from the saving-the-internet-from-the-fifth-circuit dept

It seems hardly a day goes by when another state doesn’t try to keep young people off the Internet. These attempts not only violate their First Amendment rights to interact with lawful speech, but everyone else’s as well, because the things platforms would need to do to comply with these laws inevitably impinge on everyone else’s rights to interact with online expression freely.

Fortunately challenges have been brought against many of these laws, and most have even been enjoined. Unfortunately, however, many of these injunctions have wound up appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which seems to be where the First Amendment goes to die. Even just on the online speech front there was NetChoice v. Paxton from a few years ago, challenging a social media regulation law, where the Fifth Circuit summarily ignored clear precedent in order to uphold the law, which the Supreme Court—yes, this Supreme Court—then had to undo with its combined Moody v. NetChoice decision and some shadow docket action (that challenge still lingers, waiting for the Fifth Circuit to eventually take another swing at it). And then just last year the Fifth Circuit undid two injunctions in age-gating laws in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton and NetChoice v. Fitch, which this time the Supreme Court did not fix, and just last week did the same to the Texas App Store law, letting it go into force despite the injunction the district court had earlier granted in CCIA v. Paxton.

With the challenge to Louisiana’s unconstitutional age-gating law now before it in NetChoice v. Murrill, it seemed worth trying to see if the court could at last be convinced to join most other courts that have considered age-gating laws and see the constitutional infirmities with them, and so this week the Copia Institute—the think tank arm of Techdirt—filed an amicus brief to try to do so. In it we made three basic points: age-gating laws like Louisiana’s actually harm young people, they also harm everyone else, and, if this one were allowed, it would open the door to lots of other similar laws that would cause even more harm.

With regard to young people themselves, we first reminded that even young people have First Amendment rights, and that the Supreme Court has long held that the state has no role to play in deciding what ideas are suitable for them to encounter, which Louisiana is trying to do with this law. Even its tortured definition of a social media platform, which manages to exclude plenty of social media platforms (and, as the district court found, is unconstitutionally vague about which are covered or not), shows the state being selective as to which ideas were acceptable for young people to encounter.

Furthermore, as Australia’s experience with its social media ban for young people is illustrating, cutting young people off from social media causes explicit harm. Already there is evidence of young people experiencing isolation and being cut off from news, two ways young people are being hurt, which Louisiana now wants to risk for young people who they claim they are ostensibly trying to help. Louisiana’s law conditions access to covered social media platforms on parental consent, but it ignores that not every young person lives in a safe home with a caring parent who could give that consent. In fact, there is all sorts of offline harm that young people may be facing, including at home, which being cut off from social media means now being cut off from the help they may need to deal with it.

They also would face increased risk of identity theft from having to upload sensitive documents to try to verify their identity, as would everyone who now needs to provide them in order to be able to access any covered social media platforms. In its brief Louisiana argued that its age requirements were “nothing new, nothing costly, and nothing that compromises privacy.” But it is actually all three. As we explained, online age verification is nothing like the offline age verification we have used for such things as refusing to sell young people cigarettes—in general, young people could still enter the store and buy other things. We also noted the elevated identity theft risk, which news story after news story about database hacks shows is not a hypothetical concern. And then there is the privacy angle, because there is no way to ask, “How old are you?” without also inherently asking, “Who are you?” Given that the right of free expression also includes the right to express oneself anonymously, which the Supreme Court has recently emphasized, the latter is a question no one should be obligated to answer to be able to speak, and yet, with a law like Louisiana’s, everyone, young people and adults, would have to.

It’s also not just Louisiana’s law that we need to worry about. The problem is that if the courts can look past the constitutional problems with this one, then it can look past the constitutional problems with any of them, including ones that are even more onerous or restrictive. So even though Louisiana’s may not currently reach every user of every platform, it offers no comfort to anyone, for several reasons, with one of them being that even if the law just affects some social media platforms, it will still have chilling effects on anyone who might have used them for any purpose. As we explained to the court, the Copia Institute is in the business of expression and uses social media platforms to spread its expression. But if a law like Louisiana’s can go into effect, it could eliminate those platforms, large swaths of their users, or even the ability of the Copia Institute to use them at all. In other words, even though we write about age-gating laws, if they are allowed to go into effect we may lose the ability to tell anyone.

It’s important that laws like these remain enjoined, but maintaining a preliminary injunction is a separate area of concern raised by the Fifth Circuit’s recent jurisprudence, which keeps undoing sensible preliminary injunctions of laws like these unconstitutionally burdening speech rights. First, it should be enough for plaintiffs to anticipate that they will be harmed by such laws and seek preliminary relief enjoining them before they have had to directly experience such obviously inevitable expressive harm. Furthermore, courts are supposed to consider several factors in deciding whether to grant a preliminary injunction, including the likelihood of success of one of the parties and the risk of irreparable harm if the injunction is not granted. As even Justice Kavanaugh telegraphed in NetChoice v. Fitch, NetChoice is also likely to prevail in its constitutional challenge here.

But more importantly, the potential harm of perhaps unduly enjoining this law while the litigation challenging it continues pales to the harm of not doing so. If Louisiana’s law remains enjoined the status quo will be preserved, and no one will be any worse off than they were yesterday, last week, last year, or last century. As we also pointed out, the online interconnectivity of social media has existed in some form for upwards of forty years, dating back to pre-Internet dial-up bulletin board services in the 1980s. Generations of young people have grown up online since then and turned out fine.

But more importantly: the Constitution does not have an off switch. If these laws really do offend constitutional rights—as they clearly do—then they should not be able to offend them for even a moment. The Constitution protects rights every hour of every day, and there is no constitutional mechanism that allows them to be unilaterally taken away from everyone, even temporarily.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 5th circuit, age verification, louisiana

Companies: netchoice

WWDC is just around the corner. Here’s what to expect from Apple about the future of iOS 27, macOS 27, AI, and Siri.

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference will be held from June 8 to June 12. As it’s big developer event, it is also the main place to discover the big changes that will be arriving in its operating system updates due this fall.

Just after the keynote announcing the news, Apple will release its first developer beta builds of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, tvOS 27, and visionOS 27. These will be a second beta-testing track alongside the current-gen 26 versions, though those will be more for performance and bug fixing rather than introducting new features.

In the months leading up to the event, many rumors have circulated about what Apple will announce to the world. In an industry that is now ever so focused on AI, and with a massively delayed Siri revamp on the books, WWDC has become a very important presentation for Apple.

This is what you can expect Apple to talk about during the keynote and across the week.

iOS 27, iPadOS 27

The main points of interest will be in iOS 17 and its stablemate, iPadOS 27. Continuing the name convention established one year ago, the operating systems won’t have as much of an overhaul as they did in WWDC 2025, but there will be changes.

Early rumors in November 2025 likened iOS 27 to the macOS Snow Leopard release, in that it was more about stability and bug fixes than features. Likewise, expect there to be improvements to how the operating system functions on a fundamental level.

That also includes potential updates to battery life.

As for visible changes, there are expected refinements to Liquid Glass, Apple’s current choice of aesthetic. There have been claims of a system-wide slider to change the intensity of the glass effect, similar to the lock screen clock slider.

The home screen will get a new customization tool, namely the ability to revert edits made to the layout or other elements. This will make it easier for users to try out a change before changing their mind.

For other apps, you can expect an update to the Camera app to add a more accessible Visual Intelligence button, possibly referred to as “Siri Mode.” The Photos app will also get more Apple Intelligence features, including the ability to extend, enhance, and reframe shots.

The Photos app in iOS 27 is expected to get more AI features

Advertisement

Safari will gain some changes, with the chief one being automated tab grouping.

The Wallet will let users create their own digital passes from real-life tickets and cards that don’t have digital equivalents. You may also be able to split the bill and send requests for payment to your contacts after photographing a receipt.

There have been some regulatory-related rumblings too, with the EU’s Digital Markets Act potentially forcing a change. Apple is believed to be allowing users to use alternatives to AirPlay, such as Google Cast, to meet the Act’s rules.

The main show, however, will be Siri’s revamp, which will arrive two years late. It’s also expected to arrive in beta.

This will also arrive with an upgraded appearance, if a leak is right. Apparently Siri will take up space at the top of the iPhone screen, growing the Dynamic Island to show a prompt for text entry.

You may also end up interacting with Siri in a new way. Influenced by other AI services, there have been rumblings about a Siri Chatbot app instead of the existing system, which would allow for you to have conversational threads with the assistant.

The changes will include Apple’s previously-promised context awareness, as well as other smarts brought in thanks to Apple’s use of Google Gemini as a base. The ability to understand multiple commands in a single sentence will also be there.

There’s also been hints at health-related features, under the title of Apple Health Plus.

However, while Siri will be the main AI in use, with ChatGPT’s integration continuing to exist, there should be more options for users. Reports have hinted that more third-party AI support is also on the way.

Ahead of WWDC, a subdomain for “GenAI” was discovered, which may play into proceedings.

iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 will include some more accessibility features, including to VoiceOver and Magnifier, natural language Voice Control, more subtitles for video, and other changes. These have been confirmed by Apple in a Global Accessibility Awareness Day reveal on May 19.

We may also get a hint at some features destined for the iPhone Fold too, since iOS 27 would have to support the model. So far, that seems to consist of a Split View-style feature, taking advantage of the large screen with an iPadOS-like addition.

macOS 27

While we know that it will be macOS 27, we don’t know the name of the operating system itself. It’s probably going to be some form of California nature spot, be it a mountain range or a lake, unless Apple shakes up its naming convention again.

As for what to expect from Apple for it, a lot of the elements will be in line with iOS and iPadOS.

Liquid Glass will still be present in macOS 27

There will be a tune-up of Liquid Glass to make it more readable. Changes to apps like Safari and Photos will be similar in nature, as will be the Siri upgrades and other Apple Intelligence changes.

However, there are two changes affecting older Macs. Since macOS 26 Tahoe is the last version to actively support Intel Macs, you won’t be able to update to macOS 27 on non-Apple Silicon hardware.

For developers, there’s another thing to consider. Apps that were made for Intel Macs will continue to run in macOS 27, as it will continue to have Rosetta 2 support.

It does mean that macOS 28 will not support those apps, and developers will have to update them to work on Apple Silicon if they are to continue running on future Mac models.

One thing we may already know about is the name. Thanks to a possible social media snafu, it seems that it could be known as “Big Bear.”

watchOS 27

There will be a new watchOS release this fall, with watchOS 27 due to be shown off at WWDC. However, there are few rumors about what it will include.

So far, we are aware of the Modular watch face from the Apple Watch Ultra being simplified for the non-Ultra models. That includes removing some of the complications to make it fit the lower-resolution and smaller screen.

Improvements to heart rate tracking have also been declared in rumors, but as part of an overall improvement package rather than one with many new features.

Other updates could also happen, such as power usage, but other than that, there’s little to really go on at this time.

visionOS 27, tvOS 27

When it comes to tvOS 27 and visionOS 27, we are certain that there will be improvements made to both. However, again, there are no real rumors to hint at what will happen.

The probable minimums to expect are interface updates, matching the Liquid Glass refinements in the other operating systems in the generation. Apple Intelligence improvements and the new Siri will also impact them too.

Optimizations, maintenance, and bug fixes are also prime topics for both operating systems, too.

However, as part of the Global Accessibility Awareness Day announcements, Apple did say that there will be a new Wheelchair Control coming to visionOS. It uses the eye-tracking functionality to control a powered wheelchair.

Don’t count on Mac mini or Mac Studio.

WWDC is chiefly a developer and software-centric event. That said, Apple has often used it to launch new hardware initiatives.

Don’t count on it for 2026, though.

The current state of the hardware industry is one of panic, due to the ongoing memory and chip crisis raising prices of components. It’s so bad that comments from CEO Tim Cook indicated that there won’t be any new Macs or iPads introduced before September.

Apple could always mention future hardware it plans to introduce, but that would only be if it knows it can pull it off. A challenging manufacturing environment means it will be careful about making such claims in the first place.

It could always announce something like a new Apple TV model or a HomePod refresh, or even its rumored Home Hub tablet.

But, as it stands, they are very doubtful additions to make in a keynote that’s chiefly about software.

Microsoft on Monday unveiled the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a compact desktop computer designed to let software developers run large AI models on their desks instead of paying for cloud computing — a move that directly challenges the per-token pricing model that has defined the AI industry’s economics since ChatGPT launched three and a half years ago.

The device, announced at Microsoft Build 2026, packs Nvidia’s new Blackwell-architecture RTX Spark processor and 128 gigabytes of unified memory into a small-form-factor chassis, delivering what Nvidia rates at one petaflop of AI compute. In practical terms, that means a developer can load, run and interact with AI models exceeding 120 billion parameters without sending a single API call to the cloud.

“These class of devices, we think, will get to about 100 billion parameter model running,” Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Windows and Devices, said during a press briefing ahead of the event. He emphasized that raw model size is only part of the equation: “The model size is one thing, but for the model to be effective, it kind of needs to be able to have enough context, because a larger model, you feed it larger context.” At 100,000 tokens of context, he noted, the key-value cache alone can consume 40 to 50 gigabytes of memory — which is precisely why Microsoft and Nvidia engineered the device around a 128-gigabyte unified memory pool shared dynamically between the CPU and GPU.

The machine will be available later this year in the United States, sold exclusively through Microsoft.com. The company did not disclose pricing.

Why Microsoft is betting that AI’s future runs on fixed costs, not cloud meters

The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box arrives at a moment when the economics of AI development have become a boardroom-level concern. Companies large and small are grappling with cloud GPU bills that scale unpredictably: every fine-tuning run, every inference call, every agentic workflow that loops through a frontier model accumulates cost. For a developer iterating rapidly on a prototype — running the same model dozens or hundreds of times a day — those charges compound fast.

Microsoft is framing the Dev Box as a release valve for that pressure. Andrew Hill, corporate vice president of Surface, wrote in the announcement blog post that the device “changes that equation” by letting developers “reserve frontier model calls for truly frontier problems and handle the rest on their own hardware.” The pitch is not that cloud computing is obsolete, but that much of the work currently being sent to remote data centers does not require state-of-the-art models and would be better served by capable local hardware with predictable, fixed costs.

This is a significant strategic shift for Microsoft, a company that derives tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue from Azure cloud services. By selling hardware that explicitly reduces customers’ cloud dependency, Microsoft is acknowledging a tension that has been building across the industry: the marginal cost of AI inference at scale is unsustainable for many teams, and the market is demanding alternatives. The bet appears to be that developers who prototype locally will still deploy to Azure when they need to scale — and that owning both ends of that workflow is more valuable than owning only the cloud.

Inside the 128GB unified memory architecture that makes local AI possible

The technical architecture of the Dev Box reflects a set of deliberate engineering choices aimed at sustained, not peak, performance — a distinction that matters enormously for AI workloads that can run for hours.

At the center is Nvidia’s RTX Spark system-on-chip, which combines an ultra-efficient ARM-based CPU with a Blackwell-generation RTX GPU. In a traditional Windows PC, Davuluri explained during the briefing, this configuration would require four separate components: a CPU, a discrete GPU, dedicated graphics memory and system RAM. The RTX Spark collapses all of that into a single chip paired with a single unified memory pool.

That unification is the critical design decision. Conventional gaming laptops with high-end Nvidia GPUs top out at roughly 24 gigabytes of GPU-accessible memory. The Dev Box’s 128 gigabytes of unified memory — accessible to both the CPU and GPU through what Nvidia calls its Unified Memory Access architecture — is what makes it possible to load models that would otherwise require cloud GPU instances with specialty high-bandwidth memory configurations.

Microsoft did substantial work at the operating system level to exploit this architecture. The company implemented new memory management logic in Windows that raises the ceiling on how much system memory the GPU can address, introduces smarter page-size allocation for shared memory regions and ensures that heavy GPU workloads do not starve the CPU of the resources it needs for multitasking. The Windows scheduler was also optimized for RTX Spark’s heterogeneous core layout, routing demanding workloads to performance cores while keeping efficiency cores available for background tasks.

How a 3D-printed aluminum chassis doubles as a heatsink

The thermal design is equally deliberate. The Dev Box operates within an approximately 100-watt sustained thermal envelope — modest by desktop standards, but meaningful for a device intended to run training jobs and inference workloads continuously. The aluminum chassis itself is engineered to function as a passive heatsink, and the method Microsoft used to build it is among the most striking details about the machine.

The top panel is manufactured using metal 3D printing, a process that enables internal geometries too complex for conventional CNC machining or injection molding. The perforations are not simple through-holes; they are angled in multiple directions around the internal fan to optimize airflow from cold-air intake through heat dissipation. During the press briefing, Harry, a Surface industrial designer, explained the rationale: “The complexity is something other manufacturers wouldn’t be able to do, like CNC, or like any molding, because of the complexity of shape.”

When asked whether 3D printing would constrain mass production, the designer acknowledged the challenge but suggested Microsoft had developed a process robust enough to scale. The result is a machine that runs quietly enough for an open office while sustaining the kind of continuous GPU workloads that would throttle most conventional desktops of similar size. For a device that Microsoft expects developers to leave running overnight on fine-tuning jobs, quiet sustained performance is not a luxury — it is a requirement.

A developer-first setup that eliminates hours of configuration

Microsoft is shipping the Dev Box with Windows 11 Pro pre-configured at the image level for development work — a detail that sounds minor but reflects a growing recognition that the out-of-box experience for developer hardware has historically been poor.

The machine boots into a dark theme with a simplified taskbar, widgets removed and Do Not Disturb enabled. Developer Mode is turned on. PowerShell 7 is the default shell. WSL 2 — the Windows Subsystem for Linux — comes pre-installed with GPU passthrough and CUDA support already configured. Visual Studio Code, GitHub Copilot, Git, Python and Node.js are all installed and ready.

“We’ve said, ‘Hey, you know what, we got you, you want to go fast,’” a Microsoft engineer who demonstrated the configuration during the briefing told VentureBeat. The philosophy, he explained, is that developers were going to install all of these tools anyway — the friction was in the hours of setup and configuration that stood between unboxing a machine and writing the first line of code.

The Dev Box also ships with integration points across Microsoft’s AI stack: AI Toolkit for VS Code for model conversion and fine-tuning, Windows ML and Windows Copilot Runtime for local inference, and Microsoft Foundry for connecting local prototypes to cloud deployment pipelines. For enterprises, the device integrates with Entra ID and Intune for identity and device management, and includes Secured-core PC architecture, BitLocker encryption and Microsoft Defender.

Why Apple’s Mac Mini may not be the real competition anymore

The most obvious competitive comparison is Apple’s Mac Mini, which has dominated the compact-desktop category and has been widely adopted by developers drawn to Apple Silicon’s unified memory architecture and power efficiency.

Davuluri addressed the comparison directly during the briefing, saying the Dev Box is “in a different class of performance than Mac Minis, intentionally.” He declined to share specific benchmarks, noting that detailed specifications and performance targets would come closer to the fall launch. But the architectural advantage Microsoft is claiming is clear: while the current Mac Mini with M4 Pro tops out at 48 gigabytes of unified memory and the M4 Max configuration reaches 128 gigabytes, the RTX Spark Dev Box pairs its 128 gigabytes with a Blackwell-class GPU that has a fundamentally different CUDA-based compute model — one that the vast majority of the AI/ML ecosystem’s tooling (PyTorch, TensorRT, llama.cpp, Hugging Face frameworks) is already optimized for.

That CUDA ecosystem advantage is difficult to overstate. While Apple’s Metal framework has made progress, the overwhelming majority of AI training and inference frameworks are built and tested first against Nvidia’s CUDA stack. A developer running models on the Dev Box can use the same code, the same libraries and the same workflows they would use on a cloud GPU instance — a level of portability that Apple Silicon cannot currently match.

From laptop to supercomputer: Microsoft’s three-tier plan for local AI hardware

The Dev Box is one piece of a three-tier hardware strategy Microsoft laid out at Build. The Surface Laptop Ultra, announced days earlier at Computex, brings the same RTX Spark silicon into a 15-inch laptop form factor for developers and creators who need portability. At the other end of the spectrum, the DGX Station for Windows — built on Nvidia’s GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Superchip — targets organizations that need to run frontier models up to one trillion parameters on a deskside system. That machine is expected in the fourth quarter of this year.

The three devices map to a tiered computing model that Microsoft is calling “unmetered intelligence”: small on-device language models (the company’s new Aion 1.0 family) handle lightweight tasks at zero marginal cost; RTX Spark-class hardware runs mid-range models locally for the bulk of development work; and cloud resources are reserved for genuinely frontier-scale problems.

The GitHub Copilot CLI is getting a concrete implementation of this model with a new feature called /fleet, which allows a cloud-based primary agent to build a plan, assess the complexity of each task and route appropriate subtasks to a local model running on the developer’s hardware. The cloud agent handles what requires frontier capability; the local model handles what does not. The result, in theory, is lower cost without lower quality.

The real question is whether hybrid AI can shift from buzzword to business model

Whether Microsoft’s bet pays off depends on questions that will take months to answer. How does the Dev Box actually perform under sustained, real-world workloads? What will it cost? How quickly will the open-source model ecosystem continue to produce capable models in the 70-to-120-billion-parameter range that fit within its memory envelope? And perhaps most critically: will enterprise procurement teams, trained to think of AI as a cloud line item, accept a capital expenditure on desk hardware as an alternative?

The strategic logic, however, is difficult to dismiss. For three years, the AI industry has operated on an implicit assumption: serious AI work happens in the cloud, and the economics of that arrangement are simply the cost of doing business. Microsoft, a company with every incentive to reinforce that assumption, is now selling a machine that undermines it. That is not a contradiction — it is a recognition that the market is moving, and that the company that controls the developer’s local environment and the cloud they deploy to has a more durable advantage than one that controls only the cloud.

Every dollar a developer does not spend on cloud inference is a dollar that can fund another experiment, another iteration, another prototype. For years, the AI industry told developers they needed to rent their intelligence by the token. Microsoft is now asking a different question: what if you could just buy it?

With just two weeks to go, StrictlyVC Los Angeles is quickly approaching. On Thursday, June 18, at The Aerospace Corporation Campus in El Segundo, investors, founders, and tech leaders will gather for an evening of conversation exploring some of the most consequential shifts taking place across venture capital, defense technology, artificial intelligence, and advanced industry. Secure your spot here.

For executives navigating a rapidly changing technology landscape, StrictlyVC offers something increasingly difficult to find: direct access to the people building, funding, and shaping the next generation of companies. The conversations are candid, the audience is highly curated, and the insights extend far beyond what can be found in headlines, podcasts, or social media feeds.

Who’s taking the stage in Los Angeles

The evening begins with Ethan Thornton, founder of Mach Industries. In his session, “Built for a New Era of Defense Technology,” Thornton will share his perspective on building a hard tech company at speed and how advances in autonomy, manufacturing, and national security are transforming the defense sector. His story reflects a broader movement of founders tackling ambitious challenges in industries undergoing rapid change.

The conversation continues with Delian Asparouhov of Founders Fund and Saif Khawaja of Shinkei Systems. Together they will discuss the rise of physical AI and how developments in robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence are creating new opportunities to transform the physical world. Their discussion will offer insight into what it takes to build and scale breakthrough technologies beyond software alone.

Also joining the lineup is Carter Reum, co-founder and partner at M13. In his session, “Finding the Next Big Thing,” Reum will explore how AI is reshaping industries and how investors are moving beyond short-term hype to identify companies built for long-term durability. He will share his perspective on where innovation is creating the most meaningful opportunities and how venture investing is evolving as new categories emerge.

Additional speakers and conversations will be announced soon as the StrictlyVC Los Angeles agenda continues to grow. Stay updated on the latest speaker announcements and event news.

Grab your pass and join the conversation

Beyond the conversations onstage, StrictlyVC Los Angeles is designed to bring together the people driving innovation across technology and venture capital. Throughout the evening, attendees will have opportunities to connect with founders, investors, and operators in an environment that encourages meaningful discussion and the exchange of ideas. Whether you are looking to expand your network, gain new perspectives, or discover emerging opportunities, the value of the event extends well beyond the scheduled sessions. Secure your spot here.

Update

Added new Anime Paradox codes on June 5, 2025.

Anime Paradox is a popular Roblox tower defense game that brings together characters inspired by famous anime series. Players must collect powerful units, strengthen their teams, and defend against increasingly difficult waves of enemies. To help you progress faster, developers occasionally release codes that offer free rewards such as Gems, Trait Rerolls, and other valuable items. Here are the latest working Anime Paradox codes and how to use them.

All New Anime Paradox Codes

• UPDATE3.5!  — Redeem for Rerolls and Chips (NEW)
• FreeTrophies  — Redeem for Rerolls and Chips (NEW)
• NyoHo  — Redeem for Rerolls and Chips (NEW)
• SBR!  — Redeem for Rerolls and Chips (NEW)
• RESTOCK  — Redeem for Rerolls and Chips (NEW)
• SORRYFORBUGS  — Redeem for Rerolls and Chips (NEW)
• Update3Fumble  — Redeem for 150 Rerolls
• FreeStats  — Redeem for 30 Stat Chips, 20 Super Stat Chips
• UPDATE3!  — Redeem for 35 Trait Rerolls, 5000 Dabloons
• FATE!  — Redeem for 25 rr, 3 Rainbow Essence, 5000 Dabloons

Found an expired or missing code? Please let us know, and we’ll update the article as soon as possible.

Expired Anime Paradox Codes

How to Redeem Anime Paradox Codes?

Follow these simple steps to claim your free rewards:

1. Open Anime Paradox in Roblox.
2. Select the Codes button from the menu on the right side of the screen.
3. Enter an active code into the text box.
   
4. Click Redeem to receive your rewards instantly.

How to Get More Anime Paradox Codes

The official Anime Paradox Discord server is the best place to find newly released codes. Developers often post them alongside update notes, event announcements, and community celebrations, giving players a chance to claim free rewards. Another convenient option is to bookmark this page and check back regularly. We keep our code list updated with the latest active rewards, so you can quickly find working codes without searching through multiple channels or announcements.

Why Are My Anime Paradox Codes Not Working?

If your code doesn’t work, the most common reason is a wrong or mistyped character. To avoid this, copy the code exactly as shown on our page. Also, if the game hasn’t updated for you, a quick restart can refresh the server and resolve the issue. Beyond that, it’s possible that a specific code expired between the time of writing this article and when you tried to redeem it. If that’s the case, let us know by filling out the Google form, and we’ll update our list as soon as possible.

Using an ad blocker is good for your security, privacy, and even the FBI recommends them to defend from online harms. But as much as ad blockers are great for cleaning up your browsing experience, these tools often do little to prevent the pervasive tracking from ads within apps.

Now, thanks to a new feature in iOS 26 and macOS 26, one developer has built the first device-level ad blocker that works across all of Apple’s main products — iPhones, iPads, and Macs — and isn’t just limited to the browser.

Filtr is a new tool created and maintained by Kaylee Serena Calderolla, the developer behind the popular Safari browser ad blocker Wipr. Wipr prevents ads from ever appearing in Safari, meaning that the ads won’t load, nor will their tracking code that advertisers use to follow you around the web and snoop on which websites you visit. The result is a cleaner browsing experience, free from advertisers watching over your online activity.

Filtr is an additional paid-for feature bundled into Wipr that goes one step further than ad-blocking in the browser by blocking ads in iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps. Filtr does this by using a new feature embedded in the latest Apple software called URL filters, which lets developers block access to certain websites or domains at the network level, rather than just in the browser.

I use ad blockers across various devices all the time (even if websites like this one ask that you switch them off). I have — full disclosure — used Wipr as my main ad blocker on my Apple devices for years as a paying customer. I also use ad blockers on other browsers on my desktop computers and make use of a Pi-hole ad blocker, a small server that sits on my network at home and prevents ads from reaching any of my devices connected to my home Wi-Fi. 

But that still leaves my devices largely open to ads when I’m not on my home network, as well as the various apps that I use that are chock full of ads — including web browsers that aren’t Safari. 

As you can imagine, I was keen to give Filtr a spin. Filtr particularly appealed because, as Calderolla states in her privacy policy, her apps “do not collect personal data.” Her apps also don’t need to access any personal information to work, and neither does Apple’s URL filter feature.

For me, it was a no-brainer — all upside, and no tradeoff. I paid for the $5 annual subscription, added the URL filter to my iPhone, and that was that. The relief was immediate. Every app I opened loaded without its usual flood of ads. Some ad slots showed greyed placeholder spaces where the ads would have loaded.

Calderolla told me this week that Filtr is the first app so far to utilize the URL filters feature; though, that may be in part because it was a “nightmare” to get it to work, some of which she described in a May blog post. Calderolla said that Apple’s documentation on the URL feature was sparse, requiring her to do much of the work to understand how to implement and use the feature.

The URL filter feature relies on an advertising blocklist that Calderolla maintains. Calderolla explained that Filtr consults a “pre-filter” blocklist that is stored on the user’s device and is kept constantly up-to-date via automatic updates in the Wipr app. The pre-filter list determines if a website is not on the block list and, most of the time, the website loads as normal. But if the pre-filter list finds that a website might be on the block list, it will quickly confirm against the list on Calderolla’s servers. Calderolla said that these requests are routed through Apple’s servers as a proxy so that app developers do not know who is querying their blocklists.

This means that you can set up Filtr once and generally never have to think about it again. (For a security or privacy product, that’s high praise.)

There are some caveats, but far from dealbreakers. No ad blocker is perfect, period, but minimizing exposure to the ad networks as much as possible is a major win for your privacy. Filtr does not always block ads that are served directly from the websites you visit. That means you may still see ads in the Facebook, Google, and Reddit apps, as well as any other app that serves ads from its own domain, as blocking these could break the apps altogether. Calderolla said, however, that Filtr can at times block these ads as the feature relies on filtering specific web addresses, rather than the entire domain. (Lifehacker also tested and reviewed Filtr and found that using their mobile websites instead of their apps will still allow Wipr to block the ads.)

Wipr is a universal app that costs $5 in the Apple App Store and works across all of your Apple devices. Filtr costs an additional $5 each year, or $25 for a one-time lifetime payment, via in-app purchase.

That means the chances of the attackers decrypting one of the encrypted vaults they obtained is very small in the event the master password was strong, meaning long, randomly generated, and has high entropy. However, not everyone uses such master passwords. In the event the master password was included in word lists exchanged by password crackers, the chances of success would be higher, although still unlikely.

Broadly speaking, the incident has similarities to the 2022 LastPass breach, which also allowed attackers to obtain encrypted user vaults. Eventually, the attackers managed to obtain decrypted information from some of them. The success was the result of two things.

First, certain fields, such as website URLs, remained unencrypted in vaults. That meant attackers could read them even without the master password. Second, some of the stolen vaults used outdated algorithms that didn’t adequately intensify the process for converting the plain-text password into a hash. Dashlane has said that no user fields in vaults are unencrypted. Further, when algorithms are periodically strengthened to account for advances in cracking abilities, the process occurs automatically, with no interaction required. The algorithm update process for LastPass vaults at the time came with more user friction.

Dashlane’s initial notification left out key details of the attack and led to considerable confusion about the ongoing risk users faced.

Out of an abundance of caution, both master passwords and the contents of any of the recovered Dashlane vaults should be changed immediately to reduce the chance, however unlikely, that the attackers succeed in breaking the master password. Unaffected Dashlane users don’t need to take any such action.

Valve has confirmed that Steam Machine is shipping this summer, giving PC gamers a real launch window for its SteamOS living room PC. The missing piece is still price, and that’s the detail many buyers need before they can decide whether it fits their setup.

The update came as Valve expanded its Verified program to cover Steam Machine and Steam Frame. For Steam Machine, games will be checked for default controller support, default graphics settings, and how well they run without manual setup. Valve says the hardware is roughly six times as powerful as Steam Deck, while still using SteamOS, the Steam interface, and Proton.

How your library will look

Steam Machine Verified should look familiar if you’ve used Steam Deck. The requirements are nearly identical, so you’ll get a clearer read on whether a game is ready for the TV before you spend time changing controls or graphics settings.

Valve already has a large foundation for that work. Tens of thousands of titles have gone through Steam Deck verification, and Valve is testing Steam Machine support for games that missed Deck performance targets because of CPU or GPU limits. On stronger hardware, some of those games could meet the new bar without developers changing anything.

Why the price gap lingers

The summer timing makes Steam Machine more concrete, but the missing price keeps the comparison unfinished. Buyers still don’t know whether Valve’s living room PC will sit closer to a Steam Deck, a gaming laptop, or a compact Windows gaming PC.

That comparison goes beyond raw performance. Valve has to show that a TV-connected SteamOS PC can make PC gaming easier in the living room than the options people can already buy. Verified labels should reduce setup uncertainty, but price will decide whether that convenience looks worth paying for.

When buyers get the rest

Valve has also added Steam Machine and Steam Frame tabs to the Partner Dashboard, where some games already have Verified results for the new devices. That gives developers more guidance before launch, but it isn’t the full consumer reveal yet.

For now, you shouldn’t make room for Steam Machine in your budget until Valve shares the remaining hardware details. Price is the big one, but final availability timing and configuration options will also shape whether it’s a smart upgrade or a wait-and-see PC gaming box.

For the past two years, the technology industry has raced to make AI agents more capable — teaching them to write code, navigate software interfaces, manage files, and orchestrate multi-step workflows with increasing autonomy. What the industry has not done, at least not with any consistency, is answer the question that keeps chief information security officers awake at night: what happens when an agent goes wrong?

On Tuesday at its annual Build developer conference, Microsoft offered what may become the definitive answer. The company introduced Microsoft Execution Containers, or MXC — a policy-driven execution layer, built into the Windows operating system itself, that lets developers and IT administrators declare exactly what an AI agent can and cannot access, with those boundaries enforced at runtime by the OS kernel.

The announcement, buried within a sweeping set of developer-focused updates, is arguably the most consequential platform move Microsoft made at Build this year, and it has the potential to reshape how every enterprise on Earth thinks about deploying autonomous AI software.

MXC is not a product you buy. It is an SDK and a policy model — a foundational primitive embedded in Windows and the Windows Subsystem for Linux — that provides what Microsoft calls a “composable sandbox spectrum.” That spectrum ranges from lightweight process isolation, already adopted by GitHub Copilot’s command-line interface, all the way up to micro-virtual machines, Linux containers, and full cloud instances running on Windows 365.

The system separates an agent’s execution from the user’s desktop, clipboard, user interface, and input devices. Critically, it binds every agent to a strong identity — either a local ID or a cloud-provisioned identity backed by Microsoft Entra — so that every action the agent takes can be attributed, audited, and governed.

The implications are enormous. Until now, the enterprise deployment of AI agents has been stuck in a paradox: the more autonomous and useful an agent becomes, the more dangerous it is to let it operate on a corporate network without guardrails. MXC is Microsoft’s attempt to break that paradox — not by making agents less capable, but by making the environment they operate in fundamentally more controlled.

Why every autonomous AI agent is a security incident waiting to happen

To understand why MXC matters, consider what an AI agent actually does when it runs on your computer. Unlike a traditional application, which operates within well-understood boundaries — a word processor reads and writes documents, a browser fetches web pages — an AI agent is, by design, unpredictable. It receives a goal in natural language, reasons about how to achieve it, and then takes actions: opening files, executing code, calling APIs, browsing the web, interacting with other software. Each of those interactions creates what security professionals call “attack surface.”

Microsoft’s own blog post framed the challenge in stark terms. The company wrote that “as agents become more capable and autonomous, they’re delivering material productivity gains. But they’re also introducing new risk, and the issue isn’t just the agent. It’s the entire system the agent operates across.” Every interaction between agents and humans, tools, applications, models, and other agents “exposes new attack surface and introduces different failure modes.” Microsoft characterized this as “a multi-layer systems problem.”

This is not a theoretical concern. In the months leading up to Build, security researchers demonstrated numerous ways that AI agents could be manipulated — through prompt injection, through malicious tool calls, through data exfiltration disguised as normal workflow. For enterprises that handle sensitive data, proprietary models, and regulated information, the absence of a trusted execution environment has been the single biggest barrier to moving agents from demo to deployment.

Microsoft’s answer is a sandbox that scales from a single process to a full virtual machine

MXC operates on a deceptively simple principle: declare what the agent can do before it runs, and let the operating system enforce those declarations at runtime. A developer or an IT administrator writes a policy that specifies which files, directories, and network resources an agent is allowed to access. MXC then creates a contained execution environment — a sandbox — that enforces those boundaries regardless of what the agent attempts to do.

What makes MXC unusual, and potentially very powerful, is the breadth of its isolation options. Microsoft designed the system so that a single SDK and policy model can map to the appropriate isolation construct for any given workload. For a lightweight coding assistant that just needs to read the current project directory, fast process isolation may be sufficient. For an autonomous agent that executes arbitrary code downloaded from the internet, a full micro-VM may be required. The system is designed to be “dynamically composable based on intent and risk,” meaning that the level of isolation can be adjusted based on what the agent is actually doing, not just what category it falls into.

Session isolation is a particularly important feature. MXC separates the agent’s execution from the user’s desktop, clipboard, UI, and input devices. This directly mitigates several classes of attacks that security researchers have identified as particularly dangerous for AI agents: UI spoofing, where an agent manipulates what the user sees to trick them into approving a malicious action; input injection, where an agent sends keystrokes or mouse clicks to other applications; and cross-session data leakage, where information from one user’s session bleeds into another.

A live demo showed an AI agent trying to delete files — and failing, because the OS wouldn’t let it

During a pre-briefing with VentureBeat the night before the announcement, a Microsoft developer offered a vivid demonstration of the technology in action. He had set up the open-source agent framework OpenClaw running inside MXC’s sandbox on his personal development machine. He then instructed the agent to delete all the files on his desktop. The agent attempted to comply — but the sandbox prevented it. “If you look at my desktop here, you see how clean my desktop is,” the developer said during the demo. “That’s a lie.” The files, he explained, were completely safe because “the container won’t allow it.”

The demonstration went further, showcasing the granularity of MXC’s controls. Users can mark specific files as read-only for the agent, restrict access to the browser and screen capture, control whether the agent can see location data, and have all of those permissions managed centrally by an enterprise IT department through Intune policies. The agent operates inside what is effectively a one-way mirror: it can do the work it has been asked to do, but it cannot see or touch anything outside the boundaries that its policy defines.

Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President for Windows and Devices, underscored during the pre-briefing that the primitives MXC introduces — security, containment, isolation, and user control — are essential to making AI agents commercially viable.

He emphasized that these capabilities are “not unique to OpenClaw” and that “this pattern repeats itself over and over” for any agent running on a Windows device. The primitives that exist in the operating system now “for the file around security, containment, isolating them, having users in control,” he said, are what will make agents safe enough for ordinary consumers and corporate deployments alike.

Defender, Entra, Intune, and Purview integration arriving in July turns MXC into an enterprise control plane

For corporate IT departments, the most significant element of the MXC announcement is not the SDK itself but its integration with Microsoft’s existing enterprise security stack through what the company calls Agent 365. Arriving in preview in July, Agent 365 layers Microsoft’s Entra identity service and Intune device management platform on top of MXC, so that IT administrators can govern agent containment centrally while developers choose the level of isolation their workload demands.

The integration goes further: Microsoft Defender will provide runtime threat protection, Entra will handle identity and access management, Intune will enforce device-level policies, and Microsoft Purview will extend its data governance and compliance capabilities to agent activity. This means that an enterprise could, in theory, allow employees to run AI agents on their corporate machines — even powerful, autonomous agents that execute code and manage files — while maintaining the same kind of centralized visibility and control that IT departments currently have over traditional applications.

Microsoft described the identity layer in its official blog: “Windows assigns agents a local ID or a cloud provisioned identity backed by Entra and attributes all activity from the container to that identity, so you can clearly differentiate human from agent.” For regulated industries — financial services, healthcare, government — the ability to produce an audit trail that distinguishes between human actions and agent actions on the same machine could prove to be a regulatory requirement, not merely a nice-to-have feature. Every agent action attributable to a specific identity, every containment boundary enforceable through the same policy infrastructure that already governs hundreds of millions of Windows devices — this is the architecture that could finally move AI agents from pilot programs to production.

OpenAI, Nvidia, Manus, and Nous Research are already building on MXC — and that changes the calculus

Platform announcements at developer conferences are often aspirational. What distinguishes the MXC launch is the breadth and specificity of the partners already building on it. Microsoft named five: OpenAI, Nvidia, Manus, Nous Research (maker of the Hermes agent), and the OpenClaw open-source project. Each is integrating MXC in a distinct way that illuminates a different use case for the technology.

OpenAI’s involvement is particularly striking. David Wiesen, a member of OpenAI’s technical staff, said that “working with Microsoft on the Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC) allows us to explore new patterns for AI agents to safely and efficiently generate and execute code.” He added that by combining Codex’s capabilities with MXC’s execution environment, the goal is “to help developers move from intent to reliable execution faster, while maintaining the security and control enterprises need.” The reference to Codex — OpenAI’s code-generation agent — suggests that MXC could become the default execution environment for one of the most widely anticipated agent products in the industry.

Nvidia is bringing its OpenShell framework to Windows built on MXC, providing what Microsoft described as “an easy-to-deploy package for autonomous, always-on agents safely.” Manus, the Chinese-born AI agent startup that gained viral attention earlier this year, is also integrating. Tao Zhang, Manus’s Chief Product Officer, said that MXC “gives developers a policy-driven way to define what an agent can access and enforce those boundaries at runtime, so more autonomous agents can operate safely in enterprise environments.” And Dillon Rolnick, the CEO of Nous Research, offered what may be the most concise articulation of why MXC matters: “Continuously-running local agents, like Hermes Agent, require intentional isolation. Developers need control over what an agent can access and trust that those controls will hold.”

How an open-source agent framework became Microsoft’s proving ground for AI safety on Windows

One of the more revealing stories behind the MXC announcement involves OpenClaw. During the press pre-briefing, a Microsoft developer described how the partnership came together organically — Peter Steinberger, OpenClaw’s creator, sent him a direct message in January expressing interest in collaborating. What began as a casual conversation evolved into a full-fledged platform partnership, with Microsoft developers contributing to the OpenClaw Windows companion app, built as a native WinUI application rather than a wrapped web app.

The OpenClaw integration serves as what Scott called “the ultimate test app for all the stuff that [the Windows platform team] is making.” If OpenClaw — which by its nature gives agents broad autonomy to execute tasks on a user’s machine — can run securely within MXC’s containment boundaries, then the containment system is robust enough for any agent. Scott explained the philosophy driving the work: “Think of OpenClaw Windows as the ultimate test app… If OpenClaw can succeed on Windows, that means that the Linux support is there, the container support is there, the containment is there.”

The companion app demonstrates the full spectrum of MXC’s enterprise controls — file permissions, network access, screen capture restrictions, location data — all manageable centrally through Intune policies. Microsoft donated the project to OpenClaw and plans to continue contributing to it as open source. As one member of the Windows leadership team put it during the briefing: “All agents, all comers, everyone is welcome on Windows… It’s going to run great on Windows, because the primitives are there. The base of the pyramid is solid.”

Building containment into the OS gives Microsoft a strategic edge over Apple’s walled garden and Google’s cloud-first model

MXC arrives at a moment when the technology industry is grappling with a fundamental tension. AI agents represent what may be the most significant new category of software since mobile applications, and every major technology company is racing to build them. But the security and governance infrastructure required to deploy these agents responsibly in enterprise environments barely exists. Microsoft’s approach is distinctive because it locates the trust layer at the operating system level rather than in the agent framework, the model provider, or a third-party security product.

This is a deliberate architectural choice. By building containment into Windows itself, Microsoft ensures that the security guarantees hold regardless of which agent, which model, or which framework a developer chooses.

It also means that the hundreds of millions of Windows devices already managed through Intune and secured through Defender can, in principle, become agent-ready through a software update rather than a rip-and-replace deployment.

Apple’s approach to AI agents leans heavily on its walled-garden ecosystem, offering security through restriction — limiting which agents can run and what they can do. Google’s approach, centered on its cloud infrastructure, offers security through centralization. Microsoft’s approach offers security through declaration and enforcement — allowing any agent to run, but containing its impact through OS-level policy.

For enterprises that operate in heterogeneous environments with diverse toolchains and multiple AI providers, the Microsoft model may prove the most practical. The competitive dynamics are already shifting: with OpenAI’s Codex, Nvidia’s OpenShell, and independent agent frameworks like Manus and Hermes all building on MXC, Microsoft is positioning Windows not just as the platform where agents run, but as the platform where agents can be trusted to run.

The hardest part isn’t building the sandbox — it’s writing the policies that go inside it

MXC is available now in early preview, meaning developers can begin building against the SDK and testing containment policies. The Agent 365 integration with Defender, Entra, Intune, and Purview is scheduled for preview in July — a timeline aggressive enough to suggest that much of the engineering work is already done, but far enough out to allow for refinement based on developer feedback.

The real test, however, will come when enterprises begin deploying agents at scale on production networks. Containment is only as good as the policies that govern it, and writing effective agent policies for complex enterprise environments will be an entirely new discipline — one that IT departments have not yet developed and that no vendor has yet figured out how to teach. The technology is promising, but an empty sandbox is just an empty box. Filling it with the right rules, for the right agents, in the right contexts, will require a level of organizational sophistication that most companies are only beginning to contemplate.

Still, the significance of what Microsoft announced on Tuesday is difficult to overstate. For the first time, a major operating system vendor has proposed a comprehensive, kernel-level answer to the question of how autonomous AI software should be contained, identified, and governed on the devices where most of the world’s work actually gets done. The industry spent two years teaching agents to act. Microsoft is now betting that the bigger business — and the harder engineering problem — is teaching the operating system to watch.

Apple is all set to host its yearly Worldwide Developer Conference next week, where it is expected to announce the long-awaited Siri update. As excited as I am for the smart assistant to finally work like it was supposed to all these years, the iOS 27 sneak peek could potentially confirm Apple’s next big launch: the foldable iPhone Ultra.

I say this because iPhones have trailed behind their Android counterparts in true multitasking capabilities. Sure, they have a Dynamic Island that pops up crucial information with a press-and-hold without leaving the current app. But it isn’t the same as running multiple apps side-by-side simultaneously or one app on top of another. Such use cases are crucial for big-screen foldable phones – or even big slab phones for that matter. This iOS limitation is one of the reasons I believe the 6.9-inch screen estate on Pro Max models isn’t utilized to its full potential. But this might change at next week’s WWDC.

According to a Bloomberg report, Apple’s foldable iPhone will feature an “iPad-like interface when opened.” It could support running two apps side-by-side and add sidebars to many apps. We’ve never had an iPhone running multiple apps on the screen simultaneously, and if  Apple demos such an instance at WWDC 26, it’ll likely point towards the launch of an iPhone with a larger screen – hopefully, one that folds.

However, iOS 27 needs more than just an iPad-like multitasking UI to take advantage of its bigger canvas. After using most of the foldable phones launched in the last five years, I have a few notes for Apple to maximize the big screen potential.

Multitasking with intuitive window management

The Oppo Find N6 is my favorite foldable phone. It has an anti-reflective screen for better outdoor legibility, big battery all-day endurance and above all, a software experience that makes it a multitasking powerhouse. It is much more than having a simple split-screen at your disposal. That’s not to say I don’t use split-screen multitasking but running two apps side-by-side isn’t ideal when you have to type in one app (like Google Docs). Once the keyboard pops up, you get less space to type.

Oppo (and OnePlus) solved this issue in 2023, when you could run two apps side-by-side and a third one in full-screen at the bottom. It lets me reference search material from a webpage on the left half of the screen and have a PDF running on the other half, while also running Google Docs at the bottom to type my story on the go.

The latest Oppo Find N6 takes it to the next level with its Free-Flow Window feature, which lets you run up to four apps simultaneously in resizeable windows. Is four apps too much? Yes. But is it logical? Also yes. I thought it was overkill till I was at the airport and had to urgently submit my invoices. I opened Google Sheets (to create the invoice), Calculator (to calculate my month’s income for taxes), Keep (to take tax notes), and Chrome (to cross-check my published work.

I could do all of this on a slab phone by constantly flipping between each app. However, having the ability to run all of these apps without exiting another and resize them to your liking truly helps save time and effort. I’ve also used this feature to take notes while attending meetings and referencing shared PDFs simultaneously.

I’d love to have this feature on the iPhone Fold with an iPad-like taskbar at the bottom. It could make the iPhone Ultra like an iPad Mini when unfolded but one that fits inside my pocket.

More iOS tweaks for intuitive use

The iOS 27 redesign could touch Siri, Search, Camera, Safari, Weather, Image Playground and more. For the sake of iPhone Fold’s big screen, I hope it also adds two things to the system user interface.

First, I’d love to get a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7-like sidebar. It might not sound very useful in theory but every foldable phone has this feature now, and it is for a good reason. When AI Select was first rolled out on a Samsung phone, it was only possible to access it through the sidebar. This Galaxy AI feature allowed me to highlight a portion of my current screen and suggest contextual actions.

For instance, I used it to add Calendar events from my emails. I could open an email invite, swipe the sidebar to access AI Select and highlight the event information to automatically have the date, time and address on my Calendar app. Unless you have Gemini enabled on your Gmail account, you’d need to manually add these details to create a Calendar event.

I also use the sidebar to access the Files app and other apps for pop-up (like Calculator), which I don’t have on my taskbar. While the Bloomberg report said a sidebar could make its way to certain apps, I’d love to have system-wide accessibility so I can use it on top of my on-screen content, no matter what app I’m currently using.

Second, I want more smartphone manufacturers to borrow Honor’s extended folders. It helps keep apps within one-tap access, while also letting me group them. It is the best of both worlds – having a folder as well as a single app icon on the screen.

This feature was adopted by more Android skins last year but most of them are limited to three apps. Honor allows me to add up to five apps in a vertical or horizontal extended folder, which groups my favorite apps without needing me to tap on a folder to access them. It is a neat feature that I’ve missed immensely since I shifted back to my iPhone 17 Pro Max. The best I can do on an iPhone right now is move apps closer to each other, or use Smart Stack to group a few widgets together.

These iOS 27 additions would make the upcoming Apple foldable easier to use and help maximize its big screen utility. I hope we can get our first look at some of them next week at WWDC 26, alongside the other more exciting iOS 27 features. Either way, it is going to be a packed week for Apple software!