Apple finally built its own modem, and the industry's most feared hackers turned out to still be inside the walls. The iPhone 16e, announced February 19 at 599 dollars, carries the C1, Apple's first in-house cellular modem after seven years and billions of dollars of effort, beginning the end of its dependence on Qualcomm and giving the company control of the silicon that connects a billion devices to carrier networks. The security news was darker: threat researchers confirmed that Salt Typhoon, the Chinese state group that penetrated US carriers last year, remained active into 2025, compromising additional telecom networks through unpatched Cisco routers and stolen credentials, months after the intrusions were first exposed.
Google broke with a decade of tradition and launched the Pixel 9 in August — six weeks before Apple's event — to claim the 'AI phone' label first, shipping Gemini deep in the OS while Apple Intelligence remained a promise. Cisco underlined how brutally the networking hardware business is being reshaped, cutting another 7% of its workforce — its second major layoff of the year — to redirect spending toward AI and security. And in the Southeast, 17,000 AT&T technicians walked off the job in what would become a month-long strike across nine states.
OpenAI revealed Sora, a text-to-video model whose photorealistic minute-long clips instantly reset assumptions about synthetic media — and about how much bandwidth and compute the AI era will consume. Nvidia's market value sailed past Alphabet's, making the chipmaker the third most valuable U.S. company behind only Microsoft and Apple, days before earnings that would justify the climb. And Cisco — the networking giant of the last internet buildout — announced it would cut 5% of its workforce, a stark reminder that the infrastructure boom is not lifting all boats equally.