Eager to upgrade to Apple’s latest iPhone? Well, it’s coming soon, but there will be some changes in the way the latest iPhone models are rolled out, and it will cost a couple hundred dollars more than the last generation.

Apple is counting on its latest iPhone 18 launch, debuting September 9, being as or more successful as its previous smartphone launch nearly 12 months ago. That’s a high bar and there are lots of things in the way.

“The iPhone 17 has been extraordinarily successful, and Apple is looking to build on that,” Techsponential President Avi Greengart said. “We know that component shortages are going to force Apple to raise prices. … The question is how much supply will Apple have to meet what is likely to be strong demand.”

Driven by the iPhone 17 release, the combined iPhone product line achieved an all-time quarterly revenue mark from October - December 2025, generating $85.3 billion.

“In terms of hardware, I'm expecting to see new silicon; I'm going to be looking to see which phones get Apple's modem instead of Qualcomm's,” Greengart added. “We'll see if Apple has further improved its telephoto camera, as its competitors have.”

Apple uses a network of vendors and manufacturers to supply the components for the iPhone. TSMC will make  Apple’s A20 and A20 Pro chips for the latest smartphone. As well as Apple’s C2 5G modems.

Qualcomm is still expected to supply the multi-mode 5G modems that can support millimeter wave for the American market. Reuters reports that otherwise Apple will largely try to replace the Qualcomm models with their TSMC-made Apple C2 modems in the rest of the world.

Samsung Display is the primary OLED supplier, LG Display is the back-up provider. Apple is said to have secured lower display prices for the phone, as many other component costs — most notably, memory — rise amid so-called chipflation.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that, for the first time, Apple will split its launch timetable for its latest smartphone models. The more expensive iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, as well as Apple’s first foldable phone, will be unveiled at the September launch.

“I'm expecting a new folding phone to come in at a much higher price point,” Greengart said.

The foldable phone is expected to start at $1,999 when loaded with 256GB of memory. This is expected to rise to $2,900 with 1TB of memory onboard. Foldable phones are generally more expensive than their unbendable cousins, the Apple foldable is unsurprisingly even more than expensive than the usual foldable fancies.

AT&T and T-Mobile are currently offering as much as $1,100 in bill credits on iPhone 17 trade-ins. Verizon is offering up to $1,000. But these bridges can only take consumers so far on a $3,000 smart phone.

We are likely to see a split launch schedule for the iPhone 18, with the high-end models, such as the Pro, Pro Max and foldable arriving in September. The lower end models will arrive early next year, according to multiple reports.

The Cupertino company doesn’t seem to be highlighting AI this time around. Investors and commentators had hyped an AI Supercycle around last year’s iPhone 17 launch. The iPhone 17 was a successful product, as Greengart noted, but the but the latest Siri AI update didn’t actually get dropped until for developer testing until June this year and is going into beta this year.

So, the AI updates are way too offset to actually produce a real supercycle that isn’t just a penny farthing tricycle drawn by Grok.

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“We already know about the improved Siri that is coming to the new iPhones, but we may also hear about new third party agentic software integration with it,” Greengart said. In fact, the added expense for Apple consumers because of anticipated component cost rises and shortages seem to be more important to potential users right now.

Demand from AI companies for DRAM and memory chips building data centers is causing a worldwide memory shortage. J.P. Morgan Global Research estimates that DRAM prices will have risen more than 400% from the start of 2024 to the end of 2026.

The expected Apple price rises may end up being the tip of iceberg. The financial analysts have said that the DRAM shortage that may take years to unwind.

— Dan Jones

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The GPU giant followed that up on Monday by loaning $105 billion to OpenAI for an Ohio data center

Last week, Nvidia announced a new partnership with some of Wall Street’s biggest companies to “mobilize” up to $500 billion of third-party investor capital to help Nvidia’s hyperscale customers finance GPUs and build more AI compute infrastructure.

In a world where aggressive hyperscalers such as Oracle are running out of free cash and collateral, Nvidia’s scheme is built on the conceit that its graphic processing units are themselves “investable assets.”

Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR will turn Nvidia’s AI compute hardware into a new asset class for their investors, creating “pools of financing” with interest rates that are “attractive” to Nvidia clients.

Some call it “risky but brilliant,” describing the plan as a “competitive moat,” offering AI infrastructure builders something rival GPU makers can’t, financing.

Others are getting flashbacks to those ruinous “synthetic collateralized debt obligation” products of 20 years ago. Michael Burry, famous for predicting the mortgage-backed securities collapse — and portrayed by actor Christian Bale in the Adam McKay’s Oscar-winning 2015 docudrama The Big Short — just started shorting Nvidia.

If someone approaches you with something built around subprime GPUs, just run and don’t look back.

Jensen Huang, CEO of the $5.45 trillion chipmaking giant, has repeatedly argued that GPU evolution is hitting the limits of physics, which means traditional obsoleting factors including Moore’s Law no longer apply. GPUs are now a durable “revenue-generating, investable asset,” Huang claims. (Huang talked about it last week on CNBC, which you can see in this X embed.)

If you don’t fully buy Huang’s argument, Nvidia’s backstopping the scheme — if a hyperscaler defaults, and the underpinning Nvidia GPUs decline in value before a liquidator can re-sell them on the secondary market, the chip giant will cover up to 25% of the shortfall.

On Monday, Nvidia agreed to provide $105 billion of financing for an OpenAI data center in Ohio.

And Fierce Networks just reported that Nvidia holds 122.8 million shares of SpaceX stock valued at $21 billion. Alphabet, meanwhile, has SpaceX holdings tallied at $94 billion.

What could go wrong?

“The announcement consists of nothing more than Wall Street coming up with complicated new debt products to securitize popular assets, which it has done since the beginning of time — including during the internet and housing bubbles,” blogged Futuriom Founder and Principal Analyst Scott Raynovich.

“What's more concerning is Nvidia’'s pivot toward finance,” he added. “There is a grim history when technology companies pivot their focus to finance. See: Lucent Technologies and Qwest Communications.”

Huang has tried to differentiate Nvidia’s strategy from Lucent, the telecom company that went boom and bust 25 years ago amid the dot-com bubble, offering direct vendor financing to companies such as Qwest for its fiber-optic tech.

“Is this circular financing?” Huang wrote on X. “This initiative is designed to address that concern. We are bringing independent, long-term institutional capital into the AI infrastructure market.”

So if the risk is spread across Wall Street, and not just with Nvidia in the same way it was with Lucent, everything will be OK? Well, if you’re pretty certain current red-hot demand for AI compute will stay red-hot … and also that we’ve lapsed into this new era of computer physics in which chips now hold their value for years, just like Huang said they would … then … sure.

To Burry’s thinking, just as Enron ran aground a year after Lucent, trying to turn wholesale electrical power into financial products, GPUs simply don’t add up to a "natural asset.”

"Structuring credit is a natural part of the system. Structuring unnatural credits to prolong momentum late in the bull phase is where the worry comes in," Burry wrote on his Substack. He added that the "off-balance-sheet liabilities today are putting both 2000 and 2008 to shame."

— Daniel Frankel

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Forget 6G sensing! Operators, startups and established vendors have decided to steal the only 6G use case that has actually interested people: 6G Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC).

It’s a new feature that combines data transmission and environmental radar into one wireless signal, even though the basic joint radio and radar concept would be familiar to a Spitfire pilot flying over the Chain Home radar towers in the summer of 1940!

But what’s old is new again in the world of ISAC. Indeed, although commentators have already questioned the costs of the widespread deployment of ISAC on 6G, mobile operators are busy promoting 5G ISAC drone detection application at airports, stadiums, hospitals and more.

To that end, Lockheed Martin demonstrated its NetSense drone detection system in Miami in July. The NetSense solution combines two core components: Lockheed Martin’s warning and tracking systems.

Together, these capabilities use AI to interpret changes in a drones flight path, predict and track its next moves, and automatically alert customers to a potential threat.

As explained by Lockheed Martin, he system can detect and maintain track of drones using Verizon’s 5G network and ODC’s AI-RAN software, which utilizes the radio frequency measurements the network already collects. Nvidia’s AI Aerial platform powers the detection algorithms from the data feeds delivered by ODC’s AI-RAN software, while Keysight’s radio modeling helps to ensure optimal deployment.

“As drones become more affordable and accessible, airspace awareness technology needs to evolve rapidly to outpace potential threats,”  said Lockheed Martin Senior VP of Technology and Strategic Innovation Sarah Hiza in a statement. “By working within the established 5G spectrum, we’re able to collaborate with the commercial technology industry and deploy a solution that’s ready at the time of need.” 

The U.S. defense contractor said that the July demonstration validated the technology for broad commercial applications across critical infrastructure, large-scale events at stadiums, utilities like power plants, and places like schools, hospitals and airports. Lockheed Martin reiterated that the system doesn’t need 6G to operate, rather working within the 5G environment. 

Lockheed Martin and Verizon aren’t the only companies following the drone detection trail. AT&T worked with Ericsson recently to set up a drone detection test system at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, during a World Cup match, which we covered recently.

Expect such 5G drone detection systems to sprout up around Washington, D.C., at many stadiums and especially in Los Angeles ahead of the 2028 summer Olympics. They will likely be some of the actual pre-6G technology - that hopefully works! - for the event.

— D.J.