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Another year, another iPhone event. But the iPhone 17 lines introduction was one of the more significant in some time, with Apple making major hardware changes that look to have resulted in a competitive, highly differentiated lineup. While the higher-end models will grab most of the headlines, some of the biggest upgrades have come to the base iPhone 17, as well as new features that apply across the entire range. I would not have considered using an iPhone 16 as my daily driver, but the 17 looks like a great buy at $799. The upgrades The top upgrade is ProMotion, or 120Hz variable refresh rate, which enables smooth on-screen motion thats impossible to go back from once youre used to it. Apple first introduced it on the iPad Pro before bringing it to the iPhone and MacBook Pro, but a high refresh rate has long been table stakes for Android phones that cost well below the iPhone 17, so its introduction at this level is both overdue and welcome. The feature uses LTPO screen technology, which also enables an always-on display on the 17. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/multicore_logo.jpg","headline":"Multicore","description":"Multicore is about technology hardware and design. It's written from Tokyo by Sam Byford. To learn more visit multicore.blog","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.multicore.blog","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}} Other upgrades for the iPhone 17 include a 48-megapixel ultrawide camera, in line with the Pro models. Storage on the base model has also been doubled to 256GB without a corresponding increase in price. The whole iPhone 17 lineup is getting new features that trickle down to the base iPhone 17. Charging speeds have been boosted, the Ceramic Shield 2 glass promises to be sturdier, and the screen has an anti-reflective finish. The addition that will get the most use is undoubtedly the new 18-megapixel Center Stage selfie camera, which uses a square sensor to intelligently switch between portrait and landscape photos without you needing to physically rotate the phone. While the iPhone 17 might not be all that exciting, I think Id be happy enough using one as my main phone. Apple has ticked off a lot of boxes here, making the iPhone 17 much more competitive with similarly priced devices like the Google Pixel 10. The vibrant color options help, too. The MacBook Air of phones But the $999 iPhone Airnot the 17 Air, surprisinglyrepresents a whole new take on iPhone design. Most of the phones computing components have been crammed into the camera bar, allowing Apple to fill the rest of the ultrathin device with battery cells. Its an inspired approach, but there are two obvious trade-offs. You only get one camera lens, much as Apple likes to pretend that its digital zoom system gives you four, and the battery capacity is still diminished compared to the other iPhone 17 models. On the other hand, Apple is claiming 27 hours of video playback time on the Air, which is what it rated last years iPhone 16 Plus and 16 Pro at. Thats a little hard to believe, but well have to wait until the phones are in hand to see how they perform in practice. It is worth noting that Apple is selling a new $99 MagSafe battery pack that works with the Airand only the Air. The SIM card slot is another casualty of the Airs constrained dimensions. Apple has already been omitting the physical slot from iPhones in the U.S. for a while, but this is the first time its doing so on any model across the worldwhich is particularly notable in China, where only a single carrier, third-placed China Unicom, even offers eSIM support. The Air might be cooked in China, then, but itll be fascinating to see how it performs elsewhere. Earlier this year I speculated that the goal should be to create something like the MacBook Air of phones: impressive design with unspectacular specs that are good enough for most use cases and I think Apple might just have pulled that off. Adventurous colors The iPhone 17 Pro, meanwhile, has gone in completely the opposite direction. Its muscular redesign adds a little more thickness, a little more weight, and a chunky new camera bump that runs the full width of the phone. Apple has returned to aluminum on its Pro phones, this time in a unibody build with a glass cutout to enable wireless charging. Thats a notable backtrack after the company made a big deal out of shifting to titanium two years ago, a move widely blamed for the iPhone 15 and 16 Pros poor thermal performance. Apple is also using a new vapor chamber cooling system on the 17 Pro, which should further alleviate that issue. One way to express confidence in your industrial design is to release it in bright orange, and thats what Apples done this year. Equally as out of character is the decision to eschew a black model; the only other two iPhone 17 Pro colorways are white and dark blue. If that boosts the sales numbers of the orange version and promotes more adventurous colors in the future, Im all for it. The 17 Pro comes with a significantly upgraded telephoto camera setup. The focal length is now 4x the main camera, down from 5x in the 16 Pro, but the 1/2 sensor is much larger than before and Id expect it to perform better at 5x and beyond. While this still doesnt quite compete with the best from Chinese companies like Xiaomi and Oppo, it should be comfortably the best smartphone zoom camera available in the U.S. Finally, the RAM has been boosted by 50% to 12GB. Apple Intelligence did not exactly set the world on fire, but if its going to be the impetus for Apple to stop shipping miserly amounts of memory on its highest end phones, Ill take it. This is looking like a really strong iPhone lineup. Each model has its clear strengths and I honestly think Id be happy to use any of them. This is going to be the first time in a long while that a lot of upgraders will have to think hard about which one to go for. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/multicore_logo.jpg","headline":"Multicore","description":"Multicore is about technology hardware and design. It's written from Tokyo by Sam Byford. To learn more visit multicore.blog","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.multicore.blog","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}}
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Months ago, I warned about shadow AI: employees moving faster than their companies, using AI without permission or training, while managers pretended not to notice. The right response was never prohibition but education and better governance. That was only the first signal of something bigger: BYOA or BYOAI, bring your own algorithm or bring your own AI. Now the trend is visible everywhere: workers are embedding their own agents into daily workflows, while companies scramble to bolt on controls after the fact. The comparison with the old BYOD is misleadingthis is not about carrying a device, but about bringing in a cognitive layer that decides, infers, and learns alongside us. Now, recent evidence makes this gap even harder to ignore. The data backs it up: Microsofts Work Trend Index already noted in 2024 that three out of four employees were using AI, and that 78% of them were bringing it from home, without waiting for corporate tools. This isnt marginal: its the new normal in an overworked environment where AI becomes a cognitive shortcut. The 2025 report goes further, warning that todays workload pushes the limits of the human and that the real frontier organizations will be those that adopt humanagent collaboration as their default architecture. Governance, meanwhile, is still lagging behind.Even so, the soothing corporate narrative (well provide official access and train everyone soon) ignores an uncomfortable fact: BYOAI is not a fad, its an asymmetry of power. Half of all employees admit to using unapproved tools, and they wouldnt stop even if you banned them. The incentive is obvious: less friction, higher performance, and with it, better evaluations and opportunities. This shadow AI is the natural extension of shadow IT, but this time with qualitative consequences: an external model can leak data, yes, but it can also accumulate the organizations tacit knowledgeand walk out the door with the employee the day they leave. Sociology not technology The real shift is not technological, its sociological. Most users, the non-experts, will simply adopt whatever OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Perplexity, Anthropic, or others give them, using those models like cognitive appliances: plug and play, nothing more, and they will share all the data they generate with these companies, that will exploit them (a.k.a. monetize them) to oblivion. But a different type of professional is already emerging: the truly competent, AI-savvy users who build or assemble their own agents, feed them with their data, fine-tune them, run them on their own infrastructure, and treat them as part of their personal capital. This person no longer uses software: they work with their personal AI. Without it, their productivity, their method, and even their professional identity collapse. Telling them to abandon their agent to comply with a corporate list of approved tools is like telling a professional guitar player to play on a toy guitar. The result will always be worse. This reality forces companies to rethink incetives. If you want that caliber of talent, you cannot hope to blunt their edge with policy memos. Just as BYOD ended with corporate devices inside secure containers, BYOA will end with enclaves of trusted compute inside the corporate perimeter: spaces where a professionals personal agent can operate with model attestation, sealed weights, clearly defined data perimeters, transparent telemetry, and cryptographic limits. The goal is not to standardize agents, but to make their coexistence possiblesafe for the business, free for the professional. The prognosis My prognosis is clear: first of all, contracts will evolve too. Expect algorithmic clauses spelling out the use of personal agents: declaration of models and datasets, isolation requirements, audit rights over outputs that shape key decisions, and obligations of portability and deletion when employment ends. Alongside that, new perks will emerge: compute stipends, inference credits, subsidies for local hardware or edge nodes. Second, security and compliance will shift from the fantasy of eradicating shadow AI to the reality of managing it: explicit, inventoried, and auditable. Companies that get this sooner will capture the value. Those that dont will keep bleeding talent. Third, this will exacerbate the competition for talent, and management culture will also need to grow up. The manager who clings to tool uniformity will drive away exactly those employees who make AI a force multiplier. The metric that matters will not be obedience to corporate software lists, but performance that is verifiable and traceable. Do you have employees like this in your company? If so, protect them at all costs. If not, you should be worriedbecause the best talent doesnt even consider working with you. Leaders will have to learn to evaluate humanmachine outcomes, to decide when to delegate to the agent and when not to, and to design processes where hybrid teams are the default. Ignoring this is not cautionits a gift to your competitors. Denial is a waste of time This is why BYOA is not a discipline problem. Its the recognition that knowledge work is already mediated by agents. Denying it is a waste of time. Accepting it means more than licenses and bans: it requires redrawing trust, responsibility, and intellectual property in an economy where human capital literally arrives with its own algorithm under its arm. The organizations that understand this will stop asking whether they allow people to bring their AI, and start asking how to turn that fact into a strategic advantage. The rest will keep wondering why the best people dont want to, or simply cannot, work without theirs.
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E-Commerce
Forrest Gumps mama was right when she compared the human experience to a box of assorted chocolates. Its true: You never know what youre gonna get. And these days, the same could be said of my LinkedIn feed.The social networkonce a bland haven for professional connections and job listingshas morphed in the influencer age. Its the only place on Will Smiths internet where youll find entrepreneurial bros preaching hustle culture alongside weirdly inappropriate overshares, clearly fabricated business allegories, and, yes, some personal news related to a new job or promotion. Its no wonder multiple publications have crowned LinkedIn as social medias king of the cringe. (Theres at least one Instagram account dedicated to it, too.)And yet every day Im right there lurking. My M.O. is the same as on every other platform: Im more consumer than creator. You wont find me all up in the videos on TikTok (Suge Knight would approve) and I stopped tweeting around the time the Tesla guy took over. Yet for all of the eye-rolling that my LinkedIn feed provokes, Ive recently come to a humbling realization: the most relentless brand builders, humblebraggers, and engagement farmers seem to be the ones landing opportunities while Im busy scrolling in silence. In this personal season of unemployment, its made me consider rebelling against my natural low-key demeanor and consistently putting myself out thereespecially with the September surge upon us.For the uninitiated, the September surge is that burst of hiring activity between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, right before everything slows down for the holidays. Hiring managers want seats filled so teams can power through Q4 and hit the ground running post-New Years Day. For job seekers, its the golden window. Miss it, and odds are youll still be writing cover letters come January.Normally, I would just keep my head down and continue cold applying. Ive always believed my work and my rep speak for themselves. The irony, of course, is that I work in marketing. My entire career has been about making noise for other peoples brands. Meanwhile, my own? Silent. If hypocrisy could pay rent, Id be set.Thats not to say I havent done well for myself by overshooting goals and being generally dope at my job. But if giving my victories and expertise the silent treatment has taken me this far, I cant help but wonder if my failure to constantly take to the digital mountaintops and big myself up is keeping me out of sight, out of mind. And ultimately, out of a job.As much as I hate to admit it, I know whats at the root of this reluctance: that nagging fear of judgment. Would folks size up my wins? Think Im too proud, too arrogant, too braggy? Will people look down on me during a chapter of struggle? Judge the open-to-work banner on my photo? I know its B.S. as I type it out, but that doesnt make it any less real in my mind. And it certainly doesnt fit the attention economy, where volume often matters more than value.I must admit, taking up digital space has previously worked in my favor. When I announced that I was back on the job market after being laid off, I quickly got two separate offers to tackle short-term copywriting projects. One LinkedIn connection even hit me up about a gig off nothing more than a birthday notification.The September surge dovetails with the Great Lock In, another trend that kicks off toward the end of summer but instead focuses on personal development and accomplishing goals. This year, Im getting in on the Gen-Z popularized movement and stepping up my self-promo. Because the truth is, being your own publicist isnt optional anymore. Ive watched peers land jobs, speaking gigs, mentorships, and adjunct professor roles because they werent afraid to shout themselves out. Meanwhile, Im imagining the opportunities Ive let pass by because I didnt want to be that guy. No more. So this September, Im rewriting the script. Im gonna reflect and remind folks of my past and present wins, highlight interesting peers and developments related to my field, and simply ask for help landing my next role without overthinking. The goal isnt to go viral; its to stop being invisible. If youre LinkedIn shy, let this be your push to do the same. Just dont be cringe, yo.
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E-Commerce
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