Future Technology[Daily Briefing] 📱 Apple folds Wednesday, 💾 RAM up 110%, 🪐 Moon eats Jupiter
Morning. Apple opens its foldable era on Wednesday, memory prices are doing something genuinely unprecedented, and tonight the Moon swallows a planet eleven times wider than Earth. Here is the briefing.
Apple's first foldable lands Wednesday, and the crease is the only spec that matters
Apple's Surprise and Shine keynote runs Wednesday 9 September at 10:00 Pacific. The headline device is the first foldable iPhone, widely expected to be called iPhone Ultra: a roughly 5.5 inch outer OLED that opens into about 7.8 inches, in a book-style layout closer to a small iPad than a phone.
The reported build is titanium frame, ultra-thin body, Touch ID moved into the power button rather than Face ID, two front cameras and a dual rear system. Pricing estimates cluster around 1,999 dollars to start, with higher configurations reported as far as 2,500. That would make it the most expensive iPhone Apple has ever sold, by a wide margin.
Alongside it: iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max, new Apple Watches and new AirPods. There is no standard iPhone 18 this autumn, which breaks a release cadence that has held for a decade. The cheaper models are reported to be moving to spring 2027.
Why it matters: Samsung has been shipping folding phones since 2019 and the category never went mainstream. Apple arriving five years late at two thousand dollars is either the moment foldables become normal, or the moment we find out they were always a niche. Watch the first ninety seconds of every hands-on video. Everyone will run a fingertip down that screen, and the crease is the entire pitch.
Quick hits
- PC memory prices are up as much as 110 percent in a single quarter. Samsung, SK hynix and Micron are shifting production away from ordinary DDR5 toward high bandwidth memory for AI accelerators, and Nvidia has warned its manufacturers to expect AI server price rises above 15 percent in early 2027. The full picture on RAM pricing.
- Figure retired its entire robot fleet at BMW Spartanburg after 30,000 cars. A humanoid pilot that actually reached production volume, then got pulled, which tells you more about the economics than any demo video. What the retirement signals.
- Astronomers found real sugar 27,000 light years away. Erythrulose, a genuine sugar rather than a sugar-adjacent molecule, detected in interstellar space with no planet involved. How they spotted it.
- Star formation across the universe has collapsed 59 percent, and the hydrogen is still there. The raw material has not run out, so something else is stopping galaxies from building stars at the old rate. The missing piece.
- CISA flagged seven actively exploited flaws this month. Roughly 2,300 CVEs landed last week. Seven are the ones attackers are actually using, which is the only list worth triaging first. The seven that matter.
Tool of the day
Raspberry Pi 5, 8GB. With RAM and SSD prices climbing, the cheapest way to stop paying monthly for photo storage, password syncing and document scanning is a small machine you already own the hardware for. A Pi 5 will comfortably run Immich, Vaultwarden and Paperless-ngx together. It will not run a Plex transcoding farm, and it is not a NAS replacement, so be honest about the ceiling before you buy.
If you want the full build, including the mini PC and Beelink options that handle heavier workloads, we costed all three tiers against the subscriptions they replace: the 2026 home server build.
One more thing
Tonight and tomorrow the Moon passes directly in front of Jupiter, hiding it for close to an hour. The Moon is 3,474 kilometres across, Jupiter is 139,820. Distance is the only reason the small one wins.
Quick question for you: if the foldable really does start at 1,999 dollars, is that a hard no, or would you still want to hold one first? Hit reply and tell me, I read every one.
Nath
Future Technology
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