"Polished But Rough": First Major Review Casts Doubt On Foldable iPhone Duo's Mass Adoption

Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, who has more than 21 million subscribers, offered a mixed first take on Apple's foldable iPhone Duo ahead of its Friday release, describing the device as "very polished around the edges, but kind of rough in the middle."

Brownlee's review of Apple's first foldable iPhone may present a hurdle to adoption. At more than $2,000, the Duo's first-generation shortcomings could make buyers reluctant to pay the hefty premium, prompting some to wait for a second generation.

"It's $2,000 to get an iPad mini that can fit in your pocket. 120 Hz iPad Mini OLED fits in your pocket. Have you ever wanted that? They made it. They did it. Great. This is the first generation. It's made for you. But also, yeah, it is it is polished but rough," Brownlee noted.

The Duo is slightly thicker and heavier than the latest Samsung Galaxy Z Fold, a difference Brownlee said "makes a big difference in daily use."

After testing the Duo for a week, he said, "you would be happy if it were 20% lighter."

Brownlee pointed out that the battery capacity is about 4,900 mAh, split across the two halves. With typical mixed use (roughly 75% closed and 25% open), Brownlee called it a "very efficient phone" and "an all-day phone and then some," regularly finishing the day with more than 30% battery remaining.

The dual rear cameras (48 MP main and ultra-wide) are "right on par with the rest of the foldables" and "solid" most of the time, though the smaller main sensor gets noisier in weaker light and there is no optical zoom, he explained.

He continued, "The app situation on the iPhone Duo is its biggest downside right now."

"I think after the learning curve and getting used to not having Face ID, this is a really fun phone to use," he added.

Brownlee's verdict is mixed:

If you are the iPhone filmmaker who wants the absolute best cameras to go shoot their next thing, no. Uh if you're the type of person who breaks your phone every like nine months cuz you drop it all the time, yep, probably no. But if the $2,000 or the difference between 35 and 55 bucks a month doesn't mean much to you and you just kind of like the idea and want to jump in, I think after the learning curve and and getting used to not having Face ID, this is a really fun phone to use.

And it's really just cuz that polish, that polish around the edges goes a long way towards the fun factor. So, the awesome animations, the incredible hinge, the wonderful inside display, like all of that is just really nice and it hides a little bit of the rough core. Like, it will feel a little heavy sometimes and not all your favorite apps will be updated right out the box, but it is fun.

Apple can't completely engineer their way around the compromises of this form factor, like the slightly worse battery and the slightly worse speakers and the slightly worse cameras. Like, that's just physics. But what they have done is an admirable job with their first generation. Now, I'm just going to have to cross my fingers that second generation actually listens to some of that core feedback cuz that could be an amazing phone.

Watch The Duo Review Here Before Buying

Last Friday, when preorders for the Duo opened, we pointed out the incredible initial demand as delivery estimates slipped further and further beyond this Friday by the minute.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the Duo's estimated delivery date is January 22.

The question remains whether the Duo, at a base price of $2,000, can achieve mass adoption, given that Tim Cook's $3,400 Vision Pro was a total disaster. Now it's John Ternus' turn to prove to investors that Apple still has demand for its premium products.

Tyler Durden Wed, 10/21/2026 - 14:45
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"Polished But Rough": First Major Review Casts Doubt On Foldable iPhone Duo's Mass Adoption

1% Of Companies Account For 80% Of OpenAI And Anthropic Spending - And It Just Stalled

Just 1% of companies account for 80% of all business spending on OpenAI and Anthropic, according to corporate card giant Ramp, which tracks payments across more than 70,000 U.S. businesses. Ramp lead economist Ara Kharazian, who flagged the figure in early September, noted that spending on the two AI labs is more concentrated than in any other software category the firm tracks.

Per capita, the biggest spenders are overwhelmingly venture-backed. According to Ramp's summer report, the median VC-backed startup spent $76 per employee per month on AI - more than ten times the $7 spent at private equity-backed firms.

That top-heavy dynamic mirrors what YipitData uncovered at Anthropic specifically: the lab's top 1% of customers generated 46% of its revenue in August, nearly doubling from 25% a year earlier. How many of those whale customers, we asked at the time, are funded by the very same VCs backing Anthropic?

Anthropic's IPO prospectus - the updated version of which we dissected yesterday - confirms the concentration at the very top: just two unnamed customers generated nearly a quarter of its 2025 revenue, according to Reuters. Their identities aren't hard to guess. Last year, two AI coding tools - Cursor and Microsoft's GitHub Copilot - drove roughly $1.2 billion of Anthropic's $5 billion annualized revenue run-rate, as VentureBeat reported.

Follow the money. Cursor's parent company, Anysphere, raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation last November in a round co-led by Accel and Coatue, alongside Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, and Google. Three months later, Coatue and Singapore's GIC led Anthropic's massive $30 billion Series G, with Nvidia again participating. Coatue's cash flows into Cursor, Cursor spends it on Claude tokens, those tokens book as Anthropic revenue, and that revenue underwrites the markups on Coatue's Anthropic stake.

Even the scorekeeper is inside the loop. Ramp itself raised $1.85 billion at a $60 billion valuation last week in a round led by Dragoneer, Thrive, Founders Fund, Sands Capital, and Avenir Growth. Its cap table also features Coatue, D1, ICONIQ, GIC, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, General Catalyst, and Lightspeed - every single one of which, alongside Dragoneer and Founders Fund, backed Anthropic's Series G.

Volumes Up, Dollars Flat

Yet it is Ramp's own economist who is documenting the cracks in the facade. In his October AI Index - pointedly titled "Cracks in the AI Thesis Part 3" - Kharazian reported that the top 1% of AI-spending firms shelled out $9,568 per employee in September. While that was up 11.7% from August, it remained 3.1% below July's peak of $9,873.

Across the broader cohort, the stall is even starker. In August and September, Ramp recorded "two straight months of virtually no growth in token spend," even as raw token volumes continued to climb.

Total dollar spend did eke out a new high in early October, but cleared its previous August peak by a paltry 1.5%.

Source: Ramp Rate

The culprit, according to Kharazian, is deflation: "the main driver is price declines at the frontier, in addition to efficiency and quality improvements for models across intelligence levels, that are driving the blended price per million tokens down."

Source: Ramp Rate

Nor have the AI labs been able to lock in their biggest customers. Asked whether OpenAI and Anthropic are using enterprise contracts to guarantee revenue, Kharazian noted that buyers hold all the leverage. Enterprise deals are rarely signed on the assumption of higher-than-normal spend, and when they are, "the labs are willing to provide concessions in the form of discounts on models from the sticker price." His takeaway: "These contracts could contribute to price cuts without driving additional volume."

The customer base isn't widening much, either. Paid AI adoption across Ramp's corporate network nudged up just 0.62 percentage points to 55.9% in September. "It feels like we're at the top of the S-curve," Kharazian wrote, "where the growth in the market will have to come from more intense adoption rather than more customers."

Source: Ramp Rate

Anthropic Joins The Price War

Meanwhile, Anthropic's realized token price has been cut in half in just a month. The Ornn Anthropic Token Price Index - which measures the actual dollars customers pay per token consumed - has cratered to $0.83 per million tokens from over $1.70 in mid-September, marking a record low since the benchmark launched in June.

Even after that plunge, Anthropic remains pricier than OpenAI, whose index sits at $0.45. OpenAI's realized pricing collapsed in late July after it slashed rates on its GPT-5.6 Luna and Terra models by up to 80% - just three days after Chinese lab Moonshot released the open weights for Kimi K3, the model blamed for sending chip stocks into a bear market earlier that month. OpenAI has since reportedly leaned toward delaying its IPO until 2027.

Jevons Isn't Riding To The Rescue

Jevon is an offset and total demand is rising... until it hits physical constraints of hundreds of delayed or canceled data centers. https://t.co/BqONarz80n

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 14, 2026

The bulls' reflex answer to relentless price cuts is Jevons paradox: make tokens cheap enough, and usage will explode so fast that total revenue rises anyway. The data isn't cooperating. In a Sept. 25 note, Goldman Sachs warned that "token demand growth will need to outpace declining token prices to support continued growth in investment spending," noting that while "frontier models are currently a key source of demand for hyperscaler compute," cheap open-source rivals are rapidly gaining ground. By Goldman's estimate - built on Anera and OpenRouter data - total token demand has surged roughly 18-fold since December, but demand for high-margin frontier models has grown only half as fast.

That margin squeeze is now flowing directly upstream to the companies building the data centers. Goldman calculates that realized return on invested capital (ROIC) across Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle has fallen from 40% to 25% - the lowest reading in its dataset going back to 2016.

On Tuesday - the same day Citadel's Ken Griffin told Bloomberg that markets are "almost certainly" in an AI bubble - Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok diagnosed the underlying demand problem. "Silicon Valley operates on the premise that compute demand is unlimited, yet the recent slowdown in token spending growth suggests that this appetite may exist only when compute is effectively free," Slok wrote, citing Ramp's figures. Instead of inelastic hunger, compute faces "a flat, highly price-sensitive demand curve, where even modest changes in token prices can drive buyers to throttle usage or substitute cheap open-source alternatives."

"Ultimately, the number-one variable governing the viability of data center construction models is not physical capacity or power; it is the actual price users are willing to pay for the compute being built," Slok concluded. Corporate buyers will only pay a premium if they can translate tokens into "higher top-line growth, bigger profit margins or substantial cost savings, little of which is showing up at scale yet. Maybe that will come in the future. Maybe not."

Back in June, Ramp product director Adam Sommer boasted to a New York panel that "our largest AI spenders at Ramp are seeing their spend double month-over-month for the last several months." Three months later, the top 1% were spending less per employee than they had in July.

 

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1% Of Companies Account For 80% Of OpenAI And Anthropic Spending - And It Just Stalled

Pollster Cited By NY Times, Other Outlets Admits It's Fake

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

A purported company whose polls were listed by a slew of outlets, including The New York Times, has said that all but one of its surveys were not real.

Wedgewood Polling said in a statement on Oct. 20 that it was developed by people who previously worked in the poll sector and wondered how easy it would be for a fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously, and "expose how little scrutinization exists in media and public commentary."

The entity said that its surveys often did not have any real data behind them, but they were nonetheless included in poll averages by the NY Times and some other outlets.

"Our fabricated numbers were given instant credibility across national media platforms - including being cited on air and in reporting by outlets such as MS Now," Wedgewood Polling said. "The ease with which unverified figures were absorbed into mainstream political narratives highlights a systemic breakdown in media vetting and data aggregation."

The surveys largely favored Democrats, including having Democrat candidate Abdul El-Sayed ahead of Republican candidate Mike Rogers in the race for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan.

Wedgewood Polling conducted a single legitimate poll, in Nebraska, that served as a baseline to compare against fake data.

Wedgewood Polling said it did not intend to mislead the public or sway an election, and that the purpose was to spark changes in the polling and media industries.

Decision Desk HQ said on X on Wednesday that it removed 17 polls from Wedgewood Polling in light of the company's admission.

"As polling and averages are a component of our forecast model, we have rerun the model and all of our forecasts now reflect the removal of the fraudulent data," Decision Desk said. "The removal of these polls has not changed the projected seat totals or chamber control probabilities in the Senate or House."

Zachary Donnini, head of data science at VoteHub, another poll aggregator, said on X on Tuesday that he contacted Wedgewood Polling's head pollster after the company first appeared, and that the individual said he was a college student who had experience in the polling space. The conversation led to VoteHub including polls from the company on its website.

"A few years ago, I was a college student following politics as a hobby myself, so I try to give people in that position the benefit of the doubt," Donnini said. "It's disappointing to see how this has unfolded, because it's going to be a ... lot harder for the next college kid who's actually well-intentioned and super into politics to break into the space after this."

FiftyPlusOne, which had also included Wedgewood Polling surveys, said on Tuesday that it had sent questions about the polls to the company prior to the admission that most of its polls were fake. It said the questions prompted the disclosure.

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Pollster Cited By NY Times, Other Outlets Admits It's Fake

The Simpsons Brings Back Apu As Irritable, Loud, And Unlikeable

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

The Simpsons has finally let the the Indian character Apu speak again after nearly a decade of silence prompted by previous accusations of 'racist stereotyping' levelled at the show all stemming from the fact that a white actor voiced the character.

However, what has now transpired perfectly illustrates what happens when producers cave to activist pressure and then overcorrect.

The once happy, lovable Kwik-E-Mart owner is now irritable, loud and unlikable, according to viewers reacting to Sunday's episode "The Revengening."

Removes Indian immigrant character who was happy and lovable because of claims of racist stereotyping. Bring character back after hiring authentic Indian immigrants to write and voice character. He is now irritable, loud, and unlikable. What did the producers mean by this?

— Magills (@magills_) October 19, 2026

The character last spoke in the October 2017 episode "The Serfsons." He continued to appear in the background as a mute figure while the show grappled with complaints over voice actor Hank Azaria affecting an Indian accent.

Azaria told a podcast at the time that he had spoken at his son's school and encountered a 17-year-old Indian student who had never watched the show yet treated "Apu" as a slur.

"It's practically a slur at this point," Azaria said. "All he knows is that is how his people are thought of and represented to many people in this country." He continued: "I really do apologise. I know you weren't asking for that but it's important. I apologise for my part in creating that and participating in that. Part of me feels like I need to go around to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologise."

Plenty of Indian viewers rejected that framing at the time.

No Indian was ever offended by Apu apart from that failed comedian Hari Kondabolu.
Most Indians loved Apu.
So take your concepts of cancel culture and cultural appropriation and stick it where the sun don't shine.

— Raj (@rsn) April 13, 2021

Why do people keep listening to a small percentage of outraged marxist mobs on the internet ????

— s?? ???????? ???? ? (@SamChenkual) April 13, 2021

The pressure that produced the apology originated with Kondabolu's 2017 documentary The Problem With Apu. The film argued that the convenience-store clerk character rested on harmful stereotypes. The show made a glancing reference to the complaints in 2018, then largely parked the character.

Azaria later described the decision to stop as a collective one the production team felt was "the right thing." He continued voicing other Springfield residents while Apu stayed quiet.

Sunday's Halloween-themed episode treated the long absence as plot. A mysterious killer in a "Daft Monk" costume (a Daft Punk helmet plus monastic robe) is repeatedly killed by Springfield residents, survives, and returns a year later seeking revenge. He summons the town to City Hall, removes the helmet, and reveals himself as Apu. "I am the man you left for dead. I am the one you pretended never existed," he declares.

The character is now voiced by India-born, U.S.-raised actor Sunil Malhotra, known for animation work including The Legend of Korra and The Legend of Vox Machina.

In the episode, Apu recounts being dumped on the Island of Forgotten Garbage, healed by Dr. Nick, returning home to find his family and the Kwik-E-Mart gone, and then being ignored by everyone in town as if invisible.

Marge steps in with language that tracks the show's own earlier hesitation: "Apu, we're so sorry we left you for dead. Believe me, we wanted to do the right thing." Bart adds, "But we were so scared, and just didn't know what to do."

Homer offers a penance that doubles as a reminder of the character's previous place in town life: "You were on our bowling teams, our barbershop quartets, our dad rock cover bands. We took you for granted. I took you for granted." The sequence turns out to be a nightmare; Apu wakes in the Kwik-E-Mart with Manjula (now voiced by Janina Gavankar) and agrees to attend a Halloween party.

Showrunner Matt Selman described the approach as deliberate. "We love this character, and wanted to bring him back in a smart, 'Simpsons'-y way that allowed him to evolve," he told Variety. "We're excited by what Sunil has already brought to the role, and look forward to seeing more of Apu in the future."

Viewers who watched the episode did not share that enthusiasm. Reactions on X described the new voice as try-hard and the character as louder and much less appealing than the version that had been retired.

@DiscussingFilm This seems more racist then the first voice

— I hear you (@Seriously_try) October 19, 2026

@DiscussingFilm Leftism and political correctness ruins everything. This shit is ass.

— holysmokes (@holysmokes_84) October 19, 2026

@DiscussingFilm Sounds like a shittier version of what his voice was before

— Cozy Autumn Groyper (@thatgroyper2) October 19, 2026

@DiscussingFilm This actually sounds way more offensive because he is trying to emulate the original

— Karim Jovian (@KJovian) October 19, 2026

@DiscussingFilm id rather have him silent than this. honestly, just end the show already.

— ?? (@1c0pnq) October 19, 2026

@DiscussingFilm That voice is fucking garbage. Insulting to fans. Just end the show. The Simpsons, as great as it was its heyday, is now an anachronism that cannot exist in today’s hypersensitive culture. It is now something else, so just end the show and create something else, FFS.

— William Sullivan (@WillyJSullivan) October 19, 2026

This is what happens when a show that once thrived on sharp, boundary-pushing satire decides every joke must first clear a committee of the professionally aggrieved.

The Simpsons built its appeal on equal-opportunity exaggeration, the willingness to mock everyone and everything without pausing to check who might claim injury on behalf of someone else.

That edge is gone. What remains is a cautious, self-flagellating version of the same program, rewritten to soothe activists who treat other people's cultures as props for their own moral status.

The result is not progress. It is a shambling remnant of the original, kept on air by people more interested in signalling their virtue than in telling a funny story.

* * *

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The Simpsons Brings Back Apu As Irritable, Loud, And Unlikeable

Intifada For All...

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via kunstler.com,

"The Dems are a total mess of cluster B psychopathology. They will continue to humiliate themselves & alienate the normal population."

- JD Haltigan on X

Looks like the punishments will continue across the pond until morale improves. France on fire in the "mostly peaceful" riots - according to the BBC - this past weekend could yet ignite a final, furious, Globalist-Jacobin bid to wreck Western Civ as populist nationalism looms ever larger to defeat them. That is, whatever the demonic coalition of desperate Euro elites backed by the Soros NGO empire, the WEF, the UN bureaucracy, possibly the British Crown, and the EU, can induce their Lefty-left useful idiots to act out intifada-style against the people and their culture.

A Nice Bordeaux with Your Intifada?

President Macron stepped up Sunday to ask, "How can French people do this to France?" as the ancient tower of the Limoges city hall collapsed in flames. Somebody please inform him that the parties responsible for all the fiery chaos are not necessarily French people. Any way you cut it, this has got to be the end-of-pretend that flooding Europe with jihadis for two decades was a grand and noble idea. Where's that whiff of grapeshot when you really need it?

You also must wonder whether the American Lefty-left has riot-envy. Their handlers in the Democratic Party and its dark entourage of "resistance" foundations, billionaire NGO-funders, and Deep State seditionists must be itching to unleash similar punishments across the USA, as they managed to do in 2020 to honor the saintly George Floyd. Of course, they don't have the same resources they enjoyed back then. The US president - know who that is? - has choked off a good deal of their money-laundered cash-flow.

The main question seems to be: will any street-fighting commence here before or after the mid-term election? Before Nov. 3, let's face it, would not be such a good look for the Dems. Flash mobs of "teens" looting the sneaker stores and burning down 7-Eleven shops might only prompt the Trump-weary Republican hold-outs to show up at the polls bigly in swing states. Certainly, big, violent street demonstrations full of jihadi and communist iconography won't reflect well on Mamdani wannabe Senate candidates Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan or Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who assisted Tim Walz in covering-up the Somali fraud operations for years and years, and ran the Signal comms network during the Minneapolis ICE riots of last winter.

Of course, if the Euroland riots keep going, the American Lefties just might bust out anyway. "Solidarity," and all that. Comically, the "No Kings" demos of Saturday were hamstrung when Mark Zuckerberg's Meta company (formerly Facebook) suspended the No Kings Instagram account around the peak time of scheduled events around the country (starting at 1:30 p.m. ET) and for nearly two hours after. Meta later explained something about an automated security system triggered by a high volume of bot postings linked to an Anthropic AI tool. The No Kings organizers lost their action coordination platform. Fizzle fizzle. . . Boo-hoo.

After the election, however, you might consider that the same Lefty-left minions in America will take to the streets whether they win or lose the big contest over who gets to run Congress. For one thing, do not underestimate the degree of scrutiny that the federal government will give to balloting in previously sketchy corners of the land such as Michigan, Arizona, Minnesota, California, and many other places.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, sent letters to fifty states last summer warning officials they could face criminal liability for allowing or enabling non-citizens to vote. This ain't no fool' around. The DOJ is also sending attorneys by the hundreds to "observe" election proceedings. The Department of Homeland Security announced and is taking multiple actions framed as "protecting election integrity and addressing voter fraud."

The Democratic Party is already royally pissed-off at the prospect that their manifold cheating operations might be stifled this time around. You can bet that a failure to win the House and Senate will produce a vigorous reaction, easily turning violent, along with a massive effort led by lawfare ninjas Norm Eisen and Marc Elias to foul up all efforts at certifying the vote in a thousand frivolous lawsuits. Is it not time to recognize that as a form of seditious conspiracy and prosecute it accordingly?

The last big question, then, is how the president might respond to post-election shenanigans. Well, for one thing, and whatever the outcome, Mr. Trump will no longer be constrained by the need to avoid the appearance of election interference. My guess is that he will finally go medieval on these vile seditionists, even if it requires declaring some sort of national emergency or invoking the Insurrection Act. He is not going to allow a replay of anything like the 2020 mayhem.

Whatever the Europeans choose to do, it would be a shame if they lose their countries. We won't lose ours, and we are not coming to rescue them this time.

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Intifada For All...