There are a few different ways to keep apps under the radar.

The primary method for hiding iPhone apps

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Hidden apps aren’t totally invisible

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Other methods to keep apps under control

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The Apple Watch will see a revamp in the coming years, as Apple is reportedly in the middle of a shake up its wearables formula to meet an ever-changing market.

The Apple Watch has retained the same core design of a square display on a watch band, but it has evolved over time. While it has become thinner, larger, and more rugged in the Apple Watch Ultra, it can potentially do more.

In Sunday’s “Power On” newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman writes that the Apple Watch is ready to get overhauled into something new. The company’s industrial design team has been rethinking smartwatches in general over the last year, and it’s considering new directions to go in.

The team hasn’t quite decided what to actually do with the Apple Watch yet, but it is mulling the problem over.

These changes apparently include switching the square display for a circular version of various sizes. There’s also the possibility of removing the display altogether, to match the growing market for wearables without screens.

Smart rings are also seeing a rise in adoption, which gives Apple another wearable avenue to explore. It has repeatedly filed patents in the field, but an Apple Ring release continues to elude the company.

Sooner changes

Whatever new direction the Apple Watch takes, it won’t be anytime soon. The expected Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 will be largely performance-based updates.

Health and fitness changes are said to be included. Despite previous rumors, there are no major design changes in 2026 for the main Apple Watch body.

There is, however, a rumor that Apple will be introducing a new band attachment method for the 2026 model. If correct, it’s a change that will probably make earlier Apple Watch bands incompatible with the new model.

That said, it’s a rumor that we have heard on and off since 2022. It may happen, but it could be better suited as part of a larger overhaul.

I was fourteen or so when I went to the Gadget Show Live (once a big tech event in the UK which showed off the latest technology) in 2016 as a punter and overheard someone on a stand I’d visited mention they’d spent £1,000 on a custom gaming PC.

A thousand pounds. On a computer. I remember turning that figure over in my head (it’s roughly $1,400) and not quite being able to make sense of it, not necessarily because I couldn’t fathom how much money that was, but because at the time, it seemed like a lot of money to spend on a PC without any frame of reference as to what that price got you.

When a loved one dies, who downloads their important files from their cloud storage account? Who monitors their email inbox? Who decides what happens to the photos and videos on their social media accounts? And what if those tasks fall to you?

Everyone will die, but not everyone has planned what they want to happen with their digital assets after they’re gone. Even when someone makes a plan, survivors might still be limited in what they can do.

Tying up loose ends can become a nightmare for the living, especially when the volume of digital assets is enormous. Still, the more you know, the better you can plan for your own digital estate, and the easier it will be to manage someone else’s.

Take Inventory

The biggest determining factor in how much work it’s going to be to manage the online accounts and digital assets of someone who is incapacitated or deceased is whether they did any estate planning. If a person doesn’t write down what digital assets they have and what they want done with them, it’s impossible for anyone to know.

It’s not always a simple matter of memorializing a Facebook account or downloading photos from iCloud either. Digital assets can have as much monetary value as sentimental value. Say a person’s social media accounts earn dividends. How will a beneficiary collect future proceeds? And should they keep the account alive?

What about cryptocurrency? If it’s stored in a private wallet and no one has the key, the money is lost forever. It’s a different story, however, if a third party, like Coinbase or PayPal, holds the crypto. At present, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are considered “digital assets” and thus need to be treated that way when doing any estate planning.

Navigating the Law

In the US, digital inheritance is overseen by state law, the same as traditional probate and estate matters, according to Benjamin Orzeske, chief counsel at the Uniform Law Commission. He and his organization developed a state law known as the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), which has been enacted in 48 states, Washington, DC, and the US Virgin Islands. The missing two states are Massachusetts, where RUFADAA has been adopted but not yet enacted as of this writing, and Louisiana, which went its own way with a similar but different law.

“At the heart of RUFADAA is this recognition that digital property is in some ways different from traditional, tangible property,” Orzeske says. He gives the example of mail versus email. When a person dies, their mail gets forwarded to a dedicated person, the fiduciary, who then receives incoming communication, bills, and payments. If they get a bill in the mail for a magazine subscription, they know to cancel it. Receiving the mail effectively gives the person appropriate information and access to manage the deceased’s accounts and estate going forward. Email is different. The fiduciary doesn’t just get new incoming mail. They might also have access to a searchable history of communication, which the deceased person might have expected to be kept private.

The real point of conflict, according to Orzeske, lies in the Stored Communications Act, a federal law that says companies that handle our online assets can’t release them without our permission. So RUFADAA gives survivors some rights while retaining the original asset holder’s privacy.

Under RUFADAA, a named trusted person can close accounts, but they can only get the contents—meaning the bodies of emails, private messages, videos, photos, attachments, and so forth—if the decedent specifically “grants the authority to the personal representative fiduciary,” according to Catherine Hodder, a senior attorney editor at FindLaw. FindLaw is an informational website that breaks down legal issues for a general audience.

Vinyl has survived cassettes, CDs, Napster, the iPod, Spotify and several decades of people confidently predicting its imminent death because records continue to provide something streaming cannot: ownership, permanence, large artwork, ritual and a physical connection to music that someone presumably cared enough to write, perform, record and master. Artificial intelligence has apparently looked at all of that and decided it needed a piece of the action.

Suno is preparing to launch Suno Vinyl, a service that will turn music generated through its AI platform into personalized 12 inch records. Users will be able to select up to 46 minutes of music, create custom artwork and labels, and have the finished record pressed and shipped to their door for an estimated $45 plus shipping. The service is not yet live, although Suno is accepting users for its waitlist, which raises the fairly obvious question of who exactly has been sitting around waiting for this particular collision between generative AI and physical media.

That does not make Suno Vinyl an irrelevant story. Quite the opposite. Suno has become one of the largest generative music platforms in the world, raised hundreds of millions of dollars and is now operating at a scale where its decisions can influence how AI generated music is created, distributed and monetized. What makes this announcement interesting is not that somebody can turn an AI song into a record; it is that AI generated music is rapidly acquiring the same commercial infrastructure as conventional recorded music, including licensing, distribution, royalty policies, copyright disputes and now physical products.

Whether it deserves all of that is another question.

Calling It “Vinyl” Requires an Asterisk

There is one detail getting somewhat lost in the excitement: Suno calls the service Suno Vinyl, but the actual 12 inch record is manufactured from black PETG rather than conventional PVC vinyl. Suno describes the material as environmentally friendly and says the records are genuinely pressed rather than novelty lathe cuts, with full color printed sleeves, custom labels and audio taken from the user’s final mix.

That is fine as far as it goes, but if you are charging roughly $45 for something intended to spend its life on a turntable, we would like considerably more information. Suno currently says nothing meaningful about the pressing plant, mastering process, record weight, manufacturing tolerances or whether the supplied file receives any additional preparation before being committed to the physical format. The company promises “high quality audio,” but without any technical context that phrase carries about as much useful information as “premium sound” on the side of a Bluetooth speaker box.

Those omissions would be troubling if Suno were positioning this as an audiophile product, although there is little indication that it is. The target customer is not likely to be comparing cutter heads, lacquer sources or different pressings of A Love Supreme before deciding whether a PETG copy of an AI generated ska song about the family Labradoodle deserves shelf space.

$45 Buys a Lot of Actual Music

The pricing becomes more amusing when placed beside what traditional record buyers can purchase for the same money. We recently reviewed Rhino High Fidelity’s new edition of Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly, an all analog release cut by Kevin Gray and produced specifically for listeners who care about sound quality, and that record sells for $39.98.

Suno estimates about $45 plus shipping for a personalized PETG pressing of whatever its software generated after somebody typed a sufficiently elaborate prompt. The comparison is not entirely fair because Rhino can manufacture an established title in quantity while Suno is offering personalized, low volume production with custom artwork and packaging, but consumers do not make purchasing decisions inside an accounting seminar. They have $45, and that amount buys excellent new releases, several used records, a stack of inexpensive CDs or, depending on your level of restraint inside a record shop, the first twelve minutes of what eventually becomes a $140 purchase.

That is why Suno Vinyl makes almost no sense as a value proposition for conventional music collectors. It is not really competing with Rhino, Blue Note, Craft Recordings, Analogue Productions or any of the labels serving the vinyl enthusiast market. It is competing with personalized gifts, novelty merchandise and the emotional satisfaction of taking something that existed only on a screen and turning it into an object.

What Problem Is Suno Vinyl Solving?

Generative AI has removed almost every traditional obstacle involved in creating something resembling a finished song. You do not necessarily need musicians, a recording studio, microphones, instruments, engineers or enough musical ability to survive “Hot Cross Buns” on a recorder because software can produce something in seconds that has vocals, instrumentation, structure and a finished mix.

If the result is terrible, you generate another one. If that is terrible, you generate ten more. Deezer recently reported receiving tens of thousands of fully AI generated tracks every day, which underscores one of the central contradictions of this entire market: we can now create music much faster than anybody can realistically consume it.

Against that backdrop, Suno’s decision to turn one of those infinitely reproducible digital files into a scarce physical object is almost comically logical. The technology creates abundance, while the record creates the appearance of permanence and scarcity. You have to admire the capitalism involved because Suno has effectively identified a way to assign physical and emotional weight to a product whose defining advantage is that it can be generated endlessly and almost instantly.

That may ultimately be the real appeal.

Vinyl Means Something AI Music Does Not

The resilience of physical music has very little to do with consumers suddenly forgetting how convenient streaming is. Hundreds of millions of people pay for streaming subscriptions precisely because instant access to almost everything is useful, yet vinyl and CDs continue selling because ownership still means something when the rest of our media lives increasingly exist behind subscriptions, licensing agreements and corporate servers.

People stream because it is convenient; they buy records because some music matters enough to own. A copy of Kind of Blue, London Calling, Super Fly or Songs in the Key of Life does not become meaningful because somebody pressed it onto plastic. The record exists because the music already demonstrated enough cultural or personal value that listeners wanted to keep it, display it and return to it.

Suno reverses that relationship. Pressing the music onto a record can become part of the process of convincing ourselves that the thing mattered in the first place, which is a considerably stranger proposition. Someone may create a song about a deceased parent, a wedding, a child’s birth or another deeply personal experience and treasure the resulting object, and there is nothing artificial about that emotional reaction. But Suno also promotes birthday songs, anniversary tracks and inside jokes as likely applications, which tells us far more about the real market than any grand claim about reshaping music creation.

So Who Is This Actually For?

Suno Vinyl is primarily personalized merchandise, and viewed through that lens the concept begins to make considerably more sense. It is for the person who generates a birthday song for Dad and thinks presenting him with an actual record will be funnier and more memorable than texting him a link. It is for couples who want their AI generated anniversary anthem sitting beside the wedding photographs, and for people creating fictional bands, joke albums and personal projects who simply want to hold the finished result in their hands.

There is also a more legitimate creative use case for musicians who employ AI as one tool inside a larger process involving their own lyrics, vocals, instrumentation or production. AI assisted music and fully AI generated music are not the same thing, something we have argued repeatedly in our recent coverage, and a physical pressing of a genuinely collaborative project may have real personal or promotional value.

But none of that turns Suno Vinyl into the next meaningful development in analog playback. For most customers, it is closer to a custom photo mug that happens to spin at 33⅓ rpm, which is not necessarily an insult because personalized products can be fun. It merely means the thing belongs in a very different conversation from an AAA Blue Note reissue, and nobody should expect Kevin Gray to arrive with tasting notes.

The Copyright Mess Now Comes With a Record Sleeve

The physical format also makes the unresolved legal and ethical issues surrounding AI music feel considerably more tangible. Suno says users who create songs while subscribed to its paid plans are considered the owners of those songs and retain commercial usage rights, while material created on its free tier is intended for noncommercial use. The company also acknowledges that ownership of a generated recording does not necessarily mean the work qualifies for copyright protection, particularly when the human contribution is limited.

That distinction becomes harder to ignore when the thing arrives in the mail with your name printed on the jacket.

Suno’s relationship with the traditional music business remains equally complicated. Warner Music Group settled its dispute with Suno and entered into a partnership intended to support future licensed models and new AI experiences involving participating artists, yet litigation involving AI training and copyrighted material continues elsewhere. A Munich court recently ruled against Suno in a case brought by German rights organization GEMA, illustrating just how unsettled the legal framework remains even as companies race ahead with new commercial products.

That is why Suno Vinyl deserves more attention than a goofy product announcement normally would. AI music now has creation platforms, label partnerships, licensing agreements, streaming distribution, royalty policies, chart debates, copyright litigation and physical records. It has managed to recreate almost the entire music industry with remarkable speed, although nobody has yet announced an AI tour manager capable of losing the band’s cash somewhere outside Cleveland.

Physical Media Deserves Better Than More Content

We have spent much of 2026 covering the continued strength of physical music because records and CDs provide something increasingly valuable in an era of rented digital access. They offer ownership, preserve particular masterings and editions, support artists and labels, and encourage listeners to engage with albums rather than allowing an algorithm to pour background audio through the room until everyone goes to bed.

That is what makes Suno Vinyl simultaneously fascinating and faintly ridiculous. The vinyl revival has been driven partly by listeners deciding that certain music deserves more attention, more permanence and more emotional investment than another disposable stream, while Suno’s technology is built around making the creation of additional music almost frictionless. Those ideas are fundamentally at odds, and putting one inside the packaging of the other does not solve the contradiction so much as give it a rather handsome record sleeve.

The Bottom Line

Suno Vinyl is an important story attached to a profoundly unnecessary product. The company plans to let users take up to 46 minutes of music from their Suno libraries, add custom artwork and receive a genuinely pressed 12 inch PETG record for approximately $45 plus shipping, but there is almost no audiophile reason to care. Suno has disclosed very little about the mastering or manufacturing process, the record is PETG rather than conventional PVC vinyl, and the same amount of money can buy exceptionally well produced recordings containing music written, performed and engineered by human beings.

That comparison is ultimately beside the point because audiophiles are not really the customer. Suno Vinyl is a keepsake, novelty item, personalized gift and piece of creator merchandise designed for people who want something generated on a screen to feel more permanent, and that is precisely why the product matters even if most serious record collectors would never consider buying one.

AI companies have become remarkably good at generating limitless quantities of content. Suno is now testing whether putting some of that content into a physical object can make consumers assign it greater emotional and monetary value, and perhaps it can. If the next phase involves AI generated yacht rock pressed onto PETG, numbered 1 of 1 and listed on Discogs for $175, we may finally have reached the runout groove.

For more information: vinyl.suno.com

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The Trump administration is paying another $1.2 billion to cancel an offshore wind lease, this time to German utility RWE. 

The energy company said in an announcement that the wind farms would have been built off the coasts of California, Louisiana, and New York. Instead, RWE will spend $900 million to buy a small stake in a Louisiana liquid natural gas export terminal.

The New York wind farm would have generated more than 3 gigawatts, according to Heatmap News.

The remaining $300 million will go toward buying natural gas turbines to power 15 peaking power plants around the country. Peaking power plants are among the most expensive and most polluting natural gas power plants to operate. It’s unclear when those will be completed — there’s currently a backlog for new turbines stretching into the early 2030s.

RWE isn’t backing off its offshore wind investments elsewhere, though. The company said it bought 6.9 gigawatts of capacity in the U.K.’s recent auction.

The Trump administration has paid $3.93 billion for the 12 leases it has coaxed developers into abandoning.

Bill Swearingen has spent the past year running largely the same test, over and over again. The goal was to produce a computer-generated pattern that could block the surveillance cameras lining America’s streets from detecting it.

Some 31 million tests later, Swearingen says he can now produce patterns on-demand that, when applied to clothing and objects, prevent some of the most commonly deployed license plate readers and surveillance cameras from detecting whatever the pattern covers, from people to vehicles.

His project, which he calls noRecognition, allows people to escape the automatic detection and algorithmic surveillance used across the U.S. and beyond.

In recent years, surveillance cameras have been supercharged with the ability to detect what is happening in the footage being recorded, from tracking the license plates of speeding vehicles to using facial recognition to identify suspected criminals, albeit with mixed success and sometimes terrifying results. The detection algorithms that power most surveillance cameras today can sift through vast amounts of footage, allowing law enforcement to pick out activity of interest, akin to pulling a needle out of a haystack.

Swearingen’s computer-generated patterns do not block surveillance cameras from recording video footage. Instead, they scramble the camera’s ability to identify objects, people, or faces, so that the cameras do not trigger any detection alerts. By blocking the camera’s ability to detect what the pattern covers, the person becomes a needle in a haystack again — until someone knows where to look. 

“Privacy is a fundamental right,” Swearingen told TechCrunch in a call this week. He described his patterns as a way to allow people to “opt-out of being tracked.”

In its first public test Friday at the Def Con cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, Swearingen successfully demonstrated the pattern printed on a vehicle, proving that these patterns can be effective at defeating surveillance detection in the real world.

Teaching a model how to paint

In a call from his home in Kansas City, where he co-founded cybersecurity meet-up SecKC, Swearingen told TechCrunch that as a cyber professional he is acutely aware of the privacy and security risks of surveillance.

He described how his town is swamped with surveillance cameras, sometimes located just a few feet from each other. He said that he and others never opted in to being watched, just like he never opted-in to having the government use his driver’s license for facial recognition.

Swearingen described himself as a middle-aged white guy who lives in the center of the United States, and acknowledged that as a result he has not faced hardship or discrimination for being who he is or what he looks like. Swearingen recounted how last year he wanted to attend a protest, but felt uncomfortable and concerned that the vast number of cameras could track people who were exercising their constitutional rights to free expression.

If he felt this way, undoubtedly others would as well, including those who wanted to exercise their rights but may not feel safe or comfortable doing so themselves. Swearingen got to work.

For as long as there have been cameras capable of detecting things, there have been efforts to counter the technology. Several art projects and clothing brands have introduced apparel that aims to help people defeat facial recognition. Some eyeglass makers are jumping on the trend, albeit not with much efficacy. 

Swearingen said his research builds on some of this earlier work, which showed that it was possible to block camera detections. 

He started out last year with a proof-of-concept test lab that began by incrementally defeating one open-source video camera detection algorithm after another. Over the course of the year, he refined the patterns by scaling up his tests with additional computer processing power. He thanked the wider community who showed up with hardware to help further the project along. 

His proof-of-concept evolved over time into a reinforcement learning model, essentially a self-contained system that could train itself on which patterns work and which do not against the specific camera algorithms he is testing. In simple terms, Swearingen told TechCrunch that he essentially taught his model “how to paint.”

Each time a pattern failed and an algorithm detected it, the model would try again, over and over, until it eventually defeated multiple algorithms at once.

His model soon began to find perfect recipes for patterns that were able to defeat all of the 11 open-source detection algorithms he tested, including the software that powers Flock license plate readers, Axon body-worn cameras, and cameras running Clearview AI.

Now the model creates new patterns every minute, each batch mathematically better than the last, he said.

On Friday at the Def Con cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, Swearingen ran his first real-world test. With help from Donut Media, the test involved covering a 2009 Toyota Yaris with one of Swearingen’s newest patterns to see if the car would be invisible to detection by a Flock camera.

“We proved it was effective;” said Swearingen; though, the wheels were a challenge, he said. The video of the demo will be out in the next few weeks, said Donut Media.

With a public demo in Las Vegas now under his belt, the project is early proof that it is possible to avoid algorithmic detection in public spaces. The next step is getting the patterns into the hands of people who want them, he said.

The noRecognition project also has a crowdsourcing campaign to help fund the sale of early merchandise featuring the patterns, from T-shirts to hoodies, with the potential for pattern-printed skins for vehicles down the line. Swearingen said the aim is for the patterns to be high quality and resolution good enough to work from a distance, while also looking aesthetically fashionable.

He said he is keeping his strongest patterns off the internet to prevent the camera makers from defeating them, but that the work is not yet done. His models are continuing to grind out new patterns.

“Every failure improves my model, and so [the patterns] keep getting better and better,” he said.

The iPhone Fold’s two colorways may have been revealed, with the foldable smartphone potentially shipping in dark blue and silver colorways.

The iPhone Fold is expected to arrive this fall alongside the iPhone 18 Pro. However, while the general design and specifications have pretty much been settled on, rumors over the summer couldn’t decide what colors it will ship with.

If images shared by Sonny Dickson are accurate, it will ship in at least two fairly pedestrian colorways. That would be Silver and Dark Blue.

The post to X on August 8 shows a pair of third-party accessories for the inbound model. The covers for the camera bump are claimed to be color-matched to the iPhone Fold.

This does depend on the manufacturer of the camera bump protector to be correct with their information. It’s possible that the two images are correct, but they can always be an educated guess by the accessory producer.

Sonny Dickson is a fairly reliable leaker, which means we can consider the accessories as being genuinely produced by someone. Whether that manufacturer is right is another matter entirely.

This is not the only color-related post Dickson has made for the inbound iPhones. In May, he posted photos of dummy units of the iPhone 18, including options in Silver, Black, Light Blue, and Dark Cherry.

Speculative colors

Back in February, one rumor about the specifications of the iPhone Fold said that two colors were on the way. It was claimed that one color was white and the other was unknown, but that the camera plateau would be all-black either way.

The same month, another report insisted that one of the two colors would be a black or dark gray, while the other was white or light silver.

By June, it was alleged that Apple still hadn’t nailed down the colors for the model, and that a black option probably wasn’t on the way.

Based on the iPhone Fold being a premium model that Apple’s supply chain is only getting to grips with producing for the first time, the limited color choice seems very plausible. That said, it doesn’t stop Apple from introducing other colors down the road.