Foldable iPhone Duo Draws Lines, PwC Faces Extortion Claim

Full transcript

Alex: Welcome to Daily Tech News for Saturday, October twenty-fourth, twenty twenty-six. I am Alex, and today we have a launch day that drew overnight lines, an extortion claim aimed at one of the biggest accounting firms on earth, a gaming breach that now touches nearly twelve million accounts, and a draft I P O filing that is still the talk of the A I world.

Jordan: And I am Jordan. Let us start with the lines, because Apple finally did the thing it waited seven years to do. The iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable phone, went on sale in stores worldwide on Friday.

Alex: That is right, and the scene looked like an old-fashioned iPhone launch. Shoppers camped out overnight, lines wrapped around buildings, and Apple warned ahead of time that walk-in stock would be limited.

Jordan: The phone itself folds open like a book. It has a seven point six inch inner display, a titanium frame, and a starting price of one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars, which makes it the most expensive iPhone Apple has ever sold.

Alex: Preorders opened on October sixteenth, and reported shipping times slipped to January twenty twenty-seven within minutes. That points to tight supply, heavy demand, or, honestly, a bit of both.

Jordan: Here is the angle I keep coming back to. Samsung is on its eighth generation of book-style foldables, so Apple is not inventing this category. Apple is betting that waiting on hinge durability and screen reliability was worth more than being first.

Alex: And the early test is not the spec sheet. The real test is whether that folding screen still looks perfect after a year of opening and closing it dozens of times a day. If it holds up, Apple could plausibly lead this category by next year, which is what several analysts are already predicting.

Jordan: From foldables to filings. The other story still dominating the weekend conversation is Anthropic's draft I P O prospectus, which the Wall Street Journal reviewed and Reuters reported on earlier this week.

Alex: The headline numbers are hard to wrap your head around. Anthropic took in about sixteen point three billion dollars in revenue in the first half of twenty twenty-six, up from about one point one billion dollars in the same period a year earlier.

Jordan: That is roughly fifteen times the revenue in one year. But the spending side is just as dramatic. The company spent close to nine billion dollars on computing capacity in those six months, and its long-term cloud and compute commitments run past six hundred billion dollars.

Alex: And then there is the loss figure, which needs a careful explanation. The draft shows a net loss of about eighty point seven billion dollars for the half, but roughly seventy-two billion dollars of that is a non-cash accounting charge tied to the rising value of its convertible financing, not money that left the building.

Jordan: So the honest summary is this. Anthropic is growing faster than almost any software company in history, it is still deeply capital hungry, and about one fifth of its revenue reportedly comes from just two customers, which is a real concentration risk for public investors to weigh.

Alex: It also lands in the same week that Meta's own A I spending spooked the stock market, which we covered yesterday. The theme is identical. Nobody is doubting the demand for A I anymore. The argument is entirely about who finances the buildout, and how long the payoff takes.

Jordan: Now to security, and a story where the claim and the confirmation are two very different things. On Friday, P w C confirmed a cybersecurity incident involving a third-party vendor that hosts its employee learning records.

Alex: The confirmation came a day after a cyber extortion group calling itself Everest claimed it had stolen five hundred ninety gigabytes of company data, and posted a countdown timer threatening to release it.

Jordan: P w C's response is worth hearing precisely. The company says the affected site does not hold client data, sensitive personal data, or financial information, and that the incident does not affect its network or its operations.

Alex: Everest, for its part, claims the data includes regional human resources and learning exports, along with names, email addresses, phone numbers, and addresses. Those two accounts do not match, and right now only the extortion group's claim and P w C's denial are on the record.

Jordan: The practical takeaway does not depend on who is right. When an extortion group names your employer, expect polished phishing that rides on the headlines, and verify anything unusual through a channel you already trust.

Alex: Our second security story is more clear-cut. Capcom posted an update on Friday about the breach of its Capcom I D account system, which players use across games like Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and Street Fighter.

Jordan: Capcom says information tied to more than eleven point seven million accounts was exposed. For most accounts that means email addresses, account creation and last login dates, login counts, and the I P address of the most recent login.

Alex: A small slice of forty-three accounts also had birth dates, gender, country, and nicknames exposed. Attackers changed the passwords on one hundred ninety-six accounts, and Capcom has already reset those.

Jordan: The company says it has found no evidence that the passwords customers set themselves were leaked, and no credit card data was involved. As with P w C, the biggest near-term risk is phishing, this time impersonating Capcom or the big game platforms, so sign in directly rather than through any link in an email.

Alex: Let us close with enterprise A I. Space X has launched a partner network to push its Grok models into businesses, and it opened with more than one hundred thirty launch partners.

Jordan: The names are serious. Bain and Company, Databricks, Nvidia, and Snowflake are all on the list, split between firms that help companies deploy Grok and partners that build plug-ins and integrations for it.

Alex: The company's workplace agent, Grok Bot, reportedly passed four hundred thousand weekly users about a month after launch. Whether or not Grok wins the enterprise race, the move tells you the race has shifted. The fight is no longer just about whose model scores best. It is about whose partners show up in the boardroom.

Jordan: So let us recap the day. Apple's two thousand dollar foldable drew real lines and a wait into January. Anthropic's draft filing shows explosive growth financed by more than six hundred billion dollars in compute commitments. P w C is pushing back on an extortion group's claims, Capcom is warning nearly twelve million players to watch for phishing, and Space X is recruiting an army of partners to sell Grok to the enterprise.

Alex: That is your Saturday edition. The thread running through all of it is scale, and who pays for it, in money, in patience, or in vigilance. We will be back tomorrow with whatever the weekend brings. Thanks for listening.