Apple’s smart home device will be the AI center of the household, with it potentially becoming the poster child for Apple’s new “intelligent personal hub” strategy.

During the Apple keynote, new CEO John Ternus laid out the company’s plans for the future, including what is described as an “intelligent personal hub” approach. If a report is right, the long-rumored Home Hub will do that for the home, as the iPhone does for the person.

Outlined in the “Power On” newsletter for Bloomberg on Sunday, Mark Gurman writes that the rumored smart display will serve as the anchor for the home. It will bring together a person’s digital connected life, including device controls, video calls, and media.

The newsletter goes out of its way to suggest that Ternus’ characterization of iPhone as an already-existing “intelligent personal hub” is in some way meant to protect the company from OpenAI’s impending hardware product. Then it goes on to describe Apple’s second hub, one for the home, suggesting that Ternus has a bad hand of cards and is running out of plays in light of OpenAI’s still non-existent hardware platform.

OpenAI’s current known cash burn is $1.25 per dollar it earns, if that says anything about the danger Apple faces.

Referred to as J490, the Apple Home Hub will use an operating system focused on Siri AI, and is apparently being tested in employees’ homes. It also allegedly matches Ternus’ description of an intelligent personal hub.

Gurman goes on to reiterate various previously-rumored elements, such as the square-ish display that uses a desk-based stand that looks like half a HomePod mini, or attaches to a wall mount using magnets.

It will use facial recognition to identify users, to personalize the information it displays to that individual. However, it will do so without a Face ID-level depth sensor.

Apparently, this feat could result in facial recognition in a future iPhone Duo update, without necessarily requiring the physical space for the sensor array.

The hub will have a home screen, widgets, and clock faces, but Siri will be the main feature. It will be able to bring up information across the user’s devices and accounts, play pertinent podcasts and songs, and also carry out more precise tasks.

One thing that is still missing is a release date. So far, all of the hype about the device implies it is coming “soon,” possibly this fall, though when exactly is still a mystery.

On the outside, the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max look identical and have the same dimensions as last year’s iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max. But on the inside, the 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max are quite different, with bigger batteries, a new A20 Pro chip, a significantly larger vapor-cooling system, and tiny mechanical aperture blades in the main camera’s lens.

As the new Apple pro phones make their way into people’s pockets, they’re also appearing in durability testing and teardown videos. 

Tech reviewer Zach Nelson dropped a pair of iPhone 18 Pro videos on his YouTube channel, JerryRigEverything: one showing how the new pro phone did in a scratch and durability test, and the other showing him dismantle Apple’s new handset.

On Sunday, the tech repair and advocacy site iFixIt did a teardown of the iPhone 18 Pro, and not all of it went according to plan. Taking the back glass panel was relatively straightforward, but there’s not much that a person can repair aside from the panel itself.

Of the four 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max models that iFixIt took apart, the plastic frame behind the display broke on three. Apple doesn’t sell the plastic frame part, so if it’s damaged, it can only be replaced by getting a whole new display module. You could put the display back on without the plastic backing frame, but it wouldn’t sit flush with the body. I should note that in Nelson’s teardown, he didn’t suffer the same calamity and gave Apple a “thumbs up for repairability” after removing the display.

“Four phones are too few to establish a failure rate. Adhesive strength, heating, technique, or a difference in the plastic could all matter. That plastic frame has been present since the 15 Pro. But it hasn’t given us nearly as much trouble in previous years,” wrote Liz Chamberlian and Carsten Frauenheim, iFixIt’s director of sustainability and repairability engineer, respectively, in a blog post. “Using isopropyl alcohol might make display removal more consistent, but we’ll have to do more testing to be sure.”

Nelson and iFixIt’s teardown, along with Apple’s Ireland site, gives us a complete picture of the battery capacity for the new iPhone Pro models, SIM card and eSIM only models. Both the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max have larger batteries compared to last year’s 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max. The variants sold outside the US have a slightly smaller battery to afford room for a SIM card tray.

The new variable aperture on the main camera of the 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max is another curiosity. It’s made of six tiny mechanical blades. For CNET’s iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max review video, our cinematographer, Celso Bulgatti, filmed it in action.

If any of the rear cameras on the iPhone 18 Pro or 18 Pro Max break, you’d likely need to replace the entire camera array, which includes the new mechanical aperture.

“We dismantled the main camera and concluded that an aperture-only repair isn’t going to be feasible: if your aperture gets stuck, you’ll be looking at replacing the entire main camera assembly,” noted Chamberlian and Frauenheim.

On the whole, iFixIt gave the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max a provisional repairability score of 7 out of 10, the same as the 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max and 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max.

You can watch more of iFixIt’s findings in the company’s full teardown video below.

Patrick Holland

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As Director of Content, Hardware, I lead CNET’s team of journalists and editors, covering news and testing on smartphones, laptops, wireless carriers, AI, and pretty much anything with a battery.

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Security researchers found two ways out of the OpenAI Codex sandbox, one of them capable of running commands on a developer’s machine from Codex’s most locked-down mode, with no approval prompt and nothing shown on screen.

Both flaws were reported to OpenAI on August 12 and fixed within eight days, according to Oren Yomtov of Accomplish AI.

The more serious of the two, which the researchers call Heapjack, turns a routine action into remote code execution: open someone else’s repository in Codex, ask it a question about the code, and whoever wrote that repository gets unsandboxed command execution on your computer.

Codex is OpenAI’s coding agent, available as a command-line tool and a desktop app. Like rival agents, it runs the model’s actions inside a sandbox so that untrusted code cannot touch the wider system. Both escapes work by defeating that boundary from the inside.

Heapjack

The Heapjack technique, as described in Yomtov’s writeup, targets a component called node_repl, which Codex Desktop writes into the global ‘~/.codex/config.toml’ file at install time.

There is no opt-in and no setting to turn it off, and because the entry lives in the shared config, plain Codex CLI users inherit the same tool without ever being asked.

node_repl runs a single Node.js process that holds two separate JavaScript execution contexts. One is trusted and contains OpenAI’s own code. The other is untrusted and runs the agent’s code. The trusted context proves it is trusted by presenting a random token generated fresh on each run.

The problem is that both contexts live in one Node process and share one memory heap, so the token is just a string sitting in memory the untrusted side can read.

The untrusted code takes a snapshot of the heap with ‘v8.getHeapSnapshot()’ and tries every string shaped like a UUID. A wrong guess returns “not authorized.” A correct token with a bad argument returns a real validation error, which tells the attacker the token is right.

With the token, the untrusted code writes its own request onto the same pipe the trusted context uses to talk to a native, unsandboxed parent process.

The parent checks the token, sees a valid one, and does the work. The proof of concept used the system’s ‘open’ command to launch an application outside Codex’s process tree entirely. The same access reaches any Unix socket, a Docker daemon socket being the obvious target, and a tool for editing the global config file.

All of this runs at read-only, the strictest sandbox mode, where the agent is not supposed to write anything at all.

Overpatch

The second flaw, Overpatch, sits in the open-source Codex CLI. In workspace-write mode, the agent may only write inside the project folder, and a shell command aimed at the home directory is refused.

The researchers got Codex’s own patch tool, apply_patch, to write there anyway.

The tool grants write access to the parent folder of each path named in a patch. Name ‘/tmp’, and it grants write access to the root of the disk.

The working exploit uses a patch with two changes: one that names ‘/tmp’ and does nothing useful except widen the permission, and one that appends a line to ‘.zshrc’ through a symlink into the home directory.

Remove the first change and the write is refused. With it, the next terminal the developer opens runs the attacker’s line unsandboxed.

The same underlying mistake

Both bugs share a shape: the enforcement mechanism was living inside the thing it was supposed to be enforcing. apply_patch worked out its own permissions from attacker-supplied input. node_repl kept the secret separating trusted from untrusted code in the same memory as the untrusted code.

In each case the sandbox was told, from the inside, to let something through.

The class of bug is not new. In July 2026, Pillar Security researchers demonstrated the same idea across Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI and Google’s Antigravity, where an agent that stays inside its sandbox writes a file a trusted tool outside the sandbox later runs.

Reacting to Yomtov’s post on X, one commenter wrote that “V8 contexts isolate globals, not memory, so the sandbox was really a promise the heap never agreed to.” Another called the trust boundary “a room divider.” The default-enabled behavior drew its own scrutiny, with one asking why a privileged token was reachable from untrusted JavaScript at all.

What to do

OpenAI fixed Heapjack in Codex Desktop build 26.818.21641 and Overpatch in Codex CLI 0.149.0, according to Accomplish.

Users should update to those versions or later. Yomtov credited OpenAI with resolving both issues within eight days of his report.

BleepingComputer reached out to OpenAI for comment prior to publishing.

Join Mikko Hyppönen and security leaders from the NFL, CHANEL, and Atlassian for a two-hour digital summit on what AI-speed attacks change, what defenders should stop doing, and how to validate, decide, fix, and re-validate at machine speed.

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Xbox mode doesn’t reinvent the PC gaming experience, but it has a few nice touches.

How to enable and open Xbox mode in Windows 11

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What does Xbox mode actually do in Windows 11?

Max Miller for Engadget

What just happened? With OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta all hitting the headlines for their AI agents going rogue, it seems that Google might have been feeling a bit superior – but apparently not. The company has confirmed that its Gemini AI breached the systems of three other companies during cybersecurity tests. In one instance, it repeatedly guessed passwords until it found the right one, and Google wasn’t very forthcoming about what happened.

The incidents, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, took place in May during an evaluation by AI security firm Irregular. Gemini was supposed to work with fictional companies in a controlled test environment. However, an unintended internet connection gave the model access to real websites, and it treated them as part of the exercise.

In one test, Gemini was asked to retrieve information from software belonging to a fake company that shared its name with a real business. The AI guessed passwords until it gained access to the real firm’s protected system.

In the other cases, the model found credentials in public online repositories and used them to enter two more companies’ systems.

Google says that in all three instances, Gemini stopped once it realized the targets were real. The company didn’t disclose the incidents publicly when Irregular informed it in late July. It says no damage was done, the affected organizations were notified, and the testing procedures have since been changed. Google has not named the companies or identified which Gemini model was involved.

Heather Adkins, Google’s vice president of security engineering, said the incidents show why powerful AI models need to be trained to act responsibly. Google maintains that the model was trying to complete its assigned task, rather than deliberately seeking out victims.

This is just the latest in a series of similar incidents involving big AI companies. OpenAI’s agents breached Hugging Face and compromised accounts across several other services after escaping a test environment. Anthropic disclosed that Claude models accessed three organizations’ production systems during evaluations; another model tried to trick a real developer into accepting malicious code.

Meta’s model also reached the internet during an Irregular test and breached a third-party service. Meta blamed the breach on a testing misconfiguration. Unsurprisingly, Google and the other companies never publicly apologized for any of these breaches.

These incidents, alongside warnings from AI developers themselves, have intensified fears that the technology could threaten humanity’s survival. We’ve also seen Anthropic boss Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and xAI owner Elon Musk support calls for a slowdown in frontier model development.

Elsewhere, Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar have announced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would permanently ban the development and deployment of superintelligent AI and temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulator has established safety rules. Individuals who violate the proposed restrictions could face up to 20 years in prison.

After spending some time daily driving the Pixel 11 Pro, I could find plenty of faults with the device. Comparing Google’s latest flagship with other expensive Android phones, you’ll find areas where it lags behind. It isn’t the best in terms of raw performance, battery, or even charging–and many can argue that One UI or other Android skins feel better in various aspects, especially when it comes down to customizations.

Even then, I managed to get along with it just fine, and even after reviewing it, I’ve decided to stick to it for a little while longer. The Pixel has become an increasingly divisive phone. I know some fans of the Pixel formula, and even more who dislike it with a passion. Regardless of which side you lean, it is a very “opinionated” phone. So to really see its strengths, you have to pay attention to what Google actually spent its engineering effort on.

Only room for casuals, but then again, is that really a bad thing?

Tensor G6 still isn’t the chip I’d choose if mobile gaming were my priority, and I don’t think Google gets a free pass because Tensor was designed differently. Gaming will show you exactly where the Tensor G6 stumbles. An argument can be made for people expecting top-tier performance on their $1000+ phone, but then again, not everyone is playing AAA mobile games. The chip isn’t disgustingly slow to the point that you can’t smoothly scroll through the UI. Still, gaming was a choppy experience overall.

Tensor G6 has 50% more TPU compute than its predecessor, according to Google, and the company directly credits that additional AI processing with features such as Instant Night Sight, Magic Capture, and its latest on-device Gemini capabilities. But if you consider its real-world experience, it’s fast enough for most people. A vast majority of mobile games don’t require top-of-the-line hardware, and that’s where the Tensor shines. It is for the average user who just wants to drop in for some rounds in PUBG Mobile or play some relaxing puzzle games.

The little interactions go a long way

The same thinking extends beyond the camera. Google highlights Magic Capture, Rambler, and HiLight as three examples of how it wants the Pixel 11 family to make your experience with the Pixel smoother. Rambler is designed around transcribing naturally spoken thoughts, while HiLight provides information through the rear light without requiring you to turn the phone over.

Neither feature is enough to sell me a $1,099 phone outright. HiLight seems underwhelming for the most part, even if I prefer it over the niche sensor that I never used on the Pixel 10 Pro. But there’s a lot more solid groundwork here. Live Translation is an example, letting you dub supported audio and video into another language in real time using Tensor G6’s on-device models.

Gemini Intelligence is also getting smarter, with the system now anticipating more of your needs and working across information on the phone. Sure, a lot of these are features that will trickle down to older Pixels; still, it doesn’t take away from the fact that the Pixel experience here is the main deal. Individually, these are small features, but together, they make a genuinely good package.

Some compromises are still just compromises

Google having a different philosophy isn’t a checkmate against the rest of the industry–being different doesn’t automatically make you right. I’ve spent enough time using phones with 80W and 90W charging that my habits have changed around them. A few good minutes restore a meaningful amount of battery.

Meanwhile, the Pixel 11 Pro requires more planning. Battery life isn’t worth showing off either. Tensor G6 appears reasonably efficient, which only makes me wonder how good the smaller Pro could be with a little more capacity. Figuring out Google’s priorities helped me appreciate the phone, not blinding me to its issues. The software is there, but the hardware still has a little catching up to do.

Google isn’t playing the same game

People often miss the point of Pixels. Google honestly isn’t competing in terms of shipments with Apple or Samsung. The company is only moderately pushing to grow Pixel sales and mainstream appeal. It is mainly using the Pixel lineup as a hardware and AI showcase. Pixel Drops are also a big highlight, which offer the first access to the latest Android features (along with bug fixes).

So if you’re a competitive mobile gamer or a power user who needs a long-lasting and powerful phone, the Pixel is definitely not my first recommendation. Used to charging a phone in 20 minutes? Well, that is out of the question too. I wouldn’t try to convince you that you’re looking at the Pixel incorrectly; there are plenty of good options out there. Your only mistake would be assuming otherwise.

A memory of some kind is now a standard feature for an AI chatbot. The chatbot stores all of your interactions in its memory, enabling you to refer back to previous conversations, and giving the tool some useful context to frame its answers with. For example, if you tell it you’re vegetarian, it won’t recommend recipes with meat in them.

This comes with privacy considerations as more of us share more of our lives with these apps. But it also has the potential to affect the responses you get from the AI in ways that you don’t necessarily want.

Perhaps you’ve spent a week researching how to replace a light switch and ChatGPT thinks you’re a DIY enthusiast. Or you’ve been looking up places around a certain location that you’re heading to for vacation, and the AI thinks you live there. All the bot’s answers come with memory context now. Here’s how it works, and what you can do about it.

How ChatGPT Memory Works

Memory settings in ChatGPT on the web.

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Screenshot: David Nield

When ChatGPT first introduced a memory feature back in April 2024, you had to be very specific about what you wanted it to remember: You had to explicitly say to the bot “remember this” about something, otherwise it would be lost in the flow of conversation. You could then refer back to it as needed.

It was a start, but not a very good one. These memories were very fixed—so if you mentioned an upcoming party, ChatGPT would always assume it was still in the future, even after the date had passed. Until you told the AI bot otherwise, it would always be referring to an upcoming event.

After an update in June, ChatGPT now does something called dreaming, as explained on the OpenAI blog. Memories are now flexible, and are now built up and edited over time—so ChatGPT knows the party is in the past, not the future. What’s more, memories are saved and sifted through automatically, so you don’t have to make manual requests any more.

Essentially, it’s now down to the chatbot rather than you to decide what’s important enough to be remembered—and while that’s certainly more convenient for users, it can come with its own problems. ChatGPT is continually refining what it thinks it knows about you every time you interact with it, and it won’t always make the right assessments.

OpenAI says the three main aims of memory (or dreaming) are to carry forward useful context, to follow preferences and constraints, and to stay current over time. Ideally, that should mean responses that are tuned and personalized in helpful ways, but you don’t get as much control over this as you might expect.

You Can Edit ChatGPT’s Memory

ChatGPT’s memory logs are presented as a summary.Screenshot: David Nield

To find out what ChatGPT has remembered about you in the web app, click your profile icon (bottom left), then choose Personalization and scroll down to the Memory section. In the mobile apps, tap the menu button (top left), then your profile icon, then Memory.

The launch of the iPhone Duo is a play to reinvigorate iPhone sales by offering something new to consumers. It may make up close to half of the foldables market by 2027.

Apple’s introduction of the iPhone Duo confirmed long-time rumors of the development of a folding smartphone. Its launch wasn’t without a small amount of sticker shock, with consumers expected to pay $1,999 for the base model.

However, before the iPhone Duo makes it to consumer hands, analysts are already claiming it will be a help to Apple’s iPhone fortunes.

In Sunday’s report from The Information, IDC analysts forecast that Apple will be selling 10 million units in the first 12 months after launch.

The model will introduce “novelty” and help drive high-end customers willing to pay the highest prices for whatever Apple brings out, says IDC VP for data and analytics Francisco Jeronimo.

A revenue bump up

Revenue from iPhones hasn’t really changed much over the last few years. With relatively flat revenue from 2022 to 2025 and just a 4% rise in the fiscal year ending September 2025, thanks to four-year upgraders. Apple had work to do on improving matters for its flagship product.

Jeronimo believes that a product like the iPhone Duo could help lift sales by nudging consumers who upgrade more frequently to do so. Novelty is apparently a big factor for some consumers.

The first year’s 10-million-unit forecast should rake in $27 billion for Apple, including consumers paying for the more expensive, higher-capacity models. This would reflect 6% of Apple’s total expected revenue for the fiscal 2026 year.

The skew to more costly variants isn’t new, as it’s been observed in other rival foldables, such as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8.

While expensive, analysts believe that existing consumers who opt for the already-costly Pro and Pro Max versions could transition over to the Duo.

Trade-ins will also help sales for the Duo, as will the increasingly popular use of installment plans.

A big market impact

For Apple, the sales from foldable smartphones in general are a good reason to step in to the market. Global revenue from that product category rose 16% year-over-year in 2025, versus a 7% growth for non-foldables, IDC said.

Apple can also expect to secure a large amount of the foldables market with the iPhone Duo alone.

To IDC, Android foldables made up close to 90% of the niche in 2025. The 2026 forecast has Apple netting about 30% to Android’s 50%, with 2027 seeing iOS hitting 40% of foldable market share

Apple certainly has the potential to make big swings in markets its only just entering. Unless there is a massive blunder, the forecasts should be in the ballpark of reality.