iPhone Duo Receives Highest iFixit Repairability Score for a Foldable

iFixit has performed one of its famed teardowns, this time taking apart the all-new iPhone Duo to determine how repairable Apple’s first-gen foldable really is.

The iPhone Duo is Apple’s long-awaited entry in the foldable phone market. In typical Apple fashion, the company learned from the industry to see what worked and what didn’t, and then integrated some of the best ideas from market leaders.

One area where they seem to be outpacing more established competitors, however, is in the realm of repairability. According to iFixit, the Duo is the most repairable foldable currently available.

The iPhone Duo earns a provisional 5 out of 10 for repairability, the highest score we’ve given a foldable smartphone so far.

The outer screen survived removal, the batteries released cleanly, and smaller components are fairly accessible. Apple has already published its repair manual. Our score’s provisional because we’re still waiting on replacement parts, though we expect them to arrive through Apple’s self-service program soon.

The inner display and hinge account for the biggest deduction. Replacing them takes a lot of work, and the price could put owners off repairing the phone at all. Many are opting for Apple Care+ coverage for this reason (great if you don’t mind yet another monthly subscription fee). The early reports of screen failures make clear that display replacement is more than a distant possibility.

For a first attempt, Apple has done well. The easy battery removal alone is something we’d like to see on every foldable. But of course we’ll hold Apple accountable for making replacement parts available, and here’s hoping that the next generation of the Duo features a more affordable inner display and a more accessible hinge repair.

Despite the (relatively) high score for a foldable, not everything was good news. Some early reports have surfaced of Duo screens cracking or displaying bright lines, in some cases within hours of purchase or even during initial setup. iFixit did extensive testing, but was unable to conclusively nail down the cause. One of the most likely culprits involves the area around the flex cable and central hinge support.

The breaks cluster near the transition from the gap for the crossing flex cable to the central hinge support. The damage we’re seeing in photos isn’t right where the display cable passes through the hinge, but slightly lower, at a point where several edges meet and change how the thin display is supported as it bends.

Similarly, despite having an IP68 rating, which means the phone should be relatively immune to dust, it seems Apple has not fully solved this problem that has plagued foldables since the very first one. iFixit notes its test isn’t an IP test, since IP ratings don’t appear to cover a foldable’s hinge mechanism. To see where dust ends up, iFixit used a glowing dust that is finer than beach sand, but not dissimilar to the kind of dust and dirt found in an office environment.

In the tests, the dust managed to get into the phone, even resulting in crunching sounds from the hinge. To be fair, the Duo performed better in this test than the Pixel 11 Pro Fold, which also sports an IP68 rating, or the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8, which has an IP48 rating.

All in all, Apple’s first foray into the foldable market is shaping up to be a strong showing. Even the issues iFixit uncovered are not unexpected for a first-gen device, and early adopters can rest easy knowing they have the most repairable foldable available.

from WebProNews https://ift.tt/8mjxgfT

Outside Big Tech, Apollo’s Torsten Slok Sees Zero Payoff From AI So Far

Revenue per worker is climbing at the seven biggest tech companies and going nowhere at the other 493 members of the S&P 500. Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, put that gap at the center of a note posted Saturday, and his read on it was blunt: “the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech.”

Profit margins show the same split in his charts, rising for the so-called Mag 7 and flat for everyone else. A third chart, built on the San Francisco Fed’s utilization-adjusted productivity series, shows no sign yet of AI lifting productivity growth. The note lands days before Microsoft reports Wednesday, with Alphabet’s call that same afternoon and Amazon’s on Thursday. Bloomberg, which picked up the note Sunday, also ran an earnings preview that expects healthy growth from those three companies while warning that AI spending fears threaten to swamp the results.

Tokens keep getting cheaper

Slok’s argument turns on who is buying. Venture-backed companies keep spending more on tokens, he wrote, while mainstream businesses don’t need the newest models and won’t pay for them. With nothing showing up on the bottom line, he said, many of those companies are pulling back and starting to see token spending as a cost center that weighs on margins.

Ramp’s AI Index, which feeds two of his charts, shows adoption still growing, with 55.9% of U.S. businesses on Ramp paying for AI in September, up 12.1 points from a year earlier. The spending is lopsided, though. Among firms on the corporate card platform that pay for AI, the median spent $15.70 per employee in September, while the top 1% spent a median of $9,567.53. Token prices are also falling. The blended price per million tokens across OpenAI and Anthropic dropped 25.4% to $0.64 in the week ending Oct. 11, compared with the same week a month earlier.

Slok’s open question is whether companies can turn “increasingly cheap intelligence” into faster revenue growth and fatter margins. That “may be harder than it sounds,” he wrote, since in business, intelligence is mostly judgment, and judgment depends on context.

Some buyers are still hiring around it

Slok has been making this case since at least a June 30 note that named health care, banking, manufacturing and legal among the slow movers. Executives report wins but struggle to measure them. Half of UK chief executives in EY-Parthenon’s CEO Outlook ranked AI tools among their top three productivity drivers, yet only 14% had full real-time visibility of AI costs, WebProNews reported.

JPMorgan Chase, one of the 493, plans to add staff alongside its AI tools. Its EMEA private bank uses AI for onboarding and research and expects adviser headcount there to grow 10% to 15% over three to five years, its regional chief told Bloomberg.

His conclusion was that “the AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7.”

from WebProNews https://ift.tt/Rti2wkb

r/opensource Bans AI Projects, Along With New Projects and Non-English Posts

A few days after Linux kernel maintainers dropped the requirement to disclose AI use in kernel work, the moderators of Reddit’s r/opensource went the other way. Any project that “uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI” is no longer welcome in the forum, which lists close to 392,000 members.

Moderator Wolvereness laid out the policy in a post Saturday evening titled “Your tokens aren’t valuable: No more AI.” The post calls AI, “as it exists today,” incongruent with the community. By Sunday morning it had drawn roughly 1,180 comments, and much of the thread was critical.

The AI ban is only part of it

Most of the attention has gone to the AI clause, but the new submission criteria reach well past it. A project shared on the subreddit now has to be at least a year old and actively maintained, with multiple contributors (the post says “subjectively 3+”) and an existing community. School-style capstone projects like note-taking apps, PDF viewers and command-line music players are out, as are tools built for AI, with MCP servers named as an example. Projects still need an OSI-approved license.

Posters need an account at least a year old with significant Reddit activity. The moderators also say they can no longer take posts asking for maintainers or contributors, which closes off a common route for a solo developer looking for help with a new project.

The language rule has drawn some of the sharpest objections. “If you don’t speak English, you need to find a different community,” the post says, explaining that moderators “cannot distinguish between AI-written and AI-translated.” Nonprofits incorporated under 501(c) and several related tax designations, or their equivalents abroad, can skip the age and account minimums if they get approval through modmail before posting.

The moderator gave one reason for the strict approach: an estimated 20 messages a day from people seeking exceptions for what the post calls “slop projects and burner accounts.”

Enforcement comes down to judgment

When a commenter asked how anyone would decide that AI use is “obvious,” Wolvereness replied that there is no objective test. “The rule is written so that from a moderation perspective, we’re afforded discretion to remove as much ‘slop’ as necessary,” the moderator wrote.

The Verge, which reported the change Sunday, noted that commenters keep pointing to the Linux kernel, which now contains some AI-generated code. Read strictly, that could put projects built on it at odds with the rule. Linus Torvalds made his own position plain in the kernel mailing list thread behind the disclosure change: “We’re not going to make stupid rules that say “you can’t use tools for X”.”

Unhappy users have already split off. A new subreddit, r/TrueOpenSource, was created Saturday, and its founder pinned a complaint megathread for anyone upset about the rules or a ban. Wolvereness added an edit to the original post wishing the new forum well as “a great refuge for those affected by this policy.”

Some established projects drew similar lines a while ago. Gentoo’s council voted in April 2024 to forbid contributions created with the help of natural language processing AI tools, citing copyright, quality and ethical concerns, while still allowing packages for AI software. NetBSD’s commit guidelines treat code from tools like Copilot or ChatGPT as presumed tainted, and it can’t be committed without prior written approval from the project’s core team.

from WebProNews https://ift.tt/oqMchmB

AI Handles the Busywork as JPMorgan’s EMEA Private Bank Plans to Add Advisers

JPMorgan Chase’s private bank wants more wealth advisers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa over the next few years, and it is counting on AI to let each of them get through more of the work that surrounds a client. Pablo Garnica, chief executive of the bank’s EMEA private bank, told Bloomberg in an interview published Sunday that the unit is using AI to onboard clients, for investment research and for other tasks, with the goal of raising adviser productivity.

He also put a number on hiring. According to Bloomberg’s report, Garnica expects the EMEA adviser count to grow 10% to 15% over the next three to five years, with the bank pushing hardest in continental Europe and still growing in the Middle East.

What the software does for advisers

JPMorgan has described its tools in some detail. When Euromoney named it the world’s best private bank for digital solutions in March, the magazine described Connect Coach, an adviser tool in the bank’s generative AI kit that prepares meeting materials, pulls together market intelligence and suggests next-best actions. The firmwide LLM Suite, the bank’s internal large language model platform, had processed millions of adviser prompts by then.

The client-facing side is narrower by design. Euromoney said the bank deliberately avoids automated portfolio construction and personalized investment advice, using AI instead to summarize material and help clients find existing research. “We are a digitally enabled, not digital only, organisation,” Andrew Catterall, head of digital and data transformation for the international private bank, told the magazine.

JPMorgan’s top executive has been more guarded about AI from outside the bank. On JPMorgan’s earnings call this month, Jamie Dimon said the bank would not let just any outside AI agent into its systems, one of several warnings from bank chiefs about rogue agents that week.

Fewer staff in Geneva, more advisers on the way

The bank’s Swiss subsidiary shows how this plays out in headcount. J.P. Morgan (Suisse) SA ended 2025 with 816 staff, down from 830 a year earlier, a drop its annual report describes as “reflecting operational efficiencies and natural attrition.” The same report says net adviser hiring sped up during the year, with more growth planned for 2026, and that the unit widened its use of AI tools so teams could spend more time on higher-value client work.

Hiring targets are familiar territory for Garnica, who joined JPMorgan in 1996. In a 2022 Bloomberg interview carried by WealthManagement.com, he said, “The headline figure on talent growth is around 10% a year — that’s net growth.” His unit had added 12% to its adviser ranks in 2021.

Citigroup is placing a similar bet on people backed by software. At Citi’s investor day in May, wealth head Andy Sieg said the bank would add more than 400 client advisers and personal bankers in the U.S. and about 100 people at its global private bank, American Banker reported. Citi’s investor day slides include a section on Citi Sky, which the deck calls “intelligence for advisors.” “More advisors means deeper relationships and more investment conversations,” Sieg said.

from WebProNews https://ift.tt/O0RMvmP

Malaysia Says an Investor Picked It for $50 Billion in AI. Bloomberg Says It’s SoftBank’s Son.

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim says one of the world’s largest investors has picked Kuching, in Sarawak, and Peninsular Malaysia for $50 billion of spending on artificial intelligence, new technology and data centers. Bloomberg reported that the investor is Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group.

Anwar disclosed the plan in a speech in Melaka on Saturday. “Last Tuesday, one of the world’s largest investors held a video conference with me,” he said, in remarks carried by the national news agency Bernama and published by The Star. He didn’t name the investor or give project details, a timeline or a job count, The Vibes reported. Bloomberg, which put Son’s name to the call, said SoftBank representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside normal business hours.

What SoftBank has put in writing

SoftBank’s own announcement on Sarawak carries no price tag. In Kuching on Oct. 8, Son signed a framework agreement with Grab CEO Anthony Tan and Dato Janin Girie, group CEO of Petroleum Sarawak Berhad (PETROS), to explore an AI and digital infrastructure platform in Sarawak. The three said they would draw up a roadmap for building it in phases and would look at AI compute and services, robotics and local workforce development.

The release spells out its limits. “The Framework Agreement does not obligate the Companies to enter into definitive agreements with respect to, or to implement, the contemplated project,” it says. Its risk factors include the possibility that suitable land, competitively priced and reliable power, connectivity or contracted customer demand will not be secured. PETROS, master developer of the Kuching Low-Carbon Hub, is the partner on the energy side.

Malaysia already has the hyperscalers

The country recorded 385.7 billion ringgit, about $94 billion, of data-center-related investment from 2021 through the first half of 2026, according to Malaysian Investment Development Authority figures cited by Bloomberg. Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google are among the companies that have invested there. The Philippines, one of its neighbors, has a $34.4 billion AI infrastructure masterplan of its own, and electricity has become the hard limit on the region’s build-out, WebProNews reported in September.

For SoftBank, a Malaysian program would sit next to two larger commitments that Bloomberg listed: a $500 billion data-center-focused project in Ohio and a French project that could cost as much as 75 billion euros. At home, its telecom unit is building data centers in Hokkaido and in Sakai, Osaka.

In the same speech, Anwar said workforce training would be needed to move Malaysia beyond back-end technology work into the middle- and front-end segments, which he said offer higher added value. Neither he nor SoftBank has said how the $50 billion would be split between Sarawak and the peninsula.

from WebProNews https://ift.tt/Wxbj5Rd

Oracle Puts $1 Billion Behind Its Partners and Lets Customers Spend More Cloud Credits in Its Marketplace

Oracle is setting aside $1 billion over the next four years for the systems integrators, software vendors, resellers and other firms that build on and sell its products. Oracle said the money is meant to help those partners win business from customers who want AI-powered products and services.

The company announced the commitment on Friday at Oracle AI World in Las Vegas. The money goes into new and expanded benefits in the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), with planned spending on training and certification, development, testing and demonstration environments, cloud migration funding, go-to-market collaboration and selling through Oracle Marketplace. Oracle didn’t say how the $1 billion will be divided among those areas, and every benefit is subject to program terms and eligibility requirements.

“Our partners extend our sales reach, expand our delivery capacity, and bring their own innovation and investment to help customers address evolving business needs,” Mark Hura, president of Oracle Global Field Operations, said in the announcement.

Where the money is supposed to go

Oracle sorted the spending into four areas. Partners building their own products get dev/test environments, technical guidance and integration validation for applications, accelerators and AI agents that run on Oracle technology. On the sales side, Oracle lists joint sales and marketing work, demo environments, and funding and incentives for eligible opportunities. Delivery support covers migration resources and advisory help with implementations and database modernization. The last bucket is about what happens after a deployment goes live, and it includes a tool called Oracle AI Success Navigator.

“Our partners have different business models, capabilities, and growth ambitions, and our investment is designed to support that diversity,” said Leah Yomtovian, senior vice president of Partner, Sales, and Operations Strategy at Oracle.

The partner push comes two days after Oracle announced its AI Agent Studio for Industry Applications, a no-code and low-code environment for building industry-specific agents that Oracle plans to make available in the U.S. within 12 months.

What changes for software vendors

A companion announcement on Friday was aimed at independent software vendors selling through Oracle Marketplace. Oracle raised the share of a customer’s eligible Universal Credits commitment that can be spent on qualifying Marketplace purchases, so buyers can put cloud budget they’ve already committed toward partner products. A co-sell program called Marketplace Private Offers Co-Sell pairs eligible ISVs with Oracle sellers on qualified deals, and Multi-Party Private Offers let an ISV, an authorized reseller and a U.S. customer build a single customized transaction.

Multi-Party Private Offers are available now in the U.S., Spain and Brazil, with more European Union countries planned by the end of the year. Marketplace purchasing is also coming to India and Japan. Partner-built agents get a Marketplace route too: Oracle said Fusion Applications AI Agents give Fusion Cloud customers access to partner-built agent templates that Oracle has validated.

Stuart Wilson, IDC’s worldwide vice president for partnering ecosystems, alliances and channels, said in Oracle’s release that “partners increasingly want access to customers, seller collaboration, flexible commercial models, and the ability to align with enterprise procurement preferences.”

Fortinet, Pipefy and RackWare were among the partners Oracle quoted. “Oracle Marketplace opens the door to building joint solutions, rather than just executing joint transactions,” said Andre Agra, CFO and EVP of strategic alliances at Pipefy.

from WebProNews https://ift.tt/Swk9j3c

GMO Asks Tokyo to Use Its New Cyber Defense Powers After Intruders Hit Customers’ Trading Desktops

The part of Japan’s Active Cyber Defense law that lets police and the Self-Defense Forces get into attackers’ servers and disable them has been in effect for a little over three weeks, and GMO Internet already wants it used on its behalf. The Tokyo internet infrastructure company said Saturday, Tokyo time, that it had sent the government an urgent request to apply “Active Cyber Defense” against whoever broke into Onamae.com Desktop Cloud, a hosted Windows desktop service that NHK described as used by investors for foreign exchange trading.

GMO framed the case as a “first case of ‘activation'” for the law in its English disclosure to investors. Its argument rests on what happened after the break-in. Customers have reported trades in their brokerage and FX accounts that they didn’t make, and logins saved in trading tools such as MT4 and MT5 may have been lifted from the hosted machines, which GMO says puts the attack beyond ordinary encryption or data theft. “It is difficult for a private business operator alone, through defense and post-incident response alone, to eradicate the plundering of citizens’ assets by sophisticated cybercriminal groups operating across national borders,” the company wrote.

It started with one customer’s question

A customer inquiry on Monday started the investigation. By Tuesday GMO had found a malicious program installed in some customers’ server environments, and early Wednesday Tokyo time it began shutting down every plan. Its first notice put the number of servers that could be affected at 26,739. After customers reported unauthorized operations in their trading accounts, a second report on Thursday said passwords for trading tools and accounts used on those machines may have been viewed by a third party, and told users to change them from a different device.

The company now says its own system had a security problem and that customer information left its environment. Someone believed to be the attacker has demanded money, GMO said. If it isn’t paid, the sender threatened to keep manipulating customer accounts held at more than 70 securities and FX firms in Japan and abroad, to publish information about GMO and its customers, and to launch a ransomware attack. GMO won’t pay, and it has handed the threat messages to the police’s cybercrime unit.

The service is not coming back on its old infrastructure. Customers who still want a Windows desktop will be offered a replacement on an independent cloud platform, free for six months. Every current user will get a flat 5,000 yen, and GMO will cover realized trading losses from orders it confirms were unauthorized, though not market swings or lost profits. It said it can’t yet estimate the cost.

Tokyo says the law doesn’t take requests

Government officials pushed back the same day. There’s no mechanism for accepting requests from individual companies, an official at the National Cybersecurity Office told the Nikkei, while a senior official said Tokyo would support GMO’s defense but still had to analyze the attack before knowing whether it would lead to neutralization. Another senior official handling cyber policy told the paper the law covers serious cases such as national security threats and that the situation doesn’t yet call for using it. Another official told the Yomiuri Shimbun the request had no legal basis. The powers are meant to catch the signs of an attack and head off damage in advance, the paper said, and a second official said they mean little once the damage is done. As a rule, the government won’t say case by case whether it used them. Neutralization also generally needs prior approval from an independent oversight commission, and a separate provision letting the government collect communications data without company consent isn’t due to take effect until fall 2027, according to the Nikkei.

Keio University professor Motohiro Tsuchiya told the Nikkei the request doesn’t match the kind of neutralization the system was designed for. The aim is for the government to identify attackers and head off attacks itself, he said, not to respond to companies’ requests.

The breach adds to a run of Japanese incidents this fall that had the National Cybersecurity Office telling ministries to warn companies earlier this month. For Desktop Cloud customers, the next date to watch is Oct. 30, when GMO has promised to email details on the goodwill payment and the replacement service.

from WebProNews https://ift.tt/Z2FlGUE