Foldable iPhone Duo, LG Allegations and the Week in Technology

Apple product launches dominated the technology agenda in the week of September 7 to 12, while other manufacturers preferred to hold their announcements for later weeks. Foldable phones, television privacy, and chip investments stood out in a week of moderate intensity. On the legal front, new charges against Huawei and lawsuits facing television makers drew attention.

Apple's first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, arrived with an inner display reaching 7.6 inches when opened. The device adopts a squarer build reminiscent of the passport-like form Samsung introduced this year. The matching proportions of the cover display and the inner display earned praise as a detail supporting interface consistency.

The inner-display camera drew attention with its under-display construction, an approach Samsung tried and later abandoned. Apple announced 3,000 nits of brightness for the inner display along with a coating that reduces reflections. The coating is expected to deliver a feel similar to the matte tablet displays Huawei introduced.

The Duo draws its power from the new A20 Pro chip, and its Turkish starting price appeared on Apple's site at 229,000 lira. Deliveries to preorder customers will begin on October 23. The price sits at the very top of the foldable segment and stays out of reach for broad audiences.

The event also introduced the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max, while the standard iPhone 18 made no appearance. AirPods 5, Watch Ultra 4, and Watch Series 12 took the stage too, yet they stayed in the shadow of the Duo. Apple thus refreshed several product lines in a single event.

One of the week's surprise comebacks came from Packard Bell, founded as a radio maker in 1926 and owned by Acer since 2008. The brand returned at IFA with a colorful product range, led by the 14.5-inch DotBook laptop. Lifestyle products such as phones and a record player joined the lineup, raising the question of whether they will reach Türkiye.

Allegations aimed at LG smart televisions formed one of the week's most disputed stories. According to Gamers Nexus, the sets constantly listen to ambient sound, convert speech to text, and transmit it to headquarters, recording even while offline and uploading once connected. A second claim says the devices scan other hardware on the home network, a practice said to cover 216 million televisions worldwide.

LG rejected the claims, stating that a set enters listening mode only when the microphone button on the remote is pressed or after its wake word. On network scanning, the company argued that probing nearby devices is standard behavior for smart products that communicate with each other. The response failed to satisfy those who raised the claims, and calls for independent verification continue.

The United States administration opened a new legal front against Huawei, this time bringing organized-crime charges under the 1970 RICO statute. Observers note there is no precedent for such a case against a technology company. The move reads as a legal escalation beyond years of trade-secret theft accusations.

TSMC and Sony are forming Advanced Vision Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, a 4.69-billion-dollar venture for image-sensor production. Sony covers roughly 3 billion dollars of the investment and keeps management control, with headquarters in Japan. Mass production targets 2029, and the deal should cement Sony's already strong sensor position.

TSMC plans trial production on its 1.4-nanometer process in April 2027 and mass production in the second half of 2028, roughly one year ahead of the original roadmap. The company has reportedly spent 49 billion dollars on new plants for this node. While Intel reports faster-than-expected yield improvement on 14A with mass production targeted for 2028, China's SMIC lifted profit by 20 percent and climbed to third place.

After replacing the messaging app on its phones with the Google version, Samsung is retiring two more of its own apps. Quick Measure and AR Doodle leave the store on December 31; they keep working on installed devices but receive no updates. Whether the company will revive these functions in another form remains unclear.

The science story of the week concerned work on the Navier-Stokes equations, one of the million-dollar Millennium Prize problems. Tristan Buckmaster of New York University and Levent Alpöge, a Turkish mathematician at Anthropic, made substantial progress with the help of tools such as Claude and Codex. Shortly after the researchers signaled they were nearing a solution, OpenAI claimed to have solved the problem after a compute-intensive run begun on September 1, igniting debate over whether researcher queries had fed the central model.

Nvidia announced Pair, software that pools idle home computers into a compute cluster over the local network. The company estimates that home PCs sit used only 17 percent of the time, leaving 165 teraflops of processing power idle in an average American home. Supporting Linux, Windows, and Mac, the software works with LM Studio or Ollama to route jobs to a capable machine, though it neither merges memory nor splits large models across devices.

In gaming, Microsoft appeared to test personalized pricing on Game Pass after Sony's store experiments; some users saw the Ultimate plan, officially 23 dollars, priced between 16 and 19 dollars. Kojima's espionage game Physint, announced in 2024, moved to Xbox after Sony walked away, with release expected within six years. GOG added printable box templates for older games, while the Saudi-owned EA is expected to address a Savvy Games merger only after the Moonton purchase closes.