A visit by iFixit to one of China’s large battery production sites offers a rare look at how replacement batteries for iPhones actually get finished and tested. The team captured the work on video, showing lead teardown technician Shahram Mokhtari walking through the final assembly steps that turn a bare lithium-polymer cell into a complete, safe pack ready for installation.

The facility operates on a massive scale, manufacturing approximately 13 million battery cells per month. These cells begin life as a stack of dozens of ultra-thin layers that are sealed to extremely tight tolerances, ensuring that the chemistry inside remains stable and efficient throughout years of continuous use. Quality control tests are performed at each stage to detect any potential problems that could affect capacity, heat buildup, or long-term reliability, down to the smallest details that can make a significant difference.

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When a finished cell reaches the assembly area, the true integration begins. Rows of blank battery management system boards, or BMS boards, are waiting to be programmed. A machine places a contact pin into each board and applies the firmware that protects the cell from damage. That software protects the battery from overcharging or overdischarge, monitors the temperature, and delivers correct health data to the phone. Without it, even raw cells cannot be trusted to function securely within an iPhone.

The next step is attachment, which involves a machine pressing a programmed BMS board and its flexible cable onto the bare cell extremely nicely. It’s critical that the connection is solid but small, as any misalignment at this step could come back to get you later when the battery needs to fit into an iPhone. Folding follows, with workers or machines folding the BMS board down twice to fit snuggly against the cell. The edges are wrapped with Kapton tape to prevent any exposed contacts from contacting and causing a short, and the sticker machine applies a little label that folds back on itself to keep the board in place and from shifting during handling or installation.

Now it’s time to remove the protective films that were applied to both sides of the cell during early manufacture. Those films have kept the surfaces pristine up until now. Removing them prepares the battery for the adhesive strips that will keep it securely in place within the iPhone case. Quality control must be nearly excellent at this time. A testing machine takes the battery through a variety of checks, including impedance, capacity, and overcurrent tests, and returns a simple pass or fail result. A pass indicates that the battery is in good working order and will behave as expected in a genuine device, whereas failed batteries are removed.

Mohktari then plugs the finished battery with a diagnostic tool. The screen displays all of the live data obtained directly from the BMS, such as the current charge level, condition of health, temperature, design capacity, and actual maximum capacity. It’s all the proof you need to know the battery will function correctly, just like a fresh new pack in a phone. The final step in preparation is to apply the adhesive pull strips that Apple uses to secure batteries inside iPhones. Those strips allow technicians to cleanly remove the old battery during a repair and secure the new one without adding excessive bulk. To ensure that everything works properly, the completed battery is inserted into an actual iPhone, which switches on without a hitch, demonstrating that the pack works from start to finish. Every step up to that point has been taken to ensure that the last bit happens as planned.

Anthropic says Claude Fable 5 won’t be accessible via Claude subscriptions after July 7, but it’s not a permanent change, and the company expects the model to return outside the usage-based plan soon.

Fable 5 was recently restored after the US government lifted export controls on Anthropic’s most powerful models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

As part of the redeployment, Anthropic said Fable 5 would be available globally on Claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and the Claude Platform.

However, Anthropic has restricted Claude Fable usage due to high demand, and plans to move the model to usage-based billing next week.

“For Pro, Max, Team, and select Enterprise plans, Fable 5 will be included for up to 50% of weekly usage limits through July 7, after which it will be available via usage credits,” Anthropic said in its original blog post.

That line led to concerns that Fable 5, Anthropic’s most powerful model, was becoming a permanent pay-to-play upgrade for regular Claude users.

However, a Claude Code lead engineer has now clarified that Fable is expected to return to subscriptions once Anthropic has enough capacity.

“I’ve heard a lot of questions about Fable’s availability on subscription plans,” the engineer wrote in a post on X. “While it will come off subscriptions after July 7th, we aim to restore Fable as a standard part of our subscriptions as soon as capacity allows, as we mentioned in our original blog post.”

Anthropic says Fable 5 demand is difficult to predict

In its announcement, Anthropic said it expects demand for Fable 5 to be “very high, and difficult to predict.”

The company said Fable 5 is fully available today on the Claude API and consumption-based Enterprise plans, but access on subscription plans is being handled more conservatively.

“For subscription plans, we’d rather give access sooner than later, so we’re rolling out more conservatively, in stages,” Anthropic said.

Anthropic also said that after the included subscription window ends, it aims to restore Fable 5 as a standard part of subscription plans “when sufficient capacity allows us to do so.”

For now, Claude users who rely on Fable 5 should expect usage-credit billing after the deadline, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

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Claude Fable, the company’s most powerful model, is now available to all users, but early impressions are disappointing, as it appears to be nowhere near the original release.

When the Department of Commerce announced that it was lifting the ban on Claude Fable, I was holding my breath and counting seconds for the model to show up on Claude Code. I had also loaded up my usage-based credit wallet, just in case the model debuted as strictly usage-based.

To our surprise, Claude Fable shipped for everyone, including those with a $100 Max subscription, but there are multiple restrictions.

According to Anthropic, while Fable 5 is included in Max, Pro, and Team plans, it is heavily capped.

For example, you can use Fable for up to 50% of your weekly usage limits, which is not significant for such a powerful model. But it’ll get worse after July 7, as the model will transition entirely to a pay-to-play system via usage credits.

However, the real gut punch is the degraded performance, or as famously used in the AI community, the “nerfed” performance.

On Reddit, users are reporting that the restored Fable 5 feels weaker, or is simply being routed through stricter safety systems more often than before.

“The new guardrails are kicking in on way too many tasks and falling back to Opus 4.8,” one user wrote in a Reddit post. “This is not the model that got banned.”

The problem is not just limited to Claude desktop, as Claude Code is also struggling with similar issues.

One user said Fable “didn’t even let me search for dead code without switching to Opus,” while another said it was “very very obvious” when the fallback triggers because Claude tells the user and visibly shifts to Opus.

Another developer claimed the model was unusable for some systems-level coding work, saying that C, C++, Rust, Win32 API references, memory-related work, and files mentioning words like “security,” “vulnerable,” “unsafe,” or “hook” appeared to trigger a fallback or block.

Fable 5 may still be powerful when it actually handles the task, but the restored version appears to be far more sensitive to prompts, project files, and security-adjacent language.

However, BleepingComputer understands that the model itself has not been nerfed. Instead, it is likely that Anthropic is being extra careful with the safety guardrails, which is negatively affecting Fable’s daily use cases.

In fact, we observed that Fable is sometimes routed to Opus 4.8 even when the task does not appear to be a safety risk.

Anthropic has said that its updated safeguards rely on a large “safety margin,” which could explain the subpar experience some users are seeing with Fable.

Anthropic hasn’t acknowledged the reports of false positives yet, but it’s likely the company is aware of the problem and will address it in a future update.

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from the swiss-slapp-suits dept

Earlier this year we wrote about the ridiculous thin-skinned executives at Palantir suing a small independent Swiss online magazine, Republik, that had reported on the great lengths the company had gone to, trying to get the Swiss government to purchase Palantir’s surveillance technology. Palantir knew they couldn’t sue for defamation because, you know, everything Republik reported was true. Instead, they sued, trying to invoke a Swiss “right of reply” law, claiming that because Republik refused to publish the press release Palantir wanted to run in response to the reporting, the magazine had violated the law.

As we said at the time, this is the height of entitlement. Palantir doesn’t get to tell Republik how and what it must publish.

And, thankfully, a court has agreed. Zurich’s commercial court rejected 22 of 23 claims that Palantir made.

The data analytics company lost on 22 out of 23 counts of the suit. In a ruling on Friday, Zurich’s commercial court dismissed the majority of counterstatement requests filed by the company and its Swiss subsidiary finding that only a single passage in one article warranted a published response from the company.

While the court agrees that there is a “right of reply” law in Switzerland, it has limitations:

While Swiss media law allows the subjects of a story to request a right of reply, this has caveats: the right of reply has to be concise and stick to the facts of the story.

The one count that stuck: the court found that a single passage in just one article warranted a limited published reply from Palantir.

Also, the court told Palantir to pay Republik for its legal expenses wasted on this SLAPP suit:

The court on Friday ordered Palantir to bear 95% of the 9,000 Swiss francs ($11,300; £8,400) court costs and to pay Republik 9,900 francs in legal expenses.

Of course, this case was always less about the ‘right of reply’ than about making it clear to anyone who reports critically on Palantir that the company will go to war with them, seeking any legal theory, no matter how ridiculous, to tie them up in court — the textbook logic of a SLAPP suit. Republik has said that defending the case cost the small organization quite a lot in time and resources:

Balz Oertli, a journalist with WAV research collective, said: “We invested a great deal of effort into this case, and we are very pleased with the outcome.”

Anyway, given that Palantir seems really upset about Republik’s reporting, it sure would be a shame if you decided to go read this critical reporting of Palantir’s relentless attempts to win business from the Swiss government.

Filed Under: chilling effects, free speech, right of reply, switzerland

Companies: palantir, republik

• GMKtec EVO-X3 abandoned flat mini PC designs for a vertical tower layout
• The Ryzen AI Max+ 395 survives despite newer silicon already existing
• Triple fan cooling replaces the thermal approach used by the EVO-X2

GMKtec has detailed the EVO-X3, an AI mini PC workstation built around AMD‘s Ryzen AI Max+ 395 ‘Strix Halo’ processor.

The company is retaining the same silicon used in its predecessor, the EVO-X2, which AMD CEO Lisa Su personally signed as a mark of approval.

Researchers have found a never-before-seen piece of macOS malware that combines a series of clever tradecraft to infect Macs with stealthy, custom-developed credential-stealing code.

The malware is delivered in two stages. The first is distributed in a disk image that masquerades as Maccy, a clipboard manager for Macs. It’s compiled as AppleScript that is notable for the way it delivers the second stage. The malware is named PamStealer because the Rust-written infostealer uses the Pluggable Authentication Modules interface built into macOS to validate the target’s login password before sending it to an attacker-controlled server.

A quieter execution chain

The use of both disk image and AppleScript is common in malware for Macs. More unusual is the way PamStealer combines them to gain stealth. When the AppleScript is double-clicked, it’s opened in the macOS Script Editor, where the malicious functionality is buried deep within the file.

“Rather than relying on shell commands such as curl or zsh, the AppleScript executes a self-contained JavaScript for Automation (JXA) downloader that retrieves and stages the payload using native Objective-C APIs,” researchers from Jamf, a security firm for macOS users, wrote. “Combined with a Rust-based second stage and a password capture workflow that validates credentials locally through PAM, the result is a quieter execution chain than we typically observe in commodity macOS stealers.”

When a user, expecting to install a trustworthy clipboard manager, encounters the disk image, they’re prompted to press Command-R immediately after double-clicking it. This command executes malicious code inside the AppleScript directly. It also allows the execution to bypass com.apple.quarantine, a macOS attribute that provides warnings and restrictions when executable files have been downloaded from the Internet.

As Jamf explained:

PamStealer combines a recently emerging delivery surface with a less familiar payload. While the clickable .scpt and Script Editor lure build on tradecraft that is already gaining adoption across the macOS threat landscape, the malware distinguishes itself through a self-contained JXA dropper, a Rust-based second stage, and a password capture workflow that validates credentials locally through PAM before harvesting them. That second stage puts considerable effort into staying hidden, masquerading as Finder, encrypting its command-and-control traffic, and holding back prompts like the Full Disk Access request for as long as forty minutes so its activity does not line up with launch. Together, these behaviors illustrate how commodity macOS stealers continue to evolve, adopting quieter execution chains and native implementations that reduce traditional detection opportunities while remaining compatible with standard macOS features.

The first stage puts its payload inside an app bundle that impersonates real components built into macOS. The component changes from sample to sample of the malware. Finder.app under com.apple.finder.core or com.apple.finder.monitor, and a Software Update.app under com.apple.security.daemon, are two examples. In either case, they run hidden. They also display macOS’s genuine Finder.icns as its icon.

The idea of an AI-powered device that’s not a smartphone is weird, but not unheard of. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, SpaceX has already shown investors an early prototype of one. 

The report says that Elon Musk’s SpaceX — which includes the social media platform X and the artificial intelligence startup xAI — has developed a handset-like device that’s sleeker and slimmer than an iPhone and runs a proprietary operating system that integrates xAI’s own technologies. The device reportedly runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, a common feature in many Android phones today. 

On Thursday, Musk publicly denied the existence of such a device, calling the claims “utterly false” in a post on X. 

In February, Musk publicly stated that a phone was not being developed. Earlier, during an event last October, Musk said, “the idea of making a phone makes me want to die,” while adding, “if we have to make a phone, we will.” However, there’s enough rumored evidence to believe that such a device may exist, even if Musk refuses to call it a phone.

SpaceX began being publicly traded earlier this month. Whether we see a device with its branding remains to be seen, but it wouldn’t be too much of a surprise. 

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

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A phone by any other name? 

Artificial intelligence is already everywhere on our smartphones, but tech companies are racing to build entirely new AI gadgets. OpenAI and Jony Ive are said to be working on a screenless AI device that might be worn on your ear as an always-on assistant. 

In a world saturated with “smart” and AI technologies, creating a new device running a different operating system would free Musk from the potential restrictions imposed by Apple and Google’s ecosystems. It could allow SpaceX and xAI to rely on their own technology rather than the big players. 

And given Apple and Google’s stranglehold on the smartphone industry, breaking away from the phone format would also let SpaceX’s new device escape strict app store rules. 

When shown to institutional investors, SpaceX reportedly said the device was in the early stages of development and that the design could change over time. Although it’s not called a “phone,” it’s logical to assume the device could connect to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network for connectivity. 

In fact, while a physical smartphone has been denied, a branded consumer mobile service is likely. Last week, The Financial Times reported that SpaceX is actively weighing a Starlink-branded retail mobile plan, directly competing with T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon.

from the get-out-of-lawsuit-free-card dept

Qualified immunity — crafted out of thin air by the US Supreme Court — has rarely been anything but an easy way for government employees to duck out of lawsuits before they’re actually asked to defend themselves against allegations of rights violations.

The Supreme Court has continually narrowed this doctrine, pretty much ensuring that if every single fact of an allegation doesn’t perfectly align with precedential rulings, qualified immunity will be awarded. The Supreme Court has ensured no further movement will take place by continually refusing to establish rights violations, even when it (very rarely!) disagrees with a lower court’s granting of qualified immunity.

The doctrine has been memorably pilloried more than once by appellate judges. Most famously, Judge Don Willett of the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court had this to say about the qualified immunity doctrine — something tends to reward rights violators just because they happened to find a slightly different way to violate someone’s rights.

To some observers, qualified immunity smacks of unqualified impunity, letting public officials duck consequences for bad behavior—no matter how palpably unreasonable—as long as they were the first to behave badly. 

That was the wind-up. Here’s the pitch:

Section 1983 meets Catch-22. Plaintiffs must produce precedent even as fewer courts are producing precedent. Important constitutional questions go unanswered precisely because those questions are yet unanswered. Courts then rely on that judicial silence to conclude there’s no equivalent case on the books. No precedent = no clearly established law = no liability. An Escherian Stairwell. Heads defendants win, tails plaintiffs lose.

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent [PDF] isn’t as immediately quotable, but it still delivers a stinging indictment of the qualified immunity doctrine. The facts of the case are unpleasant, as they almost always are when government defendants start invoking qualified immunity.

Green Bay, Wisconsin jail staff responded to prisoner Antonio Smith’s refusal to submit to a wellness check (on day 46 of his hunger strike) by pepper spraying him in the face, ordering him to strip naked, and taking him to the health unit. When Smith refused the wellness check, he was dumped clothed in nothing but a small towel into an unheated, unfurnished “control cell” for the next 23 hours. The temperature in the cell ranged from “25 to 57 degrees Farenheit,” according to uncontested testimony.

When Smith was first placed in the cell around noon, Van Lanen told Smith that Smith could request a shower any time and that he would come back to discuss “‘clothing and stuff,’” but he never returned. Ibid. Three and a half hours later, Smith requested clothing, bedding, and a mattress from Lieutenant Timothy Retzlaff and asked to be moved to a warmer cell given the cold. Retzlaff said he would check with Van Lanen. Twelve additional hours went by with no word from Van Lanen or Retzlaff. Then, around 3 o’clock in the morning, a different officer told Smith that if he submitted to future wellness checks, he could have a smock, but that otherwise, “he would remain naked and cold.” Ibid. Smith declined. Another eight hours came and went without any word from Van Lanen or Retzlaff. Smith remained naked and frigid overnight as the temperature dropped below freezing to 25 degrees. After 23 hours, prison staff removed Smith from the cell. Smith later stated that he stayed on his feet for most of those 23 hours because it was too painful to sit, lie down, or sleep.

The Seventh Circuit Appeals Court actually said exactly this in its ruling granting qualified immunity to the defendants.

The Seventh Circuit held that the officers violated Smith’s Eighth Amendment right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment but nevertheless granted them qualified immunity, reasoning that the Circuit “had never held it unconstitutional on closely analogous facts to house an inmate in a cell that ranged in temperature from 25 to 57 degrees over a 23-hour period without clothes or a way to keep warm.”

Yep, that’s how fucking insane this doctrine is. The court even said this was a rights violation, but since it hadn’t said the same thing earlier about a nearly exactly matching set of circumstances, the defendants apparently had no way of knowing tossing someone naked in a freezing cell for nearly 24 hours would violate the prisoner’s rights.

As Sotomayor points out, the Seventh Circuit appeared to willfully disregard its own precedent when handing down this ruling.

As Judge Hamilton explained in dissent, the Seventh Circuit has itself held that intentionally subjecting prisoners to extreme cold conditions without any way to stay warm violates the Eighth Amendment. In Gillis v. Litscher (2006), for example, the Circuit held that a reasonable jury could find that prison officials violated a prisoner’s Eighth Amendment right when they deliberately left him naked in a cell blowing cool air for five days as part of an effort to “conform [his conduct] to the rules.” [S]ee Del Raine v. Williford,(1994) (officers deliberately strip-searched prisoner in cell for 15 to 30 minutes when windchill was 40 to 50 degrees below zero). The Seventh Circuit has also held that, when cold conditions are the product of heating-system failures, officers violate the Eighth Amendment if they are aware of such conditions and fail to take corrective measures such as providing an alternative way to keep warm.

That should have been enough for SCOTUS to review this one and, hopefully, send it back with a reminder that QI readings need to be narrow, but perhaps not so narrow they provoke gasps of disbelief.

But that’s not how this Supreme Court majority operates. Sotomayor calls them out for only reviewing certain QI cases. You know the ones.

This Term… the Court has exercised its discretion to summarily reverse supposed errors that were far less clear than the one here. See, e.g., McCarthy v. Hernandez, 607 U. S. _ (2026) (per curiam); Zorn v. Linton, 607 U. S. (2026) (per curiam); see also Smith v. Scott, 608 U. S. __ (2026) (summarily vacating and remanding denial of qualified-immunity in light of Zorn). If those cases were clear enough for summary action, the Court here should have readily concluded, based on precedent and basic human decency, that it is beyond debate that it is cruel and unusual to lock someone intentionally in a freezing prison cell completely naked for 23 hours.

The Court’s decision not to do so today exacerbates its asymmetrical trend of declining to intervene when courts wrongly afford officers the benefit of qualified immunity, but unflinchingly summarily reversing when it believes courts have wrongly denied officers the protection of qualified immunity.

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This would be hypocrisy if it were being carried out by people who actually maintained a pretense of judicial fairness. But it’s being carried out by people who actively believe in the message they’re sending to the public, as well as to the administration they are so clearly devoted to pleasing.

Reversing only denials of qualified immunity sends the regrettable message that, when choosing between shielding government officials from liability and vindicating individuals’ constitutional rights, this Court will almost always choose the former.

Sotomayor is right. The message being sent is “regrettable.” Unfortunately for America, the people sending it have no regrets at all.

Filed Under: 7th circuit, 8th amendment, police misconduct, qualified immunity, rights violations, sonia sotomayor, supreme court