The thickness number is the headline. But it's the fourth or fifth most remarkable thing about this device.



• Multiple credible sources confirm Apple's first foldable iPhone — likely called iPhone Ultra, though Apple hasn't confirmed any name — will measure approximately 4.5mm when unfolded and 9mm to 9.5mm when folded, making it thinner than any current iPhone when open.

• The device uses a 7.76-inch inner OLED display and a 5.49-inch outer display, both with a 4:3 aspect ratio, powered by the A20 Pro chip on TSMC's 2nm process with 12GB RAM.

• Samsung Display developed a near-creaseless panel with a 0.15mm crease depth and under 2.5 degree crease angle specifically for this device — far below the visible crease on current foldables.

• Space constraints forced real trade-offs: no telephoto camera (just two 48MP sensors), Touch ID via power button instead of Face ID, and a possible absence of internal MagSafe magnets — with leaked cases suggesting Apple may offload that function to a case accessory.

• Mass production, originally planned for June 2026, has been pushed to August. A September launch alongside the iPhone 18 Pro remains the target, but early supply will be tight. Starting price is expected above $2,000.

"At 4.5mm unfolded, the iPhone Ultra would be thinner than the iPhone Air, thinner than the 13-inch iPad Pro, and thinner than any iPhone Apple has ever sold. That's not a spec tweak — that's a structural statement about what Apple thinks a foldable should feel like."

The Thinness Number in Context

The 13-inch iPad Pro is Apple's thinnest current product at 5.1mm. The iPhone Air — Apple's recent slim-focused phone — sits at 5.6mm. At 4.5mm unfolded, the iPhone Ultra would be thinner than both. It would be thinner than most slab phones on the market. In a foldable. That's not an incremental design achievement. That's a different category of engineering.

The camera bump is the honest asterisk here. Case schematics show a protruding square camera plateau that adds roughly 4.5mm at its highest point, pushing the maximum local thickness to around 9mm at the lens. The body is genuinely 4.5mm. The back isn't flat. Both things are true simultaneously.



What Apple Sacrificed to Get There

This is where it gets interesting. A 4.5mm unfolded chassis doesn't leave room for everything. Face ID requires a TrueDepth camera array that simply won't fit. Apple is using Touch ID in the power button instead — the same approach used on iPads. The telephoto camera is gone. Two 48MP sensors handle main and ultra-wide. The internal magnet ring for MagSafe may also be absent, based on dummy unit analysis that shows no magnets where they'd normally sit. Cases with magnets are already in production. Apple may be moving MagSafe outside the phone entirely.

These aren't failures. They're deliberate choices. Each one bought back a fraction of the thickness that enabled the 4.5mm target.

The Crease Problem Apple Solved

Every foldable phone has a crease. Most are visible in direct light. Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 7 crease is the current best-in-class, and it's still noticeable. The panel Samsung Display developed for the iPhone Ultra targets a 0.15mm crease depth — significantly lower than anything currently shipping. A crease angle under 2.5 degrees means the display surface is nearly flat even at the fold point. For Apple, shipping a foldable with a visible crease would have been unacceptable. The near-creaseless display is arguably the most technically difficult part of this entire product.

September Target, August Production, Real Risk

Mass production has slipped from June to August. That leaves a tight window for a September launch alongside the iPhone 18 Pro models. Ming-Chi Kuo flagged supply shortages potentially extending into 2027. If you plan to buy one at launch, treat it like an early Vision Pro situation — limited stock, high demand, and a wait list that forms on announcement day.

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Former executive says Microsoft missed the AI race

Microsoft’s aggressive, multi-billion-dollar push into artificial intelligence was supposed to be a flawless victory. The integration of Copilot into Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and GitHub was designed to usher in a new era of agentic computing. Yet, beneath the polished keynote presentations and massive infrastructure investments, a dramatically different reality is what we saw.

As first reported by Windows Latest, according to a highly respected former Microsoft executive, the company’s AI strategy is fundamentally failing to connect with real users, spurring calls for a massive internal “factory reset.”

The executive in question is Mat Velloso, who was most recently the Vice President of Product for the Developer Platform at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. He also led AI developer products at Google DeepMind (including the Gemini API and Google AI Studio). But before his stints at Google and Meta, Velloso spent over 12 years at Microsoft, where he served as a Partner Director managing AI innovation in Windows and, interestingly, spent four years as the Technical Advisor to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

When someone with Velloso’s resume, having observed the AI arms race from the highest levels of Microsoft, Google, and Meta, says Microsoft has “missed the AI wave,” it can rip the lid off the deep tensions within Redmond.

Ex-Microsoft exec says Microsoft missed the AI wave



Microsoft’s behavior over the last few months is nothing short of shocking. Both the Windows and Xbox divisions suddenly started prioritizing user feedback and implementing requested features after years of ignoring them.

It’s also not a small task to assemble and organize OEMs, ODMs, and chipset vendors in an event like WinHEC that had its last occurrence almost a decade ago (2018).

Explaining this sudden pivot to listening to customers, Velloso remarked that despite making Bing the company’s biggest AI bet, it failed to capture a single percentage point of search market share from Google. More damning is the state of Copilot.

According to Velloso, less than 3% of paying users actively use Copilot, even though Microsoft has pre-deployed it directly into the Windows 11 taskbar and across the Office suite.



Out of Microsoft’s 450 million Microsoft 365 user base, the company has only managed to convert roughly 15 million paid Copilot seats. This means a staggering 96.7% of users are rejecting the premium AI features, yielding just a 3.3% paid adoption rate. When viewed against Microsoft’s estimated $37.5 billion quarterly AI spending, this is an alarmingly low adoption rate.

But it’s not just software; Velloso also called out the current state of AI hardware. Over the past year, Microsoft has heavily pushed OEMs to include Neural Processing Units (NPUs) in their latest laptops to power advanced Windows 11 capabilities. We have tracked Microsoft’s push for NPU-powered AI features in Windows 11, but as Velloso noted, OEMs invested heavily in NPUs only to find out that “nobody cares because not a single valuable usecase was built for those in Windows/Office.”

Furthermore, he highlighted that GitHub, a platform that should be thriving as the centerpiece of the AI coding revolution, has seen its Service Level Agreement (SLA) reliability drop below 90%. Combine this with rising Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) and shareholders beginning to ask difficult questions, Microsoft was forced to start listening to customers because the AI bet isn’t paying off as smoothly as anticipated.

Microsoft’s executive exodus

All this friction appears to be taking a toll on Microsoft’s leadership. Recently, news broke that Julia Liuson, the highly respected head of Microsoft’s Developer Division (DevDiv), was retiring after 34 years with the software giant.

While official channels framed this as a standard retirement, Mat Velloso critiqued the news, saying, “Looks like Microsoft just went from hit refresh to hit factory reset.” He also listed a massive string of high-profile departures and reassignments across the company, including leaders from Xbox, GitHub, AI Infrastructure, Teams, and OneNote.

This public commentary drew the ire of Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s Lead Communications executive. Shaw replied to Velloso, defending the departing executives and accusing Velloso of jamming a “negative frame” onto normal corporate retirements.

All Velloso had to do was point out the harsh financial realities that the market is currently digesting. He moved from Microsoft to Google in early 2024, and while Google’s shares surged by roughly 230%, Microsoft’s stock growth remained essentially flat at 0%.

“I suppose the whole market is also wrong about this,” Velloso fired back. “But what do I know? I only saw both companies, how they operate, their strengths and their flaws. Microsoft missed the internet wave, the mobile wave and now it missed the AI wave. It is what happens when you keep doing the same things expecting different results.”



He urged Microsoft’s leadership to stop “gaslighting,” deflecting blame, and burying skeletons, arguing that hitting a complete internal “factory reset” is the only pragmatic way to fix the hard problems plaguing the operating system and enterprise software stack.

OpenAI is cutting out the middleman (Microsoft)

Apart from the internal challenges, Microsoft is increasingly being affected by its closest allies. The company has staked its entire generative AI future on its multi-billion-dollar partnership with OpenAI. However, OpenAI is rapidly building out its own enterprise infrastructure, threatening Microsoft’s historic dominance in the corporate sector.

Just days ago, OpenAI officially launched the “OpenAI Deployment Company” (DeployCo), a new business unit backed by over $4 billion in initial investment from global firms. This new venture features 150 “Forward Deployed Engineers” (FDEs) tasked with embedding directly into Fortune 500 companies to help them build and deploy custom AI solutions.

Historically, this hands-on, enterprise-level consulting was Microsoft’s bread and butter. As Velloso reminisced about his early career as a consultant, he noted that Microsoft’s incredible penetration into large enterprises was built on “armies of people spending time, listening, understanding business goals and solving them with technology in every industry vertical.”

Now, top AI labs like OpenAI are replicating this same playbook. They no longer want to delegate enterprise deployment to hyperscalers like Microsoft Azure. By cutting out the middleman and owning the direct relationship with businesses, OpenAI is stepping directly into the highly lucrative services layer where the real enterprise AI dollars are headed. This presents a huge structural threat to Microsoft’s long-term enterprise revenue, especially as users continue to push back against forced Copilot web app integrations.

Why Microsoft is far from dead: “The moat is unbreakable”

Despite these severe criticisms, Velloso defended his former employer against apocalyptic tech media narratives. When a prominent tech publication recently claimed that “AI is killing Microsoft” and compared their current trajectory to the disastrous 2008 era, Velloso stepped in to shut the narrative down.

“Nope, they are not dying,” Velloso stated. “I know I criticize them a lot and that’s because I care, but boy if you think Microsoft is dying you haven’t watched how many times they recovered from problems.”

He pointed out that while AI startups and labs might be building flashy deployment companies, completely replacing legacy enterprise software is incredibly difficult. When asked about companies claiming they can fully automate software businesses, Velloso recommended talking to Fortune 500 CIOs to see how realistic that really is.

“There’s a reason why all the top AI labs are hiring large consulting teams,” he explained. “The last mile is the hardest and Microsoft has the best distribution for that. Their moat is unbreakable.”

This is the ultimate paradox of Microsoft in 2026. They are simultaneously struggling to convince users to adopt their new AI features, yet their foundational grip on the enterprise ecosystem is still solid. Millions of businesses depend on Active Directory, Azure, Office, and Windows. While it is easy to spin up an AI agent in Python, integrating it securely into a legacy corporate environment requires the kind of massive distribution network that Microsoft has spent four decades building.

A necessary wake-up call



All the “new” features in Windows 11, including the much-awaited movable taskbar and resizable Start menu, are a result of everything that went wrong in the company and leadership finally doing something about it.

When a company realizes that pushing a 3.3% adoption-rate AI chatbot down users’ throats isn’t translating to stock growth or user satisfaction, they are compelled to reconsider their strategy.

We are finally seeing the results of this “factory reset” in real time. Microsoft is dismantling sluggish web wrappers, committing to native UI performance for Windows 11 apps, overhauling driver quality standards, and explicitly prioritizing long-ignored user feedback.

Microsoft’s pivot back to platform fundamentals proves that while AI might be the future, you cannot build that future on a crumbling foundation. The market forced Microsoft to listen, and for frustrated Windows users, that is arguably the best thing that could have possibly happened.

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Updated on May 12 as another legacy Windows issue hits users.

Microsoft is changing Windows on most PCs. Critical Secure Boot certificates will expire for the first time ever in June. First launched in 2011, this Windows change means new certificates must be installed on all devices before the deadline.

Microsoft says it is "updating the Secure Boot certificates originally issued in 2011 to ensure Windows devices continue to verify trusted boot software.”

If you bought your PC in the last two years, you’re likely already running new certificates. You can check in your Windows Security App. For all other users, the new certificates will be included in the regular monthly security updates. Users may have been updated in April, others will be updated in May.

But post April’s update, Microsoft warned that this process might trigger additional restarts on your PC. And while this will probably happen in May, if not already, it could happen at any point over the coming months as certificates change over.

“With recent and upcoming Windows updates over the next few months,” Microsoft says, some users might experience “one additional restart during installation. This one time restart occurs after a Secure Boot certificate update is applied.”

There are other complexities as well. The Windows Update process and Windows Security App will show a PC’s Secure Boot status, with critical red warnings where user “action is needed” before the Secure Boot deadline.

And Microsoft confirms that this update is only applicable to PCs eligible for security updates. That means hundreds of millions of Windows 10 PCs will not get new Secure Boot certificates and will face additional risks next month. Ensure you enrol in Microsoft’s extended security update (ESU) program if you’re affected.

The expiration of Secure Boot certificates is not the only legacy change now affecting hundreds of millions of Microsoft users. We now know that thirty-year-old code is buried beneath the shiny Windows 11 veneer, and there is new criticism that the OS is being boosted to overcome issues in its “bloat.”

Per Windows Latest, “Low Latency Profile is part of Microsoft’s plan to boost Windows 11 performance, which also includes optimizing legacy code and migrating more UI to WinUI 3.” Cue a “backlash over this new speed boosting trick" that has grown “loud enough ” that Microsoft has responded.

Windows Latest explains that the main complaint “is that temporarily boosting the CPU to open the Start menu is somehow ‘cheating’ or a sign of terrible software engineering.” Microsoft says that isn’t the case, and that macOS and Linux do the same. It how modern day operating systems “make apps feel fast.”

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From MCP servers to agentic AI to SaaS apps with AI-enabled features, AI use now extends far beyond just chat prompts and purpose-built AI tools. And, your approach to shadow AI discovery should too.

‍This guide will help you navigate different approaches to shadow AI discovery so you can build a solid foundation for your AI governance strategy.

You'll learn:

   • Commonly overlooked sources of shadow AI

   • DIY approaches leveraging tools you already have

   • Pros and cons of more advanced discovery methods

   • Considerations to help guide your strategy



Download this guide to kickstart your AI governance efforts.

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Trial could force Meta to add age verification, kill infinite scroll, and limit encryption for minors

Why it matters: A judge in Santa Fe will spend the next three weeks deciding whether Meta's platforms have created a public nuisance in New Mexico – a determination that could force major changes to how Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp work, or potentially push the company out of the state entirely. The bench trial starting Monday is the second phase of a lawsuit filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who's accused Meta of building products designed to hook young users while doing little to stop child sexual exploitation.

Back in March, a jury already found the company violated the state's consumer protection law by lying about platform safety and hit Meta with $375 million in damages.

Public nuisance law usually goes after things like factories dumping chemicals in rivers or businesses blocking roads – activities that mess with public health and safety. But states have started using it more broadly over the past few decades, going after tobacco companies, opioid makers and now social media platforms.

Judge Bryan Biedscheid has to decide whether Meta's conduct fits that standard under New Mexico law. More than 40 other states and over 1,300 school districts are watching this case closely because they've filed similar lawsuits trying to force platform changes.

Massachusetts' top court ruled in April that Meta has to face a public nuisance case there too, rejecting the company's Section 230 immunity defense.

The state is pushing for age verification systems that would stop adults from pretending to be minors, algorithm overhauls that don't just chase engagement metrics for kids, and killing features like autoplay and infinite scroll for underage users. They also want warning labels, permanent bans for adults who help enable exploitation, and limits on end-to-end encryption for minors.

An independent monitor appointed by the court would enforce all this, though Torrez said at a press conference last week they haven't picked anyone yet. "It will be an opportunity for us to explore more deeply the size and scale and effectively the monetary value of the public nuisance harm that was a product of this business's behavior for the last, you know, 10 or 15 years," he told reporters.

Beyond platform changes, New Mexico can ask for damages to fix the harm. Meta says in court filings the state wants $3.7 billion for a 15-year mental health program that would include building new facilities and hiring providers – basically forcing Meta to pay for mental health care for every teen in New Mexico regardless of why they need it. The attorney general's office hasn't said publicly what dollar figure they're actually seeking.

Meta fired back that most of what New Mexico wants is "technologically or practically infeasible" and would require building completely separate apps just for New Mexico users. The company warned it might have to pull Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp from the state's 2.1 million residents rather than try to comply.

Torrez called that a "PR stunt." "We know Meta has the ability to make these changes. For years, the company has rewritten its own rules, redesigned its products and even bent to the demands of dictators to preserve market access," he said. "This is not about technological capability. Meta simply refuses to place the safety of children ahead of engagement, advertising revenue and profit."

The company says it's already fixed many of the problems New Mexico complained about and has taken serious steps to protect young users. In court filings, Meta argues it couldn't have created a public nuisance because it hasn't interfered with any public right.

Meta also says there's no scientific proof social media causes mental health problems, and that the state's demands would trample on parental rights and free speech for everyone in New Mexico.

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