Photo credit: Sonny Dickson
New photos of a production-style dummy device for Apple’s first foldable iPhone have surfaced online. They come from leaker Sonny Dickson and offer the clearest view of the design yet. Sonny Dickson, the leaker, provided images from several perspectives. The unit appears in both closed and fully open variants, with a screen installed for a more realistic appearance than the previous crude iteration.
When you turn the device off, it shows a compact exterior display that is about 5.5 inches across. The front-facing camera is located in the center, with a circular cutout at the top. If you are familiar with the traditional iPhone, you will see that this one is somewhat shorter and wider, similar to a passport held upright. However, when you fold it open, the experience changes dramatically. The internal display stretches to about 7.8 inches and has a broader, shorter aspect ratio, akin to an iPad mini. That leaves plenty of room for apps, videos, and split-screen work, assuming the software can adjust to the new configuration.
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In the close-up images, you can notice a little round camera hole in the upper-left corner of the huge inner screen. Apple used a similar technique to previous Android foldables here, marking the first time this format has been used on an iPhone display. The vertical wrinkle down the middle of the interior screen is one of the most noticeable features. It appears faint on the dummy, but speculations suggest that Apple was able to reduce the depth and angle of the fold by changing the hinge. With some fancy glass and adhesives, the crease should be even harder to see on the finished units.
When the device is closed, a horizontal camera bar occupies a portion of the rear. Two lenses are side by side on a raised plateau that resembles the camera section of the iPhone Air, but no telephoto lens is seen at this time, and there is a small cluster of holes for the rear microphone. Other notable elements in the photographs include a titanium frame, volume controls relocated to the top edge, and a side button with Touch ID for unlocking and making payments, as this design does not appear to have Face ID.
Rumors suggest that there will just be one color option available at launch. White is the only color indicated in recent leaks, though we may see different colors later, as Apple has done with previous iPhone releases. It all comes together to create a device that fits in your pocket for everyday use and transforms into something resembling a small tablet when opened. The outer screen is ideal for fast peeks and calls without having to unfold the entire device, while the inner screen is far more comfortable for long-term tasks.
[Source]
A viewer handed over a Reevo hubless electric bike with one clear condition. Fix it first, then bring it back better than before. The machine already carried a heavy reputation for every shortcut and oversight that can sink an ambitious design. Original plans leaned hard into a futuristic look. Large hubless wheels replaced traditional spokes. A sculpted body hid most of the mechanics. Nearly every useful function, from lights to wheel locks to performance modes, ran through a smartphone app. Once the company behind that app stopped supporting it, large parts of the bike simply stopped responding.
The construction of this bike mirrored the flaws in the software. Plastic panels were held up by inexpensive inserts that grew loose or broke with regular use. Exposed wires and unsecured shroud covers gave the frame the appearance of having been put together by someone who had never heard the term “professional job.” The motor was purposefully lowered in the first place, so even a minor climb would leave passengers pushing or walking. The brakes appeared rather feeble and frequently squeaked at you to let you know they were having troubles, and don’t get me started on the constant high-pitched whining from the extra headlamp component.
Seth from the Berm Peak channel decided to tackle this disaster. He started by pulling everything up. The controller and circuit board were housed within the main motor housing, and the labels could be read in English, which was remarkable. That made a big difference in understanding how everything worked, which was before a mystery. A four-wire serial cable was connected to a laptop running simple terminal software at 115200 baud, and data started to flow in.
Next, he solved the Bluetooth problem; it turned out that the first pairing process merely spewed the password in plain text over the serial link, and one or two deliberate failed attempts yielded the code “696969”. With the key in hand, he had complete access of the bike’s internal controls. He could then look for an older Android app that explained what each button and sensor was intended to do in the first place. Button presses for assist levels, throttle, and brakes all produced consistent results that could be repeated and improved.
The bike’s OEM display was not working. Seth replaced it with a low-cost ESP32-S3 touchscreen board and wrote custom code to turn the small 2.8-inch LCD into a fully functional dashboard. Speed, battery percentage, and trip distance are all shown in a clear 7-segment format, and the touch screen allows you to adjust the headlight, badge light, kickstand lock, and pedal assist levels, ranging from basic eco mode to turbo. A PIN entry screen allows you to lock the bike when you park it, and extended brake squeezes now flash the lights to alert anyone nearby of a potential problem. To prevent the bike from starting moving on its own, an inactivity timer reduces help to zero after ten minutes.
Physical repairs addressed the bike’s deteriorated body. He glued the shattered brass inserts within the plastic panels back into place using 3D-printed adapters. Cracks and holes were repaired with strips of yellow reflector tape, and that was it. The original grips were replaced with new ones. A noisy electroluminescent headlight transformer was replaced with a basic 12-volt LED, and the twisted kickstand was secured with loctite. The original brake pads were replaced, but the builder kept them since the noise provided a good warning to anyone around.
The most significant change came from the motor controller, where a firmware update fixed the artificial power limits that had been holding the bike back in the first place, allowing it to deliver the full 750 watts it was supposed to, and hills that had previously required effort now move along with a steady pull. The same controller work also allowed the new screen to govern the kickstand servo, ensuring that when the stand is erected, the wheel lock is promptly engaged.
As he progressed, safety features were integrated throughout the interface, with warning flags on the screen screaming “turn off” if assist mode was left on and the bike was in risk of entering a terrifying runaway mode. You can simply adjust a few settings and send commands to the bike using the built-in wifi we configured, without having to redo the entire code, change the PIN, update the bluetooth key, or communicate whatever you want, all without installing any additional software. The good news is that most of these modifications will remain without having you to modify the firmware.
Tests confirmed that everything eventually added up. The panels stopped moving and rattling on their mounts. The screen would come to life when you touched it. Even after the issue with the app was resolved, the lights and signals continued to function properly. The power appeared adequate, and you could rely on it not to do anything foolish. Most importantly, the machine began to feel like a bike you could ride every day, rather than a dismal reminder of how much work needed to be done to make it perfect.
[Source]
Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit has been supercharged with AI agents, which might make it significantly easier to bring a game to the Mac.
While iOS 27 and Siri were the stars of the WWDC 2026 keynote, Apple hasn’t forgotten about the Mac as a gaming platform. While we didn’t get any triple-A game announcements this time around, the company did unveil a significant upgrade with Game Porting Toolkit 4.
The utility, as its name implies, is meant to help bring games to macOS. With the fourth release of its Game Porting Toolkit, Apple has implemented support for AI agents as part of the porting process.
“A new companion repository on Apple’s GitHub brings together open-source agent skills and sample code to help you leverage AI coding agents,” says the developer-focused announcement.
Apple’s website says that AI agents can help speed up game porting, as they offer deep Metal knowledge throughout the process. Agents are now capable of capturing, debugging, and profiling Metal workloads directly, as they now have command-line access to Metal tools.
Additionally, the evaluation environment within Game Porting Toolkit 4 now supports Metal 4, letting developers “test compatibility and performance against the latest API.”
Metal itself is hardware-dependent graphics and compute API. The original Metal framework is available on Macs as far back as 2012, while Metal 4 is only available on products with an Apple Silicon chip.
Overall, Apple says that Game Porting Toolkit 4 will greatly reduce the time, cost, and effort needed to bring a game to the Mac. The toolkit is still in beta testing, though, so it remains to be seen just how useful Apple’s AI agents will be.
Apple’s creative AI hub Image Playground will be capable of creating “photorealistic” AI images, thanks to new AI models running behind the scenes. Apple announced the news at WWDC 2026, the company’s annual developers conference.
Image Playground is one of Apple’s original AI hubs, where you can create images with generative AI. Now, that content should be more customizable and look less like plastic AI slop. You will be able to edit specific parts of an image — an important capability for error-prone AI — by tapping on it and describing the change you want with a simple text prompt.
Note the Apple Intelligence purple glow on the cake as the AI edits it.
You’ll be able to use these AI creations across your device, including to make contact posters and backgrounds.
This WWDC, we’re getting our first look at the next generation of Apple software, including iOS 27. It’s also Tim Cook’s last event as CEO, with hardware chief John Ternus expected to step up into the top role before its September iPhone 18 event.
Every major tech company has become invested in AI in recent years. Apple isn’t an exception, but it has taken a more measured approach since launching its AI two years ago. That’s all changing today as the company is expected to unveil its most significant updates to Apple Intelligence yet, specifically in the form of a new-and-improved Siri.
Rush Digital Marketing’s Nexus Install is a 60-day engagement that builds a LinkedIn lead-generation system and hands ownership to the client. Founder Amanda Rush argues the model fills a gap between DIY courses and ongoing retainers for coaches and consultants seeking predictable client acquisition.
TL;DR
Rush Digital Marketing observes a recurring tension among coaches, consultants, and agencies navigating growth: the choice often leans toward either building systems independently through time-intensive programs or engaging ongoing service providers that manage execution externally. Each path presents its own set of considerations, and within this dynamic, the firm introduces Nexus Install as a structured model that combines implementation and eventual ownership within a defined engagement.
Amanda Rush
As the marketing consulting space continues to expand, these dynamics become more pronounced. The global marketing consulting market is projected to reach $45.5 billion in 2031, with continued growth driven by increasing complexity in digital ecosystems and demand for more accountable outcomes. Within this environment, coaches and consultants are engaging with a wider array of delivery models, from modular consulting to subscription-based advisory. Rush Digital Marketing notes that this growing diversity reflects a broader shift toward flexibility, while also introducing additional layers of decision-making for professionals shaping their client acquisition strategies.
“Many professionals already understand how to close conversations effectively. The challenge often lies in creating a system where those conversations arrive with consistency and direction,” Rush explains. This observation informs the company’s method for designing outreach systems that emphasize predictability and thoughtful sequencing over sporadic bursts of activity.
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Rush Digital Marketing emphasizes that the traditional retainer model continues to play an important role across the industry, particularly for businesses that value ongoing external support. At the same time, it acknowledges that some coaches, consultants, and organizations may be interested in having more direct involvement with the systems that generate their opportunities.
Nexus Install, designed as a 60-day build-and-handover experience, is positioned as a response to that nuance. The structure follows a carefully defined timeline. The initial phase focuses on building the client’s LinkedIn lead-generation system from the ground up, defining the target audience, developing messaging sequences, and launching outreach campaigns designed to initiate early engagement.
Consequently, the second phase transitions into guided ownership, where clients learn how to interpret performance data, manage conversations, and refine messaging based on real-time feedback. “Ownership changes the relationship people have with their growth,” Rush states. “I believe that when someone understands the system and can guide it themselves, their confidence in decision-making tends to expand.”
This balance between immediate traction and long-term sustainability plays a central role in the experience. The system is designed to operate independently once established, requiring a relatively modest daily time commitment. At the same time, ongoing support remains available through structured touchpoints such as weekly Q&A sessions.
This model has developed over time. According to Rush, the Nexus framework itself has undergone years of internal refinement, with extensive testing before being introduced as a client-facing offering. That process reflects a deliberate effort to help ensure the system performs consistently across different use cases while remaining adaptable to individual markets.
Client experiences offer an additional perspective on how this model translates in practice. One coach described seeing a noticeable increase in relevant connections and conversations within a few months, alongside a growing sense of alignment between outreach efforts and business goals. Another founder said, “What impressed me most wasn’t just the results, but the process. The Rush Team is obsessive about testing and refining the messaging until it performs. Every week, they brought new data, insights, and tweaks that pushed our numbers higher.” In a separate case, a consultant shared how the initial implementation period led to sustained engagement long after active collaboration had concluded, with new opportunities continuing to emerge organically.
These experiences reinforce Rush Digital Marketing’s belief that structured systems, when understood and owned, can continue to deliver value beyond the initial build phase. For coaches and consultants evaluating their options, Nexus Install introduces an additional dimension to consider. “At Rush Digital Marketing, we want the conversation to extend beyond choosing between learning independently and delegating entirely,” Rush remarks. “We want it to become an exploration of how systems can be both built and transferred in a way that supports ongoing growth without needing continuous external management.“
The Federal Communications Commission has freed Amazon from a requirement to deploy the first 1,616 satellites in its Amazon Leo broadband internet constellation by July 30.
The looming deadline had been a condition of the FCC’s 2020 license for the network, when it was known as Project Kuiper. But in January, Amazon asked for a two-year extension of that deadline, citing the limited availability of commercial launch opportunities.
Instead of pushing back July’s interim deadline, the FCC issued a conditional waiver. Amazon is still required to deploy all 3,232 of its planned Gen 1 satellites by July 2029, as originally mandated.
SpaceX — which operates Starlink, a rival satellite broadband network with more than 10 million subscribers — opposed giving Amazon more time. It argued that the FCC should make Amazon wait for a future license processing round before allowing more satellites to be launched. But in an order filed on Friday, the FCC said its remedy was “tailored to ensure that Americans quickly benefit from multiple, facilities-based providers of next-gen satellite services.”
Under the conditional waiver, Amazon Leo satellites launched after July 30 would temporarily lose priority status. That means Amazon bears the regulatory burden of ensuring its newer satellites won’t interfere with other constellations, including Starlink.
Amazon can reclaim its priority status in March 2028, or sooner if it hits the 50% deployment milestone before then. The order also includes a provision to restore priority status in October 2027 if Amazon can prove it has manufactured all necessary hardware and fully secured the required launch manifests to hit that 50% mark.
Amazon still faces a challenging schedule to meet its final milestone. It has reserved dozens of launches on rockets ranging from United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 and Vulcan, Arianespace’s Ariane 6 and SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The company has also been counting on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture to launch Amazon Leo satellites on its New Glenn rocket. But two weeks ago, a New Glenn rocket blew up on its Florida launch pad during a static-fire test — forcing what’s likely to be months of delay in Blue Origin’s launch schedule.
ZeroAvia was flying high. After launching in California in 2017, the clean aviation startup was expanding, establishing an R&D facility in Everett in the shadow of aerospace juggernaut Boeing and running test flights in the United Kingdom. It was raising cash from government grants and investors including Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund.
In May 2023, the company unveiled a retired turboprop from Alaska Airlines, wrapped in ZeroAvia’s navy and sky blue graphics, as part of a partnership to outfit the craft with sustainable technologies.
“The largest hydrogen-powered commercial aircraft is being developed right here in the greatest, most innovative state, the state of Washington,” said then-Gov. Jay Inslee at an event at Everett’s Paine Field.
Three years later, the startup is in a far different place.
Except for a sales team, ZeroAvia’s operations in Washington have ceased. The plane was never retrofit with hydrogen powertrains and the fate of the startup’s 136,000-square-foot Paine Field R&D facility is uncertain. Product development has shifted to the UK, and that work has narrowed. The company left California.
Last month ZeroAvia announced that CEO and founder Val Miftakhov had stepped down “to pursue new opportunities.” At least three other members of the C-suite have also departed.
Despite the setbacks, the company says it’s moving forward.
“The vision and mission of the company is the same — it’s hydrogen electric powertrains for aviation, decarbonization, reduced cost — these are the goals,” Chief Strategic Officer James McMicking told GeekWire. “But we have to adjust the pace and focus based on what’s going on in the market.”
Aviation is proving one of the most difficult sectors to decarbonize. Traditional jet fuel is far more energy-dense and widely available than planet-friendly alternatives such as hydrogen, batteries and sustainable aviation fuels — and that challenge is central to ZeroAvia’s struggle.
The startup is developing hydrogen fuel cells to generate electricity, which powers electric motors to turn an aircraft’s propellers. The plan was to develop a product line at the Everett site including fuel cells, power electronics, compressors and advanced electric motors, giving companies the option of buying full engines as well as components.
But hydrogen has struggled to take off in the U.S., and while momentum was building under the Biden administration, President Trump slashed support for the sector after taking office last year.
Snohomish County Executive Dave Somers was sympathetic to ZeroAvia’s struggles.
“Any business can face ups and downs, and those ups and downs may be particularly notable for businesses in emerging technologies or sectors,” he said by email, wishing the company his best “as they work through their challenges.”
One year ago, Bloomberg reported the company was trying to quickly secure $150 million from investors to stay solvent through the end of 2028. McMicking declined to say how much was raised. Earlier rounds and government support come to roughly $300 million, and in 2023 Breakthrough Energy Ventures was ZeroAvia’s largest shareholder.
That funding includes $700,000 from Washington state, awarded across two grants to support its Everett operations. ZeroAvia put up $5.5 million of its own money to lease and prepare the R&D facility, which is owned by Snohomish County. By 2023, ZeroAvia employed roughly 40 people in the area.
Daniel Tappana, director of economic development for the Economic Alliance of Snohomish County, said ZeroAvia was a good fit for the region, with Boeing’s deep roots and a robust aviation sector with skilled employees.
“It was an incredible opportunity with some of the new emerging clean, green aviation technologies,” Tappana said.
Three years after launching, ZeroAvia conducted its first test flight on a six-seat hydrogen-powered electric aircraft in 2020. The company in 2024 announced that American Airlines planned to buy 100 of its hydrogen electric engines for its 65-seat Bombardier CRJ700 jets. It set a target of selling hydrogen-powered systems for aircraft carrying up to 20 passengers by the end of last year, and for Q400 aircraft — like the plane provided by Alaska Airlines — as soon as next year.
The new plan is more modest: focus on the hydrogen fuel cell system, while powertrain ambitions are on hold. R&D in the UK now centers on systems including hydrogen refueling and onboard storage, with a team also working on high-temperature fuel-cell stacks for larger aircraft.
ZeroAvia is selling prototype fuel-cell systems and working toward certification with UK aviation regulators. Customers can integrate the technology into their own systems, which the startup aims to accommodate with customized products. The company also sees opportunities in defense applications, including hydrogen-powered drones, particularly in remote locations.
The work is underway as ZeroAvia’s board searches for a new CEO. Board chair Christine Ourmieres-Widener has been managing day-to-day operations for the past five months and will continue in that role until a successor is hired. Miftakhov, who is based in California, “is still very much engaged,” McMicking said.
“We all feel very comfortable that we’ve got a good plan,” he said.
Clean aviation has proven a tough sector to crack. Arlington, Wash.-based Eviation Aircraft laid off most of its employees last year after developing an electric-powered airplane. But other electric aviation startups press on, including magniX, AeroTEC, Electra and Beta Technologies.
Fellow California aviation company Universal Hydrogen ran out of money in 2024 and shut down — a fate Europe’s hydrogen-aviation ecosystem has largely avoided, thanks in part to stronger public funding.
In announcing Universal Hydrogen’s closure, co-founder Jon Gordon urged others to stay the course, saying it was up to companies like ZeroAvia, Airbus and others to realize the vision for hydrogen aviation.
“You can bet I am cheering them on,” Gordon said on LinkedIn. “Our future may depend on it.”
Trump signed NSPM-11 ordering the military to adopt frontier AI faster, protect models from Chinese distillation, and barring vendors from disabling systems warfighters depend on. Warren is demanding hearings on whether the rush leaves Americans exposed.
TL;DR
President Donald Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 11 on Friday, directing the US military and intelligence agencies to accelerate their adoption of advanced AI while protecting frontier models from theft by foreign adversaries. The directive replaces the Biden administration’s NSM-25, which had governed AI in national security since 2024, and adds a provision that no commercial vendor can disable, degrade, or modify an AI system that American warfighters depend on without prior government approval.
The memo lands in a week already crowded with AI policy moves: a voluntary executive order on frontier model reviews, the announcement that Anthropic is preparing to release Mythos-class models to the general public, and growing pressure from Senator Elizabeth Warren to probe whether the administration’s approach is moving too fast without adequate safeguards.
The memo gives agencies 120 days to review and update procurement processes so they can onboard advanced AI models from multiple vendors rapidly. It requires the Secretary of Defense to update the directive governing autonomy in weapon systems within 90 days. It calls on agencies including the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Office of the National Cyber Director to maintain “deep, proactive” partnerships with the AI industry.
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The language is blunt: US military and intelligence agencies have been too slow to adopt AI, and the technology is developing faster than their procurement systems can accommodate. The memo also discloses the existence of a classified annex, to be issued within 90 days, whose contents are not public.
On the defensive side, the memo directs officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and NSA chief General Joshua Rudd to work with “willing private-sector companies” to develop protocols protecting frontier models from adversary efforts to steal or replicate them. The distillation attacks the White House described in April, where Chinese labs submitted millions of queries to American models to replicate their capabilities, are the explicit concern.
NSPM-11 arrives as Anthropic prepares to release Mythos-class models to the general public in the coming weeks. Mythos found more than 10,000 high-severity software vulnerabilities in its first month of testing and was initially shared only with a limited group of trusted partners through Project Glasswing. Making it widely available means the same offensive cybersecurity capabilities that the US government wants to deploy will also be accessible to anyone with an API key.
CISA, the top US cyber defence agency, is expected to issue its own directive in the coming days ordering federal agencies to secure their networks against AI-boosted hackers. The layering of NSPM-11, the voluntary executive order, and the coming CISA directive represents the most concentrated burst of AI security policy the administration has produced.
Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott on Monday, calling for hearings with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on the administration’s AI policy. Warren argued that the voluntary model-review provision in the executive order gives AI companies a “free pass at the expense of Americans’ safety and security.”
She also pressed on chip exports. Warren cited Commerce Department guidance issued last month to block Chinese companies from acquiring advanced AI chips through overseas affiliates, calling the existing export control regime riddled with loopholes. “The Commerce Department’s mismanagement of US export controls has resulted in loopholes that may have allowed the most advanced AI chips to flow to companies with ties to China’s military,” she wrote.
The administration is simultaneously telling agencies to move faster on AI adoption and trying to protect the models those agencies will use from the adversaries who want to copy them. It is building a framework that is voluntary for the companies, mandatory for the agencies, and contested by Congress.
Meanwhile, Iranian drone strikes earlier this year knocked out power to Amazon Web Services data centres in Bahrain and the UAE, demonstrating that the physical infrastructure AI runs on is itself a target. The memo calls on agencies to work with the private sector to boost both physical and cybersecurity of data centres.
Sriram Krishnan, one of the administration’s top AI advisers, announced on Friday that he will leave the White House at the end of the month. His departure removes one of the few figures who bridged the gap between Silicon Valley and the national security establishment at a moment when that bridge has never been more load-bearing.
Humanity may be scrolling its way out of existence.
Across the globe, fertility rates are plummeting. In 2023, the average number of births per woman worldwide fell beneath 2.1 — the minimum level necessary for averting population decline (also known as the “replacement rate”). And this collapse is not concentrated in just a handful of places; more than two-thirds of all nations now have below-replacement fertility.
While this crisis has been building for decades, its nature recently changed. In the 20th century, fertility fell primarily because couples started having fewer children. Now, it is falling mostly because fewer people are forming couples — or having sex at all.
If these trends continue, the consequences will be transformative — and possibly, catastrophic, as graying populations place unprecedented burdens on the remaining young. Vast countries will swiftly shrivel into city states. Today, Thailand is home to 63 million people. In two centuries, that will fall to 2 million, if the country’s current fertility rate persists.
These are just 23rd-century problems. If sustained indefinitely, today’s global fertility rate would ensure humanity’s extinction.
And it’s partly your phone’s fault.
Or so one leading theory goes. To make sense of recent fertility trends, some analysts have turned to the devices in their pockets. In the view of the journalist John Burn-Murdoch and social scientist Alice Evans, the smartphone helped birth the global spike in singledom.
Their argument goes (partly) like this: As smartphone ownership skyrocketed globally during the 2010s, more and more young people tapped into a vast, omnipresent trove of personalized entertainment, which reduced their incentives to socialize in person. When you have virtually every movie, TV show, and pornography ever made at your fingertips, you no longer need parties for stimulation or diversion. And when you have an X or Facebook account, you can participate in a public conversation — and experience communal recognition — without ever leaving the comfort of your goon cave.
Yet this withdrawal from in-person socializing reduces young people’s opportunities to meet romantic partners or develop social skills. Relationship formation falls as a result.
“The digital revolution has played a signal role in both degrading socialization for young adults and dividing young adults from one another,” Brad Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, told me.
And that revolution is only just beginning. After all, the tech sector’s quest to make social isolation more appealing did not end with the advent of the iPhone, Netflix, or TikTok.
Since 2022, more than 1 billion people have gained access to an infinitely patient conversation partner — one who can speak knowledgeably about all of their interests and listen compassionately to all of their problems. Thanks to Claude and ChatGPT, hermits can not only enjoy perpetual stimulation without social contact but also forms of emotional support that had previously required an intimate friend, family member, lover, or licensed therapist.
And these are the worst versions of these products we’ll ever see. Future iterations may take even more engaging forms; someday, Claude might be able to get it on.
This makes the “smartphone theory” one of the more important hypotheses of our time. If its narrative is correct — and there is some compelling evidence in its favor — then the fertility crisis is liable to deepen in the coming years. And AI might be replacing more than just our jobs.
Before digging into the “smartphone theory” of falling birth rates, it’s worth clarifying its scope.
No one thinks that digital technology is the primary cause of declining fertility, a trend that predates the iPhone by more than a century in wealthy countries (Swedish farmers did not start having fewer kids in the 1880s because of TikTok).
Rather, the main drivers of the long-term fertility descent appear to be foundational features of modernity: When scientific systems of healthcare and sanitation reduce child mortality, couples feel less compelled to have six kids in the hopes that three might survive. When industrial progress boosts the returns to education, parents have an incentive to invest more resources in each individual child’s development, making large families harder to sustain. And when women secure political rights, economic autonomy, and reliable contraception, fewer choose to spend decades of their lives perpetually pregnant.
Yet these structural forces only get us so far. Modern medicine, economic development, and women’s emancipation may have put humanity on the path to collapsing fertility. But some other factor recently sped us on our way: In the aughts, fertility rates actually plateaued globally and rose in advanced economies — before abruptly plummeting in the 2010s.
During that same decade, rates of singledom also spiked. In countries as varied as the United States, South Korea, Turkey, Tunisia, and Finland, young adults became less likely to have a romantic partner. And this “relationship recession” seems to have fueled the post-2010 drop in fertility. According to a 2025 study published in Nature, mothers in most high-income countries are having about as many children as they did decades ago. Yet fertility rates are falling nonetheless, due to a steep drop in the share of women who have any children at all.
The coupling collapse can’t be explained by a sudden expansion of women’s rights; it is happening even in deeply patriarchal societies like Saudi Arabia. Nor is it easily attributed to economic turmoil; rates of romantic partnership have fallen in both high-growth and low-growth nations, advanced economies and developing ones, countries rattled by the 2008 crisis and those largely unharmed by it.
Smartphones, on the other hand, were in the right places at the right times.
In country after country, the rise in singles — and drop in birth rates — coincided with the mass adoption of smartphones, according to an analysis from Burn-Murdoch, the journalist at the Financial Times.
Correlation isn’t causation. But there’s reason to think this timing isn’t coincidental.
In one recent study, economists from the University of Cincinnati examined how teen fertility changed in different American and British localities as they gained access to 4G mobile networks. They found that the arrival of high-speed internet consistently accelerated declines in adolescent birth rates and conceptions. Their explanation for this phenomenon is straightforward: When the center of adolescent life moves online, in-personal socializing declines — and with it, opportunities for one thing to lead to another.
Time-use data lends credence to this theory. Across 21 European nations, the share of people who got together with their friends on a daily basis fell from 21 percent in 2006 to 12 percent in 2022. In the US, meanwhile, time spent on in-person social interaction has plunged during the smartphone era.
Taken together, these data points appear to tell a simple story: When humans acquire 24/7 access to social media platforms and unlimited digital entertainment, they feel less need to hang out with peers in the real world — and demand more from potential partners.
“When phones become ever more engaging and ever more exciting, then you want a super engaging person,” Evans, the social scientist, said. “He’s got to be better than an episode of Bridgerton.”
Thus, some retreat from the frictions of in-person socialization entirely. Others forfeit opportunities to hone their social skills or find suitable but imperfect mates. Sexlessness ensues.
It isn’t hard to see how AI could accelerate these trends.
Streaming and social media might have made the solitary life less dull and uncomfortable. But Pornhub won’t talk with you about your career anxieties, favorite Civil War battle, or debilitating fear of iguanas. And TikTok won’t provide discrete reassurance about that new mole on your chest. Before 2022, securing this sort of sympathetic ear typically required forging and sustaining real-world relationships.
But now, Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT are happy to oblige.
Thus, if smartphones were outcompeting offline interaction before they hosted chatbots, they seem even better equipped to do so today.
Separately, AI may also widen the gap between young people’s romantic expectations and dating realities.
Frequent interaction with a chatbot — who perpetually centers your concerns, never loses patience, and always has something to say about your topics of interest — could encourage unrealistic standards for human conversation, particularly among those who’ve used AI intensively from an early age.
Of course, these are mere speculations. And research into AI’s impacts on in-person socialization and dating is limited. But there is some evidence that chatbots could be expediting young people’s drift towards solitude and sexlessness.
In a study published in 2025 from OpenAI and MIT, researchers tracked 981 participants’ use of AI chatbots over a four-week period. They found that subjects who voluntarily spent more time talking with LLMs during that span became more socially isolated by the study’s end.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that heavy chatbot use caused people to socialize less with other humans. After all, those who lack hangout opportunities might be more inclined to talk with chatbots. And yet, those who used AI intensively during the study had roughly as active social lives as other participants when the trial period began. Therefore, it seems likely that — at least in some cases — bonding with ChatGPT led to social isolation rather than vice versa.
Meanwhile, survey data suggest that people are turning to chatbots for companionship or romantic stimulation in growing numbers. In a 2025 poll from Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute, 19 percent of American adults — including 31 percent of young men — said they had chatted with an AI system meant to simulate a romantic partner.
More recently, the institute examined the use of these pseudo-significant others by young Americans in committed relationships. In its survey, 15 percent of young adults with human partners reported having a secret AI romantic relationship. And among this significant minority, more than 70 percent of men — and nearly 60 percent of women — agreed with the statement, “I wish conversations with my partner were like AI.” And more than half of both male and female users of AI companions said they wished their human partners “behaved like my AI.”
Perhaps more concerningly, respondents who used AI companions regularly were more likely to be in unstable relationships — in which they often thought that their partnership was in trouble, or discussed ending the relationship, or had broken up and gotten back together.
Once again, causality is difficult to determine. People in unstable relationships might be more inclined to seek artificial companionship. But chatbots’ influence on their users’ expectations are likely a factor, according to the report’s co-author Brian Willoughby.
“The more I talk to an AI companion that is always validating me, always taking my side, and always talking about what I want to talk about,” Willoughby said, “the more conversations with my real-life partner — who has their own views — will start paling in comparison to those AI interactions.”
And silicon substitutes for human intimacy will only grow more sophisticated and holistic in the coming decades. Or so many in and around the tech industry believe.
Daniel Faggella, founder of Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research, believes that advances in AI, virtual reality, and mechanized sex toys will eventually render human intercourse an obsolete pastime — one largely confined to nostalgists and connoisseurs, like driving stick shift.
“The great sexual organ is the brain,” Faggella told me. “If you have the visuals, the voice, the haptics, the sound, real-time biofeedback — and even very crude physical implements to go along with them — I think you’re going to beat the human flesh experience every time.”
I suspect that sex has more staying power than Faggella allows. But erotic AI doesn’t need to fully displace intimacy to accelerate the dating recession and fertility crisis. It merely needs to lure a sizable minority of men and women away from the hassle and heartbreak of human relationships. Judging by existing trends, superintelligent sexbots seem liable to meet that challenge.
AI’s effects on human sociality remain uncertain. In theory, artificial intelligence could benefit human relationships and fertility — by, for example, helping awkward adolescents refine their conversational skills or providing troubled couples with on-demand counseling.
Moreover, some experts question how much smartphones actually changed fertility trends. In the view of University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, the fundamental causes of the 2010s fertility collapse are long-term structural forces — among them, secularization, the “dissolution of old social networks,” and the rise of a service economy in which women’s relative economic power has increased.
Social media and streaming may have accelerated these processes, in Fernández-Villaverde’s view, by diffusing feminist ideas: Over the past decade, women in patriarchal societies have gained unprecedented access to commentary and dramas that affirm their desire for autonomy and idealize egalitarian marriages (Evans and Burn-Murdoch also put considerable weight on this dynamic). But he believes that this merely hastened already inevitable declines.
“Cellphones matter a little bit,” Fernández-Villaverde said. “But it’s not because people are spending their whole life playing Pokémon. It’s because they’re seeing what the rest of the world looks like and deciding that they want to do things differently.”
Nevertheless, it is clear that mass smartphone adoption coincided with falling in-person socialization — and rising singledom — in all manner of different countries. And there are some signs that AI is further displacing face-to-face interaction and distorting relationship expectations. In any case, the tech industry has a strong incentive to generate evermore compelling substitutes for human connection.
“Here in the Bay Area, all these startups are trying to make apps that will compete in the attention economy,” Evans said. “All these genius software engineers are trying to make something that hooks you in. So I’d predict that the market will enable AI to outcompete humans — they will be funnier, more charming, and enticing.”
At the very least, that possibility warrants concern, given the potential consequences for both fertility and human welfare.
If the past decade is any guide, technological progress may be speeding us toward a future of ubiquitous ghost towns, scarce children, and nursing homes full of gray-haired hermits, each passing their days with VR paramours as civilization slowly unwinds.
There are worse fates. But ideally, humanity would hold out for a better one.
The all-new Siri AI looks like it’s finally coming to iPhone in 2026, after much drama, analyst hand-wringing, and two years later than expected.
WWDC is Apple’s annual developer conference. It’s held every June and gives developers and fans alike a glimpse of what to expect when Apple rolls out its major operating system updates in the fall.
This year is somewhat of a banner year, now, all thanks to one announcement. It finally seems like we’re going to get a brand new, contextualized Siri AI
You know, the one that we were initially promised in 2024.
As well as the new name, Siri AI’s upgrade looks a bit different from what we were initially given. Instead of the iPhone being bordered by a rainbow of colors, Siri now springs to life from the Dynamic Island with a Liquid Glass appearance.
In addition to familiar verbal commands, Siri AI is now able to work with data from multiple apps to provide answers to prompts. There’s now also a dedicated Siri AI app that works across platforms.
Example of a conversation with the new Siri AI – image credit: Apple
It can also maintain a conversation with users, allowing for follow-up questions and prompts. At any point, Siri AI can be activated by “Hey, Siri,” or pressing on the iPhone’s side button.
On the Mac, it’s part of Spotlight. Instead of the old “Type to Siri” that was reached by pressing the Command key twice, Spotlight recognizes a Siri request and passes it to the new Siri AI.
Siri AI then enters a chatbot-style interface, as previously rumored. Apple says that as well as data from a user’s apps, it has World Knowledge, which means it can retrieve information from the web.
Now Siri AI is also part of the Camera app. Instead of launching Visual Intelligence, Siri can analyze photos directly from the camera.
Apple says the most powerful on-device AI models will not be on all devices – image credit: Apple
But the biggest takeaway is that we’re finally getting the contextual Siri we’ve been hoping for, natural language prompts and all.
Apple first introduced its idea for a new, more personal Siri in 2024. At that time, Apple believed that while the revamped personal assistant may not make it to the iOS 18 launch, it most certainly would be out before the year was over.
Siri AI on the Mac is now part of Spotlight – image credit: Apple
And then Apple believed that Siri would make its debut in March, as part of the iOS 18.4 update that introduced other Apple Intelligence features. But, it didn’t.
Apple soon realized that it had bitten off more than it could chew. In March 2025, the company announced that Siri would be delayed for an indeterminate amount of time.
And then came the shakeups. That same month, John Giannandrea was ousted as the Siri chief, replaced by Mike Rockwell.
The following month, it was learned that Apple would be sending nearly 200 engineers to a multi-week AI vibecoding bootcamp to help shore up coding deficiencies.
Since then, Apple’s been working on Siri behind the scenes. Months would go by without much news, either from Apple or purported insider knowledge.
Then, in October 2025, CEO Tim Cook announced that Siri would finally appear in its newest form “on time” in 2026. Of course, saying “in 2026” is still hedging, as it gave the developers a 365-day deadline.
All these delays haven’t reflected well on Apple, either. Apple got hit with a class action lawsuit, which was eventually settled in December 2025 for $250 million.
The UK government has laid out a $1.47 billion plan to shake its dependence on foreign-made artificial intelligence hardware.
Under the measures, announced Monday, the UK will spend more than $1 billion on a national AI supercomputer. It will be stocked with $530 million worth of hardware, including $200 million that will go toward specialist inference chips for processing AI tasks. Priority will be given to up-and-coming British firms in the procurement process; the government pointed to Olix and Fractile, two UK startups developing new styles of inference chip, as potential beneficiaries. British researchers and startups are expected to be able to use the supercomputer starting in 2030.
The new measures are part of a broader effort by the UK government to minimize dependence on foreign powers for access to AI products and services—a move made more urgent by the apparent souring of the relationship between the US and its European counterparts. The European Union outlined a similar “tech sovereignty” proposal last week. This year, European leaders have found themselves in confrontation with the Trump administration over issues ranging from the sovereignty of Greenland to tariff policy to immigration, leading to speculation about a deterioration in the NATO alliance. Against that backdrop, a dependence on American technology could be a liability, wielded by the US against European countries as leverage.
“The geopolitical settlement of the last 40 years has ruptured—and many would argue is gone for good,” UK technology secretary Liz Kendall said during an April speech at the Royal United Services Institute, a defense and security think tank. “For Britain, AI sovereignty is about reducing overdependencies and increasing resilience.”
“There are those who say this race is already lost—that it is too late to challenge the dominance of the US or China in AI chips—but I do not accept such defeatism,” she added.
Last November, the UK began to establish “AI growth zones,” regions across the country with fewer administrative and regulatory barriers to building data centers. In April, it launched a $675 million venture fund, SovAI, for investing in homegrown AI startups in fields ranging from model development to agentic AI to drug discovery. The supercomputer hardware plan is the latest piece of that expanding mosaic.
Though the UK is home to prominent firms like ARM, whose chip architectures are ubiquitous across the globe, semiconductor design and manufacturing is otherwise dominated by American and Asian companies. By acting as a large customer to domestic chip startups, the UK government is aiming to both support their growth and incentivize them to remain in the country long-term.
“Historically, the UK government has just been impenetrable … the willingness to back UK businesses with innovative technologies with hard contracts is a really important milestone,” says Ed Bussey, CEO at Oxford Science Enterprises, a venture capital firm that participated in Fractile’s 2024 seed round. “If we can build out a procurement pipeline of revenues for these companies, it helps to anchor them here.”
The changes unfolding in AI datacenter design—moving away from homogenous fleets of chips toward a mix of specialist hardware for different purposes—represent an opportunity for the UK to carve out a strategically important niche.
“You can’t do everything on your own, so you really have to be militant about what areas you want to specialize in,” says Keegan McBride, director of science and technology at the Tony Blair Institute, a think tank founded by the former UK prime minister. “The UK is playing a very smart game … If they get it right, there’s a massive opportunity. If other companies begin to depend on British chips, that gives you leverage.”
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