TechPulse USA

Nothing's CEO Calls the $1,999 iPhone Duo 'a Waste of Money' By Maya Krishnan, Senior Technology Correspondent | October 13, 2026 Carl Pei thinks you are about to waste $1,999. The co-founder and CEO of Nothing — the London phone company that has built its entire brand on trolling the smartphone establishment — posted a reel on Instagram on Monday calling Apple's first foldable, the iPhone Duo, "a waste of money," four days before preorders open on October 16. His charge sheet is short and brutal: no Face ID, no telephoto camera, and a worse selfie camera than the phone that costs $800 less. It is the kind of attack that would be easy to dismiss as marketing theatre, except for one problem. On the facts, Pei is essentially right. The timing is not accidental. Apple starts taking Duo preorders on Friday, with the device reaching stores on October 23, priced from $1,999 in the US. Pei's reel is a preemptive strike — a rival CEO telling Apple customers t...

  Apple is about to stage the most extravagant in-store audition in retail history — more than 150 folding iPhones in a single shop, fixtures that beg you to fold and unfold them, and a first-boot greeting that already knows your name. There is just one delicious catch: you probably can't buy one. That's the tension at the heart of Mark Gurman's latest Power On newsletter, the Sunday edition in which Bloomberg's best-connected Apple reporter revealed the company's plan for a "huge number of demo units" at its US flagships ahead of the iPhone Duo's October 23 launch — a retail blitz built on launch-day inventory Apple itself isn't sure exists. Photo: Apple's Fifth Avenue flagship in New York, where a dedicated iPhone Duo takeover area is planned for the October 23 launch — the Duo itself is not pictured. Jorge Láscar (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons. 150 demo units. One store. The allocation numbers, as reported by MacRumors , iClarified ...

Apple raised the price of its best iPhones by $100 — and less than a month later, told suppliers to start cutting production. The culprit, according to the report, is the same force driving the price hikes in the first place: the AI industry's bottomless appetite for memory chips. Nikkei Asia reported on Friday that Apple has asked some suppliers to cut October component orders for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max by at least 15%, after the price increases dampened demand. Reuters relayed the report — while noting, honestly, that it "could not immediately verify" it, since the Nikkei original sits behind a paywall and names no suppliers. Read that again: the most valuable company on Earth is cutting production of its flagship product because the AI boom made the parts too expensive, and then it made the phone too expensive, and now fewer people want it. There is a word for this kind of circular damage. It is called a feedback loop, and Apple is caught in one of...