We’ve all been there at one point or another; you unlock your iPhone with the intention of checking the weather or sending a quick text, only to be greeted by a sea of little red circles. 

They’re everywhere, screaming for your attention like a digital toddler until you open the app and clear it. It’s a core part of the iOS experience, sure, but after years of staring at these tiny stress-inducers, I’ve had enough. The problem? I can’t really do much about it. 

App badges are my worst enemy

The problem with app badges is that they are designed to be addictive. They’re pitched as helpful reminders, but in reality, they’re designed to draw you into an app to see what’s “new,” even when there’s nothing of substance actually waiting for you. 

Every time I unlock my iPhone and see a bunch of badges on my home screen, I’m immediately distracted. Instead of doing what I actually set out to do, I find myself mindlessly scrolling through a feed just to make the number go away.

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It’s even more infuriating when the badges refuse to leave. We’ve all dealt with that one stubborn app – it’s the Oura app for me at the moment, oddly enough – where you’ve cleared every notification, read every message, and checked every update, yet the badge remains. 

For a company that prides itself on “clean” design, the home screen often looks like a messy desk covered in red Post-it notes.

No, I’m not going to disable them one by one

Now, I know what the power users among you are going to say, “Just go into Settings and turn them off!” And yes, technically, you can. 

But, there’s the catch: Apple forces you to do it on an app-by-app basis. I have hundreds of apps installed on my iPhone, and the idea of diving into the notification settings for every single one of them to toggle off “Badges” leaves me in a cold sweat – and besides, it’d take the better part of an afternoon.

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It begs the question: why isn’t there a system-wide toggle? Apple gives us “Silence Unknown Callers” and “Focus” modes to reclaim our digital sanity, yet it won’t give us a single master switch to kill the red dots. It’s a bizarre omission when you really think about it, especially for an operating system that is supposed to be the very pinnacle of user-friendliness.

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Android fixed the issue years ago

What makes this even harder to swallow is that our friends over in the Android camp solved this ages ago. 

On most Android skins, app badges (or “dots”) are intrinsically linked to the notification shade. If you swipe away a notification because you’ve seen it and decided it’s not important, the badge on the app icon vanishes too. A system that, in my mind, makes a lot of sense.

On iOS, the badge and the notification centre live in two completely different worlds. You can clear your entire lock screen, but those red circles will stay pinned to your icons until you manually open the app. 

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At the very least, Apple should give us the option to mirror that Android-style functionality in the Settings menu for those of us who find the current system a little bit archaic.

It probably won’t change any time soon

As much as I’d love to be optimistic, I’m not holding my breath. With the reveal of iOS 27 scheduled for WWDC in early June, the rumour mill is buzzing about the long-awaited reveal of the Gemini-powered Siri and even more powerful AI features, but a badge overhaul is nowhere to be found.

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Badges have been a staple of the iPhone since the very beginning, and despite Apple redesigning the notification system multiple times over the last decade, they’ve remained largely untouched. It seems Apple is perfectly happy with the status quo, even if it means our home screens remain a cluttered, distracting mess for the foreseeable future. 

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Please, Apple, prove me wrong.

It’s about to become more expensive for Claude Code subscribers to use Anthropic’s coding assistant with OpenClaw and other third-party tools.

According to a customer email shared on Hacker News, Anthropic said that starting at noon Pacific on April 4 (today), subscribers will “no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw.” Instead, they’ll need to pay for extra usage through “a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription.”

The company said that while it’s starting with OpenClaw today, the policy “applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out to more shortly.”

Anthropic’s head of Claude Code Boris Cherny wrote on X that the company’s “subscriptions weren’t built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools” and that Anthropic is now trying “to be intentional in managing our growth to continue to serve our customers sustainably long-term.”

The announcement comes after OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger said he was joining Anthropic rival OpenAI, with OpenClaw continuing as an open source project with support from OpenAI.

Steinberger posted that he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin “tried to talk sense into Anthropic” but were only able to delay the increased pricing by a week.

“Funny how timings match up, first they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source,” Steinberger said.

Cherny, however, insisted that Claude Code team members are “big fans of open source” and that he himself “just put up a few [pull requests] to improve prompt cache efficiency for OpenClaw specifically.”

“This is more about engineering constraints,” he said, adding that Anthropic is still offering full refunds for subscribers. “We know not everyone realized this isn’t something we support, and this is an attempt to make it clear and explicit.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI recently shut down its Sora app and video generation models, reportedly to free up computing resources and as part of a broader effort to refocus on winning over the software engineers and enterprises that are increasingly relying on products like Claude Code.

Back in 2021, rumors circulated about a new LG phone with a screen that unfurled like a scroll, similar to a roll-up map rather than a fold. Interestingly, they had planned to release it that year, but LG decided to discontinue its entire mobile division. As a result, the idea fizzled, only to resurface recently with a prototype reaching Zack Nelson (of JerryRigEverything fame).

Zack Nelson began by looking at the exterior elements. In its compressed state, the screen measures around 6.8 inches diagonally. With a simple command, the display expands to 7.4 inches diagonally, thanks to the internal motors. It generates a rather mild buzzing noise, which is thankfully muffled by software that includes some great sound effects. Users can watch the item expand in size in real time and even get dynamic backgrounds that adapt on the fly.

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Nelson removed two Phillips head screws near the roller bit as he began to disassemble it. He applied heat to the back glass, and it popped straight off in one piece. With the glass removed, the side panel came away, and he discovered all these minuscule little hair-like things designed to keep dust from entering the flexy screen area. These tiny hairs are enclosed in a metal cage that protects the part that rolls up.

After that, Nelson proceeded on to check the actual roll component itself, which required him to retract it completely for some extra wiggle room to free it from the frame. He was surprised to see the screen curved around a pretty mild radius, compared to the other folding phones. Behind the screen, there are a series of elevated slats that rise upwards like escalator steps, helping to keep the entire structure flat and stable during expansion.

Other interesting features include little zipper-like linkages along the top and bottom margins of the screen. The sides have metal guides going along them to keep everything neat and tight. It all operates in tandem with two geared motors that communicate via a rack system. There are even three little spring-loaded arms that help keep the entire thing straight and smooth during extension, ensuring that it does not wobble or become stuck. LG stated that the entire system can withstand around 200,000 cycles, which is a significant number given the amount of stress placed on it.

Deeper inside the phone, you’ll find a battery rated a solid 4500 milliamp hours, as well as the usual suspects like a Snapdragon processor, 12 gigs of RAM, and 256 gigs of storage. The rear camera configuration includes a 64-megapixel primary sensor with optical stabilisation and a 12-megapixel ultra-wide lens. On the back, you’ll find a power button that also serves as a fingerprint reader. All of the connection wires are arranged in a fairly straightforward manner that may be simply disassembled.

The screen has a plastic layer that may be scratched with a fingernail, similar to the flexible screens on other phones. When you roll it up, the active portion rests behind the rear glass, allowing you to quickly check alerts and even take selfies (with the main cameras). If anything gets in the way, the software will pause the roll and offer a friendly warning.

Nathan Fielder, best known for his Comedy Central show, Nathan For You (and cringe comedy), writes, directs and stars in this new HBO series. In the show, the comedian goes to extraordinary lengths to let people rehearse moments before they happen. In the first episode, Fielder helps a man prepare for a confession to a friend, and builds an exact replica of the bar they’re planning to meet at (the attention to detail is incredible). After planning for any outlandish thing that might happen, we see how the real exchange between the two friends plays out. Bizarre and truly fascinating, The Rehearsal should get some time on your screen.

Glen Anderson has been brokering trades in private company shares since 2010, back when the number of institutional investors focused on the late-stage private market could be counted on two hands. Today, he says, there are thousands.

As president of the investment bank Rainmaker Securities, whose focus includes private securities markets — it facilitates transactions in roughly 1,000 stocks — Anderson has a front-row seat to one of the most nail-biting moments in the history of the secondary market. And right now, he suggests, the narrative has three main characters: Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX.

But the storyline is more complicated than the headlines suggest.

Anderson’s read on Anthropic is consistent with what Bloomberg reported earlier this week: demand for the company’s shares has become almost insatiable. Bloomberg quoted Ken Smythe, founder and CEO of Next Round Capital, saying that buyers had indicated to his outfit that they had $2 billion of cash ready to deploy into Anthropic, even as roughly $600 million in OpenAI shares that investors are trying to sell haven’t found takers.

Anderson sees something similar at Rainmaker. “The hardest stock to source in our marketplace is Anthropic,” he told TechCrunch yesterday afternoon from his Miami home. “There’s just no sellers.”

Part of what turbocharged that demand, Anderson argues, was Anthropic’s very public standoff with the Department of Defense — a turn of events that initially seemed like bad news for the company but has wound up becoming a gift.

“The app got more popular, people rallied around the company as kind of a hero, taking on big government,” he said. “I think it amplified the story and made it even more differentiated from OpenAI.”

That distinction is becoming increasingly meaningful to investors navigating a market where, for years, the prevailing logic was to bet on everyone. Anderson notes that many institutional investors still want exposure to both Anthropic and OpenAI. “The jury’s still out,” he said, on which AI model will ultimately win – but the momentum, at least in the secondary market, has shifted.

That doesn’t mean OpenAI has fallen off a cliff. Anderson pushes back slightly on a binary reading of the situation.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a one-or-the-other conversation,” he said.

But the excitement isn’t there. “It’s not nearly as vibrant a market as Anthropic right now,” he acknowledged.

On valuation, Anderson broadly confirmed Bloomberg’s reporting that OpenAI shares on the secondary market are trading as if the company were valued at $765 billion — an appreciable discount to the company’s newest $852 billion primary-round valuation. He cautioned that he was working from memory, but said the Bloomberg figure was “in the right range.”

OpenAI itself has tried to assert more control over secondary trading. “People should be extremely cautious of any firm that purports to have access to OpenAI equity, including through an SPV,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg, noting the company had established authorized channels through banks, with no fees, to counter what it described as a high-fee broker model.

Perhaps tellingly — at least for now — banks including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have begun offering OpenAI shares to their high-net-worth clients without charging carry fees, according to Bloomberg. Goldman, meanwhile, is charging its customary carry – often 15% to 20% of profits – for clients seeking Anthropic exposure.

What none of this accounts for is SpaceX, which stands apart amid shifting sentiment around these other powerful brands. Anderson describes it as one of the only names in Rainmaker’s universe that never experienced the punishing correction that hit much of the private market between 2022 and 2024, a period when many private companies’ shares fell 60% to 70% from their peaks (after their valuations were run up just as fast).

The rocket and satellite behemoth has “been pretty much consistently up and to the right,” Anderson said.

Anderson, who, naturally, has an economic interest in flattering the company and its earlier backers, credits SpaceX’s management with disciplined pricing and not squeezing every last dollar out of each funding round or tender offer.

“A lot of companies will fall for the temptation to maximize the price of their stock in every round,” he said. “The problem is that that doesn’t leave any room for error.”

SpaceX, by contrast, played it conservatively, by “not getting too greedy,” and the payoff for earlier investors has been enormous. “You can imagine if someone got in in 2015 what kind of gain they’re sitting on right now,” said Anderson.

To put a finer point on that comment: SpaceX was valued at roughly $12 billion in 2015, when Google and Fidelity jointly invested $1 billion in the company. Someone who got in at that price is now sitting on a gain of more than 100x, with the company valued at more than $1 trillion ahead of its planned IPO.

That IPO is now imminent, seemingly. SpaceX filed confidentially this week for an initial public offering, setting the stage for what could be one of the largest market debuts in history, with Elon Musk reportedly aiming to raise between $50 billion and $75 billion, possibly in June. Only Saudi Aramco’s 2019 debut, which valued the energy giant at $1.7 trillion, has come close.

Unsurprisingly, the rumored filing has already changed the dynamics of the secondary market for SpaceX shares, according to Anderson.

“Today, I saw a flood of SpaceX investors coming to me saying, ‘Can you give me SpaceX?’” he noted. “It’s been a very active buy side.” But supply is drying up. The closer a company gets to an IPO, the less incentive existing shareholders have to sell because they can see the liquidity event on the horizon.

That’s where things get a little dicier for OpenAI and Anthropic. Both companies are reportedly exploring public offerings of their own and have signaled they could move this year. But SpaceX, by filing first, is about to test the market’s appetite in a major way, and Anderson suggested that whoever follows will be at a disadvantage.

“SpaceX is going to soak up a lot of liquidity,” he said flatly. “There’s only so much money out there allocated to IPOs.” The first mover gets to the trough first; those who follow face both more scrutiny and, potentially, less capital.

It’s a dynamic that plays out in every so-called vertical and from which the AI companies aren’t completely immune, despite the attention being showered on them right now. Time your IPO too early and you’re the one testing market receptivity. Wait for someone else to go first, and you may find the biggest checks have already been written.

You can hear more of our interview with Anderson in the upcoming episode of the StrictlyVC Download podcast, which drops every Tuesday. In the meantime, check out recent episodes, including those with Whoop CEO Will Ahmed and investor Bill Gurley.