Tech Brew Ride Home - Hope You Weren't Putting Off Buying A Mac

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Apple hiked Mac and iPad prices 15-25% on the memory crunch; iPhones held steady. Anthropic accused Alibaba of distilling Claude 28.8 million times. IBM detailed a 0.7nm chip, Facebook revived its Creator Studio app, and Kalshi chased a $40B valuation. Apple raises Mac, iPad, and other product prices by 15%-25%, saying it has "never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly"; iPhone is unchanged (WSJ) Apple Raises Mac and iPad Prices to Counter Memory Shortages (Bloomberg) Sources: in a letter to US officials, Anthropic accused Alibaba of adversarial distillation, using Claude 28.8M times from April to June via almost 25K accounts (Bloomberg) IBM details a 0.7nm chip manufacturing process that utilizes a "nanostack" 3D transistor architecture, which it says could continue chip innovation for 10 years (The New York Times) Facebook brings back Facebook Creator Studio as a stand-alone app with a built-in AI chatbot to help creators grow their audiences through personalized guidance (TechCrunch) Meta looks to AI to review harmful content in cost-cutting drive (FT) Sources: Kalshi is in talks to raise funding at a ~$40B valuation in a round that may close as soon as Q3; Kalshi raised $1B at a $22B valuation in May 2026 (FT) Subscribe to the ad-free feed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Welcome to the TechBrew right home for Thursday, June 25th. With 2026, I'm Brian McCullough today. Apple hiked Mac and iPad prices 15 to 25%. Anthropic accused Alibaba of distilling clawed 28 million times. IBM detailed a 0.7 nanometer chip. Facebook revived its creator's studio app and Kalsh continues to prove that the big story this year in tech, beyond AI, is prediction markets. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. I'm getting to the age where I might pull a muscle just by thinking about stretching. That's why Blueprints, longevity

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Blueprint.com for 20% off. And after you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Well, here we go. Apple has raised Mac, iPad, and other product prices by 15 to 25%, saying it has never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. Notable that at least for now, the pricing of the iPhone remains unchanged, quoting the journal. Among the price increases, the base MacBook Air rose $200 to $1,299. The base MacBook Pro increased $300 to $1999. The entry-level MacBook Neo increased $600 to $699. The iPad Air increased $150 to $749, and the iPad Pro increased $200 to $1,199. iPhone prices were unchanged, though the company hinted at more increases

in a statement. We have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices, it said. We have never seen a component price increase to this much of this quickly. Apple's price hikes arrived the day after Micron Technology, the big American maker of memory and storage chips reported blowout quarterly earnings, touting gross profit margins that topped 80%. shares in Micron jumped 16% after the close and appeared likely to power a Thursday rally among semi-conductor stocks. Micron executives who typically offer cautious projections about the boom-bust memory business said on their earnings call that tight conditions will persist beyond 2027. Just three months ago, they had projected tight conditions going only beyond this year.

In an interview Wednesday night, Micron Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana said the company couldn't make investments during the memory market's last downturn when Micron's gross profits went negative, in part because certain customers took advantage to pay rock bottom prices. Quote, we told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive, he said, without naming Apple, specifically, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments. A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 23 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins, end quote. Apple, the iPhone maker, is well known for using its huge memory and storage purchases as

leverage to secure the lowest prices, say analysts and former memory company executives, end quote. So I guess the suggestion here is that this is a bit of chickens coming home to roost for Apple, at least according to Micron. And quoting Mark German, Apple added, it has, quote, shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today's increases for iPad and Mac. The price increases are largely unprecedented with no equivalent in Apple's modern history of sweeping hikes across much of its product line. The company has raised prices on individual models before, including a $100 increase for the iPhone 17 pro last year, but not across several product categories at once. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions. Apple said. The higher-end MacBook Neo with more storage and touch ID is now $799 up from $699, a fully loaded

16-inch MacBook Pro with the highest amount of memory, and storage is now priced at $9,99. A 15-inch MacBook Air is now $1499 up from $12.99. We're not at the point where we're saying this is going to end anytime soon, Tim Cook said in April, adding that the constraints will likely last, quote, several months. John Ternis will inherit the memory crisis on September 1st when he steps into the CEO role, succeeding Cook. The shortage has also had an impact on Apple's ability to roll out new products with the problem holding back key releases like an updated Mac studio. In April, Cook said that the iPhone has been less affected by the memory issue than the Mac and has been instead facing shortages related to its main device processors, end quote. In a letter to U.S. officials, Anthropic has accused Alibaba of adversarial distillation,

using Claude 28.8 million times from April to June via almost 25,000 accounts, quoting Bloomberg. Anthropic said that a campaign by operators linked to Alibaba's Kwan AI lab targeted Claude's most prize capabilities, including software engineering and agentic reasoning, according to a letter that the AI startup sent to several U.S. senators and White House officials. The company said it was the biggest attempt so far by a Chinese company to piggyback on the work of top U.S. Labs. In its letter, Anthropics said that the effort involved 28.8 million exchanges with Claude between April and June through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts, according to people familiar with the document and a copy scene by Bloomberg News. The company said the Alibaba campaign

resembled past efforts by other Chinese developers that Anthropic flagged in a blog post earlier this year. Anthropic warned that Alibaba and other Chinese labs are making systemic and unauthorized use of results from leading U.S. models to develop a rival generation of chatbots at a fraction of the cost via a practice known as adversarial distillation. It cautioned that AI systems built using this method often lack safety guardrails, and the firm urged the Trump administration to step up efforts to halt the practice. These distillation attacks are carried out illicitly, systematically, and at industrial scale to harvest U.S. AI capabilities across Frontier Labs and repackage them as their own without incurring the training and R&D costs required to train U.S. Frontier models. Anthropic wrote in its letter,

Alibaba had no comment. An Anthropics spokesperson declined to enter into specifics on the letter, but emphasized the importance of combating distillation through coordinated action between government and industry. Anthropics letter marked the latest call from top AI American companies to rein in some kinds of distillation, where developers train systems using. results from another AI model to create similar capabilities and a new one at a far lower cost. While tolerated for training smaller, less advanced systems, distillation violates AI labs terms of use when it's employed to replicate a cutting-edge AI model without permission. The practice has alarmed U.S. developers to the point that Anthropic, OpenAI, and Alphabet's

Google have joined forces to share information about distillation attempts that violate their terms of service. Anthropic and Open AI have each warned that Chinese AI startups, including deep-seek and minimax have employed distillation to develop their own models, end quote. IBM has revealed a 0.7 nanometer chip manufacturing process that utilizes what it calls nanostack 3D transistor architecture, which it says could continue chip innovations for at least the next 10 years. Quoting the times. For decades, the tech industry has relied on the ability of semiconductor companies to ring more power out of computer chips, making the smartphones that fit in a hand today, more capable than the computers that filled entire

rooms 40 years ago. While some experts worry that era of increased miniaturization is ending, IBM is saying, not so fast. The big tech company on Thursday released details of its next advance in chip manufacturing technology, which it says could keep that innovation going for another 10 years. Using a novel approach to making smaller transistors that act as tiny switches in microprocessors and other chips, IBM said the new production process can squeeze nearly twice as many transistors on a fingernail-sized chip as the last technology it introduced in 2021. That will offer 50% greater computing performance and 70% better energy efficiency, the company said. Both attributes are in hot demand, particularly in the race to build

data centers for artificial intelligence. Power is a particularly severe constraint with energy-hungry AI chips in some cases causing construction delays for builders that can't secure affordable electricity. Everyone demands more performance, but no one wants to pay for the power. Huing Ming-Boo and IBM Vice President who leads chip research and development said in a briefing with reporters, IBM, though a pioneer in semiconductors doesn't make or sell chips anymore, but engineers at its laboratory in Albany, New York, still develop new technology for turning silicon waferes into chips, which it typically licenses to manufacturers. Mr. Boo said the technology should be ready in the next five years, but he declined to disclose potential users.

Past licensees have included Samsung and Rapidus, a Japanese company. Industry analysts briefed on the IBM announcement were impressed while noting that the approach would face competition. This is a big deal, said Dan Hutchison, an analyst at Tech Insights. It basically puts another 10 or 15 years on the roadmap. The chip roadmap is a shorthand for Moore's law and often cited tenant about progress in chips attributed to the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. It projects that companies will pack twice as many transistors, on a chip every year or two, boosting performance while lowering the cost per transistor. Chip manufacturing has become so expensive that the cost benefits of making transistors smaller

have vanished leading industry leaders like Jensen Huang, chief executive of the chip giant Nvidia to declare Moore's Law dead. But computing speed and data storage capacity have continued to improve thanks to tinier transistors. Miniaturization gains are frequently described in nanometers or billions of a meter, though that nomenclature is now less a precise measurement than a marketing term to distinguish technology generations. Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing company, for example, is making ships rated at roughly two nanometers, and Intel has a comparable technology described as 1.8 nanometers. IBM described its new production process as 0.7 nanometers, the first to break the one nanometer threshold. The underlying innovation, which IBM first

described a year ago, is what the company calls a nanostack transistor. It is the latest example of building transistors from three-dimensional structures akin to tiny skyscrapers rising from the surface of the chip rather than simply shrinking transistors in lateral directions. TSM and Intel recently adopted a new 3D structure called a nanosheet transistor, which was also pioneered partly by IBM. IBM's latest approach takes two waferes with nanosheet-style transistors and effectively glues one upside down on top of the other, creating a structure that vertically links two types of transistors in a compact space, IBM said, end quote.

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By giving creators access to this AI companion app, Meta is looking to keep creators active on Facebook as it competes for their attention against rivals like TikTok and YouTube. The company also likely hopes that the app will allow. eliminate the need for creators to turn to third-party tools like ChatGPT when brainstorming content ideas and analyzing performance. The new app, which is currently being tested with select creators, will have Facebook's recently launched AI Creator Assistant built into it. The Assistant provides creators with personalized recommendations based on their content style, performance, audience engagement, and goals. Creators often have to sift through charts and dashboards to understand their performance, but with the AI Assistant, they can get quick answers to

questions like, when should I post? And what are people saying in my comments? Since the AI Assistant is conversational, they can also ask follow-up questions like how their audience has shifted over time. Beyond the built-in AI Assistant, the Creator Studio app will include a set of several new features, such as an AI-powered comment tool that will help surface the most important comments and draft replies in the creator's own tone. Creators can edit and approve the drafted replies before posting them, Facebook says. When creators open the app each day, they will see a feed of daily priorities, reviewing their newest post performance, tracking progress toward goals and flagging comments in need of a reply, end quote. And then on the other side of the equation, there's this from the FT. Meta is racing to replace human moderation with generative artificial intelligence as it

undergoes a broader cost-cutting drive to offset Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's vast spending on AI. Already, Meta has replaced about 50% of human review requests with LLMs this year, several of the people said. The company is aiming to reduce that figure even further. By the end of the year, the people added, potential. by more than 90% for certain types of content. Meta has long relied on a mixture of automated systems and human reviewers, including third-party contractors to assess whether a post or an advert breaches

its rules. Appeals by users have typically been handled by human reviewers. Meta said the shift toward AI moderation was to use a rapidly evolving technology more effectively rather than for cost savings. Since March, it said, its initial tests have shown that on average, LLMs make 13% fewer mistakes than humans when enforcing against violating content while finding 10% more actual violations. The point of this work is to improve our enforcement efforts and we're deploying these more advanced AI systems once we're sure they're consistently performing better than our current methods of content enforcement, it added. Meta has been using Google's Gemini large language model for most of its moderation and customer support, but staff have recently

been told to switch to Meta's new foundational model, Muse Spark, the people said. regular AI moderation, which typically relies on traditional machine learning classifiers to flag rule-breaking material can struggle with nuances such as satire or evolving language. Meta has argued that rapidly advancing LLMs trained on large amounts of text and data have the potential to improve efficiency, accuracy, and the speed at which violations are responded to while also increasing the coverage of more languages, end quote. Finally today, even as AI is all over the news, if you step back, the real big story in tech this year, other than AI, has been the explosion of the prediction markets.

Well, quoting the FT again. Calci is in talks to raise funds at evaluation of about $40 billion as the rapidly growing predictions market steps up efforts to offer new products and challenge the biggest players in the derivatives and gambling industries. The U.S.-based company could close a fresh funding round as soon as the third quarter of this year, according to people familiar with the matter. Kalshi's financing discussions, which come after it raised one. billion dollars at a $22 billion valuation just last month highlight how the group and

rivals like Polly Market are swiftly growing their customer bases and threatening the dominance of major companies like derivatives exchange operator CME group. The group's last funding round included well-known Wall Street firms including Philippe LaFont's investment firm Co2 as well as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Morgan Stanley. The $22 billion valuation compares with $11 billion in December and $5 billion earlier last year. Calci more than $17 billion in trading volume last month up from less than $5 billion a year ago. Kalshi's rapid rise has been helped by U.S. regulator's light touch approach to prediction market companies and President Trump's de facto blessing. The president last month branded several

prominent critics of the platforms as, quote, scum in a post on social media. His eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., joined Kalshi as a strategic advisor in early 2025. CME last week sued the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the U.S. Derivatives regulator for approving CalShe's so-called perpetual futures contracts that allow for wagers on cryptocurrency prices. The product competes with CME's futures contracts, which are widely traded on Wall Street. Sports bets dominate the platform, accounting for about 65% of CalShe's volume. Multi-leg combo wagers, similar to parlayes or accumulators have proved wildly popular since they were rolled out on the platform last September, end quote.

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