Vitamix has earned quite a reputation in the best blenders conversation thanks to its powerful motors, which deliver impressive results. But for the better part of a century, the well-known brand has offered only full-size blenders, with the option to purchase a $150 personal cup adapter separately. Until now.
On Monday, Vitamix launched the Nano, its first-ever personal, single-serve blender.
The Nano was created with SmoothiePilot, the brand’s first adaptive smoothie program. Built with machine learning and specific to the Nano, SmoothiePilot automatically selects the optimal blending speed and duration for whatever you put in the cup, the company said in a press release. Its stainless steel blades blend smoothies, frozen cocktails, post-workout shakes, ice and more.
With a single dial on the 1,000-watt Nano, you can select SmoothiePilot or opt for variable speed.
The Nano comes with two BPA-free, 20-ounce Tritan cups designed to fit most cup holders and two to-go drink lids. Once you’re done with your beverage, you can pop the cups back onto the blender’s base, add a drop of dish soap and warm water, then blend to clean.
Available in black or white and sporting a cohesive look with its larger counterparts, the Nano is 15.3 inches tall, 4.3 inches less than CNET’s pick for best overall blender, the Vitamix VX1, but 2.39 inches taller than our pick for best personal blender, Ninja’s BlendBoss.
The Nano can now be purchased for $200 on Vitamix.com and comes with a three-year limited warranty on the Nano’s motor base, blade base and cups. Starting Monday, select retailers, including Amazon, will also carry the Nano.
The $3,000 to $4,000 headphone category is not suffering from a shortage of interesting engineering.
Planar magnetic designs from Audeze, Meze Audio, HiFiMAN and ZMF dominate much of the conversation, while HEDD Audio recently reminded us with the HEDDphone TWO GT that a full range Air Motion Transformer can play in the same league without copying anyone else’s homework.
ETA Audio is taking an entirely different route with the $3,499 ULI, an ultra open dynamic headphone built around an AlNiCo magnetic motor, 50mm biocellulose diaphragm and an underhung silver plated copper voice coil. The boutique American manufacturer will demonstrate the ULI at CanJam SoCal 2026, which runs August 29 and 30 at the Irvine Marriott in California.
If you thought we had reached the point where every possible way of moving a headphone diaphragm had already been tried, apparently nobody told ETA.
ETA Audio is a small headphone company established in 2020, with a team based in New York and California. Co-founder Ev Schaaf leads acoustic engineering, while co-founder Tommy Tak handles product design and development. The company describes its approach as heavily influenced by DIY audio culture and community listening sessions, with its headphones assembled and tuned in small batches.
The ULI (which stands for Ultra Low Impedance) represents its eighth generation of driver development and sits far above earlier ETA models in both ambition and price. At $3,499, nobody gets bonus points anymore for being small, clever or enthusiastic. The headphone has to compete with some very serious established products.
AlNiCo is an alloy of aluminum, nickel, cobalt and iron that has a long history in loudspeaker drivers, guitar speakers and vintage professional audio products. Modern headphone manufacturers generally use powerful neodymium magnets instead, making ETA’s choice unusually exotic for this application.
ETA says the different electromechanical properties of AlNiCo contribute to lower distortion, higher efficiency and the smoother decay characteristics it was seeking from the ULI. Those are manufacturer claims that will ultimately require measurements and listening to evaluate, but using AlNiCo in a modern headphone motor is unquestionably unusual.
The motor uses a long gap, short coil configuration, with the voice coil designed to remain within the magnetic field throughout its excursion. ETA pairs that system with a 50mm biocellulose paper diaphragm, consisting of a 7 micron dome and 5 micron ribbed PET suspension.
The voice coil uses silver plated copper and the headphone has a nominal impedance of just 16 ohms.
That last number requires some context.
The ULI is rated at only 81 dB/mW sensitivity, which is low for a headphone. Its 16 ohm impedance therefore should not be interpreted as permission to plug it into the headphone jack on whatever happens to be sitting nearby and expect the best from it.
A capable amplifier with substantial current delivery makes far more sense, and ETA’s CanJam demonstration systems provide a clue about how seriously it takes amplification. The company plans to demonstrate the ULI with a Pass Labs HPA-1C, its own $2,999 Bravo 6V6 Class A tube amplifier, and a separate Topping D900/A900 solid state system.
Nobody is bringing a Lightning dongle to this particular knife fight.
The ULI uses a Multi Jet Fusion fused nylon chassis, stainless steel headband, suspension strap and a deliberately open rear grille designed to minimize acoustic obstruction behind the driver.
ETA currently specifies the headphone at under 500 grams. Two sets of 145 x 125 x 30mm ear pads, a Pelican hard shell case, stock cable and documentation are included. Buyers can order cables terminated with 6.35mm, 4 pin XLR or 4.4mm connectors.
ETA has not published a conventional frequency response specification on the current product page, nor has it announced a firm shipping date. The ULI is presently available for preorder at $3,499.
The most obvious comparison is the Audio-Technica ATH-ADX7000, another $3,499 open back dynamic flagship. We spent time with it at CanJam NYC earlier this year and came away impressed by its speed, transparency and unusually spacious presentation. Audio-Technica gets there through a very different high impedance dynamic architecture, but the price makes the two unavoidable competitors.
ZMF Atrium is another relevant dynamic alternative. Its $2,499 open back design also uses a biocellulose driver, but pairs it with an N52 neodymium motor and ZMF’s own acoustic damping system. Move to the $3,499 ZMF Caldera, and the competition switches to planar magnetic technology at exactly the same price as the ULI.
Then there is the $2,199 HEDDphone TWO GT, which we recently reviewed. Its full range AMT takes yet another route and proved that being technically different can matter when the resulting headphone actually delivers musically.
That is the challenge facing ETA. Audiophiles spending $3,499 are not buying an interesting science project.
The ETA ULI stands out because almost nobody in modern headphone design is building around an AlNiCo motor, and ETA has combined that old school magnetic material with a thoroughly modern 50mm biocellulose driver, underhung voice coil and highly open chassis.
Whether that translates into a sonic advantage over the ATH-ADX7000, ZMF Atrium, Caldera or the increasingly diverse group of planar, dynamic and AMT flagships is something that has to be heard rather than inferred from metallurgy.
Fortunately, CanJam exists for precisely this kind of nonsense.
The ETA ULI will be demonstrated throughout CanJam SoCal 2026 on August 29 and 30 at the Irvine Marriott, giving headphone enthusiasts their first good opportunity on the West Coast to decide whether AlNiCo deserves a comeback outside the loudspeaker world.
Where to buy: $3,499 at ETA Headphones
SECURITY
Attackers now ready to exploit how things work, rather than just break them, says Oracle support expert
In late July, Oracle released a mammoth security patch dump with 1,449 patches, in a perhaps unprecedented bad day for database admins.
None of them, it turns out, would have prevented the credential theft on an Oracle database server described by security platform Huntress.
“Even if it had been fully patched, everything working, it still would have happened,” said Craig Savage, cybersecurity lead at Oracle third-party support vendor Spinnaker Support, referring to the attack.
In July, Huntress was alerted to credential theft activity, according to a post from the security company. The attack involved a “simple” SQL injection exploiting an unnamed organization’s public-facing web app.
Although SQL injections have a long history and are easy to avoid with good info-sec housekeeping, what happened next was more unusual.
“After gaining initial access, the threat actor dropped a post-exploitation toolkit (called khunt) via a Java Source within an Oracle database, which is a novel aspect of this attack,” Huntress said.
Because a code-object can be loaded directly in Oracle’s database engine, the malicious actors were able to upload their toolkit directly into the database.
“This is a technique that’s previously been discussed and described over the years, including via a technique described as oraexec – however, the use of the technique in the wild has rarely been documented,” Huntress said.
Oracle’s database has an embedded Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and users can take Java source code and store it as a database object. “This is what attackers did during this incident: they fed CREATE JAVA SOURCE commands to the Oracle database from [Java implementation] Tomcat, through the [database] connection, and the Java source code contained within was then compiled directly inside the database as a stored schema object,” the vendor said.
Speaking to The Register, Savage said: “Oracle has its own JDK. You are able to build and run Oracle Java programs within the database. It should never be something a web server can do. In fact, in a production Oracle environment, it should be locked down. It should only be re-enabled during a development or maintenance window, for example. It was poorly configured, poorly secured, but it wasn’t an Oracle breach.”
The ability to run Java in the database should be limited to only the DBA user, Savage argued, and users should disable the ability to compile code on a production server. “If they’d done that, it would have downloaded that Java code, and JDK would not have been configured to compile it,” he said.
Savage said cybercriminals were seeking to exploit this kind of functionality more commonly, rather than simply looking to find and use vulnerabilities.
“We’re starting to see more and more of this: these cybercrime gangs now know about these products. They don’t just know how to break them. They also know what legitimate functionality they could potentially use if it’s been turned on, and that’s what we saw here. That’s the wake-up call. Oracle published something like 1450-ish patches. Organizations are totally focused on patch, patch, patch, but you still need to do the basics,” he said. ®
The premium car audio arms race has become wonderfully ridiculous.
Genesis just unveiled a 25-speaker Bang & Olufsen system with a discrete 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos layout for its flagship GV90. Cadillac has stuffed 38 AKG speakers into the Escalade IQ. BMW offers 36 Bowers & Wilkins speakers in the 7 Series, while Volvo continues expanding Dolby Atmos and Apple Music Spatial Audio across its latest Bowers & Wilkins-equipped EVs.
Porsche, apparently deciding that another dozen loudspeakers would be too obvious, has gone after the semiconductors instead.
The German automaker has developed what it describes as the world’s first production-ready high-end automotive audio system to incorporate gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductor technology, with the first application scheduled to reach a future Porsche vehicle in 2027. The technology is being integrated into Porsche’s Burmester 3D High-End Surround Sound System and was developed with the University of Stuttgart.
There is an important technical distinction here. Porsche has not announced that every amplifier stage in the Burmester system is becoming a GaN design.
A GaN-based high-performance chip is being used for the voltage conversion required to power the system’s 400-watt subwoofer amplifier. That may sound less dramatic than proclaiming that Porsche has invented a giant GaN-powered stereo on wheels, but it is also considerably more accurate.
Gallium nitride is already familiar to anyone following modern Class D amplification and compact power supplies. Compared with conventional silicon semiconductors, GaN devices can switch at higher frequencies with lower losses, helping engineers reduce heat and shrink some of the supporting circuitry.
Those advantages are particularly useful inside a car, where packaging space and weight matter far more than they do in a listening room.
Porsche says the improved efficiency allows the Burmester amplifier’s heat sink to be approximately 20 percent lighter, while passive components including capacitors and inductors can also be made smaller.
That 20 percent figure applies specifically to the heat sink, not the complete amplifier or audio system.
The project began in mid-2023, when Porsche engineers started investigating whether GaN could meet the thermal, durability and packaging demands of an automotive environment.
Beginning in spring 2024, Porsche audio, semiconductor and sustainability specialists worked with the Institute for Robust Power Semiconductor Systems at the University of Stuttgart to develop a prototype GaN-based subwoofer amplifier.
Porsche subsequently worked with an unnamed international semiconductor manufacturer and an audio development partner to turn the concept into a production-ready design. The company says several patent applications have resulted from the project.
The first production application is scheduled for 2027, although Porsche has not disclosed which model will receive it first.
We also don’t know the complete speaker configuration, total amplifier output, option price or whether the first GaN-equipped system will otherwise mirror one of Porsche’s existing Burmester installations.
The current electric Porsche Macan provides useful context.
Its $6,010 optional Burmester 3D High-End Surround Sound System uses 21 speakers, 21 amplifier channels and 1,470 watts of total system output, including a 400-watt active subwoofer.
Porsche has also been expanding its immersive audio capabilities. For model year 2026, compatible vehicles equipped with premium Bose or Burmester systems gained support for Dolby Atmos through the latest Porsche Communication Management platform.
The GaN project therefore isn’t replacing Porsche’s broader push toward immersive audio and advanced DSP. It is addressing the electrical hardware underneath those systems.
We have been watching this transformation accelerate throughout 2026.
The Genesis GV90 arrives with a 25-speaker Bang & Olufsen Premier 3D system configured as a 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos layout, including four overhead speakers. Acoustic Lens Technology, cabin isolation and B&O’s Virtual Venue processing make it one of the more ambitious factory systems announced this year.
The Cadillac Escalade IQ’s 38-speaker AKG Dolby Atmos system was also one of the best automotive immersive audio demonstrations we heard at NAMM 2026. Its success wasn’t simply about the speaker count; the system worked because the drivers, processing, bass reproduction and cabin were engineered together.
BMW’s current 7 Series offers a 36-speaker Bowers & Wilkins Diamond Surround Sound System with Dolby Atmos, while Volvo continues pursuing the same immersive direction with Bowers & Wilkins systems in vehicles including the EX60, EX90 and ES90.
Premium automotive audio is no longer defined by attaching a famous hi-fi badge to a door grille and hoping somebody notices before signing the lease. Cabin acoustics, streaming platforms, DSP, amplification and immersive formats are increasingly being developed as parts of the same system.
Porsche’s GaN project adds semiconductor efficiency to that equation.
What separates Porsche’s announcement from most recent high-end car audio launches is its focus.
Genesis, Cadillac, BMW and Volvo are primarily pushing immersive playback, additional channels and more sophisticated cabin processing. Porsche is working deeper inside the electronics, attempting to reduce the size, weight and thermal demands of the hardware supplying that performance.
In a sports car or EV, those gains matter.
Nobody should expect this single audio component to produce a meaningful increase in driving range, and Porsche has made no such claim. The significance is more about what could follow.
The company says it is already examining additional GaN applications elsewhere in the vehicle, including power conversion in high-voltage systems used by electric sports cars, while also evaluating broader uses within automotive audio.
The subwoofer amplifier may therefore be the first production application rather than the final objective.
Porsche says the first production implementation of its GaN technology will appear in a future Porsche vehicle in 2027.
The company has not announced the vehicle, U.S. availability, pricing, complete Burmester system specifications or whether the technology will initially be standard equipment or part of an optional audio package.
The Porsche and Burmester GaN project matters because it approaches premium automotive audio from a different direction. While much of the industry is concentrating on Dolby Atmos, DSP and ever-more-elaborate speaker arrays, Porsche is trying to make the electronics behind those systems smaller, lighter and easier to cool.
For now, the application is relatively focused: GaN-based voltage conversion for a 400-watt Burmester subwoofer amplifier arriving in an unnamed Porsche model in 2027.
But if Porsche can expand the technology across more of the audio system and eventually into other areas of the vehicle, this could prove considerably more important than adding another row of speakers to the headliner.
For more information: newsroom.porsche.com
It’s a shame the Fold is only available in two colors: Obsidian, the color of my review unit, looks more like a dark matte gray than black, while Olive Green has a shinier gold frame.
I’m not a fan of Google’s asymmetrical design. With the Pixel 11 Pro Fold closed, there’s a curved corner cutout, and when you open the phone, the two halves have slightly different thicknesses. All folding phones still have a detectable fold line in the middle of the screen when you open them, but Google’s is among the most noticeable. Some folks won’t notice or care, but I’m the kind of guy who goes upstairs to turn the light on so the downstairs switches aren’t misaligned.
The fingerprint sensor in the power button always bugs me when I switch to a folding phone, because I have to pick it up to touch it and unlock the screen, rather than pressing on the screen like most phones. You do have face unlock with the Pixel 11 Pro Fold, and it works well provided there’s ample light, but it still doesn’t work in a dark room, which is still annoying.
You get two lovely, sharp OLED displays in the Pixel 11 Pro Fold: an 8-inch main screen and a 6.5-inch cover screen. Both push peak brightness to 3,600 nits, remaining legible in direct sunlight, and boast a variable refresh rate up to 120 Hz. They’re smooth, with rich colors, and I have nothing to complain about beyond that crease.
I’m not convinced the 11 Pro Fold earns the “Pro” in its title. It does have the new HiLight feature, a group of color LEDs in the camera module’s flash that light up different colors based on who is calling, or swirl through the rainbow while you chat to Gemini. It’s neat, if a little underbaked. It’s handy if you put your phone face down when you’re working or trying to relax, but it’s a very minor feature.
All the Pixels get the new Tensor G6 processor, and the Fold has 16 GB of RAM paired with 256 GB, 512 GB, or 1 TB of storage. Switching from the Pixel 10 Pro XL, it was mostly smooth sailing. But it froze a couple of times in split-screen view in Gmail and after launching an app on the outer display, then unfolding the inner display.
The 11 Pro Fold actually has more in common with the regular Pixel 11, because it misses out on the high-end camera in its Pro siblings. Folding phones struggle to match flagships on camera specs because of form-factor limitations, and they must include two front-facing cameras (one for open and one for closed).
Photograph: Simon Hill
ON-PREM
State and local regulators would decide whether the public gets a say on minor-source permits
Soon, you may not even be able to find out what that new neighborhood bit barn could do to your air quality. A proposed change by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would eliminate federal minimum requirements for public participation in minor-source air permits, a move critics warn could affect some datacenter projects.
The Environmental Protection Network, which is made up of former employees of the EPA itself, says the proposed rule change would eliminate mandatory public notice and comment requirements for so-called minor New Source Review (NSR) industrial air pollution permits in state plans under the Clean Air Act (CAA).
Instead, state and local air quality regulatory authorities would be able to determine whether and to what extent public participation in minor NSR programs is necessary, effectively allowing them to decide whether the public is notified about new sources of pollution or modifications to existing sources.
The EPN, which has submitted formal public comments on the proposed changes, warns that it would leave communities in the dark regarding industrial developments. These could include large-scale, fossil-fueled power generators for AI datacenters that may be permitted as minor or synthetic-minor sources, and therefore avoid more stringent major-source review, it claims.
“By eliminating the long-standing federal requirement for public notice, this proposal continues efforts by the current administration to turn its back on the fundamental EPA principle of transparency,” said Mike Koerber, a former deputy director of EPA’s Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards.
We asked the EPA for comment.
The agency’s current administrator, Lee Zeldin, stated earlier this year that the Trump administration was not going to set national-level environmental rules for the growing datacenter industry. He argued that state and local governments were best equipped to make such decisions, as local conditions like water availability, air quality, and electricity needs differ between regions.
But the EPN says that the current proposal directly contradicts Zeldin’s earlier transparency memorandum, which pledged that “the public must be able to trust our work” and called for “the fullest possible public participation in our decision making.”
Without public review, facilities such as datacenters may be able to avoid major-source controls on pollution altogether, it warns.
The build boom in new server farms to profit from the AI gold rush has often run into difficulties when it comes to getting a connection to the grid. Rather than wait years, many developers or operators opt for on-site power generation, typically supplied by gas-burning turbines. But this can have an effect on local communities, thanks to emissions of smog-generating nitrogen oxides (NOx) and other pollutants.
This comes against a background of rising public opposition to bit barns, with a recent Gallup survey finding that more than 70 percent of Americans would be against the construction of a facility in their neighborhood.
But President Trump has become more vocal in his backing for datacenters. Speaking out about the Texas governor’s decision to pause new grid-connection approvals for datacenter projects, he claimed it would be a mistake to push back on datacenters, saying “taxes are going to go way down because this is a tremendous source of income.” ®
Apple Maps ads have finally arrived after months of buildup, with the first sponsored listings rolling out on iPhones across the US and Canada.
In March, Apple confirmed it would bring ads to Apple Maps. The ads were part of the greater Apple Business rollout.
It wasn’t known exactly when Apple would begin rolling out the ads, but the company had set a tentative release date for Summer 2026. And, true to its word, we’re now seeing ads popping up in Apple Maps.
When you open Apple Maps on iPhone, you’ll see ads in two key places. The first is when you tap the search bar, but before you search for anything specific.
The second is in the actual search results. Apple has said that results will only appear here when relevant.
Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the rollout began in the past few days. Ads are rolling out gradually in parts of the US and Canada.
Apple has promised a privacy-first advertising model. Unsurprisingly, the rules for advertising on Apple Maps are significantly stricter than those of Google Maps.
For instance, Apple Maps has strict prohibitions on certain advertising categories outright. Banned categories include bail bonding services and cryptocurrency ATMs.
Additionally, any home services ads are also banned. Medical services aren’t banned outright, but will need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Apple could raise the iPhone 18 Pro’s starting price to $1,199 as component costs climb.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman floated that figure and said it would follow the roughly $100 price increases Samsung and Google already applied to their own flagship phones this year, both citing rising memory costs across the industry.
Apple has kept its iPhone starting price frozen for several years even as it raised storage tiers and shifted other costs elsewhere, a restraint that has left base models with specifications increasingly behind rival phones at the same price point.
Behind that pressure sit sharp increases in RAM pricing driven by AI data centre demand, alongside the higher per-unit cost of the 2nm process TSMC will use for the A20 Pro chip inside the iPhone 18 Pro compared with the 3nm process behind the A19 Pro.
Apple has already applied similar increases across most of its non-iPhone lineup and raised prices by an average of 23%, with a $200 jump for the MacBook Air and a $500 jump for the Mac Studio.
Gurman estimates that a matching $100 increase would put the iPhone 18 Pro at $1,199, a 9% rise over the iPhone 17 Pro‘s $1,099 starting price, with the larger iPhone 18 Pro Max expected to start closer to $1,299.
Historical jumps of that scale remain rare, since only the iPhone X‘s rise to $999 in 2017 was a steeper 54% increase over the iPhone 8, a leap tied to an entirely new device category much like the first iPhone Fold, expected to cost over $2,000 when Apple announces it on 9 September.
Apple has generally preferred to protect its headline pricing by raising base storage tiers or trimming its own margins instead, an approach it reportedly took with the iPhone 17 rather than adjusting the sticker price outright.
Gurman notes that Apple has already warned investors about margin pressure this quarter, a signal that the company may absorb part of the higher component costs rather than pass the full amount on to buyers.
New payment plans are also said to ease the impact of any price rise for customers upgrading their handsets, though Apple has not confirmed final pricing ahead of the iPhone 18 series launch expected in September.
Healthcare and services provider Nutex is investigating a data breach incident where an unauthorized third party exfiltrated information from company servers.
The organization has disclosed the cyberattack in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), noting that the stolen data includes details that may be private or confidential.
“Based on preliminary findings from the Company’s ongoing investigation, the Company believes that certain information maintained on the Company’s servers was accessed and exfiltrated by an unauthorized third party, including some information that may be private and/or confidential,” Nutex says.
Nutex Health is a for-profit healthcare company that operates 28 facilities across 12 states, including the Bayou City ER & Hospital in Texas and Green Bay ER & Hospital in Wisconsin.
The company had an annual revenue of $875 million in 2025, a market capitalization of $1.28 billion, and is publicly traded as NUTX on the Nasdaq Capital Market.
After detecting the intrusion, the company hired external incident-response and forensic specialists, activated its cybersecurity response plan, implemented containment measures, and notified law enforcement.
Nutex has yet to determine the type of data that may have been compromised and if the impact includes patients, employees, or business partners.
“The Company continues to assess whether, and to what extent, patient, employee, credentialed provider, confidential business and financial information, intellectual property, or other information may have been accessed, acquired, or exfiltrated and continues to evaluate the potential impact of the unauthorized activity on the Company, including any potential disclosure of private and/or confidential information by the third party,” reads the SEC filing.
As of August 24, the company says it found no material impact on its operations or financial reporting systems, and it currently does not believe the incident will materially affect its business strategy, operations, financial condition, or results.
BleepingComputer could not find any threat actor claiming the attack on Nutex.
We contacted Nutex for a comment about the incident and we will update this post as soon as we receive a response.
Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.
The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.
There are times when turning off Find My is necessary, but you should always have it on otherwise to keep your phone safe.
Apple’s Find My service will help you locate your iPhone, iPad or other Apple device that has been lost, stolen or simply misplaced. It relies on Apple’s Find My network, which is a crowdsourced system where other people’s Apple devices use Bluetooth to detect the location of your item — in some cases, even when it’s switched off. It then reports the approximate location of the device to you.
While the feature can be a life-saver, there are instances when you should switch it off. Primarily, Apple recommends disabling Find My before selling, giving away or trading in your device, as well as if you’re sending it in for repair. This ensures technicians won’t be hampered by security features and can properly run diagnostics to figure out what’s wrong with your device. However, disabling Find My at other times will reduce your phone’s security.
If you’re selling or giving away your device, the process to factory reset your iPhone (Settings > General > Transfer or Reset iPhone > Erase all Content and Settings) is the easiest way to disable Find My. This will ask for your Apple Account password to make sure it’s you wiping the device, and automatically disables Find My as part of the reset process.
Importantly, turning off Find My also disables Activation Lock, which links your Apple Account to the device. When Activation Lock is enabled, your device cannot be used without entering your Apple Account credentials, even if someone factory resets it. This means someone who steals your iPhone can’t wipe it to resell it.
In case your phone was lost or stolen, erasing it remotely via Find My or iCloud on a computer will not switch off Find My and Activation Lock. Those features will continue protecting your device and letting you track it.
If you’re not planning to factory reset your phone, such as when sending your device in for repairs, you’ll have to disable Find My manually. Thankfully, this is easy: go to Settings > [Your Name] > Find My. Tap Find My iPhone and then toggle it off. This option will be grayed out if Stolen Device Protection is enabled, which is the default as of iOS 26.4.
Stolen Device Protection implements additional security measures when your iPhone is away from familiar locations, such as your home or workplace. It’s designed to protect your data if someone steals your phone and knows your passcode. Your device will require Face ID or Touch ID to access sensitive info like stored passwords, and it adds a delay before changing crucial settings like your Apple Account password.
If you need to switch off Find My, you first have to disable Stolen Device Protection. You should ideally do this while at home to avoid the aforementioned security delays. To do so, go to Settings > Face ID & Passcode > Stolen Device Protection and toggle it off. To re-enable these features after your device is serviced, follow the same steps to toggle them back on.
Find My also lets you share your location with friends and family; if you disable it, this won’t work anymore. If you’re concerned about a particular friend having access to your location, removing their access is better than turning off the entire Find My suite. Open the Find My app, tap the People tab, choose the person, and hit Stop Sharing My Location. Unless they’re on an “older operating system,” they won’t be notified that you stopped sharing with them (though they may notice when they don’t see your name in the Find My app anymore). And others won’t know when you check their location using the app.
The most obvious answer is also the most important: once you disable Find My, you cannot locate your device through Apple’s network anymore. If you lose your iPhone with Find My switched off, you won’t be able to check its location through the Find My app on another of your Apple devices or the iCloud site in a browser.
Find My’s suite of features also includes Lost Mode, which enables you to display a custom message with your number on the screen for anyone who finds it. This won’t be available once the feature is disabled, and Activation Lock will no longer protect the phone either. Because of all this, you should only disable Find My when you’re sending your phone to a trusted repair center, and re-enable the feature as soon as you get the phone back.
There’s one major scenario in which you should never disable Find My: after you’ve lost your device, especially if you receive intimidating messages about doing so. There are hundreds of stories on Reddit about people who lost their phones and later received messages demanding they disable Find My. They’ll threaten to publish the personal data on your phone, or make up sad stories about wanting to harm themselves because the phone they bought for their child isn’t working.
If this happens to you, do not remove the device from your Apple Account. Because of Activation Lock, your lost phone is useless to someone who’s stolen it and is trying to resell it — as long as you keep Find My enabled. You can erase the phone to know your data is safe, but don’t give these crooks what they want.
Unitree’s shares have fallen roughly 45% from the peak they hit on their first day of trading in Shanghai. The slide has turned a national success story into an argument about how China prices its listings.
The stock steadied on Tuesday after three consecutive days of decline, Reuters reported. The valuation of the Hangzhou humanoid robot maker reached $66bn at one point. It has since dropped by $30bn.
Unitree finished its debut up 460%. Newly listed Chinese stocks have gained an average of 226% on their first day over the past three years. Even in a market used to opening-day surges, that stood out.
Unitree listed on 19 August at 150.8 yuan a share, valuing the company near $9bn. The $66bn peak came later, intraday, once the market had its say.
Dong Baozhen chairs the Beijing asset manager Lingtong Shengtai. The distance between the offer price and the debut means “either one of them must be wrong”, he told Reuters. He thinks the debut was the mispriced one.
Debut performance is the barometer of market mood, Dong said, and exuberant mood breeds bubbles. The technology revolution narrative carried investors away. All bubbles are doomed to burst, he added.
Unitree’s adjusted net profit fell 53% in the first three months of 2026, to 40mn yuan, or about $5.95mn. The figure comes from the company’s own prospectus.
Its machines are famous for running, dancing and performing martial arts. One of them beat Usain Bolt’s 100m record at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing this month. Roboticists were quick to qualify that result.
Broader commercial applications have been harder to come by. Analysts had put the company’s likely worth at $7bn or more in the weeks before the float.
The company competes with Tesla and with Boston Dynamics, which Hyundai Motor Group owns. Its backers include Tencent, Alibaba and the AI developer DeepSeek. Founder Wang Xingxing holds about a third of the shares.
Chinese stock exchanges vet listing candidates. They also guide IPO pricing, which limits how far bankers can move to meet feverish demand. Analysts told Reuters that this distorts prices.
Two other features compound it. Regulators carry a duty to shield small investors from harm, and rules restrict short-selling. An overpriced listing therefore meets no immediate pushback from anyone betting against it. Bankers described that combination to Reuters.
Unitree’s fast-tracked listing on the STAR Market carried its own signal. The board takes only hard-tech companies in China’s national strategic industries. Analysts read a place on it as government blessing.
Abraham Zhang chairs the venture capital firm China Europe Capital. He told Reuters that a desire to pump up the shares and dump them later at lofty prices drove the debut, rather than any rosy prospect.
Loopholes in the IPO system let major shareholders cash in, Zhang said. The risk then moves to small investors buying in the secondary market. Those who won allocations walked away with smiles, he added.
Yuan Yuwei, a hedge fund manager at Trinity Synergy Investments, put it more bluntly. A stock worth 10 yuan can open at 100 yuan and then slide for years. He called it a rip-off.
Restricted short-selling is what makes those schemes possible in the first place, Yuan said.
Retail demand for the offer had been extraordinary. Small investors oversubscribed it more than 8,000 times, a STAR Market record, which left an allocation rate near 0.018%. Almost everyone who wanted the stock had to buy it after trading opened.
One retail investor who lost money wrote in a blog post that he supports Chinese innovation. He also wrote that the rapid concentration of wealth cannot be built on the pains of retail investors.
Not everyone reads the fall as a verdict on robotics. Gao Xingkun manages a fund at China Southern Asset Management, and he told an online roadshow that judging these companies on profit alone is unfair.
Many robot makers spend heavily on research while commercial orders are not yet in sight, Gao said. He compared the moment to the early years of China’s electric vehicle industry, which now dominates its category.
Unitree’s founder Wang Xingxing has made a version of the same argument. Robots are approaching a ‘ChatGPT moment’, he said last week, days after the listing.
The memory chipmaker CXMT saw its shares climb 466% on its own Shanghai debut last month, a near-identical pattern in a different strategic industry.
Scarcity plays a part. Only 21 companies went public in Shanghai during the first seven months of this year, against 104 in Hong Kong, because of tight regulatory scrutiny.
Yuan said investors chase what few opportunities there are. There are not many good companies in China’s stock market, he told Reuters.
A queue of domestic rivals is preparing to list, and Unitree’s debut was meant to set the tone for them. It still may, though not in the way those companies would have chosen.
European robotics has no comparable listing to point to, and its builders are earlier. UMA, founded by an ex-Tesla Optimus scientist, is building Europe’s humanoid from a much smaller base of capital.
Most accounts call that gap a European weakness. The past week offers a reading in which slower capital is not only a handicap. A listing that swings by $30bn in three sessions tells a founder very little about demand for the product.
The question the Shanghai market is now asking is whether the demonstrations that made Unitree famous convert into recurring orders. Zhang expects more of these episodes, saying the capital drama at Unitree is not the first in China and will not be the last.
Weekend Open Thread: Madewell – Corporette.com
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