Apple’s next-generation Pro iPhone could arrive with one of the biggest camera upgrades the company has introduced in years. But according to new analyst reports quoted by Forbes, that improvement may also come with a significant increase in manufacturing costs – raising fresh questions about whether future iPhone prices could climb even higher.

The focus of the latest leak is the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, which are expected to debut a new variable aperture camera system. Supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claims the upgraded camera module could cost Apple roughly 50 percent more than the camera hardware currently used in its Pro models.

That may not sound dramatic at first, but camera systems have increasingly become one of the most expensive and important components inside modern flagship smartphones.

A camera upgrade Apple has been chasing for years

Variable aperture technology has been rumored for iPhones for several years, and reports now suggest the feature has finally entered production for the iPhone 18 Pro lineup. Unlike current iPhone Pro models, which use a fixed aperture lens, the new system would allow the camera to physically adjust how much light enters the sensor. In practical terms, that means improved exposure control, more flexibility in challenging lighting conditions, and potentially more natural background blur effects without relying entirely on software processing.

Apple has largely relied on computational photography to improve image quality over the years, but a variable aperture would represent a more traditional camera hardware upgrade similar to features already seen on some premium Android phones.

According to Kuo, the new lens assembly is substantially more expensive than the seven-element plastic lens system Apple currently uses. Chinese supplier Sunny Optical is expected to handle a significant portion of production for the upgraded component.

Why this matters

The bigger story may not be the camera itself, but what it could mean for future iPhone pricing.

Apple has so far avoided major flagship price increases despite rising memory costs, more advanced chips, and growing manufacturing expenses. However, reports suggest the iPhone 18 Pro lineup is accumulating several expensive upgrades at once, including new camera technology, next-generation silicon, and additional connectivity features.

That has led to growing speculation that Apple may eventually need to pass some of those costs onto buyers.

Online reactions have already been mixed. Some users see variable aperture as a meaningful photography upgrade, while others argue that most everyday users may never notice the difference enough to justify higher prices.

What happens next

Apple is expected to unveil the iPhone 18 Pro series in late 2026, and current reports suggest the devices could arrive alongside Apple’s first foldable iPhone.

For now, it remains unclear whether the higher camera costs will directly affect retail pricing. Apple has historically absorbed some component increases to maintain pricing stability, particularly in highly competitive markets.

Still, if the leaks prove accurate, the iPhone 18 Pro could become a test of how much consumers are willing to pay for advanced camera hardware. Apple clearly believes better photography remains one of the strongest reasons people upgrade their phones. The question is whether buyers will feel the same if the improvements arrive with a heavier price tag attached.

“Unlimited” is a funny term. Unlimited cell phone plans often come with a long list of footnotes, terms, conditions, and exceptions. Mercifully, all of the Big Three cell companies have, by now, ditched throttling on their most expensive plans and include 5G data access in all their unlimited plans. Yet there are still many differences in the services they offer, and there are many differences between each carrier’s various tiers.

Cheaper “unlimited” tiers do offer unlimited talk and text. But they still have rules on how much data you get before they start throttling your speed, and some “unlimited” plans may throttle your data at any given time. It’s been a fixture of cell service plans for years.

It can be overwhelming, which is why I’ve broken it down. Below, I’ve highlighted what each of the three major carriers offers for “unlimited” individual and family plans to help you figure out which unlimited plan is best for you and your budget.

If you absolutely want to avoid slower data speeds at peak times, you’ll likely be choosing among the plans here. But look to our guide to the Best Prepaid Phone Plans for lower costs at the expense of some limitations. Also check out WIRED’s guides to the Best Android Phones, Best iPhones, and Best Cheap Phones.

Update February 2026: We updated prices and plans for all three major carriers. We added T-Mobile’s Essentials Saver Plan and rebranded Better Value Plan as well as AT&T’s rebranded Premium PL, Extra EL, Saver SL, and Value Plus VL plans.

The Best Unlimited Plan Right Now: T-Mobile Experience More/Better Value Plans

The Essentials plan (with autopay, taxes/fees not included): 1 Line for $60/month | 2 Lines $90 | 3 Lines $90 | 4 Lines $100 | 5 Lines $125.

Essentials Saver plan (with autopay, taxes/fees not included): 1 Line for $50/month | 2 Lines $80 | 3 Lines $140

Experience More/Better Value (with autopay, taxes/fees not included): 1 Line for $85/month | 2 Lines $140 | 3 Lines $140 | 4 Lines $170 | 5 Lines $200

Experience Beyond (with autopay, taxes/fees not included): 1 Line for $100/month | 2 Lines $170 | 3 Lines $170 | 4 Lines $215 | 5 Lines $260

T-Mobile has the best 5G coverage among the big three, the highest 5G speeds, the fastest downloads and the best overall reliability, according to analysis from OpenSignal and Ookla. The carrier also makes claims to winning on value, when you take into account perks that include entertainment bundles, airplane WiFi, and access to satellite data in emergencies.

T-Mobile has rebranded its unlimited offerings this year but still offers three (or kinda four) main unlimited talk and text plans: Essentials, Experience More, and Experience Beyond. Only the two Experience plans offer true unlimited 5G data without any throttling or deprioritizing (i.e., making your phone stand in line for data behind other, more important, phones during peak demand.)

For merely occasional jet-setters and those who want consistent phone upgrades, Experience More is the best affordable phone plan among all services. This adds WiFi during flights, 4K video, 60 gigs of high-speed mobile hot-spotting, a modicum of international data, a AA membership, free ad-supported Netflix, and cheap ($3) Apple TV. It’ll also let you upgrade your phone every two years so random children don’t make fun of your ancient iPhone at a rest stop (yes, this has happened to me.)

If you want 3 lines or more and you’re a new T-Mobile customer (or a 5-year T-Mobile customer), you have access to an even better deal. The limited-time-only Better Value plan is in fact., possibly the best deal in phonedom at the moment. For the same price as the 3-to-5 line Experience More plans, you add free ad-supported Hulu, access to the T-Satellite emergency network, unlimited mobile hot-spotting, 30 gigs of international data in hundreds of countries, plus additional watch and tablet lines for just $5 a line. With the exception of phone upgrades every two years instead on every year, the perks are actually better than T-Mobile’s highest price plan, at a much lower price. This sale price is also locked in for 5 years.

Snapchat is already packed with little symbols that can be weirdly hard to decode. You have streaks, emojis, badges, scores, Best Friends, and if you use Snapchat Plus, a tiny solar system that shows where you sit in someone’s closest-friends list.

The feature is called Friend Solar System, though most people just call it Snapchat Planets. It takes your position in a friend’s Snapchat orbit and turns it into a planet. From Mercury to Neptune, these celestial bodies signify how close a person is to you.

The important thing to know is that Snapchat Planets is a Snapchat Plus feature, and it is now off by default for first-time subscribers. To use it, you’ll need to subscribe to Snapchat Plus and manually turn on Friend Solar System from the Snapchat Plus feature management page. Snapchat says the feature can be toggled on or off at any time.

What are Snapchat Planets?

Snapchat Planets are part of Snapchat’s Friend Solar System feature. When it’s enabled, Snapchat turns a friend’s Best Friends list into a solar system, with that friend as the sun and you as one of the planets around them.

In simple terms, the planet shows where you rank in that friend’s Best Friends list. If you appear as Mercury, you’re their closest Snapchat friend. If you appear as Venus, you’re second. If you appear as Earth, you’re third, and so on.

You can find this by opening someone’s Friendship Profile and tapping the Best Friends or Friends badge with a gold ring. Snapchat says tapping that badge shows which planet you are in their Solar System.

The planet you see is about your place in their solar system. It does not automatically mean they have the same position as yours.

Snapchat Planets order and meaning

The Snapchat Planets order follows the real solar system, minus Pluto. Mercury is the closest planet, while Neptune is the farthest.

As such, the planets of your friends in order from closest to furthest are as follows:

• Mercury
• Venus
• Earth
• Mars
• Jupiter
• Saturn
• Uranus
• Neptune

And yes, Pluto gets left out again.

So, if you tap a badge on someone’s profile and see Earth, that means you are third in their Snapchat Friend Solar System. If you see Neptune, you are still in their top eight, just farther out in the ranking.

Best Friends vs Friends: What’s the difference?

Snapchat Planets can appear through two badges: Best Friends and Friends. A Best Friends badge means both of you are in each other’s closest-friends circle. In other words, you are in their top group, and they are in yours too. Meanwhile, a friend’s badge means you are in their Friend Solar System, but the relationship may not be mutual in the same way. You might be one of their top friends, even if they do not appear in the same position on your side.

Either way, tapping the badge is what reveals your planet, provided you have Snapchat Plus and the feature is turned on.

How to see your Snapchat Planet

To check your Snapchat Planet, follow these steps:

• Step 1: Open Snapchat.
• Step 2: Go to a friend’s Friendship Profile.
• Step 3: Look for a Best Friends or Friends badge with a gold ring around it.
• Step 4: Tap the badge.
• Step 5: Snapchat will show which planet you are in that friend’s Solar System.

If you do not see a badge, it usually means you either do not have Snapchat Plus, Friend Solar System is not enabled, or you are not in that person’s visible friend ranking.

How to turn on Snapchat Planets

Before you can use Snapchat Planets, you need Snapchat Plus. Pricing can vary by region and plan, so the safest way to check the current cost is inside the Snapchat app or through Snapchat’s subscription page. Snapchat also offers multiple Plus-related plans in some regions, and availability can vary.

Once you have Snapchat Plus, you may still need to turn on Friend Solar System manually.

• Step 1: Open Snapchat and go to your profile.
• Step 2: Tap your Snapchat Plus membership card or banner.
• Step 3: Open the Snapchat Plus feature management page.
• Step 4: Find Solar System or Friend Solar System.
• Step 5: Toggle it on.

The astounding growth of the hair-transplant industry in Turkey is not just a medical tourism success story; it’s also a tale of “hacked” medical equipment and algorithmic craftsmanship.

From a biological and evolutionary perspective, human hair is often viewed as an unremarkable mass of keratin that still plays some important functions—protecting our scalps from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays and regulating our body temperatures—but, for the most part, is no longer essential to our survival.

Yet, since ancient times, our subconscious perceptions of whether another person is healthy, young, or fertile have been based on visual cues such as skin radiance, the integrity of teeth, and hair density. Deep within our perceptions, hair has become one of the most powerful representations of our identity and self-confidence. It’s key to social communications and perceptions.

Today, the global hair-transplant and restoration industry, which has evolved around this deep psychological and evolutionary need, has grown into a massive, multibillion-dollar industry. Various research firms have estimated the total size of the global hair-transplant market as sitting somewhere between $7.33 billion and $11.61 billion in 2024. And those figures don’t include the underground economy. According to Ministry of Health data, 1.39 million people visited Turkey for medical treatments in 2025. The revenue generated from medical tourism is $3 billion in 2025 (roughly the same as in 2024). While there is no data about how many of these individuals came for hair transplants specifically, it is estimated that one-third of them visited for aesthetic treatments.

The role that hair transplantation plays in promoting Turkey is also noteworthy. For example, Turkish Airlines is occasionally referred to as “Turkish Hair Lines” or simply “Turkish Hair,” a nod to how significant hair transplants are when it comes to tourism to the country. (Similarly, Istanbul Airport has been jokingly referred to as “Istanbul Hairport.”)

It’s possible to see current examples of this in virtually every aspect of popular culture. Last March, a social media user shared a post titled “There won’t be a single bald Spaniard left in the world,” accompanied by an image of the famous soccer player Andrés Iniesta with long hair. It was in response to Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s stance against the war in Iran, a position that Turkey supports. The post went viral and made headlines on Spanish news channels. Similarly, American basketball star Shaquille O’Neal’s joke in Turkcell’s 5G ads—“I’m here for a hair transplant” while wearing a long curly wig and footage from Turkey’s seven regions—is likely to be talked about for a long time.

Turkey’s global success in hair transplantation and the dominant position the country has achieved are issues too complex to be explained solely by affordable labor, low costs, and favorable exchange rates. Instead it is the result of a bold and at times chaotic yet highly innovative evolution. This includes everything from the adaptation of motors designed for dental devices and sapphire blades used in eye surgery to Anatolia’s ancient craft culture and the master-apprentice relationship transferred to microsurgical techniques.

Makeup for the Modern Man

The development of the institutional infrastructure needed to meet this massive demand in Turkey dates back to the late 1990s. At a time when Turkey’s most famous figures were traveling to Europe for cosmetic surgeries, Dr. Mustafa Tuncer, who attended the Medica trade show in Düsseldorf in 1999, adopted a radical new vision. Tuncer laid the foundation for the Esteworld plastic and aesthetic surgery clinics when he announced, “If Turkey’s celebrities are going to Europe for cosmetic surgery, I will build the best hospital, hire the best doctors, and bring Europeans to Turkey.” Thus, Health Tourism 1.0 began, characterized by fully equipped institutions that combined plastic surgery and hair transplantation under one roof while raising standards to the highest level.

As medical director of the Esteworld Health Group and a member of the second generation of his family to share this vision, Dr. Burak Tuncer says that at the heart of this innovative evolution lies a philosophy with psychological and medical depth—one that does not view the matter merely as a cosmetic procedure. “Hair is a tissue that cannot be replaced or cloned,” he says, adding, “If roots are damaged during the hair-transplant process—whether while being extracted or implanted—we permanently lose that unique tissue. That is why we treat every single strand of hair with the same value and care as we would a kidney or a heart.”

London-based AI lab Inherent emerged from stealth on Wednesday with a $50 million seed round co-led by Index Ventures and Radical Ventures. Nvidia’s venture arm NVentures also participated, alongside Ex/Ante, Metaplanet, Macroscopic Ventures, and Mythos Ventures. It is among Europe’s largest AI stealth-to-launch rounds in 2026.

The founding team comes from DeepMind, Microsoft, and Reka AI. Tantum Collins and Edward Hughes previously collaborated on cooperative AI research at DeepMind. Louis Kirsch, another co-founder, also worked at DeepMind. Kaloyan Aleksiev came from Reka AI and Microsoft.

Collins has a policy background that most AI lab founders lack. He worked on AI policy at the Biden White House before co-founding Inherent. Matt Clifford, co-founder of Entrepreneurs First and the UK government’s former AI tsar, has joined as an adviser.

Inherent is building a platform called Faraday, named after the scientist. Its purpose is not to answer questions faster. It is to figure out which questions are worth asking in the first place.

“Most AI is built to answer questions. What it can’t do yet is figure out which questions are worth asking, the open-ended curiosity that produced penicillin, the microwave, the GPU,” said Danny Rimer, partner at Index Ventures. “That’s the gap Inherent is building into.”

Faraday pairs human researchers with AI agents that are designed to improve themselves iteratively on hard scientific problems. The company describes this as “AI-native science,” a paradigm it says will look and feel different from the scientific method as practised for the past 400 years.

Index Ventures framed the bet in those terms. “AI-native science will be messier, less legible, but capable of exceptional outcomes,” the firm wrote in a blog post announcing the investment. The conviction is that the most valuable application of frontier AI is not automating existing workflows but enabling discoveries that human researchers could not reach alone.

Inherent is structured as a public benefit corporation, a legal form that requires the company to consider its impact on society alongside shareholder returns. The structure is unusual for a venture-backed AI lab. It signals that the founders view governance as a competitive advantage rather than a constraint.

European AI startups are increasingly demonstrating that they can raise at scales previously reserved for Silicon Valley. Inherent’s $50 million seed sits alongside Peec AI’s $10 million ARR in six months, Lovable’s $100 million single-month revenue, and Mistral’s $300 million ARR. The gap between European and American AI funding is narrowing for companies building in categories where the technology is genuinely new.

Anthropic’s Glasswing project demonstrated that frontier AI can find vulnerabilities at a rate that outpaces human remediation. Inherent’s bet is that the same dynamic applies to scientific discovery: AI agents that can explore hypothesis spaces faster than human researchers can, while humans provide the judgment, taste, and ethical guardrails that agents cannot.

The team’s combination of DeepMind research credentials and White House policy experience gives it unusual positioning. It can credibly pitch to both the scientific establishment and the government institutions that fund basic research. Whether Faraday delivers on the promise of AI-native science will take years to evaluate. The $50 million buys the time to find out.

A Google security engineer was charged with insider trading after winning $1.2 million using confidential company data to place bets on the cryptocurrency-based Polymarket decentralized prediction market.

36-year-old Michele Spagnuolo, an Italian citizen residing in Switzerland and a Google employee since 2014, appeared on Wednesday in the Southern District of New York.

In parallel, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) filed a separate civil complaint the same day, seeking restitution, disgorgement, civil monetary penalties, and trading and registration bans.

According to the criminal complaint, throughout this scheme, Spagnuolo used his access to an internal software tool containing confidential “Year in Search” data (Google’s annual ranking of top trending search terms), which was marked with a “Google Confidential” banner in red text.

Beginning in October 2025, Spagnuolo allegedly used a Polymarket account under the alias “AlphaRaccoon” to bet on whether specific individuals would appear on Google’s top trending search lists. He also allegedly used confidential data from Google’s internal data tool and placed bets with near-perfect accuracy across approximately 25 unlikely outcomes, while risking roughly $2.75 million in total.

After Google publicly announced its Year in Search results on December 4, 2025, Spagnuolo’s AlphaRaccoon Polymarket account collected approximately $1.2 million in USDC.e winnings.

“From on or about December 4, 2025 through on or about December 10, 2025, when the Polymarket markets regarding Google’s Year in Search resolved, the software released approximately 3,914,362 million USDC.e to the AlphaRaccoon Polymarket account. On or about December 10, 2025, the AlphaRaccoon Polymarket account sent approximately 5.045 million USDC.e, to Wallet-0xAf6,” the complaint reads.

The FBI traced the AlphaRaccoon account to a payment processor account registered in Spagnuolo’s name and linked to an Italian government identification card. After online communities on Discord and X began speculating that AlphaRaccoon was a Google insider, the username was removed from the account, reverting it to an alphanumeric wallet address.

Prosecutors said that Spagnuolo subsequently moved the illegal proceeds through multiple cryptocurrency-swapping services, including one that removes wallet addresses from the blockchain.

“Today’s charges reinforce a decades-old message: corporate insiders cannot use confidential business information to turn a profit in our markets,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton. “As alleged, Spagnuolo violated the duties he owed to his employer and used Google’s confidential business information to make more than $1.2 million in trading profits on Polymarket.”

“Employees who are entrusted with confidential business information cannot misappropriate that information for personal financial gain,” added CFTC Director of Enforcement David I. Miller.

Spagnuolo now faces a maximum of 10 years in prison on a commodities fraud count and 20 years each on wire fraud and money laundering counts.

Automated pentesting tools deliver real value, but they were built to answer one question: can an attacker move through the network? They were not built to test whether your controls block threats, your detection rules fire, or your cloud configs hold.

This guide covers the 6 surfaces you actually need to validate.

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“I used to walk into a room and just go ‘ta-da!’ Now, I tiptoe.” This is a line I’ve directly quoted from episode 1 of Russell T Davies‘ blistering new Channel 4 drama Tip Toe, but it’s also the sentiment of any LGBTQIA+ person living in the UK over the last few years.

As Western politics continues to shift to the right, being out and proud is something that’s starting to have a brand-new set of consequences — and instead of shying away from it, Davies presents us with an alarming vision of the future.