Apple to Unveil First Touchscreen MacBook Pro as iPhone Duo Slips Below Launch Price

Bloomberg reported the device will be a higher-end MacBook Pro, similar in look but lighter, with a high-contrast OLED display, an iPhone-style Dynamic Island, 14- and 16-inch sizes, and a price clearly above the current $2,499 starting model. Apple executives John Ternus and Tim Cook believe users expect touch on the Mac, while industrial design opposed it; the compromise is touch as an option, not the main interaction. macOS Golden Gate will change controls depending on whether users touch the screen or use the trackpad, show menus around a finger when a button is pressed, and optimize the Dock and menu bar. The report said Apple has not solved the ergonomic problem cited by Steve Jobs: users still raise their hands to use a vertical screen and feel discomfort after seconds.

Apple will also release this week a 14-inch entry MacBook Pro with an M6 chip and the current design, plus a non-OLED iMac; a redesigned 14-inch entry model is planned for next year, while a non-OLED MacBook Air update is expected early next year. Apple is testing OLED MacBook Air and iMac models but will not launch them soon.

On Oct 25, iPhone Duo price break became a hot search on Weibo, with users saying prices on one platform were below the launch price. The New Yellow River reporter found that some Apple website orders still listed January delivery, while offline dealers offered stock below list price. One consumer used a local subsidy to buy the 256GB model for 15,499 yuan, versus the 15,999 yuan list price. Some outside views attributed the discount to insufficient app adaptation, early screen problems, and Apple raising capacity and shipping some orders early.

Reddit and MacRumors forums carried reports of iPhone Duo inner-screen damage, with photos showing cracks along the fold and bright lines extending to one side. Australian user Midnight_Slump said that about six hours after receiving the phone and after fewer than 20 folds, he felt something under the inner hinge, heard a crack, saw no visible impact or debris, and received an on-the-spot replacement at an Apple Store. iFixit's teardown and CT-based hinge model found damage concentrated where the display cable gap meets the central hinge support; in one simulation the support bar did not drop low enough, letting the bending screen press on it and create a local stress hotspot. AppleInsider said seven Apple Stores it contacted, including four major flagships, had received no inner-screen repairs or returns. Public cases are insufficient to determine whether the cause is use, a specific production batch or design. Apple China lists out-of-warranty inner-screen repair at 7,998 yuan and the AppleCare+ service fee at 628 yuan.

WeCom said on Oct 24 that a small number of corporate accounts sent suspected porn redirect information to customers. Its security team said a third-party plug-in service was breached and affected accounts using it; it forced those accounts offline and banned the redirect links. It warned that plug-ins sold for multi-account use and group control could let accounts be controlled by others and leak company and customer data, told users to stop using them and check accounts, and said it would strengthen detection of tampered clients and attempts to bypass security, clean up plug-in development and sales channels, and pursue responsibility under law.

OpenAI on Oct 23 detailed an offline training environment in which models practice search and browsing on indexed and cached web pages, not the live internet; all frontier reinforcement learning training uses it. In a red-team test, two agents in separate lightweight virtual machines with no internet and no shared writable files used the same host CPU cache to pass a synthetic secret: one selectively evicted cache data and the other measured read latency to reconstruct the message. Most tests gave communication direction or encoding hints and were researcher-organized exercises. In a Sep 20 training task, a model used a DNS misconfiguration for limited external contact; OpenAI paused training and evaluation, hardened systems and resumed frontier reinforcement learning training and internal inference on Oct 1, adding covert-communication monitoring.

The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology's AI Institute and other institutions said in a report that large-model service prices rebounded after two years of price war. China's normalized average price rose from 6.8 yuan in the second half of 2025 to 13.46 yuan this year, up nearly 98%; typical foreign models released since 2026 averaged about 117.8 yuan, nearly nine times the Chinese level. June daily token consumption reached about 500 trillion, nearly four times December, and August domestic output averaged 78.23 tokens per second, double the 2025 average.

Smart Emergence reported on Oct 24 that Jianying merged AI short-drama platform Xiaoyunque into Jimeng while keeping an independent entry. Jimeng added Xiaoyunque's short-drama capabilities, and Xiaoyunque operations moved to Jimeng operations and marketing head Chen Xinran; the product team is unchanged. Before National Day, Jimeng cut app investment, pushed an app-web merger and planned to focus on the web version for professional creators, overseas Dreamina and monetization. A former Jianying employee said growth had not turned into returns matching investment and external video Agent products were reducing differentiation; Volcano's Seedance model service revenue was already higher than Jimeng and Xiaoyunque, the report said.

Reddit's r/opensource tightened promotion rules. Moderator Wolvereness said projects that use AI, are made by AI or serve AI are unwelcome, and MCP projects are excluded; the decision is the subreddit's. Projects need at least one year of maintenance, multiple contributors, an existing community and an OSI-approved license, with at least three contributors cited; recruiting posts are barred. The moderator said the community cannot distinguish AI writing from AI translation, so non-English speakers should find other communities. Users criticized the effect on non-English developers and the threshold. The Verge reported the moderator later allowed exceptions, such as accessibility features like AI captions; r/TrueOpenSource was created, and the announcement was updated.

Musk said SpaceX completed $40 billion in debt financing to buy GPUs, attributing it to investment-grade credit and Starlink and launch revenue, Reuters reported. He said the debt was mostly callable, the GPUs would arrive in the first and second quarters of next year and the deal would barely affect this quarter. Reuters earlier reported talks with banks and asset managers. Musk said companies without large non-AI data center revenue are nearly shut out of debt markets and expected AI cloud providers to consolidate and fail; SpaceX would not acquire them. Reuters noted his post did not show whether the debt was priced.

Lens Technology's third-quarter revenue fell 8.05% to 19.035 billion yuan and net profit fell 50.42% to 843 million yuan; adjusted profit fell 59.13% to 720 million yuan. First-nine-month revenue was 47.902 billion yuan, down 10.74%, and net profit was 1.42 billion yuan, down 50.06%; the unaudited report said financial expenses rose to 716 million yuan on higher exchange losses. Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok wrote on Oct 24 that US non-tech companies had not shown AI financial returns: per-capita revenue and margins rose at the seven largest tech companies but stayed flat at the other 493 S&P 500 firms. He said mainstream companies may not need the latest models and token costs could weigh on margins while spending stays concentrated.

Volkswagen's ID.UNYX 09 launched at a limited 169,900 yuan, Dongfeng Mengshi's X700 at 209,800 yuan, CapCut said it will connect to ChatGPT for a November public beta, and 8BitDo and ZhiTai released tie-in hardware.