[Daily Briefing] 📱 A $2,400 iPhone, 🔓 a perfect-10 exploit, 🐉 a 4,073x IPO

Apple has picked next Wednesday to ask a question it has never really asked before: will people pay laptop money for a phone?

Apple's foldable arrives on 9 September, and the price is the story

The "Surprise and Shine" event is confirmed for Wednesday 9 September, 10:00 Pacific, at Apple Park. Three phones are expected: the iPhone 18 Pro, the 18 Pro Max, and the first foldable, widely tipped to be called iPhone Ultra. It is described as a passport-style book fold, roughly a 5.5 inch cover display opening to about 7.8 inch inside, with liquid metal and ultra-thin glass in the hinge to soften the crease.

The number everyone keeps landing on is 2,400 dollars. If that holds, it is the most expensive iPhone ever sold by a wide margin, and not by a little. Supply is expected to be tight, possibly US-only at launch, in two colours: white and indigo.

The Pro models get a quieter year by comparison. A variable aperture main camera, a smaller Dynamic Island, and Apple's own C2 modem. All three phones run the A20 Pro on a 2nm process, which is the part that will still matter in three years when the foldable novelty has worn off.

Why it matters: this is the first keynote under John Ternus, and Apple is asking for laptop money at exactly the moment memory and component costs are climbing. Whether the crease is invisible is a design question. Whether 2,400 dollars sells is the one that decides if anyone else follows.

Read more

Quick hits

• A perfect 10.0 is being exploited on remote access boxes right now. SonicWall confirmed active exploitation of two SMA1000 flaws on 1 September, and CVE-2026-83548 is pre-authentication, meaning no password is needed at all. Read more
• A Chinese AI chipmaker's IPO was oversubscribed 4,073 times. Roughly 7 million retail investors ordered 42.1 billion Enflame shares against a raise of about 911 million dollars, which tells you more about sentiment than silicon. Read more
• When do RAM prices actually come down? The honest answer is late 2027, and the reasoning is worth understanding before you buy anything with memory in it this year. Read more
• NASA's next telescope is built to find 100,000 planets. The Nancy Grace Roman telescope is not a Webb replacement, it is a survey machine, and the difference explains what it will actually see. Read more
• Self-host a model or rent an API? We ran the actual numbers rather than the hype, and the crossover point is probably further away than you think. Read more

Tool of the day

Shodan. Given the SonicWall story above, the useful exercise today is finding out what your own connection looks like from the outside. Shodan indexes internet-facing devices, and its free tier is enough to look up your own public IP and see which services are answering the door.

Honest take: the free tier is genuinely limited, the interface assumes you already know what a banner is, and it will happily show you things about your network that ruin your afternoon. That last part is the point.

So: is a 2,400 dollar phone a real product or a very expensive proof of concept? Hit reply and tell me whether you would ever buy one.

Nath, Future Technology

Forwarded? Get your own free briefing at futuretechnologyhq.com/newsletter

Some links may be affiliate links.