategy has expanded far beyond traditional gaming creators. According to Das, India boasts one of the largest gaming creator ecosystems in the world for a single title. But he believes the industry has now reached an inflection point where relying solely on gaming creators is no longer enough.

Over the last few months, BGMI has worked with creators like Bhuvan Bam and other mainstream internet personalities. The company is also preparing collaborations with CarryMinati, showing how the game’s reach now extends well beyond the gaming audience. “We’re going beyond gaming-focused influencers,” Das explained. “We’re seeing what else lies beyond that world.”

How KRAFTON Decides What Goes Into New BGMI Updates

One of the more interesting aspects of BGMI today is its updates. Every few months, a new mode introduces a new map to discover, along with special abilities that take time to master. It’s one of the biggest reasons my friends and I still log in to the game, as it’s more fun than just running around a field trying to find an enemy.

I asked Das how the team comes up with these, and he said player feedback remains at the center of the update process. The recently released BGMI 4.4 update introduced a Greek and Roman mythology-inspired theme, complete with floating islands, special powers, and new gameplay mechanics. While these large thematic updates have become a regular part of BGMI, KRAFTON says the goal is always to create new ways for players to prove themselves.

One example is the new Glory Battle system. Instead of allowing everyone access to the same rewards, only top-performing teams can participate in certain encounters and unlock some of the most valuable rewards. According to Das, this creates a stronger sense of achievement and rewards skilled gameplay. “Players repeatedly tell us they like it when we make these changes because it gives them a chance to prove themselves,” he said.

Along with these updates, another trend that’s become more common in BGMI is brand collaborations, such as those with Mahindra, Royal Enfield, Harley-Davidson, and Ford. While many players may view these collaborations as simple cosmetic additions, Das says the reality is far more detailed. According to him, partner brands are involved in nearly every stage of development. Everything from a vehicle’s appearance to how it sounds and handles is carefully reviewed. Using Royal Enfield as an example, Das told us that both teams spent considerable time perfecting the exact sound the motorcycle makes when players start it up in-game.

A More Social Gaming Experience

More than ever, BGMI feels like a social platform rather than just a game. According to Das, KRAFTON is actively designing for that behavior. Over the years, BGMI has evolved from a simple lobby into a much broader social experience. Features like the Hub, Collection Hall, Home Ground, and the newly introduced Flash Crew system are all designed to encourage players to spend time together outside of matches.

The Hub allows players to interact while waiting for games. Collection Hall lets users showcase their collections to friends. Home Ground gives players the ability to build their own spaces and host gatherings. Flash Crew takes that idea even further by allowing players to create multiple friend groups around different interests and activities. “It’s not just your closest friends anymore,” Das explained. “You can have different types of friends for different circumstances.”

The company is also focusing more on player-generated content. Das said that players have already created nearly 30,000 custom maps using BGMI’s creation tools. That’s a massive leap from the handful of official maps that existed during the game’s early years.

The company now wants to invest even more heavily in that ecosystem. Future tools could allow players to create everything from zombie survival experiences and fighter jet battles to parkour challenges and uniquely Indian environments. “We’re seeing players who don’t just want to play content anymore. They want to create it,” Das said.

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off today at Apple Park in Cupertino, California. The annual software event, geared toward developers, is also a preview of software (and sometimes hardware) to come. 

You can catch the WWDC keynote on Apple’s website, Apple TV, the Apple Developer app and the company’s official YouTube channel on Monday, June 8, at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. BST). We expect to hear from Apple’s team, including Tim Cook, likely for the last time as Apple’s CEO. 

What to expect at WWDC 2026

At this year’s WWDC keynote, the company is expected to unveil new software upgrades, including iOS 27, MacOS 27, iPadOS 27 and WatchOS 27. Apple’s unlikely to announce any new hardware, like the rumored iPhone Fold, but we might see new iOS features that would be particularly nice on a foldable phone. It’s entirely possible Apple Intelligence could be at the center of it all.

But the breakout star of WWDC 2026 will likely be a revamped Siri that doubles as Apple’s AI chatbot. 

Apple’s WWDC also comes following an eventful first few months of 2026. In March, Apple unveiled new hardware, including the budget-friendly MacBook Neo and iPhone 17E, as well as new MacBook models powered by the M5 chip for improved performance.

WWDC will also likely be the final major Apple keynote helmed by Cook, who will step down as CEO on Sept. 1. John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, will then become the company’s CEO just in time for its presumed iPhone announcement in the fall. As part of the CNET Group’s Big Guessing Game contest, 96% of readers who responded think that Ternus will speak at the WWDC keynote today.

Since Apple is full of surprises, nothing’s guaranteed, but with the big event less than two weeks away, we’re unpacking everything we expect to see. 

Watch this: What to Expect From Apple at WWDC 2026 | Tech Today

02:49

A revamped Siri 

Last year, iOS got a major redesign with Liquid Glass. But another big change is expected this year — Siri could be getting a makeover. 

Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Apple was testing a standalone Siri app. The rumored overhaul of Siri could mean a button to “Ask Siri” and a standalone Siri app could make the voice assistant more prominent on Apple devices. Siri could also be Apple’s AI chatbot (which could be powered by Google Gemini). If that’s true, Apple’s known voice assistant could be more powerful with generative AI features across iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and MacOS 27. 

Siri aside, we could also see an update to the camera with Visual Intelligence AI-powered features for photo and video modes. 

MacOS 27 

Some of the highly anticipated features we may see in iOS 27 could also be available for MacOS 27 — like a standalone Siri app and built-in Apple Intelligence features. But since MacOS Tahoe is the last operating system to support Intel Macs, we may get a glimpse of what changes we can expect now that Apple Silicon microchips will be required for updates. 

iPadOS 27

There’s not much we can say about iPadOS 27 right now. We’ll have to see what new features come with the rumored iPadOS 27. Last year, Apple announced iPadOS 26 features, including a new menu bar for apps, the Liquid Glass redesign and Apple Intelligence features like live translation, text summaries and Image Playground updates with ChatGPT. If we see Apple Intelligence and Siri updates in iOS 27, we hope they will be available in iPadOS 27. 

Watch this: iPadOS 26 Almost Turns Your iPad Into a Mac

01:22

WatchOS 27

Apple hasn’t shared whether the new WatchOS 27 will focus more on features or aesthetics. The new WatchOS could be a slimmed version of the Watch Ultra’s face, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Instead, the watch face could be simpler, like a massive clock with three complication options. But we’ll have to wait to see. Even though WatchOS 27 could be coming soon, WatchOS 26.5 will be a new Pride Luminance watch face and matching band for Pride month in June. 

VisionOS 27

We likely won’t see new Vision Pro hardware until 2028, according to Gurman. Apple’s mixed-reality headsets — the Apple Vision Pro (M2) and (M5) are currently available. 

Apple announced new accessibility features for its hardware, including some exclusive to the Apple Vision Pro, in a May press release. The Apple Vision Pro will be able to control compatible wheelchairs using your eyes later this year. On-device speech recognition for generating subtitles will also be available on Apple devices, including the Apple Vision Pro. The headset will allow facial gestures for actions and the selection of elements with your eyes. And if you use the Apple Vision Pro as a car passenger, the headset’s Vehicle Motion Cues can reduce motion sickness, Apple says. 

Otherwise, Apple’s been pretty tight-lipped about any software updates, so we’ll have to see what else is in store at WWDC. 

Watch this: Apple Vision Pro’s Best Feature Is Your Avatar. Could Personas End Up on an iPhone Next?

04:13

Hints of Apple’s first foldable phone

It’s unlikely that we’ll see Apple’s rumored first foldable phone at WWDC, but we might see iOS 27 features that point toward the possibility of one. Plenty of rumors are swirling about what we could expect, if so. 

Reports say the phone could be called the iPhone Ultra, iPhone Flip or the iPhone Fold. Design leaks of Apple’s foldable phone resemble the wider book-style similar to Google’s original Pixel Fold. The battery could have a 5,500-mAh capacity, which is better than the iPhone 17 Pro Max. Leakers predict a September launch and price between $2,000 and $2,500. 

While a foldable iPhone has been rumored as far back as 2021, we’ll have to see if Apple provides any official hints of one at this year’s WWDC. If any new updates to iOS 27 happen to incorporate some of the multitasking features now available on the iPad, that could be as strong a clue as any that a foldable iPhone with a tablet-like display could be on the way.

Halo Studios has set a firm launch date for Halo: Campaign Evolved, its full remake of the original 2001 Halo: Combat Evolved campaign. The new Halo game arrives July 28, with Premium and Collector’s Edition owners getting up to five days of early access starting July 23. Pre-orders are now open across Xbox, Steam, and PlayStation.

New missions add a prequel story arc

Every edition of Halo: Campaign Evolved will include Operation: METEORITE, a new three-mission story arc set one year before the events of the original game. The missions will follow Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson on a covert UNSC operation aboard a Covenant research vessel.

Halo Studios developed the story in collaboration with sci-fi author Troy Denning, whose previous work spans several Halo novels. The studio revealed the first trailer for Operation: METEORITE at the Xbox Games Showcase, showing off new enemy types including the Brute Berserker and a space combat sequence.

Three editions, one pre-order bonus

The Standard Edition is priced at $49.99 and includes the original 10-mission campaign alongside Operation: METEORITE. The Premium Edition runs $69.99 and adds early access, the Alpha Halo Armory Pack with five armor skins and six weapon skins, and a Digital Story & Art Collection that includes a new short story by Denning.

The Collector’s Edition is $199.99 and bundles in a 12-inch Master Chief statue, a light-up Cortana chip, a Steelbook, concept art prints, and a physical game disc for Xbox Series X and PS5.

All pre-orders receive the Foundry Armory Pack, which includes a Classic 2001 Mark V Armor skin and matching Assault Rifle skin, plus two Gilded Onys variants. The Collector’s Edition is exclusive to HaloWaypoint. The game will support cross-play and cross-progression across Xbox Series X|S, PC, and PS5, and will be available on day one with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass.

For longtime fans, the arrival of a full remake built in Unreal Engine 5, launching simultaneously on PlayStation for the first time, marks a notable shift in how Microsoft is approaching its biggest franchises.

ChatGPT is reportedly moving away from chatbots to agents that perform tasks.

OpenAI is overhauling ChatGPT into a ‘superapp’, as it looks to win business customers and better compete with Anthropic ahead of its plans to go public later this year.

News of a ‘superapp’ – a desktop app that combines the AI chatbot alongside the company’s coding tool Codex, and Atlas, an AI-powered web browser launched last October – first surfaced in April this year.

Reports, at the time, suggested that the new app, reportedly representing the biggest ChatGPT overhaul since launch, will be led by head of applications Fidji Simo and company president Greg Brockman.

The Financial Times reported that the new app will strongly feature Codex, a move that reflects shifting interests from AI chatbots to agents that perform tasks for users. As one senior OpenAI employee told the publication: “Chat is dead”.

Sources told the publication that the new app would feature functions that direct users towards coding, multimodal generation and applications built by partners including Canva and Booking.com. The changes are expected to begin rolling out in the coming weeks, the publication added.

Earlier this year, the AI giant hired agent-creator OpenClaw’s founder Peter Steinberger to develop the “next generation of personal agents”, while shutting down less profitable ventures such as its Sora video generation model.

OpenAI isn’t alone in this move. Meta, in March, acquired the viral Reddit-style platform for AI agents called Moltbook. The platform joins Meta’s Superintelligence Labs to develop newer use cases for agents to support individual and business users.

While, SaaS giant ServiceNow unveiled a raft of AI-driven products earlier this year to position itself as the ‘AI agent of agents’, and Google launched a slew of new products aimed at simplifying agent management.

Google also made its biggest revamp to Search in 25 years with a Gemini integration, giving users the ability to use AI agents that conduct background tasks.

According to the FT, OpenAI executives view ChatGPT as an introductory tool to encourage pick-up of more higher-value products.

A majority of OpenAI’s 1bn monthly-active ChatGPT customers use the free version of the tool. The company’s website states that it has around 5m business users across industries, while the FT reported that it has 2m businesses under its wing and 5m weekly active Codex users.

The company expects revenue from its business customers, which represents 40pc of its revenue, to grow to 50pc by the end of the year.

An overhaul of ChatGPT comes as reports suggest Anthropic has been capturing a significantly higher portion of first-time enterprise AI customers when compared to OpenAI.

The company, which was relatively quiet about plans to go public, filed for an IPO earlier this month after a funding round that valued it above OpenAI. Estimates suggest the round would take Anthropic soaring above a $1trn valuation.

OpenAI, recently valued at $852bn, is also planning to go public, with new reports suggesting that the company is in talks with the US government in hopes that it purchases some of its shares.

xAI’s parent company SpaceX has also filed for a historic IPO which could value it around $1.75trn. While the AI giants’ Chinese rival DeepSeek is reportedly closing a $7.4bn funding round backed by the country’s National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund.

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Today only, pick up a 13-inch MacBook Air with a 10-core GPU for $899 during B&H’s WWDC Deal Zone event.

Both Apple’s Sky Blue and Midnight colorways are marked down to $899 this Monday, a discount of $300 off the original MSRP for the closeout M4 model.

Buy M4 13″ MacBook Air for $899

This 13-inch spec has a 10-core GPU, 16GB of unified memory, and 512GB of storage. And with free 2-day shipping on orders shipped within the contiguous U.S., you won’t have to wait long to begin using your ultraportable laptop.

With Father’s Day on June 21 and graduation gift-giving in full swing, this 24-hour Deal Zone is worth checking out thanks to its budget-friendly price tag and upgraded GPU.

While the M4 laptop is a last-gen model that was released in 2025, you can still enjoy the same chassis design and two Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) ports as the current M5 model (only at a much lower price point).

B&H’s WWDC Deal Zone ends tonight at 8:59 p.m. Pacific Time, or while supplies last. And if you need a larger screen size, B&H has also slashed prices on 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros with discounts of up to $300 off.