Device week doubled as a preview of the industry's two next battlegrounds. Apple introduced the iPhone 16 line as its first hardware 'built for Apple Intelligence' — betting the upgrade cycle on AI features that would arrive in stages — while Huawei answered within hours, unveiling a $2,800 tri-fold phone that sold out its pre-order list in China and flaunted how far the sanctioned giant has clawed back. And far above the phones, AST SpaceMobile put its first five commercial BlueBird satellites into orbit — the largest commercial communications arrays ever flown, and the first pieces of a carrier-partnered answer to Starlink's direct-to-cell push.
Nvidia completed its climb, passing Microsoft to become the most valuable public company on earth — a title held by a chipmaker for the first time in the modern market era. The week's cautionary tale came from the auto industry: a ransomware attack on CDK Global, the software backbone for roughly 15,000 dealerships, froze car sales across the country and dragged on for days, another demonstration that a single vendor can be a national single point of failure. And Apple, eleven days after unveiling Apple Intelligence, said its marquee AI features won't launch in the EU this year — blaming the Digital Markets Act's interoperability requirements.
Apple finally showed its AI hand: Apple Intelligence, a system-wide layer across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with ChatGPT integrated into Siri and a hard hardware floor — most of it requires an iPhone 15 Pro or newer. In one keynote, Apple turned AI from a feature race into an upgrade-cycle engine aimed at hundreds of millions of aging handsets. Elon Musk responded by threatening to ban Apple devices from his companies, and Broadcom — the quiet giant whose silicon sits inside iPhones and data centers alike — beat earnings, announced a 10-for-1 split, and rode AI networking revenue to record levels.