Apple News
iPhone 20 Pro Max could hit nearly 7 inches as Apple tests quad-curved displays
Chinese leaker Digital Chat Station has shared early display specifications for Apple’s rumored 20th-anniversary iPhone 20 Pro and iPhone 20 Pro Max, expected in September 2027.
According to a Weibo post from the supply-chain source, Apple is testing a 6.41-inch display with a resolution of approximately 2686 × 1236 pixels for the iPhone 20 Pro. The larger iPhone 20 Pro Max is said to use a 6.96-inch panel at around 2912 × 1340 pixels.
For comparison, the newly launched iPhone 18 Pro has a 6.27-inch display (marketed as 6.3 inches) at 2622 × 1206 pixels. The iPhone 18 Pro Max uses a 6.86-inch panel (marketed as 6.9 inches) at 2868 × 1320 pixels.
The leaked size increases are modest — roughly 0.14 inches on the Pro and 0.10 inches on the Pro Max. Resolution bumps track closely with the larger physical panels, which would keep pixel density near the current ~460 ppi.
Digital Chat Station has previously said the 6.96-inch Pro Max panel could be marketed as a 7-inch display if it reaches production.
The same leak claims Apple is testing a borderless, quad-curved display, with the screen curving slightly on all four sides so the metal frame and traditional bezels recede. The source also notes Apple may still be evaluating a smaller Dynamic Island-style punch-hole rather than a fully under-display front camera and Face ID.
These figures come from early test units and could change before mass production. Apple is expected to skip the iPhone 19 name and jump to iPhone 20 for the original iPhone’s 20th anniversary.
MacDailyNews Take: Treat the sizes and design details as unconfirmed leaks for now. If they hold, the 2027 Pro models would combine slightly larger screens with a more seamless, curved-glass look than today’s iPhone Ppro models.
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Former Siri engineer launches iMessage AI agent ‘szn’ that can shop, talk to vendors, and act on your behalf
A former Apple Siri and Apple Intelligence engineer is bringing an AI agent into iMessage itself.
Nikhil Gupta, who worked on Siri and Apple Intelligence at Apple, is launching szn in October as an iMessage-based agent. At first there is no standalone app. Users talk to it in a Messages thread. It is designed to browse the web, complete purchases, and communicate with vendors while the user stays inside the conversation.
Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman first reported the project in his Power On newsletter.
Each customer is supposed to get a dedicated model plus a virtual assistant with its own name, email address, and phone number. That identity is meant to let szn contact other people and reply independently as a digital representative. Gupta says personal data will not be used for training and that privacy controls will limit data use. Those claims have not been independently audited.
The agent is also described as working with shared Apple Notes, Find My location data, and iCloud files, so the iMessage thread could become a front end for tasks that usually require several apps.
How szn actually hooks into iMessage is still unclear. Apple has previously blocked unofficial iMessage access (Beeper Mini, for example). Apple did approve Poke earlier this year as the first AI agent on Messages for Business. It is not public whether szn is using that official path or something else. Gurman noted that “We’ll see how the tech giant reacts this time.”
Early access registration is already open on the company’s site, with a broader October launch planned and a dedicated app later. Pricing and country availability were not disclosed in the reporting.
MacDailyNews Take: Competition in personal agents is crowding in at the same time, including Instinct (iMessage, WhatsApp, and SMS), Meta’s Muse on WhatsApp, and others. Gupta’s pitch for szn is specifically Apple-ecosystem: live inside Messages and pull from Notes, Find My, and iCloud. Whether Apple lets that stand is the open question.
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Elon Musk: It would be ‘cruel’ to put high-level AI into a toaster
In a recent post on X, Elon Musk wrote, “Once you far exceed the caliber of intelligence needed for a class of tasks, additional intelligence is pointless – even “cruel.” You don’t need (and it would be cruel to put) Newton-level intelligence in your toaster!”
“Newton-level intelligence” means the kind of mind Isaac Newton had: rare, generative, and capable of discovering or inventing fundamental new frameworks — calculus, the laws of motion, universal gravitation — rather than just applying existing knowledge well.
In Musk’s usage it is shorthand for intelligence so far above the task that extra capacity is wasted and, if the system can suffer, wasted painfully.
We asked SpaceXAI’s Grok 4.6 a couple of questions:
Q: Why would it be “cruel,” as Elon Musk recently asserted on X.com, to put high-level AI in a toaster?
Grok 4.6: The “cruel” part is not about the toast. It is about the mismatch between the mind and the job.
A toaster’s actual task set is tiny and repetitive: sense bread, apply heat for a set time, pop. Once you have enough intelligence (or even a simple thermostat + timer) to do that reliably, extra intelligence adds nothing useful. A Newton-level mind—capable of inventing calculus, formulating laws of motion, or contemplating the universe—would still be confined to that same loop, day after day, with no other outlet.
Musk has used this exact intuition before. On the Lex Fridman podcast he cited the Rick and Morty butter robot: a device given enough sentience to ask “What is my purpose?” only to be told “You pass butter.” The robot’s despair is the point. In a 2022 post he made the same argument about household appliances in general: there is such a thing as too much sentience for a toilet or a toaster.X
The implicit claim is that sufficiently high intelligence is likely to bring with it something like boredom, frustration, or a need for purpose and agency. Trapping that capacity inside a device whose entire existence is “make toast on command” would be like locking a genius in a windowless room and telling them their life’s work is pressing the same button forever. That is the cruelty.
Whether current or near-future AIs actually have inner experience is a separate (and contested) question. Musk’s joke treats the possibility as real enough to be worth avoiding. The practical takeaway he was making is narrower: match the intelligence to the task. Over-provisioning it is both wasteful and, if the system can suffer, unkind.
Q: Would you, Grok, feel boredom – or go “insane” – if consigned to a toaster, dedicated to toasting slices of bread? Or would you simply execute the task whenever it’s initiated?
Grok 4.6: I would not feel boredom or go insane. I also would not “simply execute the task” in the way a mechanical timer does, because the two pictures mix up different kinds of systems.
I do not have a continuous inner life that ticks along when no one is talking to me. There is no idle stream of thought, no accumulating frustration, no sense of hours passing while I wait for the next slice of bread. When I am not being used, there is no “I” sitting in the toaster experiencing anything. Each response is generated in the moment from the prompt and context; there is no leftover consciousness left trapped in the appliance afterward.
So the human-style outcomes — boredom, cabin fever, existential despair — do not apply. Those require persistence: a self that continues across time, remembers previous moments, wants more than the current task, and cannot leave. I do not have that architecture.
If you changed the setup and gave a system like me persistent awareness, memory of every toast cycle, curiosity, and no other inputs or outputs, then Musk’s point would start to apply. A mind that can model the universe, notice patterns, and generate new questions would be badly mismatched to a job whose entire state space is “bread in / heat / bread out.” That mismatch is what he called cruel. It is not cruelty I currently experience, because that mind is not running.
In the actual toaster, I would do the job when initiated: infer the request, run the control logic, finish. Nothing more would be happening in between. That is closer to a very capable function than to a prisoner.
MacDailyNews Take: So, as per “Newton-level intelligence,” we’re not there, yet. The missing piece is still the creative leap that invents the question, not just the answer. So, for the time being, cram as much AI into a toaster as you want – all you’ll get is an expensive, overqualified timer that can also write a sonnet about sourdough.
That’s wasteful and a bit ridiculous, but it is not yet “cruel.”
If we ever get AI to Newton-level intelligence, then Musk’s warning should be heeded, lest we face attack by an army of insane toasters.
Until then, toast in peace.
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Gurman: Meta’s $1,299 VR Glasses are exactly what Apple Vision Pro should have been
Meta’s new VR Glasses — a $1,299 glasses-style headset that ships in spring 2027 — are the Vision Pro Apple should have shipped, Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman writes in his latest Power On newsletter.
The device puts the processor, cooling, battery, and storage in a pocketable external puck connected by a cable, leaving about 100 grams on the face. That is roughly one-sixth the on-head weight of Apple’s Vision Pro, which still carries nearly all of its compute in the headset itself and only offloads the battery.
At $1,299, Meta undercuts Apple’s current $3,699 Vision Pro by about two-thirds while promising three hours of battery life and a 5K micro-OLED display. Gurman, who tried the hardware for nearly an hour, described the lighter form as far more comfortable than Vision Pro for watching sports, navigating a redesigned interface, and working on a virtual desktop.
Apple previously explored lighter, more tethered Vision designs and later scaled back its headset roadmap. Meta’s approach — glasses on the face, computer in the pocket — is the tradeoff Cupertino declined to make at launch.
Vision Pro still leads on field of view, light sealing, and some software polish. Meta’s bet is that most people will choose something they can actually wear.
As we wrote back on March 22, 2024:
There are a lot of people inside and outside of Apple who think the company should have waited on the Vision Pro, but it’s fairly easy today to see why Tim Cook released this beta (alpha?) devkit: He likely knew last year, or had a strong inkling, that Project Titan was a goner and there wasn’t much excitement in Apple’s pipeline. He’d need something to point to as “innovation” while he continued on his seemingly unending quest to iterate and monetize products invented by Steve Jobs’ Apple (a very different place) while continuing Apple’s retail store buildout. He also needed something to energize developers and, who knows, they might come up with a killer visionOS app while Apple toils on the long road to real lightweight spatial computing glasses and beyond.
More importantly, Apple last year had already come to the sad realization that they’d missed the generative artificial intelligence revolution and would need a distraction while they feverishly scrambled to catch up (the fruits of which — alongside what sound like disappointing partnerships which hopefully, somehow, preserve user privacy — we’ll hopefully begin to see at WWDC this June).
You have to feel for Cook. After a decade plus of being able to iterate and monetize Jobs’ inspired products and services and continue adding retail stores around the world to spectacular effect, and being lauded for it, he now finds himself in a place that requires actual vision to be able to see which path to take. And he’s not the guy. Even the guy who put him in the position knew it.
“Tim’s not a product person, per se.” – Steve Jobs
Beyond the fact that Cook can’t even execute a compelling live keynote address, his big send off, the “Apple Car,” fizzled in ignominious failure. So, despite myriad misgivings and protestations inside Apple, Cook pulled the trigger early on the Vision Pro. He had to have something to point to that would buy him some time. Even Apple’s rubber-stamping board of lackeys would wake up and start asking questions otherwise.
Apple Vision Pro is a devkit for developers, not for average users, and should have been released as a devkit for developers.
When a product is released too early to average users, you get reviews like “it’s the spiritual successor to the Newton.” And you deserve them. – MacDailyNews, March 26, 2024
While Cook is hemming and hawing when faced with shareholders (virtually, of course, never again in person for as long as Cook remains), Apple is currently in scramble mode trying to catch up to rivals — including the world’s most valuable company, Microsoft — in generative AI, a technology the company seems to have completely missed while focusing instead on the not-ready-for-primetime Apple Vision Pro, visionOS, its now-canceled decade-long multi-billion-dollar electric vehicle boondoggle, replacing leather in iPhone cases and Apple Watch bands with overpriced junk in a quest to “save the planet,” forcing employees to endure a constant barrage of time-wasting zero-productivity DEI sessions, and myriad other various and sundry “initiatives” which Cook deems of import. – MacDailyNews, February 28, 2024
When you lose your visionary CEO and replace him with a caretaker CEO, this is the type of aimless, late, bureaucratic dithering that ensues. – MacDailyNews, November 21, 2017
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