|
Apple's outgoing CEO, Tim Cook, bade an emotional farewell to analysts and shareholders on Thursday as the company announced a record June quarter. His successor, John Ternus, takes over at the beginning of September with the company seemingly in solid shape.
The results were impressive, though some worrying challenges were confirmed. Apple managed to set a new June quarter record, but acknowledged slowing services growth and an unexpected mishap in forecasting future demand. Mac sales jumped an absolutely astonishing 28.7%, as the MacBook Neo grabbed consumer imagination, and overall the company saw growth everywhere except the iPad.
Apple's fiscal Q3 2026 results saw the company generate $109.4 billion in revenue, up 16% year-over-year for a net quarterly profit of $29.8 billion. Gross margin for the quarter was 50.1%, compared to 46.5% in the year-ago quarter (though two points of this was attributed to tariff returns).
More specifically:
iPhone sales were up 21.7%, an unusually high number for what is traditionally a slower quarter.
Wearables increased 6.5%.
Services revenue increased 12%.
And the iPad declined 5.9%.
The Mac is out the bottle
|
|
OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna API prices by 80% and Terra prices by 20% after model and inference gains lowered serving costs for high-volume AI work.
|
|
 Sony, Bose, and Sennheiser owners have been able to adjust the audio frequency spectrum of their headphones for years, whereas AirPods owners have had to make do with Apple's default tuning. That's no longer the case in iOS 27, which adds a three-band equalizer to the AirPods settings screen.
|
|
All of the major AI providers want you to use, and ideally stay within, their super apps, and now Microsoft is looking to capture that attention, too.
During an earnings call this week, CEO Satya Nadella confirmed that the tech giant is building a Copilot ‘super app' that will be rolled out this quarter. The new platform will bring together various Copilot tools, including chat, Cowork, long-running Autopilot agents, and the always-on Microsoft Scout, powered by OpenClaw.
Microsoft said the super app will be wired into many of its other governance platforms, including Agent 365, IT Ops, SecOps, FinOps, and business processes. And, it said, CRM and ERP systems will "serve as skills and plug-ins that go into core work."
"You're able to take that enterprise-wide workflow and wire it into the super app," Nadella said, describing it as "the coming together of a new way to work."
With this move, Microsoft will compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT Work, Claude Cowork, and a growing number of others trying to capture as much of a user's workflow as possible. It could prove a strong contender, as everyday Copilot "usage intensity" is at the same level as that of Outlook or Teams, Nadella said, and paid seats now surpass 30 million.
Every model should be ‘swappable'
Even as it builds a super app to bridge workflows, Microsoft is acknowledging enterprise demand for model choice. Customers are making it clear that
|
|
A prominent Norwegian AI researcher on Tuesday posted details about an AI worm that is wreaking havoc in various Microsoft applications, including Word and Copilot.
The report from noted Norwegian AI researcher Håkon Måløy, now confirmed by Microsoft, said that an attacker can conceal instructions in a document that is later used as source material for Copilot-generated or Copilot-edited Word documents, for example, as input to a financial report. Those malicious instructions could potentially alter figures in the document being created. They then copy themselves into the new document, causing it to become a carrier of the attack when used in another Copilot-assisted workflow.
Måløy noted: "To my knowledge, this is among the first public demonstrations of document-borne AI-worm self-propagation through normal workflows in a mainstream commercial productivity suite."
Microsoft on Thursday emailed a statement to CSOonline discussing the report's revelations.
"We have addressed the findings reported by the researcher and thank them for working with us through coordinated vulnerability disclosure. To address this class of risk, we use a defense-in-depth strategy with safeguards that block malicious instructions at multiple points and help keep tasks aligned with users' re
|
|
A ban on open Chinese AI models under the guise of security might actually put our cybersecurity more at risk.
|
|
The head of the US government's AI testing institute, Chris Fall, has resigned about three months after taking charge of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), the federal organization responsible for evaluating advanced artificial intelligence models for safety and security.
Current National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST Director Arvind Raman will serve as acting CAISI Director following Fall's departure while continuing to oversee the Commerce Department office responsible for the institute, the Daily Signal reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.
A Commerce Department spokesperson who spoke to the publication did not disclose a reason for the resignation.
Fall assumed leadership of CAISI in April after the Trump administration reorganized the former US AI Safety Institute under NIST. The institute develops methodologies for evaluating frontier AI models and works with AI developers on voluntary technical assessments covering areas such as cybersecurity, model misuse, reliability and other risks associated with increasingly capable AI systems.
The leadership change comes as governments and AI companies continue developing technical approaches for evaluating frontier AI models while enterprises expand deployments of generative AI and agentic AI across business operations.
In recent months, t
|
|
A group of industry stalwarts is banding together to help enterprises, services providers and telcos fight cyber foes.
The Network Resilience Coalition includes AT&T, Broadcom, BT Group, Cisco Systems, Fortinet, Intel, Juniper Networks, Lumen Technologies, Palo Alto Networks, Verizon and VMware. Its aim is to deliver open and collaborative techniques to help improve the security of network hardware and software across the industry.
The coalition was brought together under the Center for Cybersecurity Policy & Law, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the security of networks, devices and critical infrastructure. The Center has a broad security mission, but at least for now, it wants the Resilience group to focus on routers, switches and firewalls that are older, may have reached end-of-life vendor support, or have been overlooked for security patching or replacement.
To read this article in full, please click here
|
|
