Don’t just hand your laptop to a friend or secondhand store; you need to protect your personal data.

Back up everything first

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Do a proper wipe of your laptop

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Angle the speakers, move the couch a bit, lay down a rug.

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Other things to try out to improve sound quality

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CD players are back. Back again. Tell a friend — preferably the one who dumped an entire collection at Goodwill because Spotify was supposedly the future forever.

The timing of FiiO’s new DP11 could hardly be better. Our recent look at RIAA data found U.S. CD unit volume up 45.7% to 17.5 million during the first half of 2026, while wholesale revenue jumped 58.6% to $171.1 million. Streaming still dominates music consumption, but the little silver disc is behaving rather poorly for a format that was pronounced dead years ago.

FiiO has already leaned hard into the revival with portable models including the DM13 and DM15 R2R. The DP11 takes a different approach: it is a compact desktop CD transport and player designed to sit in a proper hi-fi system.

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What Makes the DP11 Different?

Currently listed at $169.99 through HiFiGo, the DP11 is unusually well equipped for the money. FiiO uses a custom desktop CD mechanism with optimized servo control and a support structure designed to reduce mechanical noise during playback.

The rear panel is the real story. AES, coaxial and optical digital outputs let the DP11 feed an external DAC, while an internal Cirrus Logic CS43198 DAC and stereo RCA output mean you do not actually need one. USB can also turn the DP11 into a digital interface for a computer, phone or tablet, while CDs can be ripped directly to USB storage in lossless WAV format.

Power can come from the internal AC supply or an external 12V DC supply, giving tweakers an obvious path toward an aftermarket linear power supply. Nobody required FiiO to make a $170 CD player this flexible, but here we are.

FiiO DP11 Specifications

• Type: Desktop CD player / digital transport
• Mechanism: Custom tray-loading CD drive
• DAC: Cirrus Logic CS43198
• Digital Outputs: AES, coaxial, optical
• Analog Output: Stereo RCA
• USB: Digital interface and CD ripping
• CD Ripping: Lossless WAV to USB storage
• Display: 3.71-inch LCD
• Power: Internal AC or 12V/2A DC
• Remote Control: Included
• Dimensions: 213 x 230 x 67 mm
• Weight: 1.8 kg / 4 lbs
• Finishes: Black or silver

The Bottom Line

The DP11 is not an everything box. There is no headphone output, SACD playback, Bluetooth or network streaming, so anyone wanting a Discman, streamer and headphone amplifier rolled into one should keep walking.

That focus is also part of the appeal. The $299 Shanling CR60 also rips CDs and functions as a compact transport, but requires an external DAC. The $199 Shanling EC Play adds Bluetooth 6.0, LDAC and headphone outputs, but is designed primarily as a portable player.

For listeners with shelves full of CDs and an existing amplifier or DAC, the DP11 offers an unusually complete set of connections for very little money. Considering what has happened to CD sales in 2026, FiiO may have arrived at exactly the right moment.

The CD player is back. Again. Please try to act surprised.

Where to buy:

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John Ternus and iPhone Duo designers reveal how ordinary paper notebooks were a key inspiration for the new foldable iPhone Duo.

Even as Apple is celebrating the arrival of the iPhone 18 Pro in stores, even its own executives are looking ahead to when the iPhone Duo comes out. CEO John Ternus, hardware executive Molly Anderson and software executive Steve Lemay have been talking to GQ magazine about having started from scratch to build the foldable.

“Steve [Jobs] talked about the intersection of technology and liberal arts,” says Ternus, “and I think iPhone Duo is a perfect example of that.”

According to Anderson, vice president of industrial design, reaching that goal meant starting with specific aims that were derived from paper notebooks.

“Everyone knows what a notebook feels like in the pocket and what it feels like to carry around,” says Anderson. “So that was a big part of the inspiration: ‘How do you get to something that gives you space but also feels compact?’”

GQ claims that the iPhone Duo’s proportions are actually based on the A-series paper system used internationally. A4 is the international nearest equivalent to US Letter size, for instance.

If the iPhone Duo’s proportions were based on that series, they’re closest to A5, which is half the size of A4. Even that isn’t an exact match, but it’s near.

Apple and most people who’ve tried the iPhone Duo out instead tend to describe it as passport-sized when closed. But of course this is a phone that is meant to be opened out, and Anderson says Apple focused intensely on how it feels to use it open.

Apple’s Steve Lemay (left) and Molly Anderson, during the iPhone Duo launch – image credit: Apple.

“We really obsessed about how it feels when you open it — it’s incredibly smooth,” she says. “The hinge is defined by a custom variable torque profile, so it’s easy to open, and then it’s actually biased so that it holds itself open and lays flat.”

Anderson says the hardware design started, at least in part, with the aim of emulating the convenience of paper notebooks, and making something new. Steve Lemay, vice president of human interface design, says that at the same time, its software grew out of all that had come before.

“You’ll see a lot of learnings from iPad in here, learnings from even Macintosh, and learnings from the existing phones,” he says. “It’s sort of the greatest hits of those products together.”

“We didn’t want it to feel like you’re starting a different operating system when you unfold it,” he continued. “And you’re never searching for the button you were just looking at.”

Pre-orders for the iPhone Duo begin on October 16, 2026. The iPhone 18 Pro is now available both online and also in Apple Stores.

Police sought a man in an iPhone theft at a casino, and a man is accused of stealing iPads from a company that had just fired him,, all in this week’s Apple Crime Blotter.

The latest in an occasional AppleInsider series on the world of Apple-related crime.

Man in Best Buy line has iPhone stolen

A man waiting in line for nearly 40 hours at a West Hollywood Best Buy for a new Pokemon card release had his iPhone 17 Plus stolen, although he later tracked it and got it back.

According to WeHo Online, the man got in line on the afternoon of Monday the 14th for the release of Pokemon’s 30th anniversary trading cards, and was still in line on the 16th. At 7 a.m., it was reported to police that the iPhone had been stolen.

The man gave police permission to track the device, and police determined that the thief had dropped it. The man got his iPhone back and declined to press charges.

Man sought for theft of iPhone from casino

Carson City Sheriff’s Office in Nevada is looking for a man who they say stole an iPhone from a customer at the Nugget Casino.

2 News reports the theft took place August 17, and the alleged thief was “last seen wearing a purple sweatshirt, gray sweatpants, purple-and-black Nike shoes and a white headband.”

Man accused of stealing 30 iPads from company that fired him

A 43-year-old man from Hialeah, Fla., has been arrested for stealing 30 iPads, valued at $12,000, from a business that had fired him earlier that day.

According to NBC Miami, police say the theft happened on September 4, when an employee recognized the man as he was entering the warehouse. Even though the man was wearing a mask, the owner of the business was also able to recognize him on surveillance video.

The report said the man had been fired for not showing up for work the previous two days. It was later discovered he had pawned some of the iPads shortly after the theft.

iPhone left in Porsche helps catch a scammer

An elderly Connecticut woman had nearly $28,000 stolen in an identity theft scam, although an iPhone left in a Porsche led to the scammer’s arrest.

CT Post explains a scammer told the 80-year-old woman her Social Security number had been compromised, using a fake “Apple Security” alert. The man on the phone told her that she would need to pay $27,975, in cash left in a shoebox, to get a new Social Security number.

A witness provided a license plate number of a Porsche used in the scam. An iPhone left in the car was traced back to the man who was later arrested.

AirPods signal leads police to stolen car in New Jersey

Police in Englewood, N.J., arrested a man after they followed the signal from a pair of AirPods to track a stolen car.

According to News 12, police eventually found the man carrying the AirPods, after which he “made several disparaging comments and threatened one of the officers.”

He was hit with several charges, including burglary, theft, receiving stolen property, terroristic threats, resisting arrest and possession of burglary tools.

Man put on Walmart vest to steal Apple Watches, police say

A 42-year-old man walked into a Walmart store in Sarasota, Fla., put on a Walmart vest in order to impersonate a store employee, in an attempt to steal from the store.

That didn’t work, as he got out only with the vest. However, he later used that vest in a different Walmart to steal three Apple Watches, police said.

WWSB reports police caught up with him entering his vehicle, which they searched, turning up the watches and a gun. He was charged with grand theft, a felon in possession of a firearm, and burglary of an occupied structure.

Verbal disturbance report leads to arrest for thefts of iPad Pro and AirPods

A 19-year-old North Carolina man has been charged with multiple felonies after he allegedly broke into the victim’s vehicle and took an iPad Pro, AirPods, a wallet, a purse, and medication.

According to Fox Carolina, police pinged the AirPods to the man’s residence. After a verbal altercation between the man and the victim, the sheriff’s office arrived, recovered the items, and arrested the man.

Police said evidence from the man’s phone “supports the allegations of theft.” He was hit with charges of felony breaking and entering a motor vehicle, felony larceny, and felony possession of stolen goods/property.

Man arrested for AirTag stalking, threats

Police in Ohio arrested a man on charges that he used an AirTag to stalk a woman.

TiffinOhio.net writes the woman told police that the man had been following her and placed the device on her car, in addition to making threats.

The man was charged with menacing by stalking, a first-degree misdemeanor.

Man arrested in Georgia for iPhone counterfeiting

A man in Georgia, the country, was arrested for a rather crude form of iPhone counterfeiting. Police say he made a plastic object meant to resemble an iPhone and attempted to pawn it at a Tbilisi pawn shop.

According to Georgia Today, police determined that the man was part of a conspiracy that had pawned “six imitation mobile phone devices at different pawnshops, causing significant financial damage to the companies.”

He was charged with repeated fraud, attempted fraud, and the production and use of forged documents, the Interior Ministry told the outlet.

Military aircraft were already in the air this spring when U.S. officials made an alarming discovery: The intelligence driving an armed operation against a Chinese vessel had been hallucinated by an AI chatbot. The operation was aborted at the last minute, narrowly averting a potential conflict with China, CNN reported on Friday.

The episode underscores a growing concern among military officials and outside experts: As decision-makers lean more heavily on AI, the errors these systems produce can travel up the chain of command before being questioned.

The intelligence report, which circulated during the war with Iran, said the vessel was carrying components for a nuclear weapons program.

The false intelligence originated with a Special Operations Command analyst who queried an AI chatbot to synthesize open source data with classified signals intelligence. The chatbot misidentified the ship’s cargo manifest. The analyst then used the tool a second time to format the erroneous findings into an official-looking summary, which was circulated across command channels.

The near-miss comes as the U.S. military races to integrate AI to accelerate decision-making and maintain its edge over China. The Pentagon has described AI as delivering a significant advantage in speeding up its kill chain so commanders can respond in the right time. But the same speed that makes AI attractive may also allow hallucinations with insufficient human oversight.

“It’s important for service members to understand the uncertainty inherent to LLMs,” said Jake Steckler, research scholar at GovAI and veteran U.S. Army officer, in a written response to TechCrunch. “But it’s especially critical for any decisions that could lead to use of force, like targeting, intelligence analysis, or operational planning. There are life and death consequences for those decisions.” 

Still, Steckler says, the incident should serve as a call to add more safeguards to AI, not a reason to avoid it. “These tools can be useful in the right contexts and with the right safeguards in place,” he said. “But prioritizing adoption speed over all else will likely lead to incidents that only make service members lose trust in these systems, which ultimately is only going to slow adoption.”

A federal judge in Los Angeles has tentatively refused to lift the consent decree imposed on Musical.ly, the app ByteDance bought and turned into TikTok. Vlad Savov and Josh Sisco reported the ruling for Bloomberg, which said Judge George H. Wu intends to keep oversight of the company’s privacy practices.

Wu wrote that the order imposed obligations neither TikTok nor the government had shown to be obviated. The ruling is tentative and can change.

Why $100m is riding on it

The Justice Department announced the $400m settlement in August, resolving a children’s privacy case it filed in 2024. The structure is the part worth reading closely.

TikTok pays $300m immediately. The remaining $100m falls due only on entry of an order vacating the Musical.ly decree.

So a quarter of the headline figure is contingent on a court agreeing to stop supervising the company. Read one way, the government negotiated an extra $100m if it could deliver that. Read the other, release from oversight was worth $100m to TikTok.

What the 2019 order actually did

The Federal Trade Commission settled with Musical.ly in February 2019 for $5.7m, then the largest children’s privacy penalty it had obtained. The money was the smaller part.

The decree required the company to comply with the children’s privacy law going forward, take offline every video made by a user under 13, and destroy improperly collected data or obtain parental consent for it.

Those are continuing obligations enforceable by a court. The sum now offered to end them is roughly seventeen times the original penalty.

The government argued for ending it

The Justice Department’s own announcement made the case. It said TikTok had undergone significant changes to its ownership, management, compliance functions and privacy practices since the complaint was filed.

Those developments, it argued, had materially advanced the public interests underlying the litigation. That is an enforcement agency telling a court its supervision is no longer necessary.

Wu has tentatively disagreed with the party that brought the case. TNW reported the settlement in August, including the conditional structure now in question.

Why a judge might be unpersuaded

The record since 2019 is not thin. A Texas judge found TikTok liable for telling parents its app was safe for children while knowing it was not.

There is also the question of what the company did with a fix it already had. A sealed document showed TikTok withheld a safety feature from 15 million US users by design, keeping them as a control group.

None of that is before Wu in this proceeding. It is the context in which a court decides whether a company’s compliance improvements have made judicial supervision redundant.

The money in proportion

$400m is one of the largest recoveries ever obtained under the children’s privacy statute, which says more about the statute than the sum. Penalties are capped per violation and the law dates from 1998.

Compare the exposure elsewhere. Meta agreed to pay up to $16.68bn to settle a youth safety case brought by 29 states, roughly forty times as much.

State consumer protection law and product liability claims have proved more expensive than the federal privacy statute written for the era of the family computer.

The European position is the opposite

Brussels is adding supervision rather than removing it. The European Commission has charged TikTok with failing to protect children under the Digital Services Act.

The structural difference matters more than the amounts. A DSA proceeding produces continuing obligations under a regulator, where a US settlement converts conduct into a payment and, if the court agrees, an exit.

That is why the tentative ruling is interesting beyond this case. The judge is the only actor in the American process holding the supervisory line.

What is not decided

TikTok has admitted nothing. The Justice Department states plainly that the resolved claims are allegations only and that there has been no determination of liability.

The $300m is not affected. If the vacatur is finally refused, the government collects less and the 2019 obligations continue.

What to watch

Watch whether the tentative ruling becomes final, and what the parties file in response. A tentative ruling is an invitation to argue, and both sides have a reason to.

Watch whether the compliance terms in the settlement are treated as a substitute for the decree. The government says they strengthen age controls and parental oversight, and a court that keeps the older order will have both running at once.

New Apple CEO John Ternus welcomed buyers of the new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max to the company’s flagship Fifth Avenue store in New York on Friday, and it’s likely to be just the first of several major product launches for the former hardware lead’s first year in the top job.

Dressed in a dark gray shirt and blue jeans, Ternus immediately took to taking selfies, giving handshakes and signing phone boxes for the hundreds of fans who chose to preorder the new iPhone or Apple Watch. 

Ternus, formerly Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, took a casual and personable approach to the launch — even gently laughing as one excited Apple fan accidentally dropped his iPhone 17 Pro Max onto the concrete while walking into the store.

“It’s fine, it’s got a little ding, no crack, thank you, Ceramic Shield,” Dallen Frutchey, 18, from Virginia, said about the accidental drop just ahead of moving his data to his new iPhone 18 Pro Max. This is his fourth time attending one of Apple’s Fifth Avenue store openings, where he had met prior CEO Tim Cook a number of times. At today’s event, he got a selfie with Ternus just before the phone drop.

“I’m excited to have someone who is down in the details with the products working on things now,” Frutchey said, wearing a blue sweater that matched his new glacier blue phone.

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The very first person to come out of the Apple store — Harry Sun, 21, from New Jersey — walked out with a burgundy phone while wearing a Believe pin from the Apple TV show Ted Lasso. Eric Morgan, the second person in line, came all the way from Guatemala. He was buying several phones for his family, who also made the trip but were staying at their hotel, away from the iPhone launch-day madness.

The glacier blue hue appeared to be an early crowd favorite at this store, and Apple’s flagship location had a number of visible changes to mark the occasion. The outside of the store had a color blend of burgundy along with that shade of blue — giving no love to the more traditional silver and black color variants that are also available for the 18 Pro and Pro Max.

Inside, the Apple store took on more of a party vibe as it filled with the crowds that had been waiting outside. A DJ booth spinning Lady Gaga songs blasted in front of a large blue carpet area that served as a showroom for the new phones, as well as the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4.

At the opposite end of the store, without many passersby, a small photography exhibit featuring photos taken on the iPhone 18 Pro was on display in an area that formerly served as the Apple HomePod demo area. We will see over the next few months whether new products will take over that real estate, since today’s event also marks a shift in how Apple conducts its iPhone launches.

Apple’s set to do at least one more store launch like this when the iPhone Duo goes on sale on Oct. 23 — marking the company’s first entry into the foldable phone space. It’s also rumored to be launching a number of new home entertainment products, with the decreased floor space for the HomePod possibly hinting at a relaunch of the speaker now that the new Siri AI assistant is rolling out to the iPhone 15 Pro and later.

And that’s not to mention the rumors hinting that a non-Pro iPhone 18 and an iPhone Air sequel may be set up for a spring launch, anchoring what could be a new annual launch event early in the year to contrast with premium phones coming later in Apple’s typical September window.

So while this is the first iPhone launch under Ternus, it’s likely that several more of these are to come over the next year.

Bridget Carey contributed to this story.

Mike Sorrentino

Senior Editor

Mike Sorrentino is a Senior Editor for Mobile, covering phones, texting apps and smartwatches — obsessing about how we can make the most of them. Mike also keeps an eye out on the movie and toy industry, and outside of work enjoys biking and pizza making.

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Google Creative Lab published Gemma Translator back in August 2026 as a voice box that never phones home. Alan Yam, Shashwath Santosh, and Dan Motzenbecker built it with help from Google Antigravity, then posted the code, model scripts, and 3D-print files on GitHub under Apache 2.0. You talk into a microphone. Moonshine turns the recording into text. Gemma 4 E2B, running locally through LiteRT-LM, translates that text. Moonshine speaks the other language from a speaker. After the first download, the radio can stay off.

Jadaie Lin modified the same setup to work on PiSugar’s Whisplay HAT+. The board is roughly the same size as a Raspberry Pi 5, measuring around 2.8 inches, but it also has some serious hardware, such as a 640 x 480 DSI touchscreen, two microphones and speakers, and a few motion sensors. The original Google setup required a separate kiosk panel (480 by 320), a USB microphone, a speaker, a push-to-talk button, and a rotary knob to select the language to use. Lin completed the entire process on a Pi 5 with only one hat put on top of it.

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Audio turns up on the onboard mics, Moonshine does its magic with some sophisticated transcription, Gemma handles the translation, and the twin speakers return the outcome to you. There’s a small retro-terminal-style web UI in React and Vite that is fed via a Python API on port 3000. This displays two discussion lanes, allowing you to sit down in front of the tablet with a friend in separate languages and chat.

Lin relocated all of the old controls on the touchscreen and placed the language switching in a convenient settings panel. He also included timing to demonstrate how long each portion of the chat takes: listen, translate, and then speak.

Gemma 4 E2B runs in LiteRT-LM and lives in memory, with a useful system prompt stored in the key-value cache. Tokens are transferred to the browser via server-sent events, and the UI refreshes in real time as the discussion progresses. Finished phrases are fed into the speech queue. Context resets after 3200 tokens, as there is a 4096 token limit, thus extended conversations do not simply stop working. By default, the translator loads models for Chinese and English.

To set everything up, you’ll need Python 3.10 or newer, Node 18, or newer, an 8GB Pi 5, and a one-time model fetch from Hugging Face. After that, the device will happily run without the radio, which is ideal for travel, classrooms, and other situations where you don’t want your speech to sit on someone else’s servers. Lin is treating the translation as the first app for Whisplay HAT+, and there is a wait list and a Discord channel established up while the board is still being distributed to clients. The code is available at on the Github page, and it’s basically a fork of google-gemma/gemma-translator, so you can see how everything works.