A new leak claims Apple may bring titanium back to future Pro iPhones after moving the iPhone 17 Pro to aluminum, a reversal that could reintroduce many of the material’s old tradeoffs.

A May 17 Weibo post from leaker “Instant Digital” claimed Apple is researching improved titanium alloys for future iPhones rather than abandoning the material entirely. The post also claimed Apple is still exploring liquid metal and glass for future premium iPhone designs.

Instant Digital has a mixed track record with Apple leaks, though earlier reports correctly pointed to features like Camera Control before Apple announced them.

Apple hasn’t publicly discussed material changes for future iPhones, and the leak offers little evidence beyond claims about Apple’s internal thinking.

Apple has repeatedly changed materials when priorities shifted

Apple’s hardware history shows a pattern of moving between materials based on engineering and manufacturing goals instead of long-term attachment to a specific premium finish.

Aluminum replaced plastic across much of the Mac lineup because it improved rigidity and overall build quality. Stainless steel later became the defining material for premium iPhones because it delivered a denser and more polished feel than aluminum.

Titanium replaced stainless steel on the iPhone 15 Pro to cut weight without giving up durability. Apple heavily promoted the material during the iPhone 15 Pro launch cycle as a major part of the phone’s design.

Apple briefly used titanium on the outer edge of iPhones

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Apple has repeatedly abandoned heavily promoted hardware decisions once the tradeoffs stopped making sense.

Butterfly keyboards, the Touch Bar, and FineWoven accessories all launched with major marketing support before Apple shifted direction. Titanium also carries real engineering drawbacks alongside its advantages.

Titanium is harder to machine, costs more to produce at scale, and transfers heat less efficiently than aluminum. Heat complaints surrounding the iPhone 15 Pro pushed more attention onto thermal performance across Apple’s lineup.

Apple later said software conditions and some third-party apps contributed heavily to overheating reports affecting the iPhone 15 lineup.

Modern iPhones face growing thermal demands from gaming, photography, video processing, and on-device processing features. Sustained performance increasingly depends on how efficiently a device can move heat away from internal components.

Aluminum remains one of the industry’s most practical materials for thermal management. It’s also easier to recycle, easier to manufacture consistently at Apple’s scale, and potentially more flexible for thinner or lighter designs.

A return to titanium wouldn’t necessarily mean Apple views aluminum as a failure. It would likely mean the company believes it has solved enough of titanium’s thermal and weight drawbacks to justify bringing the material back.

Future-material claims remain much harder to verify

The leak also claims Apple is still researching liquid metal and glass for future high-end iPhone designs. The company has experimented with liquid metal alloys for years and holds multiple patents involving the material.

Titanium. Image credit: Wikipedia

Moving liquid metal from small internal parts to full iPhone frames would still require major manufacturing advances. The post itself acknowledges those production challenges.

Large-scale liquid metal manufacturing would create difficult durability, molding, and repairability problems. The leak’s foldable iPhone claim is easier to believe.

Foldable hinges require extremely durable materials in compact spaces, making liquid metal a more realistic candidate there than for a complete external chassis.

Glass frame claims remain even more speculative. Glass could potentially improve wireless performance and industrial design flexibility, but durability and repair concerns would create obvious obstacles for a mass-market smartphone frame.

Battery size, cooling systems, and internal packaging now shape smartphone hardware decisions more than exterior materials alone.

Users are more likely to notice lower weight, cooler temperatures, or longer battery life than the specific metal surrounding a phone’s frame. If Apple moves the iPhone 18 Pro or a later model back to titanium, the decision would likely require solving many of the thermal and weight tradeoffs that pushed the company toward aluminum in the first place.

A worker died at SpaceX’s Starbase launch site in South Texas on Friday, and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) has opened an investigation.

The San Antonio Express-News reported Monday that the unidentified victim died at around 4:17 a.m. local time on May 15, citing OSHA and local officials. The Wall Street Journal later reported that the county sheriff confirmed to the outlet that a worker died. OSHA confirmed to TechCrunch that it is investigating the apparent accident.

Representatives for the nearby Brownsville police and fire departments did not respond to requests for comment. SpaceX and the newly-incorporated City of Starbase did not respond to requests for comment.

The circumstances of the worker’s death are not immediately clear. OSHA told TechCrunch that it won’t release more information until its investigation is complete, which could take months.

The death comes just a few days ahead of the first planned launch of SpaceX’s upgraded Starship rocket. Elon Musk’s spaceflight company is also reportedly releasing the detailed prospectus for its initial public offering this week, which is expected to be the biggest ever when that transaction takes place next month.

SpaceX has long dealt with worker safety problems at its Starbase site, which handles Starship prototype launches and is an active construction zone.

In 2025, TechCrunch analyzed OSHA data and determined the Texas launch site had an injury rate that far outpaced those of industry rivals, and was the most dangerous of SpaceX’s worksites. A 2023 Reuters investigation uncovered dozens of previously-unreported injuries and a worker death in 2014 at SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas test site.

In January, OSHA hit SpaceX with seven “serious” safety violations for, among other things, not properly inspecting a crane before it collapsed at Starbase last June. The safety agency dealt SpaceX the maximum financial penalty on six of those seven violations, totaling $115,850. SpaceX is contesting those penalties, federal records show.

The company has been hit with multiple lawsuits related to injuries sustained at Starbase in recent years. In December, an employee of one of SpaceX’s subcontractors sued after he was crushed by a large metal support dropped from a crane. The worker, Eduardo Cavazos, suffered a broken hip, knee, and tibia, and OSHA opened a “rapid response investigation,” as TechCrunch first reported in December.

OSHA has since closed that rapid response investigation without taking any punitive action, according to a TechCrunch public records request. And the lawsuit was recently dropped because his employee, the subcontractor, has workers compensation insurance that prevents it from being sued, according to Cavazos’ attorney.

Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw and an engineer at OpenAI, racked up $1.3 million in API costs in a single month by running approximately 100 Codex instances simultaneously on his open-source project. The bill, which covered 603 billion tokens across 7.6 million requests over 30 days, is the most visible demonstration yet of what happens when AI-powered software development is run without budget constraints, and of how quickly costs escalate when autonomous agents operate continuously at scale.

Steinberger posted a screenshot of the bill on X, showing $1,305,088.81 charged to the OpenAI API, with GPT-5.5 as the primary model. OpenAI is covering the cost: Steinberger joined the company in February 2026, and the spending is treated as a research investment in understanding what software development looks like when token economics are not a limiting factor.

Peter Steinberger X Post – source: X

What the agents actually do

The 100 Codex instances are not simply generating code. Steinberger’s three-person team has built an autonomous development pipeline in which AI agents perform a range of tasks that would ordinarily require a much larger engineering organisation. The agents review pull requests, scan commits for security vulnerabilities, deduplicate GitHub issues, write fixes, and open new pull requests based on the project’s broader roadmap. Others monitor performance benchmarks and flag regressions to the team’s Discord server. Some agents, according to The Decoder, even attend meetings and generate pull requests for features that come up in conversation.

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The team also uses Clawpatch.ai, Vercel’s Deepsec, and Codex Security for additional bug and security analysis. The result is a development operation in which three humans oversee a fleet of AI agents that collectively perform the work of what would traditionally be a mid-sized engineering team.

The cost question

Steinberger has been transparent about the economics. He clarified that the $1.3 million figure reflects Codex’s “Fast Mode” pricing, which consumes credits at a significantly higher rate than standard execution. Disabling Fast Mode alone would reduce the raw API cost to approximately $300,000 per month, a 70 per cent reduction. At standard pricing, the operation would still cost $3.6 million a year, but the gap between the headline figure and the underlying economics illustrates how pricing tiers and execution modes can dramatically inflate reported costs.

When asked about return on investment, Steinberger said everything his team builds is open source and works with leading proprietary models as well as open-weight alternatives. “I’d say pretty high,” he said.

The figure is useful precisely because vendor marketing around AI coding tools rarely discloses raw spend and token volumes at this scale. Most enterprise teams planning agentic development tooling are working from projections and estimates. Steinberger’s bill is a concrete, public data point: 100 agents running continuously for 30 days on a large open-source codebase costs between $300,000 and $1.3 million per month depending on execution speed, before any optimisation.

Who is Peter Steinberger

Steinberger is not a newcomer to building developer tools at scale. The Austrian engineer founded PSPDFKit in 2011, bootstrapping a PDF rendering and annotation framework that became the standard for mobile document handling. By 2021, apps built on PSPDFKit were running on more than one billion devices worldwide, and the company raised $116 million from Insight Partners, its first outside investment after a decade of profitable, self-funded growth.

After leaving PSPDFKit, Steinberger began experimenting with AI agents as a personal project. OpenClaw, a self-hosted autonomous AI assistant that runs entirely on users’ own hardware, became the fastest-growing open-source project in GitHub history, crossing 302,000 stars by April 2026, overtaking React, Vue.js, and TensorFlow in a fraction of the time those projects took to reach similar milestones. The framework connects to tools people already use, including email, calendars, browsers, and messaging platforms from Slack and Discord to WhatsApp and iMessage, and allows AI agents to execute shell commands, manage files, and automate web tasks locally.

When Steinberger joined OpenAI, he announced that OpenClaw would move to an independent foundation to preserve its open-source character. “I want to change the world, not build a large company,” he wrote. “Teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone.”

What it reveals about AI coding economics

The $1.3 million bill arrives at a moment when the economics of AI-powered development are a central preoccupation of the software industry. OpenAI recently opened ChatGPT subscriptions to OpenClaw’s 3.2 million users, allowing them to run autonomous agents through the Codex endpoint for $23 per month. Anthropic, by contrast, blocked Claude Pro and Max subscribers from using OpenClaw and other third-party agent frameworks, concluding that the compute demands of autonomous agents running thousands of API calls per day were economically unsustainable under flat-rate subscription pricing.

The divergence between those two approaches reflects an unresolved tension in AI pricing. Subscription models are designed for human-speed interaction: a person typing queries into a chat window generates a predictable, manageable volume of API calls. An autonomous agent fleet generates orders of magnitude more, and the gap between subscription pricing and actual compute costs is the subsidy that either the provider absorbs or the user pays.

Steinberger’s bill makes that gap visible. At $1.3 million for 100 agents, the per-agent cost is roughly $13,000 per month, far more than any subscription plan covers. Even at the optimised $300,000, each agent costs approximately $3,000 per month. For enterprise teams evaluating whether to deploy agentic coding tools at scale, these numbers provide a baseline that no vendor’s marketing page will offer.

The broader pattern

OpenClaw’s trajectory, from a personal experiment to the most-starred project on GitHub to an OpenAI-sponsored research platform, reflects a broader shift in how software is being built. AI coding agents from DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic are moving from proof-of-concept demonstrations to production deployment, and the question is no longer whether AI will write significant amounts of code but how much it will cost and who will pay for it.

The rise of AI-assisted development, from individual coding copilots to fully autonomous agent fleets, is compressing the timeline between a three-person team’s ambition and a large engineering organisation’s output. Steinberger’s setup, three humans and 100 agents, is an extreme version of what many companies will attempt at smaller scales over the next year.

The $1.3 million bill is not a cautionary tale. It is a receipt from the future, showing what it costs when AI development tools are used at full capacity, without the budget constraints that currently limit most teams to a fraction of what the technology can do. Whether that future is affordable depends on how quickly model inference costs decline, how efficiently agent orchestration frameworks manage token usage, and whether the security and quality challenges of AI-generated code can be managed at the speed these agents produce it.

With WWDC 2026 just weeks away, the apps and games nominated for the 2026 Apple Design Awards have been revealed.

Every year, Apple recognizes App Store applications that demonstrate genuine innovation and ingenuity. Through its annual Apple Design Awards, the company highlights its top picks across several app categories, celebrating developers and their creative efforts.

On Monday, all apps that were nominated for the 2026 Apple Design Awards were highlighted. Finalists are organized based on the design aspects Apple deemed particularly impressive, with three apps and three games nominated for each category.

Delight and Fun

“Finalists in this category provide memorable, engaging, and satisfying experiences enhanced by Apple technologies,” explains the company’s website.

Apps

Games

Inclusivity

The Inclusivity category celebrates App Store applications that “provide a great experience for all by reflecting a variety of backgrounds, abilities, and languages.”

Apps

Games

Innovation

Finalists chosen for the Innovation category “provide a state-of-the-art experience through a novel use of Apple technologies that sets them apart in their genre.”

Apps

Games

Interaction

Apple says that apps and games nominated for the Interaction category “deliver intuitive interfaces and effortless controls that are perfectly tailored to their platform.”

Apps

Games

Social Impact

“Finalists in this category improve lives in a meaningful way and shine a light on crucial issues,” explains Apple.

Apps

Games

Visuals and Graphics

Apple says finalists in the Visuals and Graphics category “feature stunning imagery, skillfully drawn interfaces, and high-quality animations with a distinctive and cohesive theme.”

Apps

Games

Triple-A titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Civilization VII are among the titles nominated for an Apple Design Award. Some applications, like TR-49 and Sago Mini Jinja’s Garden, were recognized as finalists in two categories.

Though Apple no longer has a dedicated “Spatial Computing” category, visionOS software like Pickle Pro and D-Day: The Camera Soldier still have a chance of winning. Apps for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and other platforms were also nominated.

The winners will be revealed at WWDC 2026, which begins on June 8. One app and one game from each category will win a 2026 Apple Design Award.