T-Mobile says iPhone Handoff will cost $5 per month, giving compatible customers a way to use one T-Mobile number across two iPhones. The feature arrives with iOS 27 and is aimed at people who regularly switch between a primary and secondary phone. Apple’s iPhone Handoff support guide says two phones need iOS 27 or later, […]
The post T-Mobile’s $5 iPhone Handoff Fee: What iOS 27 Users Need to Know appeared first on The Mac Observer.
Qualcomm is taking an unusual approach to the launch of its next-generation premium Snapdragon mobile platform this year. Instead of holding everything for its annual Snapdragon Summit in Maui happening later this month, the company has been methodically disclosing the architecture that will power the next wave of flagship Android phones over the past couple of weeks.
First, the company disclosed its new Oryon CPU architecture, followed by a major overhaul of its Adreno GPU. Today, Qualcomm is detailing the next-generation Hexagon NPU that will serve as the platform’s primary AI engine.
Taken together, the disclosures give us a pretty good picture of where Qualcomm is going before we even know the chip’s official name.
There is obviously a strong performance story here, anchored by a 5GHz CPU, but the more interesting theme running through the architecture is memory locality and specialized AI acceleration. Qualcomm is trying to keep more data close to the compute resources that need it, while distributing AI workloads across the CPU, GPU and NPU.
These architectural changes are important as the company continues to drive on-device AI beyond relatively simple generative features toward more persistent, agentic workloads.
Qualcomm disclosed in August that its next Oryon CPU will be the first mobile CPU to reach 5GHz. The eight-core design includes two 5GHz Prime cores and six Performance cores, with Qualcomm attributing the frequency gains to its fully custom Oryon microarchitecture, an in-house Arm-based CPU design that gives the company full control over the cores, cache and memory hierarchy, branch prediction and CPU subsystem.
The 5GHz headline is certainly going to get attention. However, Qualcomm’s new FlexCache architecture may ultimately have a larger impact on sustained performance. FlexCache allows Oryon’s Prime and Performance cores to tap into the same shared cache pool, with capacity dynamically allocated based on the workload. So rather than a demanding core being limited to a fixed slice of cache, it can draw on more of the available pool when needed. This keeps larger working data sets close to the CPU cores and reduces high-latency trips out to system memory.
This approach should benefit everything from gaming and multitasking to content creation, but it also aligns well with agentic AI workloads, where tasks may move through several stages of processing and across different CPU cores. The basic goal is straightforward: keep the CPU fed and avoid expensive trips to external memory.
Qualcomm’s next disclosure focused on graphics, where the company is making one of the more significant changes to its Adreno GPU engine in recent years. The new GPU adds dedicated Adreno Matrix Cores for running AI models directly inside the graphics pipeline. They’re paired with 18MB of Adreno High-Performance Memory, or HPM, which provides low-latency local storage for tile-based rendering, frame buffers and GPU compute.
Qualcomm claims HPM provides a 12% power improvement compared to its previous-gen Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.
The more visible feature for users, however, may be Adreno Neural Fusion, which combines AI super resolution, neural processing and frame generation in a unified graphics pipeline. There are obvious parallels here to what NVIDIA, AMD and others are doing with neural rendering on the PC, though Qualcomm’s next-gen Snapdragon SoC has to operate within a much tighter mobile power envelope.
Qualcomm claims enabling Neural Fusion reduces power consumption by up to 40% in its internal testing using the company’s Dragon Alley graphics demo. That’s an impressive number, though as always, we’ll want to see how the technology behaves across actual shipping games and devices before drawing any definitive conclusions.
Qualcomm has also helped integrate Neural Fusion technology into Unity and Unreal Engine, which may ultimately be just as important as the underlying hardware. Developer adoption determines whether features like this become meaningful platform advantages or just another tick box on a spec sheet.
Qualcomm
The most recent disclosure centers on Qualcomm’s Hexagon NPU, where the broader architecture starts to come together. The company’s next-generation Hexagon introduces a new Element Accelerator designed for transformer workloads, alongside its existing vector and scalar processing resources. Qualcomm says the new block is optimized for fast action loops, key-value (KV) cache acceleration and context lengths of up to 32K.
Hexagon is also getting 50% more shared memory, and again, that memory complement is important. Model state, context and KV-cache data can generate substantial memory traffic, particularly with larger language models. Keeping more of that data close to the NPU can reduce latency and power consumption. Qualcomm says the architecture is designed for long-context reasoning, multimodal models, concurrent agents and low-latency action loops.
For INT4 quantized models, the company claims up to a 50% improvement in pre-fill performance versus its previous-generation Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Qualcomm is also targeting Mixture-of-Experts, or MoE, models as large as 30 billion parameters. In its example, the company points to a 30B model that activates only about 3 billion parameters during a given token-generation step. That selective approach is a natural fit for the tight power and memory constraints of a handset.
Qualcomm isn’t suggesting that a smartphone will simply run a 30B dense model entirely from DRAM, however. By activating only the experts needed for a particular task, MoE architectures can dramatically reduce active compute and memory bandwidth requirements, potentially making much larger classes of AI models practical on mobile hardware.
There is a larger competitive story here as well. For years, flagship smartphone competition largely came down to CPU, GPU, modem performance and power efficiency. AI is now another major area of differentiation, and Qualcomm is clearly designing its next-gen Snapdragon mobile platform around this need.
Apple has the advantage of controlling its silicon, operating system and software stack end-to-end. MediaTek continues to push aggressively into premium Android devices as well. Qualcomm’s response is to make its custom Oryon CPU, Adreno GPU and Hexagon NPU work more like a fully integrated compute platform, tuned for modern AI and agentic workloads.
This is a solid advantage for Android handset OEMs because many don’t have the resources to engineer this level of silicon integration themselves. Qualcomm can effectively provide its Android OEM partners, including Samsung, Xiaomi, Honor and others, with a common hardware foundation for on-device AI, advanced graphics and agentic computing. It also gives Qualcomm another way to defend its premium Snapdragon position.
The company’s custom Oryon architecture now spans smartphones and Windows PCs, and soon servers, while AI acceleration is distributed across its CPU, GPU and NPU. For business users, that could mean more AI processing happens locally, reducing cloud and network dependence, improving response times and keeping more potentially sensitive data on-device. And for IT organizations, Qualcomm now has an opportunity to provide a more consistent AI compute foundation across Windows PCs with Snapdragon X and premium Android handsets.
There is still plenty we don’t know, however. Qualcomm hasn’t disclosed the complete SoC specifications, final performance or power characteristics, or which devices will ship with it initially. Many of these AI experiences will also depend heavily on Android, app developers and the models themselves.
The new 5GHz mobile CPU may generate the biggest headline at Snapdragon Summit, but the more important developments may be what sit around it: more local memory, specialized AI acceleration and tighter integration between the CPU, GPU and NPU.
If Qualcomm can translate this architecture into better sustained performance, enhanced power efficiency and useful on-device AI experiences, it could strengthen its position in premium Android phones while putting more competitive pressure on Apple. For business users, the payoff could be more capable local AI without sacrificing the performance and battery life expected of a flagship device.
That is the part I’ll be watching most closely when the complete silicon picture is unveiled at Snapdragon Summit later this month. And I may even get some hands-on time with it in some benchmarks, as we have in years past, so we shall see.
Twenty-five years ago, I sat near the front of the room while then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs rolled out Apple’s digital hub strategy, a vision in which the Mac would become the central manager of all manner of portable digital devices.
Now, a quarter of a century later, nearly all of those digital devices have become features on your iPhone, and the arrival of AI means the iPhone has become the intelligent personal hub, the central manager of, well, of you. Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, went straight for the concept in his important opening remarks at Wednesday’s big iPhone launch, where nearly all the pre-event speculation came true.
“As we look ahead, we see a future filled with enormous discovery and transformation,” Ternus said at the Surprise and Shine event. “AI makes entirely new kinds of experiences possible. An AI can become even more useful when it brings together your life with the apps, services, and products you use every day. And this means the product at the center of your experiences becomes even more essential — what I like to think of as an intelligent personal hub.”
(To be clear: He’s talking about the iPhone.)
Think about it: all those tasks you now do on your iPhone are tasks AI can help you with. Siri AI lets you work on files and folders using spoken commands, while contextual AI lets you sift through all the data once gathered by your iPhone to do things, make things, create networks, or even organize luncheon.
“It’s the intersection of broad new capability, and a deep understanding of your personal context that makes this idea so powerful,” Ternus explained.
That’s the context within which Apple will be introducing all its future products, a battle the company now feels confident marching into now that it appears to have resolved its historical challenges with AI. At the same time, the company also seems to be doing its best to lean into privacy — enabling life-changing AI transformation of daily lives while putting a brake on scary privacy attacks. This is going to be foundational to what happens next at Apple.
Of course, you’re not reading this to look too deeply into what Ternus said about the future of Apple; you’ll also want some insight into the slew of devices the company introduced at its event. That list includes the:
For some, the biggest surprise in these introductions was price. All of the accessories were kept at the same price as last year’s equivalents, while the new Pro iPhones came in at only $100 more for the entry-level model, rising to around $300 more at the more price-resistant highest end. An iPhone 18 Pro Max equipped with the max 2TB storage comes in at $2,499 compared to the $1,199 iPhone 18 Pro entry point.
When it came to price, though, all eyes were certainly on the iPhone Duo, and Apple has given everyone (except competitors) a pleasant surprise on that.
With a starting price of $1,999, the folding phone’s price hit the low end of expectations, and while that grows to an eye-watering $3,199 with 2TB of storage, it compares well with the market leader, Samsung. While the Galaxy Z Fold 8 begins at $1,899, in terms of features and design, Apple’s folding phone lines up with the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, which costs from $2,099.
Dig a little deeper and you’ll see that while the iPhone has IP68-rated dust and water resistance, the Samsung equivalent has only IP48. You can drop the Fold 8 into five feet of water for up to half an hour and it should be OK, but you can chuck your iPhone Duo in almost twenty feet of water, and it should survive. Though you probably shouldn’t test that unless you’re a hugely successful “influencer” already generating a small nation state of money through clicks. If that’s you, good for you. I’m only slightly envious.
What that suggests is that the iPhone is less likely to get damaged and is better engineered, though it’s also ever so slightly thicker. Apple’s device is powered by what the company modestly described as the most powerful mobile processor on the planet — which it is, particularly for the AI tasks all the new iPhones can handle. That matters, particularly for applied contextual AI deployed across daily lives.
It also matters because the combination turns Apple’s device into a mobile productivity powerhouse, one that I think will likely affect iPad sales more than anything else. Though this wouldn’t be the first time a new Apple release ended up eating its siblings.
The productive possibilities of Apple’s premium device will also be realized as app developers embrace both the form factor and Siri AI. Apple said during the keynote that more than 300,000 apps already work with Siri AI and more than 2.5 billion Siri requests are being made each day. That latter number will only grow now that Siri performance has been dramatically improved.
While this argument applies to all Apple’s new devices, the fact of the matter is that you now have an iPad-sized object you can carry in your pocket that is capable of doing some really powerful tasks by spoken command alone. That’s the iPhone Duo – a product of an unexplored territory at the crossroads between mobile computing, daily digital existence, and the opportunities of AI.
I don’t expect the Duo will be for everyone; the vast majority of users won’t be spending $2,000 on a phone. But we know that the cost of technologies like this tends to decline, which suggests that in perhaps five years’ time, it will be possible to create equivalent devices for a much lower price. Right now, it’s for affluent Apple consumers, C-class executives, students, AI pros, medical professionals and others who might actually need this kind of performance and display space to get things done.
This, incidentally, is precisely the same group of people that first embraced the iPad when it appeared, turning that into the world’s best-selling tablet.
I traded a few messages with IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo, who sees it like this: “Apple entered the foldable market and, in one keynote, set the price and the standard every rival will now be measured against.”
He also pointed out, the iPhone Duo is “…a direct test of whether Apple can use design, ecosystem integration and premium positioning to reshape a segment that has so far remained selective.”
He’s right, of course, but Ternus also just defined what that segment, and the industry, is driving for. I’s the same thing Apple was aiming at 25 years ago. “iPhone sits at the center of an amazing ecosystem of intelligent features and experiences that work seamlessly across the products you use every day,” the company said — an “intelligent personal hub.” And the Macs are all right, too.
Now please subscribe to my daily, human-curated Apple-related news headline feed at The Core, or follow me on BlueSky, LinkedIn, or Mastodon.
O Huawei Mate XT 2 apresenta uma nova arquitetura de dobra interna que protege melhor o ecrã quando está fechado, além do primeiro “privacy display” da marca a chegar aos seus smartphones.
The post Huawei Mate XT 2 aposta na privacidade e num ecrã de 10,2 polegadas em formato tripartido appeared first on Tek Notícias.
We’re hurtling toward the loss of something big. Finally, after months of speculation, Apple is about to introduce its first-ever folding smartphone. And once it does, the conversation will change as the annual iPhone rumor season is replaced with the reality of whatever Apple unveils.
Except, it won’t quite be the same as in the past. Because no sooner will new Apple CEO John Ternus finish his iPhone announcement keynote speech tomorrow than the speculation will shift to next year’s 20th-anniversary iPhone, what’s coming to the iPhone 18 and e-series iPhones, and expectations around Apple’s upcoming wave of smart home products, including health and home security services. There’s a lot going on.
Having a lot going on is one of the prime expectations of Apple under its new boss. A family man with a wife and kids, he’s led Apple’s hardware division for five years after an eight-year stint running hardware engineering. He joined the company in 2001 and is described as a highly competent, hugely talented, and modest by nature.
His hobby is quite revealing — he drives race cars, is a regular at California’s Laguna Seca Raceway, and owns an incredibly rare 2019 Porsche 935. To me it suggests a calm, competent, individual with excellent mental and physical reflexes who can make life or death decisions at speed. He’s also deeply committed to good product design.
He’ll need that calm embrace of speed and adrenaline to manage the company his predecessor, Tim Cook, led to become the world’s most valuable firm.
He’s also got a hard act to follow, as while Cook had to carve out his reputation in the shadow of Steve Jobs, Ternus must sculpt his own destiny in the shadow of Cook, who managed to make shareholders of record in 2011 around 20 times richer by the time he quit. (Apple stock rose from $13.74 per share on a split adjusted basis to $319.97 per share today.)
While Cook was frequently criticized for not being a product guy, he presided over the launch of the Apple Watch, AirPods, Apple Silicon, and the Vision Pro, and helped grow Apple’s services income to become its second-biggest product category, diversifying Apple’s revenue and creating financial stability. That’s no easy task.
Can Ternus improve on that? He’s certainly being positioned as someone who can. His deep experience in hardware has led to expectations that Apple will double down on product under his watch, so a great deal is expected of him in consequence. He is also putting together a hardware-focused team, including Laura Legros, former vice president of hardware engineering, as a direct report.
What will we see of this tomorrow? To be fair, while he will lead the announcement on the keynote stage, development of this first tranche of products took place under the leadership of Cook, and while Ternus will have had a big hand in development, this year’s Apple event should be seen as a moment of transition.
“I’m just as excited about what lies beyond that, including the incredible products already in the works and the ones we haven’t even imagined yet that we’ll dream up and create together. There’s no team in the world I’d rather build the future with,” Ternus told Apple staff in his first memo as CEO.
It’s what Apple does in the next couple of years that will truly define the new leadership. He’s literally been CEO for a week!
Here’s my TL; DR list:
While all these products are important to the company, the smart home devices should demand attention (if they appear at all), as the indicators suggest Apple intends to explore the smart home space with a range of future hardware, including domestic robotics, security services, and smart devices. This hardware proliferation in new markets could end up becoming one of the hallmarks of Ternus’ Apple leadership, as will Apple’s AR spectacles (once they are introduced).
Equally, it cannot be ignored that one of Ternus’ main tasks since becoming vice president of hardware has been the introduction of new Macs and the transition to Apple Silicon. So he’ll be expected to strike a balance between improving Apple’s traditional product lines while racing his company toward new and emerging opportunities in hardware. (I believe Apple should pay much more attention to the enterprise space within that.)
The biggest challenge to all of this will be Apple’s success in implementing AI that’s good enough to get things done while avoiding the unexpected dangers of poor implementation. We don’t want AI agents corroding smart home security, for example, which is why Ternus seems likely to maintain Cook’s focus on security and privacy as enabling technologies to support trusted hardware/software product designs.
Another thing? Tomorrow’s keynote will likely begin with the single word, “Hello,” and feels very likely to also include that classic Apple keynote line, “…One more thing.”
We’ll find out more as the conversation moves from speculation to reality after the 10am (PT) keynote.
Please subscribe to my daily, human-curated Apple-related news headline feed at The Core, or follow me on BlueSky, LinkedIn, or Mastodon.
John Ternus has entered one of the most visible positions in global business without trying to turn his first days into a personal media event. The new CEO arrived with a remarkably discreet public profile, a newly opened social presence and decades of work completed mostly behind Apple’s products.
His X account, @johnternus, appeared publicly on September 1, the day he officially succeeded Tim Cook. Its biography contained only the company logo and his new title. The first post was even shorter: “hello.”
The simplicity felt consistent with an executive who has spent most of his career explaining materials, engineering decisions and manufacturing improvements rather than building a public personality. It also created a sharp contrast with the scale of the position he now occupies.
Ternus can remain personally reserved, but the CEO role will repeatedly place him before customers, employees, investors, governments and developers. His first social post may have been quiet. The responsibilities arriving behind it are anything but.
Ternus did not maintain a prominent public social account during his years leading hardware engineering. Most customers encountered him through carefully produced product presentations, occasional interviews or appearances focused on a particular device.
Even within those settings, his style remained technical and controlled. He usually spoke about engineering choices, durability, materials, performance and the work required to turn a design into a product that could be manufactured at enormous scale.
His new X account does not immediately change that character. Opening a channel is different from revealing a private life or becoming a daily commentator. The minimal introduction suggests a place for official communication rather than an invitation into every passing thought.
That would follow an established pattern for senior leadership. Tim Cook used his public account to acknowledge product launches, employees, social causes, environmental initiatives, community visits and major events. His posts rarely became extended personal debates.
Ternus may adopt a similar rhythm, although the account is too new to define its purpose. One word and a short biography cannot tell us how frequently he will post, which subjects he will address or whether he will write directly during moments of controversy.
The restrained opening still served one practical purpose. It established an authenticated public identity before unofficial profiles, impersonators and parody accounts could occupy the space around a newly appointed CEO.
The limited public profile should not be mistaken for limited influence inside the company.
Ternus joined the product design team in 2001 and became a vice president of hardware engineering in 2013. He entered the executive team as senior vice president in 2021, eventually overseeing engineering work across iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods and Apple Watch.
His official biography credits him with an instrumental role in the introduction of iPad and AirPods, along with work across multiple generations of the company’s largest product lines. It also connects his leadership to improvements in reliability, durability, materials, repairability and environmental performance.
This background gives Ternus a different starting point from a CEO recruited principally through finance, sales, software or public policy. He arrives from the part of the organization responsible for making difficult designs function consistently outside a laboratory.
Hardware engineering at this scale reaches far beyond choosing a processor or shaping an enclosure. It requires coordinating displays, batteries, cameras, radios, thermal systems, structural materials, manufacturing equipment, repair procedures and supplier capacity. A small change can affect production across millions of units.
That experience may explain part of his measured communication style. Engineering organizations reward details that survive testing. Public attention often rewards immediate confidence. Ternus has spent his career in an environment where confidence eventually meets a drop test, production line or repair bench.
His public appearances have often carried the same discipline. He tends to explain what a product team accomplished without placing himself at the center of the accomplishment.
Leading hardware engineering allowed Ternus to speak after a product decision had passed through years of development. As CEO, he will also need to speak while difficult questions remain unresolved.
Investors will expect him to explain spending, growth and long-term priorities. Governments will want answers about manufacturing, competition, privacy and platform control. Employees will look for direction as artificial intelligence, robotics, home technology, augmented reality and satellite communications create new opportunities across the company.
Customers will judge him through products, but they will also hear his response when a launch disappoints, a service fails or a policy creates frustration.
This is where a discreet profile can become either an advantage or a limitation.
A CEO who does not comment constantly preserves the weight of the moments when he chooses to speak. Fewer posts also reduce the chance that a hurried reaction becomes the story instead of the company’s work.
Silence becomes harder to maintain when people expect reassurance. Product defects, security incidents, employee concerns and political disputes can create situations in which a carefully prepared statement feels too distant. Ternus will have to decide when restraint protects the company and when it begins to look like avoidance.
Cook will remain involved as executive chairman and is expected to assist with areas including engagement with policymakers. That arrangement gives Ternus continuity during the transition without removing the need to develop his own public authority.
The distinction between their roles will become more visible with time. Cook can offer experience and institutional relationships, but employees and customers need to recognize which priorities belong to the new CEO.
Ternus does not need to imitate Steve Jobs’ stage presence or Cook’s diplomatic style. A convincing public identity can grow from the expertise that brought him to the position.
The most natural version would be an engineering-minded CEO who explains trade-offs without turning every decision into a slogan. Product design is full of compromises involving battery life, weight, cost, durability, repairability and production capacity. Carefully explaining some of those decisions could make corporate communication more informative.
His 2024 commencement appearance at Penn Engineering offered a rare view outside a product presentation. Ternus returned to the university where he earned his mechanical engineering degree and addressed students as an experienced engineer rather than a celebrity executive.
That type of setting allows more personality to appear without requiring constant social posting. Longer interviews, engineering discussions, employee conversations and educational appearances may suit him better than trying to manufacture spontaneity several times a day.
A restrained profile could also reinforce collaboration. The products reaching customers are built by large teams, and Ternus has generally presented himself as a representative of that work. Maintaining that tone as CEO would keep attention on the organization rather than turning every announcement into a personal performance.
The difficulty will be preserving technical depth while discussing areas beyond hardware. Services, entertainment, artificial intelligence, software platforms and international policy cannot always be explained through materials and manufacturing. The CEO must connect them into one recognizable direction.
The opening “hello” gives Ternus room to decide how visible he wants to become.
Upcoming product events will offer an early test. A social account can distribute announcements and photographs, but the stage will reveal more: which subjects he chooses to introduce, how much technical detail he includes and whether he remains present throughout the presentation or delegates most of it to other executives.
Earnings calls will create a different test. Product videos are rehearsed around finished work; financial discussions require direct answers about demand, margins, investment and risks. His language in those conversations will begin shaping how investors understand the new administration.
Internal communication may prove equally influential even when the public sees only fragments. Employees will listen for signals about decision-making speed, tolerance for experimentation and the relationship between engineering ambition and commercial discipline.
The X account can support that work, but it cannot substitute for it. A polished stream of product announcements would tell customers what has shipped. Occasional direct messages during difficult moments would reveal more about how Ternus intends to lead.
For now, the empty space around his first post is part of the story. The next useful signal may not be how often John Ternus speaks, but which moment persuades this notably private engineer that the CEO should speak in his own voice.
The post John Ternus Begins His Apple CEO Era With a Discreet Public Profile appeared first on AppleMagazine.
Login