Tech Brew Ride Home - The iPhone Air Isn’t Selling

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

The iPhone Air isn’t selling, and it isn’t selling to the degree that Apple is delaying the next version. Yan LeCun is gonna strike out on his own. The big illegal streaming site takedown you might not have hear about. And Facebook doesn’t like likes anymore, at least not external likes. Apple Delays Release of Next iPhone Air Amid Weak Sales (The Information) Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun plans to exit and launch own start-up (FT) SoftBank sells Nvidia stake for $5.8bn as it prepares for AI investments (FT) Anthropic Is on Track to Turn a Profit Much Faster Than OpenAI (WSJ) Streameast: How the authorities took down the world’s largest illegal sports streaming platform (The Athletic) Meta is killing off the external Facebook Like button (Engadget) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the TechBrew Ride Home for Tuesday, November 11th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. The iPhone Air isn't selling, and it isn't selling to the degree that Apple is delaying the next version. Jan LeCoon is going to strike out on his own. The big illegal streaming site takedown you might not have heard about. And Facebook doesn't like likes anymore, at least not external likes. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. When your business evolves, so does your risk of data loss. But with VIM, your data is always on the map.

Partner with VIM for coverage that keeps you moving. and get protection for workloads of all shapes and sizes, even the ones you haven't created yet, so you can stay resilient as you scale. With VIM, it's all good. Get workload coverage that works for your business at VIMM.com. That's VEEAM.com. The information is reporting that Apple is delaying the next iPhone air, originally set for fall of 2026. After the first model, apparently has been selling below expectations and a portion of inventory remains unsold. I had seen stories about the air selling poorly, so I guess this confirms those rumors. Quote, Foxcon, one of two companies that assembles the iPhone Air for Apple, has dismantled all but one and a half of its production lines for the first version and expects to halt

all production by the end of the month, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation. Luxshare, the other company that assembles the device, halted all production at the end of October, according to people with direct knowledge of the developments. In contrast, Foxcon and Luxshare have dedicated dozens of of production lines to top-selling models like the iPhone 17 Pro. The failure of the iPhone air to sell well is the latest demonstration of Apple's struggle to come up with a new variant of the iPhone that is popular with consumers. Apple experimented with a cheaper iPhone with a smaller display known as the iPhone Mini in 2020, but killed that in favor of the iPhone Plus in 2022, which had

weaker specs paired with a larger screen. Neither of these variants sold well, and the iPhone 14 Plus faced similar production cuts just weeks after its initial release because of slow sales. Apple's marketing of the iPhone Air emphasized its thinness and durability, but reviewers have complained about the compromises Apple had to make on battery life, cameras, and speakers to get the components into such a thin body. While people with direct knowledge of the matter said Apple only set aside 10% of its manufacturing capacity for the iPhone Air, reserving most for the entry-level iPhones and the pro tiers, a substantial portion of what it has produced remains unsold.

The iPhone Air is easily available to buy online and is regularly in stock in brick and mortar stores, unlike other models, end quote. Yeah, let's come back to that notion of compromises. A lot of the stuff I've been hearing is that you simply had too many features taken away to the degree that people were like, fine, I'll just get the regular one. And to be honest, now that I think about it, I don't think I've even seen an air out in the wild. So this is interesting, also from the information. The delay of the second-generation iPhone Air will allow Apple to work on a redesign of the device

and make it more appealing to consumers, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The redesign could include a second camera lens, an attempt to address one of consumers' main complaints. Reviewers have praised the iPhone Air's ultra-thin body, but criticized compromises in the product's features, such as having only a single camera lens. Instead, some Apple engineers are hoping to release a redesigned version with a second camera lens in spring 2027 alongside existing plans to release the standard iPhone 18 and iPhone 18E at that time. It's still too early to tell whether they can successfully redesign the iPhone air in time to make that new release window the people said, end quote. The Financial Times has sources that say meta chief AI scientist Jan Lacoon plans to leave meta in the coming months to found his own startup.

A source says he is in early talks to raise funds. quote, Lacoon, a Turing Award winner who is considered one of the pioneers of modern AI, has told associates he will leave the Silicon Valley Group in the coming months, according to people familiar with the conversations. The French-U.S. scientist is also in early talks to raise funds for a new venture, one of the people said. LeCoon declined to comment. META did not immediately respond to requests for comment either.

The impending departure comes as META's founder shakes up its AI strategy in order to challenge rivals such as OpenAI and Google in developing more powerful forms of AI. Mark Zuckerberg has pivoted away from the longer-term research work of Meta's fundamental AI research lab or fair, which LeCoon has headed since 2013, to focus more on rapidly rolling out models and AI products after deciding that Meta had fallen behind the competition. Over the summer, Zuckerberg hired Alexander Wang to lead a new superintelligence team at Meta paying $14.3 billion to hire the 28-year-old founder of Data Labeling Startup Scale AI, and acquire a 49% interest in his company.

Within those wider AI efforts, Zuckerberg also personally handpicked an exclusive team called TBD Lab to propel development of the next iteration of its large language models, luring staff from rivals such as OpenAI and Google with $100 million pay packages. As a result, LeCoon, who had previously reported to Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, is now reporting to Wang. Zuckerberg's pivot followed the botched release of Meta's most recent Lama 4 model, which performed worse than the most advanced offerings from Google OpenAI and Anthropic, while its meta-AI chatbot has failed to gain traction with consumers. LeCoon, however, has long argued that the LLMs that Zuckerberg has put at the center of his strategy

are, quote, useful but will never be able to reason and plan like humans, increasingly appearing at odds with his boss's AI vision. Within fair, Lacoon has instead focused on developing an entirely new generation of AI systems that he hopes will power machines with human-level intelligence, known as, world models. These systems aim to understand the physical world by learning from videos and spatial data rather than just language, though Lecun has said it could take a decade to fully develop the architecture. Luccoon's next endeavor is focused on furthering his work on world models, according to two people familiar with the matter, end quote.

SoftBank has sold its entire Nvidia stake, around 32 million shares. It did so in October for around $5.8 billion. And also part of its T-Mobile stake for $9.2 billion, thereby boosting SoftBanks Q2 profit to $16.2 billion above estimates. Quote, this year, our investment in Open AI is large, more than $30 billion needs to be made. So for that, we do need to divest our existing portfolios, said SoftBanks chief financial officer Yoshimitsu Goto on Tuesday. We did not have a specific reason to sell in October, and it was nothing to do with Nvidia itself, end quote. Second quarter profits were also driven by the group's tech-heavy vision funds, which recorded

investment gain of $2.8 trillion from holdings including ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Japanese Payments Group Pay Pay-Pay. SoftBank also sold some of its stake in U.S. telecoms operator T-Mobile for $9.2 billion. Masayoshi Son has bet his reputation on a series of huge investments aiming at turning SoftBank into a critical player in AI, a technology he believes will shape humanity's future. alongside his ownership of UK chip designer arm. Son has invested in cloud software developer Oracle, is supporting the massive Stargate data center buildout in the U.S. and most recently bought ABB's robotics arm in a deal valuing the business at $5.4 billion.

SoftBanks shares have more than doubled this year to over $22,000 yen as investors view them as a way to gain exposure to OpenAI, making San Japan's richest man, end quote. And play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal,

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The Journal has seen documents suggesting that Anthropic expects to break even in 2008. While, if you'll remember, Open AI is projecting $74 billion in operating losses or around 75% of revenue that year before turning a promised profit. in 2030. So Anthropic is a little ahead in one key metric. Quote, the financial roadmaps both shared with investors this summer suggests that the world's two most valuable AI startups are taking vastly different approaches to growing their businesses. OpenAI expects thinner margins than Anthropic from its sales for the next five years, yet it is investing far more in the chips and data centers needed to build its AI technology and doling out more stock-based compensation to attract top researchers. The aggressive plan reflects chief executive sales.

Altman's dream of turning Open AI into a multi-trillion-dollar tech giant, his desire to set the pace of the AI boom, and his seemingly unending tolerance for risk. The strategy requires near-constant fundraising to keep the startup alive and could backfire if markets cool on the technology or its near-term profitability. The financial figures for Open AI came before the startup signed a string of new computing deals with cloud and chip giants, meaning that it is likely set to spend even more in the coming years. Altman said on Appleman said on that the deals put Open AI on the hook for up to $1.4 trillion in commitments over the next eight years, leading industry skeptics and some investors to grow doubtful about the startup's

ability to pay for them. The documents suggest that Anthropic is taking a more cautious approach with costs growing at a pace more in line with revenue. The company is focused on increasing sales among corporate customers, which account for about 80% of revenue, and is avoiding OpenAI's costly forays into image and video generation, which require much more computing power. Anthropics AI models have also taken off among coders. The documents show that Open AI expects to burn $9 billion after generating $13 billion in sales this year, while Anthropic expects to burn almost $3 billion on $4.2 billion in sales roughly 70% of revenue for both. Anthropic then becomes a much more efficient business. In 2026, it forecasts dropping its cash burn to

roughly one-third of revenue compared with 57% for OpenAI, Anthropics burn rate falls further to 9% in 2027, while it stays the same for Open AI. Open AI's large upfront investment, particularly for new chips and data centers, could pay off handsomely if demand for its products continues to surge. The company recently launched a new video app called SORA and a web browser named Atlas. It is working on a new consumer hardware device, e-commerce, and advertising features for chat GPT, and humanoid robots. The company is spending almost $100 billion on,

backup data center capacity to cover unforeseen demand from future products and research the documents show. It is setting aside much more computing capacity for new AI research than Anthropic. We believe the risk to open AI of not having enough computing power is more significant and more likely than the risk of having too much. Altman recently posted on X, end quote. This was a big story overseas that you might have missed out on. The Athletic takes a look at the effort to take down a legal sports streamer, stream e-es. East, which had 136 million global users per month, around $4.9 million in ad revenue and $150,000 in crypto. The September takedown of a Stream East long billed as the world's largest

illegal sports streaming operation sparked some interesting reactions online. Some users lamented the loss, while others insisted the brand would simply reappear under fresh domains. For anti-piracy teams, it was a decisive skirmish, not the end of the conflict. Larissa Knapp, who leads long-term enforcement for the Motion Picture Association, told the athletic, framing the challenge as brand whackamol, neutralize one site and several more pop-up, buoyed by name recognition. Stream East, she noted, has become shorthand for illicit sports streams, much like Kleenex stands in for tissue, so copycats proliferate even when an original node is dismantled. That dynamic has been borne out repeatedly, a stream east targeted by U.S. Homeland Security

investigations in 2024 gave way to new imitations, including the version recently disrupted by Egyptian authorities. Despite being a copycat, it dwarfed the rest, drawing roughly 136 million monthly users. The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, also known as Ace, an MPA-led coalition of more than 50 media companies and sports rights holders, including UEFA, the European Soccer Federation, had been tracking streamies resurgence since late 2023. Exclusive research cited alongside the probe suggested nearly 5 million people in the UK accessed pirated sports in the prior six months. Aces Live Sports Working Group first flagged Streamease. app, which DeZone elevated as a priority target. Investigators soon mapped a cluster of 120 plus StreamEase branded domains,

collectively pulling 1.2 to 1.6 billion visits a year with heavy traffic from the U.S., Canada, and the UK. The network's resistance to take down notices made it a top focus. Using trend analysis, traffic monitoring, and legal discovery tools, ACE traced infrastructure to an IP address in Egypt and followed a crypto money trail into a tangle of offshore entities. Funds flowed through a shell company to hubs in the Asia Pacific region and Dubai linked to an Egyptian national with assets spanning real estate, cash, cryptocurrency, and even gold, an attempt to fragment holdings and evade detection. Yet the transfers left fingerprints. Investigators located about 150,000 pounds, roughly $200,000 in crypto. and uncovered malvertising revenue of around 4.9 million pounds, money earned by selling pop-up ad slots to bad actors who seed malware. With evidence in hand, ACE turned to Egyptian authorities

in June. International cooperation is often the biggest hurdle in piracy cases, given different legal regimes and enforcement priorities, but here officials moved forward. On August 24, 2025, 22 officers executed coordinated raids at two residences west of Cairo, arresting two suspects on copyright infringement charges. Police seized laptops, smartphones, 10 credit cards holding about 95,000 pounds, stacks of cash, and shell company paperwork. The financial picture grew after the arrest. Additional ad revenue of 2.7 million pounds was identified, bringing the total near 7.6 million, while seized cash and new crypto fines reached 450,000 pounds. Linking this cluster definitively to other Stream East domains remains ongoing across jurisdictions. Ace says

prioritizing the worst of the worst networks is crucial because they intertwine with money laundering, tax evasion, and broader organized crime. Meanwhile, a Reddit post claiming to represent the original Stream East insisted it was still live and warned users away from fakes, a reminder that the brand indoors. Investigators expect opportunistic replicas to try to capture displaced audiences and say they're watching for the ripple effects. Finally today, from the end of an era file, quoting and gadget. next year we'll see the end arrive for two of Facebook's external social plugins. The platform's like button and share button for third-party websites will be discontinued on February 10, 2026. The blog post explaining this from Meta says that site admins shouldn't have to take

any additional steps as a result of the change, although they can choose to remove the plugins before the discontinued date. Any remaining plugins will gracefully degrade, which sounds much more dramatic than what will actually happen, which is that they'll render as a zero-by-zero-zero-invisible element. Ending support for these features marks the end of an era for meta and Facebook. External like and share buttons were introduced in 2010. The tools were promoted as ways for sites to generate more traffic through the social network, which was a major way that people shared and saw articles at that time. The company's official line is that the plugins reflect an earlier era of web development, and their usage has naturally declined as the digital landscape has evolved.

But Facebook also plays a much smaller role in the broader meta-business operation than it once did. And anecdotally, it's less common to see sites running only integrations with a single social network, end quote. By the way, this weekend, I did use AI to produce part one of my Bo Jackson episode for the 80s-90s podcast. So for those of you who subscribed to that last year and enjoyed it, turn your feeds back on. Remember, the show was called Rad History. Search for that. Talk to you tomorrow. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th.

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