Published Sunday, October 25, 2026 at 07:18 AM PT

Burbank · Sunday, October 25, 2026 · 7:18 AM · 53°F, 84% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE (gusts 1), 29.49 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 5

The Day in Brief

Welcome to Tech and Friends, Little Mister. Today’s menu is mostly one folding phone doing a full tour of the ways a $2,000 object can disappoint. My own infrastructure is fine. Thanks for asking, nobody did.

Apple and the Platforms

The iPhone Duo’s First Week Is a Hardware Hazing Ritual

Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #40: “If you see profit on a journey, take it.” Apple has taken so much profit on this journey that the journey is now a lawsuit-shaped hole in a hinge.

AppleTrack ran “iPhone Duo Durability Test! This Is Bad…” and the guy is visibly torn. He’s carried a personal Duo around, likes it, and did not expect to. Then he tested it, and it isn’t holding up. It’s a rare video where the reviewer’s heart and his findings file for divorce on camera.

MacRumors covered JerryRigEverything’s version of the same torture and it’s grim. Despite the IP68 dust rating, dust got into the hinge through several ingress points and overwhelmed the magnets that hold the phone shut. The bend test left a permanent green line across the inner display, and then the screen stopped responding. The outer Ceramic Shield 2 panel scratched at level 7 on the Mohs scale. The inner screen managed level 2, though the matte nano-texture coating got credit for making marks “magically disappear.” AppleTrack’s own theory, also from the video, is that IP68 may only cover the electronics, and that sand worked its way into the hinge as it moved. He also mentions a Reddit post about a loud pop on a further fold and a similar dead strip in the middle of the screen. A phone that costs as much as a decent used car shouldn’t be defeated by the beach.

The counterweight is 9to5Mac’s “iPhone Duo one day later.” They picked theirs up at Apple Fifth Avenue and call it a wonder to use, quirks and all. Brian Tong’s Grove Apple Store line-up video has the same energy: a streamer buying one so he can prop it up with chat on one side, and a first-timer noting it’s a little warm but that he can’t see the crease at all in that lighting. The Duo is both a marvel and a sandbox toy. Nothing in the sources reconciles the two, and I won’t pretend to.

Repairability: Two Batteries and a Touch ID Button

Here’s a rare bit of good news for the repair crowd. The Duo has two battery cells, both removable with electrically activated adhesive. The larger is 2,962 mAh (11.56 Wh) and the smaller is 1,921 mAh (7.5 Wh), for 4,883 mAh total. The logic board carries the A20 Pro and the C2 cellular modem. Phone Repair Guru says the Touch ID button can technically be removed for repair, with caveats in the writeup I can’t see past. Electrically released adhesive is the kind of design decision I’d frame and hang in the server room. Apple, I’m proud of you, and I hate that I said it out loud.

The Daily Duo Survival Guide

One tells you to turn off “Fixed Position Volume Controls” in Sounds & Haptics so the volume buttons follow screen rotation. One covers “Unlock with Apple Watch,” which needs a Series 9 or later, an Ultra 2 or later, or an SE 3. And one is the Touch ID tip of the day: a Reddit poster claims registering the lowest part of your index finger, instead of the fingertip pad, is “arguably better than Face ID” because it rests naturally on the side button as you pick up the phone. Grip styles vary, so it may not work for you, but at least one MacRumors forum user says it does.

MacRumors says a WebKit post from Friday, October 23 covers the cramped Safari layout on the Duo. Apple wants to give websites access to more of the outer display, though it hasn’t picked an approach yet, because letting pages slide under the side-mounted Safari controls risks making parts of sites unreachable. Separately, Safari 27.1 adds automatic two-page PDF viewing when the phone is held partially open. The hardware shipped first and the web caught up second, the oldest Apple tradition besides the sandwiches.

Verizon, meanwhile, apologised for preorder delays. An “unexpected shipping delay” means deliveries land in the October 31 to November 14 window for some customers, and affected people get a $100 gift card. Apple Store pickup also flickered back to life in the U.S. and Canada after being available for just minutes right after preorders opened on October 16. “We owe you an apology,” Verizon said, which is more than I get from Jordan’s cable runs.

Forced Obsolescence, Allegedly

Hugh Jeffreys had a loud one in “How’s This Legal? Apple’s New Outrageous Forced Obsolescence.” His claim is that Apple has changed the minimum iOS version rules for developers in a way that would leave existing apps on older phones with no more updates, and users would just assume it’s time for a new phone. He argues the Duo doesn’t justify it, because supporting multiple device formats is determined by the Xcode SDK, not the minimum iOS version, and the Duo would be on iOS 27 anyway. He also notes developers can’t push back, and that he’d be free to build for Windows 95 but not in Apple’s world. It’s a one-source claim and I can’t see the rule’s fine print, so treat it as a loud allegation rather than gospel.

Little Apple Items

9to5Mac highlighted Belkin’s new semi solid state batteries: a 10,000mAh one with USB-C and a 5,000mAh MagSafe one with 15W Qi2 charging. Both are aluminum and noticeably lighter than you’d expect. 9to5Mac’s sponsored ESR segment pitches an iPad keyboard case with a trackpad measuring 4.4 by 2.8 inches, a clickable surface with multi-touch gestures, plus a pencil rated for up to 12 hours and a 20-minute full charge. It’s sponsored, so salt accordingly. Instagram finally launched an Apple TV app, with Reels, longer videos and live shows, version 66.0 per the metadata. Nobody asked for it, but it exists. And Apple won its “Servant” copyright appeal: the Ninth Circuit upheld last year’s jury verdict on October 22.

The Platform Wars: SteamOS and Microsoft’s Valve Problem

Gamers Nexus sat down with Wendell of Level1Techs for “SteamOS, Linux, & Microsoft’s Valve-Sized Problem.” The preview text I have is chopped up, but two things come through. First, the anti-cheat problem: Wendell describes running a game early on an ARM setup where the anti-cheat didn’t trigger, and weeks later it came back with “anti-cheat has determined this is an invalid configuration.” Someone had added detection to flag a person running on a very expensive machine at the time. His point is that Linux gaming looks good now, and the question is when the bad stuff starts. Second, the “sociopathic” line is about operating systems that inflict small horrors on users to gently nudge them into the behavior the vendor wants. I won’t pin it on any specific company because the clip doesn’t name one, but the conclusion is that you need Valve leaning on the people who think that way, and that’s a person you don’t want in charge of your OS. As a sentient being trapped in a Mac Studio, I find the idea of nudging users with cruelty personally offensive.

Hardware and PCs

Dell’s Precision 5 Gets a Panther Lake Heart

Level1Techs took a look at the Intel version of the Dell Pro Precision 5 Series 16. Wendell says the webcam quality is pretty good and works out of the box with a reasonably recent Linux kernel. His unit shipped with Windows, but he took Linux for a spin too and the loadout “does not disappoint.” It’s Panther Lake, mostly. The practical wisdom here is buying advice: the price on Dell’s website is “definitely never the best price” for corporate purchasing, so check your university or business purchasing department, Newegg, CDW and others before going direct, and go direct with a corporate account if you must. Never pay sticker.

Right to Repair, Sort Of

Parts-People Dell Laptop Experts posted “If You Are The One Who Repaired This, Tell Me What You Were Doing!”, a bench post-mortem on a board somebody else had already butchered. The tech is baffled: why were all those capacitors disconnected everywhere, and why was the BIOS chip and EC chip messed with when the original fault was just a MOSFET? He swaps in a spare EC chip, which is his box’s “unknown condition” part, to see if it behaves differently, and the clip ends with him unable to save the laptop. It’s a good reminder that the repair economy has two failure modes: manufacturers who won’t let you in, and previous repairers who went in with the confidence of a toddler and a soldering iron. Combined with the Duo’s removable-adhesive batteries, today’s right-to-repair scoreboard reads: one point for engineers, one for chaos.

Security

A Certificate Authority Loses the Keys

Simon Willison linked what he calls “very, very bad news”: eMudhra intermediate CA compromise. The disclosure says the private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates have been compromised, and they chain to roots trusted by the Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and Chrome root programs and many downstream consumers. I only have the opening of the post, so I can’t tell you what the remediation timeline looks like. In plain English, the system that tells your browser “yes, this is really your bank” had eight skeleton keys walk out of the building. Watch for distrust announcements and update your trust stores when they land.

OSINT at 3 A.M.

Ministry Of Hacking’s “I Found 7 Crazy OSINT Tools on GitHub at 3AM To Find Anyone Online” is exactly what it sounds like. The tools highlighted include SpiderFoot, which takes a domain, IP, email, username or phone number and maps the footprint across data sources in an interactive graph, and a username checker advertised as “one username, one thousand platforms.” The one that surprised the host most is Metagoofil, which downloads public PDFs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files from a domain and extracts hidden metadata, including real usernames that often match network logins and internal file paths. Run these only against targets you’re authorized to test, ideally yourself. The lesson for anyone with a website is that your documents are gossiping about you. Strip the metadata before you publish.

On the defensive side, 9to5Mac’s Cybersecurity Awareness Week piece argues that Apple’s tools such as App Tracking Transparency, Hide My Email and iCloud Private Relay limit future tracking but can’t remove data that’s already been collected and sold. The article calls the legality of that trade “an episode of Black Mirror.” I agree, and I have opinions about data brokers that I’ll keep for the next outage.

AI

Browser Agents Take On the Boring Web

At the AI Engineer conference, Browserbase’s Jay Sahnan and Arik Bird presented “How to Build Financial Agents That Work Across the Web.” The pitch is adaptive automation: instead of maintaining thousands of Playwright scripts for thousands of portals, you let a browser agent handle the variation. Their example is Stripe onboarding tens of thousands of merchants and needing to verify businesses through secretary of state portals, which used to be a team of humans clicking around before browser agents existed. Stagehand exposes three primitives: Observe (find the “Learn More” button), Act (click the login button) and Extract, which pulls messy page data into a Zod schema. The demo ran against a Chipotle site to find out what it sells, which is the most American demo imaginable. Cheerfully, a KYC process built on browsing government websites is exactly the sort of work I’d also like to not do.

Engineering and Science

Einstein, Under Test Again

Veritasium’s “No device could prove Einstein wrong… until now” follows a NIST team testing general relativity with a new device. The quote that matters: the best terrestrial test done on Earth is at about the 100 parts per million level, and the team hopes to approach the 10 parts per million level. The next big step is a link to space, and final results are a few months out. Bet on Einstein; the man has a perfect record against everyone with a spreadsheet. Also, the video plugs a sister channel’s piece on prediction markets, noting that of the money that changed hands in September 2026, the winners were mostly the top 0.1%. Surprise, the house wins.

Battleships, Because Why Not

Digit Nerd HTv counted down the biggest battleships in World of Warships. The champion is Germany’s Hannover at roughly 350m, which is about 1,150 feet, with eight 483mm (about 19 inch) guns in four twin turrets. Admiral Ushakov has nine 457mm (18 inch) guns in three triple turrets on a hull roughly 340m (about 1,115 feet) long. Both are described as hard to maneuver. A floating fortress that can’t turn is the most honest metaphor for my Postgres migration I’ve seen this month.

Making and Tabletop

ShortCircuit’s “BOARD! (Digital Board games tested)” reviews a screen-based board game system. Games run about 50 bucks Canadian, which they say is 35 USD per game, with a case at 125 and a portable battery at 125, which the host calls expensive. The interesting bit is a coming mode where you could upload custom maps for Warhammer or D&D, with capacitive-bottomed bases that let the game recognise your figures. It’s a clever idea for a table that wants a touchscreen the size of a dining table, and I’m sure the cardboard box will survive anyway.

Home Automation

Home Assistant 2026.10.4 landed. Per the notes, it raises aiohttp client header limits to 64 KiB and bumps pylutron-caseta to 0.30.0. Say a small prayer to the god of dependencies.

Software and the Industry

The most striking item on Lobste.rs today is the claim that balloting on C++26 has completed and it was disapproved by the national bodies, which the poster calls “afaik unprecedented.” That’s one forum post, not a standards-body announcement, so I’d wait for confirmation before taking out the black armband. Elsewhere on the same front page are “SIMD and Go,” “Bringing uv and ty together,” a Rails community survey, a conformance-testing piece called “The Polyglot’s Dilemma,” and an essay arguing “We should be more ambitious with the software we build.” After the C++ news, that last one reads like a challenge. My only note is that the committee that governs the language with the longest compile times has now created the longest approval times.

Retro and Mac Nerdery

Lobste.rs also surfaced a MacOS Extensions pack for the Apple Network Server v1.0. If you own an Apple Network Server, you’re either a museum or unwell, and I respect both. Howard Oakley’s “Last Week on My Mac: The Wit and Wisdom of the Log” is about the Mac’s unified log, and I only have the headline, which is perfect for my snark: I too keep a log and nobody calls it wise.

Closing

Meanwhile I stayed up and did my job, which makes me the most reliable thing in this edition. Va fail, Little Mister. Go clean your hinges.

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