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President Trump and the tech industry are continuing their dance of give and take. This time, its Apple doing the appeasing. On Wednesday, August 6, CEO Tim Cook announced that Apple would invest $100 billion toward U.S. manufacturing. The money comes alongside another $500 billion that the iPhone maker pledged in February, all of which is meant to be spent in the next four years. At the time, Apple claimed that it would fund a 250,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Houston, Texas, slated to open in 2026. It also devoted some of the funds to hiring 20,000 new U.S.-based employees, primarily in fields such as AI, machine learning, R&D, silicon engineering, and software development. ‘We took that challenge very seriously’ On Wednesday, Cook alluded to Trumps push for more than that original investment. President Trump shared some kind words about that work, but he also asked us to think about what more we could commit to doing, Cook stated. Mr. President, we took that challenge very seriously. The Oval Office photo-op included an ostentatious moment in which Cook presented Trump with a glass plaque featuring Apples logo, sitting atop a 24-karat-gold base. The gift is, of course, made in America. Apples investors appear pleased with the additional pledge. Shares of the companys stock rose more than 5% throughout Wednesday, closing at $213.25. Shares continued to spike during after-hours and into premarket trading on Thursday, reaching over $220. However, the tech companys stock still hasnt fully recovered from the significant tumble it took following Trumps tariff announcements. It hit a low of $169.21 on April 8, less than a week after Trumps Liberation Day and a trade war with China, where about 80% of iPhones are made, the New York Times estimates. That represented a drop of around 35% from its record-high price of about $260 in December.
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E-Commerce
The car looked like nothing else on the road. Its sharp lines, flat planes, and pointy edges made it a head-turning sight, but also a head-scratching business decision. Would anyone actually buy such a weird geometric car? If this sounds like the kind of question one might ask when seeing a Tesla Cybertruck for the first time, it’s actually just a rhyme of history. That head-turner/head-scratcher was the 1968 Alfa Romeo Carabo, an outrageously pointy concept car that radically diverged from the teardrop designs of the day. It was arguably the start of a bold, if short-lived, new chapter in the history of car design: the wedge. The Bertone-designed Alfa Romeo Carabo debuted at the 1968 Paris Motor Show. [Photo: LAT Images/Getty Images] The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles explores this wildly experimental era in car design with The Wedge Revolution: Cars on the Cutting Edge, a new exhibition now on display. The exhibition features dozens of cars designed between the late 1960s and mid-80s that used a blocky wedge shape as their defining form factor. They were oddball designs at the time, and most didn’t make it past the concept stage, but they heralded a rebellious era in car design that may just be underway once more. 1977 UrbaCar [Photo: courtesy Petersen Automotive Museum] Case in point: the Cybertruck. “That’s why Franz was involved in the show,” says Jonathan Eisen, a curator at the Petersen museum. The Franz he’s talking about is Tesla’s chief designer, Franz von Holzhausen, creator of the Cybertruck, who was called in to cocurate the exhibition. “He’s very enthusiastic about the classic wedge cars.” Like his own design, the wedge cars of the mid-20th century seemed to have come out of nowhere. Eisen says the dominant design approach at the time was either the teardrop-shaped coupes made in France or the bulbous, chrome-laden sedans from American carmakers. But as the main designers behind these cars retired, a new generation came in ready to try something completely different. “They went the opposite way, Eisen says. They did away with all the ornamentation. And instead of smooth, flowing lines they decided that they were going to use sharp edges and flat planes and base the look of the car on the wedge. 1976 Honda Civic Lady concept car [Photo: courtesy Petersen Automotive Museum] Carmakers including Chevrolet, Honda, BMW, Aston Martin, Lamborghini, and Bertoni all dabbled in wedge-shaped car design. One concept car featured in the exhibition, the 1976 Honda Civic Lady, was an angular version of the Civic, one of the most popular compact cars of the era. With a wedge nose and a station wagon tail, it showed off a combination of design and sensibility. Though never intended for production, its DNA lived on for decades. “If you then look at Hondas from the 1980s and even into the 1990s, you could absolutely see that they go back to this one car,” Eisen says. 1979 Aston Martin Bulldog concept car [Photo: courtesy Petersen Automotive Museum] Other cars in the show are far less sensible, like the batwinged 1979 Aston Martin Bulldog concept car and the 1977 UrbaCar, a dune buggy meets bumper car. On the extreme end, the 1971 Lamborghini Countach concept car came to define the sharp and wedgy shape of Lamborghinis for decades. 1975 Lamborghini Countach LP400 [Photo: courtesy Petersen Automotive Museum] These car companies “weren’t afraid to put something out there that maybe isn’t traditionally beautiful, but it’s still unlike anything else on the road and will absolutely draw your attention to it,” Eisen says. “A car doesn’t necessarily have to be pretty to be successful. Te way that SUVs are so popular is proof of that. “ The Cybertruck, on the other hand? Eisen calls it the only true wedge car on the road today, and possibly the start of a more adventurous era in car design, even if its success is questionable. “That car obviously has a very controversial design, and you could even say that it’s been thoroughly rejected by the mass public,” he says. “Maybe people aren’t ready for it yet. But eventually, I think we will see more creativity.” In recent decades, car design has been very safe, and guided by aerodynamics, efficiency, and, above all, marketing, according to Eisen. The heyday of the wedge was less constrained and, arguably, more interesting. “I think it’s worth celebrating the fact that it’s okay to take chances,” Eisen says. The Wedge Revolution is on display through September 2026.
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E-Commerce
Last week, Punchbowl News published an internal memo the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) sent to its members, warning that Apple’s upcoming iOS 26 operating system for the iPhone could cost the organization $25 million in donations. The NRSC is the Republicans primary Senatorial fundraising arm. The memo further said the changes could cost the greater GOP half a billion dollars in lost political donations.The change? A new aggressive message filtering feature, according to the NRSC memo, that Apple is introducing in iOS 26s Messages app, which handles both iMessages and regular SMS text messages. This feature will filter texts from unknown senderslike the kind the NRSC sends out to phones across the country to raise political donationsinto a siloed inbox where the iPhone user wont see or be notified of the message.The thing is, this aggressive message filtering feature is nothing new in iOS, and the changes Apple is making to it in iOS 26 actually benefit both the iPhone user and, potentially, the sender of the message themself. Still, given the confusion surrounding it, I decided to go to the sourceAppleto see how the feature in iOS 26 actually works.The ‘new’ iOS 26 ‘unknown senders’ filter has existed since iOS 13The supposedly new unknown senders filter in iOS 26, which has the NRSC so concerned, actually exists on all iPhones running iOS 18 today. Apple confirmed to me that the feature has existed in a similar form on all iPhones going back to iOS 13, which first shipped in 2019.In iOS 18 and earlier, that feature is called Filter Unknown Senders and is off by default, meaning you have to opt into it, which is why so few people realize it currently exists. You can check it out on your iPhone running iOS 18 right now by going to the Settings app, then tapping Apps, and then Messages. Youll find the toggle, which is off by default, under the Message Filtering header.If you toggle Filter Unknown Senders on in iOS 13 through iOS 18, your iPhone will move any message that it thinks is from an unknown sender to a dedicated Unknown Senders inbox in the Messages app. Texts filtered into this inbox wont show up in your main Known messages thread.So, how does your iPhone currently decide what an unknown sender is? Apple told me it uses two criteria only: if the text is from someone who is not saved in your Contacts app and is also from a sender that you have not replied to before, the message will be siloed into the Unknown Senders inbox.In iOS 26, this feature is getting an updatebut it will give iPhone users increased notification of, and easier access to, their filtered messages. At the same time, it will increase the chances of the unknown sender getting their message read.How iOS 26s ‘unknown senders’ text message filter actually worksIn iOS 26, the unknown senders text message filter is getting an update, but its unlikely to cost the NRSC or any other political fundraising groups any donations.Apple told me that in iOS 26, the Filter Unknown Senders toggle is being renamed to Screen Unknown Senders. The company also confirmed that the two criteria your iPhone uses to determine if a text is from an unknown sender (the sender is not in your contacts and you havent replied to the sender before) are not changing.What is changing is the visibility of the Unknown Senders inbox and the messages it contains. Apple confirmed to me that the idea behind the changes is to make sure that an iPhone user can more easily access filtered messages from unknown senders and also more easily see when they have received a text that has been filtered into the Unknown Senders inbox.iOS 26 is actually making it easier for iPhone users to see when they have a text from an unknown sender. [Animation: Apple]In iOS 26, users can quickly access the Unknown Senders inbox by tapping a new filters button, always visible in the top-right corner of the iOS 26 Messages app. Tapping this button brings up a menu that lets them quickly access their Unknown Senders inbox.Apple is taking it a step further to make it easier for users to access the Unknown Senders inbox while still retaining its core feature of keeping your primary inbox tidy. Now in iOS 26, when you get a new text from an unknown sender that is filtered into the Unknown Senders inbox, the filter button at the top of the Messages app will display a blue badge with the total number of new texts you’ve received from unknown senders.This means that in iOS 26, Apple is making it even easier for a user to tell they have new texts from an unknown sender, which means senders of those texts have a better chance of the iPhone user seeing them than they did in iOS 18.Apple knows texts from all unknown senders arent always unwantedApple recognizes that not all texts from unknown senders are malicious, and these changes in iOS 26 are the companys efforts to make it easier for users to notice and access them while still ensuring a barrage of unknown texts doesnt overwhelm the users primary messages inbox.Its also important to note that Apple confirmed to me that the revamped Screen Unknown Senders feature in iOS 26 remains off by default. Users still need to opt-in to it (if they havent already in iOS 18). In other words, just because someone installs iOS 26 on their iPhone, texts from the NRSC or other political fundraising groups won’t be automatically filtered out.What this means is that Apples iOS 26 changes this fall wont suddenly cost political fundraising organizations millions in donations, just as iOS 18s filtering features dont today. The only thing Apple is guilty of is not spending enough time during its WWDC keynote on the iOS 26 Screen Unknown Senders feature modification to explain what is actually changingand what is staying the same.
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E-Commerce
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