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Apple, Samsung, and Google are all expected to introduce their takes on folding smartphones in the coming weeks. 

All three competitors work together on some things; Samsung allegedly makes displays for iPhone; Google makes an OS for Samsung; and Apple works with Google Gemini for AI. That proximity suggests that we might experience some synchronicity between these devices when they finally arrive.

Samsung and Google move first — but September belongs to Apple

Bloomberg agrees: the publication claims Samsung’s forthcoming Galaxy Unpacked event in London on July 22 will feature the Galaxy Z Fold 8, which will have a short, wide design “that resembles Apple Inc.’s planned folding iPhone.”

It is expected to cost around $1,999 for the 256GB model. The late July introduction is widely seen as an attempt to steal a little thunder from the upcoming launch of the iPhone Fold/Ultra, Apple’s first foldable device.

Google is also chasing the looming Apple thundercloud with its own “Made by Google” event in New York on Aug. 12. This is expected to be a Pixel family update, likely including a successor to the Pixel 11 Pro Fold. Leaks suggest these devices will have more RAM (for AI), more storage — with a 256GB minimum — and be priced at an estimated $1,999 – or maybe even more.

Both of these devices will be great. Both will likely be compelling; but what we don’t know yet is how the decade or so Apple has spent designing and developing its own folding smartphones will crystallize into the final result. 

A decade in development, but will it blend?

Apple has its reputation on the line – will its phone stand out for its combination of high-tech and high design, or will the company fail in its bid to stand apart? We’ll find out in September when Apple’s folding smartphone finally appears, and the oxygen once again starts circulating around this part of the room.

We do know that the iPhone Ultra has entered mass production, with MacRumors seemingly rebutting recent claims by Ming-Chi Kuo that the device might ship later than expected and be in short supply once it appears. Citing Chinese supply chain sources, the report says manufacturing has begun. Other reports indicate Apple has increased initial manufacturing orders to 10 million units. Somewhere in between the truth lies.

The iPhone Ultra is expected to be a book-style foldable with a 7.8-in. inner display and a 5.5-in. cover display, Touch ID, an Apple C2 modem and an A20 processor. It will run iOS 27, which has already been found to be capable of changing display layout and resolution to seamlessly switch between different views; moving from the outer to the inner display should seem almost instantaneous, with smooth transitions between both states. 

The hinges need to do the talking

Apple has paid particular attention to the hinge design, which is thought to be near invisible to the eye and extremely robust. (It needs to be robust; the hinge will inevitably be put to some very tough tests by hungry vlogging tech influencers everywhere.)

Those same influencers will also be putting Siri AI to the test, with most potential customers very curious about the extent to which Apple Intelligence can turn the folding iPhone into a viable replacement for Macs or iPads. What happens when you use an iPhone Ultra with an external mouse and keyboard, for example? Will competing devices match the user experience for productive tasks?

At $2,000 a pop, a lot of potential customers for any of these foldable devices will be looking for a solution that ticks more boxes than simply being a giant smartphone. They will certainly want the luxury finish we can expect in all three devices, but they will also be hoping for a tool fit for a range of use cases smartphones don’t generally meet. 

Samsung’s existing Fold range, for example, is celebrated for its advanced multitasking features and media content and consumption features, even as its ability to connect to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse (Samsung DeX) makes it a convenient PC replacement.

Resetting the high-end smartphone price point

You can expect much the same from all three devices: a focus on display resolution, color gamut, brightness and screen refresh rates. But for all three, the really critical point will be the resilience of the hinge. Because once the novelty of the fold fades, the winner will be the one that succeeds in becoming something more useful than the smartphone we already know. 

In the end, these things must deliver more, not less, if they are to persuade consumers to reset their price-driven comfort zones. All of the manufacturers have a vested interest in driving shoppers to spend even more money on their devices. 

Join me on social media at BlueSky,  LinkedIn, or Mastodon,and do please subscribe to The Core for your daily collection of human-curated Apple News lovingly assembled by yours truly.

Ubiquiti has shipped updates to address multiple critical security flaws impacting UniFi Connect, UniFi Talk, UniFi Access, UniFi Protect, and UniFi OS that could result in privilege escalation and arbitrary command execution. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2026-50746 (CVSS score: 10.0) - An improper access control vulnerability in UniFi Connect Application that an attackerRavie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Specops Software explains how AI is making service desk impersonation attacks more convincing, personalized, and scalable, along with practical steps organizations can take to strengthen onboarding and identity verification. [...]

US rare earths produced by Washington-backed companies are flowing to Japan and South Korea, as American demand has yet to materialize despite the Trump administration’s push to develop a national supply chain.

Rare earths products produced by MP Materials, Energy Fuels and Phoenix Tailings—which together have won billions of dollars in US government support—are being sold to companies in Asia, where the scale of magnet manufacturing remains larger than the nascent production in the US.

China’s lock on global supplies of rare earths and critical minerals has become a national security concern in the US and other Western nations, since Beijing started restricting access to them. The metals are crucial to 21st-century technology and are used in the manufacturing of everything from weapons guidance systems to electric vehicle batteries.

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A recent EvilTokens campaign targeting businesses across the US and Europe is exposing a new email security blind spot. This “ghost phishing” technique keeps the malicious page hidden until it decrypts and comes to life inside the victim’s browser. For security leaders, the risk is clear: traditional URL checks may miss the attack while Microsoft 365 access, sensitive data, and response time [email protected]

A new banking fraudulent operation is targeting customers of Mexican banks, fintech, payment processors, and cryptocurrency exchanges using ClickFix lures. The activity cluster, tracked by Elastic Security Labs under the moniker REF6045, involves infecting victims through fake CAPTCHA verification pages that deceive them into running a malicious command that installs a PowerShell toolkit dubbedRavie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Linux runs a huge portion of today's infrastructure because it gives administrators an unusual amount of control over the system. That control extends to networking, where almost every aspect of packet flow, routing, filtering, and interface behavior can be customized. The trade-off is that very little of that hardening happens automatically. A fresh installation is usually built to communicate, not to isolate.

DuckDuckGo announced that its browser can now block most video ads on YouTube, including those shown before the video starts playing and during playback. [...]

Linux runs a huge portion of today's infrastructure because it gives administrators an unusual amount of control over the system. That control extends to networking, where almost every aspect of packet flow, routing, filtering, and interface behavior can be customized. The trade-off is that very little of that hardening happens automatically. A fresh installation is usually built to communicate, not to isolate.

New research shows that a signed Git commit's hash is not the one-of-a-kind name that much of the software world assumes it to be. Given any signed commit, someone without the signing key can mint a second commit with the same files, author, and date, and a valid signature, GitHub still stamps "Verified." Everything a reviewer would check matches. The commit's hash does not. That matters Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

For years, account takeover (ATO) followed a predictable script. Attackers bought stolen credentials in bulk, ran them through automated tools, and waited for matches. Credential stuffing was cheap, scalable, and for defenders, relatively well understood. That era is ending. Not because attackers gave up, but because the front door finally got harder to kick in. Passkeys are now mainstream. [email protected]

Japanese telecommunications giant KDDI says that millions of people had their email addresses and passwords exposed after attackers breached an email platform used by five internet service providers (ISPs) in the country. [...]

An AI coding assistant that refuses to answer a dangerous request in its chat box can answer it anyway if the same request is broken into small, ordinary-looking steps inside a code editor. That is the finding of a new study of GitHub Copilot by researchers Abhishek Kumar and Carsten Maple. The models they tested through Copilot, Claude from Anthropic, and Gemini from Google, refused Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Until recently, many tech professionals viewed themselves as a special and respected worker class: highly educated, hard-working, well paid, and in demand.

“They considered themselves above unions,” says Zak Thompson, senior software engineer at Kickstarter and union steward at Kickstarter United.

Big Tech issued aspirational mission statements that motivated workers, workplaces were seen as meritocracies, and employees were encouraged to speak out if they were unhappy. If workers didn’t like where they worked, they just moved on: other employers would be falling over themselves to hire them.

How times have changed.

Now, fed up with mass layoffs, disillusioned with Big Tech’s direction, and stunned by bold management proclamations that AI will displace huge numbers of people in many tech jobs — starting with programmers — interest in unions has risen sharply among tech professionals. Workers in some organizations, including Kickstarter, have already taken the plunge.

A surge in interest

“Starting in 2022, the industry as a whole started seeing very large layoffs across the board [and] that has dramatically shifted the balance of power. I think most people in the industry have experienced that one way or another,” says Google software engineer Alan McAvinney.

But not everyone is convinced that the layoffs have changed the power dynamic. “I wouldn’t say the balance has definitively shifted… some things point to workers losing ground and others point to improvement,” says Liya Palagashvili, senior research fellow and director of the Labor Policy Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

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Liya Palagashvili of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Mercatus Center at George Mason University

What matters, she says, is not the size of the layoffs but worker options: how easily laid off workers can find alternative work in their field.

For McAvinney, the decision to support a union was about a culture change at his employer.

“In 2019, Google fired four people (the ‘Thanksgiving Four’) after they organized and spoke out internally against the company’s work with the anti-union firm IRI and US Customs and Border Protection. That was a big turning point for me,” he says. “Historically, we had a pretty robust culture that actually encouraged us to speak up internally.”

Google said the employees were fired for violating data security policies, but many workers believed the move was retaliatory. It became a galvanizing event that contributed to the launch of the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) in 2021, says McAvinney, organizing chair, Alphabet Workers Union-CWA. (Alphabet is the parent company of Google.)

So far, tech worker interest in unions hasn’t translated into higher membership numbers nationally. According to the US Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS), union membership in tech occupations was about 3.5% in 2025, says Palagashvili. “While there have been some high-profile organizing efforts, they do not yet show up as a broad national increase in tech-sector unionization.”

Overall, only 10% of American workers belonged to a union in 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported — near an all-time low — but interest in labor unions is rising. A 2025 Gallup survey found that 68% of Americans approved of unions, up from 48% in 2009. Interest is particularly strong among younger workers, the Economic Policy Institute reports, and in a 2024 online survey of 1,900 tech professionals on the career site Blind, 67% of respondents said they’d be “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to join a union if their company had one.

Nonetheless, for most tech professionals, those positive perceptions have not so far translated into widespread union membership.

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt

In the wake of mass layoffs that began in 2022, the primary driver toward tech worker unionization may well be job security.

“I think a greater concern is that their work and skills have been devalued at the same time their jobs become less secure and their wages and benefits have declined,” says Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research and senior lecturer emeritus at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

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Kate Bronfenbrenner from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University

ILR School/Cornell University

The fear that AI will displace IT workers en masse is palpable, says Google’s McAvinney. Whether the mass layoffs to date were actually driven by AI or if AI was used as a pretext, “Large numbers of people have that concern, and that is absolutely part of the interest in collective action — getting organized, joining a union, or forming a union,” he says.

The second motivator is ideological disillusionment. “Workers recruited with promises that they would be changing the world discovered that they were really building surveillance systems or military technology,” Bronfenbrenner says.

The insidious use of AI surveillance is another concern, says Bronfenbrenner. For example, Meta’s announcement that it would use AI to track US-based workers’ computer activities, including clicks, keystrokes, mouse movements, and screen snapshots to train AI agents had a dystopian feel to it. Were these workers training AI to take over their jobs, just as US workers were asked to train their lower-cost foreign replacements during the offshoring craze in the mid-2000s? (Meta later paused the tracking program after employees twice demonstrated the inadequacy of privacy protections for the collected data.)

But Bronfenbrenner argues that AI’s bigger threat may be its use as a surveillance tool to prevent organizing. “My research on surveillance in organizing campaigns found that it tripled from 11% in the early 2000s to one third in 2021,” she says.

“The deeper pattern is the same one inherent in Taylorism — management trying to know everything that’s under the worker’s cap, to monitor every step so workers have no control and no secrets,” Bronfenbrenner says. “Now they have even more technology to do it, and they can potentially replace you entirely with AI.”

Simone Robutti, an organizer with Tech Workers Coalition Global, calls the current wave of tech layoffs “a prequel to whatever AI-driven layoffs are coming.” It’s part of the trend of “lowering the cost of knowledge workers, of cognitive workers, of office workers in general — because that’s the bet on AI,” he says.

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Simone Robutti from Tech Workers Coalition Global

TWC

Whether employers can in fact replace workers with AI (or will be able to soon) is an open question. “If Amazon lays off a hundred workers, and ninety of them find comparable jobs within a few months, that mitigates the concern,” says Palagashvili from George Mason University. “If most of them have to sell their houses and move across the country, or end up underemployed — not just unemployed, but working in warehouses instead of at a competitor — that’s a different picture.”

So far that hasn’t been a big issue for former Google employees, says McAvinney. “It used to be that if you left Google, you could get a job anywhere in tech instantly. That’s no longer the case, but most people I talk to are still finding work in the industry,” he says.

But for those newly entering the workforce, it’s much harder to find a job. According to the Stanford HAI 2026 AI Index Report, released in April, “employment for software developers ages 22 to 25 has fallen nearly 20% from 2024.”

Successes and setbacks

While organizing can be an uphill battle and workers often face aggressive pushback from their employers, there have been a few notable successes.

In the UK, workers can join a union as individual members before their employer formally recognizes that union for collective bargaining purposes. That’s how 300 workers in Google DeepMind’s London office initially joined the Communication Workers Union. In April, 98% of the 300 CWU members voted in favor of pursuing union recognition, formally requesting that management recognize the CWU and Unite the Union as representatives for approximately 1,000 staff. (Google DeepMind disputed characterizing the action as a vote to unionize).

And in May, some 2,100 tech workers at the University of California joined the University Professional and Technical Employees union, which is affiliated with Communications Workers of America (UPTE-CWA), with 96% of the workers voting yes.

“A lot of tech workers right now are extremely concerned about job security and about their work being automated,” says Max Belasco, a business systems analyst at the UCLA School of Law and co-chair of the UCLA chapter of UPTE-CWA, Local 9119.

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Max Belasco from the UCLA chapter of UPTE-CWA

Zac Goldstein

The CWA described the organizing initiative as “the largest tech industry organizing campaign in US history.” But it wasn’t the first.

“Between 2022 and 2024, CWA organized nearly 400 different digital media companies,” Bronfenbrenner says, including the game developer Activision and the New York Times.

Kickstarter’s 85 employees voted in 2020 to form Kickstarter United — the vote was 55% in favor — and most recently the union negotiated a contract that includes a four-day workweek, AI protections, and a minimum pay floor for 59 employees, including tech workers.

“What we ended up winning was yearly benchmarking of all employee salaries to the 60th percentile, along with yearly cost of living adjustments,” says Thompson.

But the way forward has been rocky. Shortly after the union was ratified, Kickstarter announced layoffs. The union, which is affiliated with the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU), wasn’t able to reverse that decision but did negotiate better severance terms, including four months of severance pay (versus 2 to 3 weeks for every year worked) and six months of health benefits.

When contract negotiations faltered in October 2025, the union went on strike for 42 days. By December, a new contract was ratified. Shortly thereafter, the company announced another round of layoffs that included four union leaders, one of whom had helped to negotiate the new contract. The union is currently fighting those dismissals and will be arguing its case in third-party arbitration.

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Members of Kickstarter United union on strike

Kyle Friend

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 codified American workers’ rights to unionize and take collective action, and it established the National Labor Relations Board to protect those rights. Unfortunately for Kickstarter, NLRA enforcement under the Trump administration isn’t what it once was.

“Cases brought up for violations of the NLRA can go for months or years without ever seeing a hearing or having any sort of judgment. That gives companies more power to flagrantly ignore it,” Thompson says.

Tech firms have other weapons to dissuade employees from unionizing. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University in 2025 interviewed 44 US-based tech worker-organizers, who cited additional pressure tactics including threats to withdraw venture capital funding — essentially killing venture-backed firms if employees vote to unionize — and threats of being fired that put tech workers with H-1B visas in an impossible position.

Kickstarter United is a majority union — one that has won NLRB certification. While that’s possible in smaller organizations, success in larger tech firms has been much more limited.

Alphabet is a prime example: the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA is a “pre-majority” union that lacks NLRB certification and has no formally recognized bargaining unit. Formed in 2021 with fewer than 400 members, today it represents 1,400 members, still a small fraction of Alphabet’s US-based workforce, estimated at over 100,000.

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Alan McAvinney from Alphabet Workers Union-CWA

Aran Per Ink

The challenge, says McAvinney, lies in trying to organize a distributed workforce of in-office, remote, and contract workers. “Large tech companies don’t split easily into discrete segments — there’s no strong geographic component to teams, and a single team is often spread across many locations,” which makes getting majority support unrealistic, he says.

But that doesn’t mean the union has had no impact. “In January, we launched our Googlers for Job Security campaign. Today we’re organizing around four demands: a guaranteed minimum severance package for everyone who’s laid off, voluntary buyouts before any mandatory layoffs, an end to GRAD quotas (GRAD being Google’s performance review system) so ratings reflect actual performance and aren’t given or changed to force a particular distribution, and the option to take severance as leave, giving workers, especially those on visas, more time on payroll,” McAvinney says.

“In response, Google did start offering voluntary exit packages,” he says. The union was also able to negotiate one contract, for Google Help workers. However, those workers aren’t actually Google employees: they’re contractors who report to Google management but work for Accenture.

The counterargument

Do unions get what they bargain for? Conservative business and labor economists say union contracts typically have rigid pay structures that restrict merit-based pay in favor of seniority-based wage increases, and that unions, as certified by the NLRB, create labor monopolies that limit worker choice and push up wages to levels detrimental to both workers and business.

The collective bargaining model is not well suited to the highly dynamic and innovation-driven tech sector, Palagashvili argues. “Firms often need to reorganize teams, redesign products, adjust roles, and redeploy talent quickly,” she says.

Collective bargaining agreements make those adjustments much more difficult by imposing uniform terms for an entire bargaining unit, regardless of individual preferences and circumstances. The contracts, she says, “are more about higher pay and less about flexibility.”

But Thompson says that hasn’t been his experience. “The thing with a union is you get to write the contract,” he says. “At Kickstarter we care about recognizing individual contributions, merit, and having a clear career progression.”

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Zak Thompson from Kickstarter United

Fee Christoph

Kickstarter United pushed the company to clearly define what it takes to get a promotion, advocated for no “at will” employment, where employees can be fired any time without a stated reason; won standards for minimum pay, raises, promotions, and time off; secured AI protections; and codified a four-day work week.

Yes, some tech professionals voiced concerns about unions, such as that they stifle innovation and limit compensation for top performers, Thompson says, but “a lot of those people came around. They said ‘I was wrong. I feel way more protected, more secure, and I see the benefits.’”

Bronfenbrenner says it’s a mistake to think that tech workers are inherently different from other workers, adding that the two industries with the highest union density are entertainment and professional sports. “These are professionals with unique talents and capabilities, and they’ve organized successfully under the exclusive representation system.”

Will we see a unionized tech workforce?

If unions eventually prevail in tech, it will happen in the face of intense pressure from employers not to organize.

“The Alphabet Workers Union is a case study of the limits of the first wave of tech labor organizing,” says Robutti from the Tech Workers Coalition. “They hit a threshold beyond which they couldn’t fight the union busting anymore, and they became entrenched at that size.”

No one should expect large-scale unionization to occur overnight, Bronfenbrenner says. “The auto and steel industries weren’t organized in months. It took decades. Organizing global tech companies will take the same.”

While McAvinney acknowledges that a traditional majority union may be difficult to achieve any time soon in a company as large as Alphabet, he’s still bullish on his pre-majority union’s ability to make a difference. “Ultimately, regardless of which type of union you are, you can only win as much as you have leverage to win. Your leverage is inherently limited, but that doesn’t mean you can’t win anything,” he says.

Attitudes about unions appear to be changing rapidly. “Interest in unions is high, and I expect that will continue,” McAvinney says. “Now is an excellent time for people to start getting organized. I have seen lots of evidence of that.”

Thompson agrees. “We are seeing an uptick of people in tech reaching out, trying to get help organizing. When people have their job conditions continue to deteriorate, they are going to start organizing,” he says. “We’re definitely seeing a shift from ‘it’d be nice if we had a union’ to ‘okay, how can I actually do this now?’”

Come back next week for Part 2: How to unionize your tech workplace

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) gave federal agencies until Friday to patch an actively exploited vulnerability in the Langflow visual framework for building AI agents. [...]

A Chinese threat actor tracked as UAT-7810 is actively refining its bespoke malware to expand its Operational Relay Box (ORB) network by breaking into internet-facing networking devices. According to findings from Cisco Talos, UAT-7810 is an advanced persistent threat (APT) actor that's responsible for maintaining and proliferating LapDogs, an ORB network that first came to light in June 2025. Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Ubiquiti has released security updates to patch seven critical vulnerabilities in UniFi OS, including a maximum-severity flaw that can be exploited in command injection attacks. [...]

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has ordered government agencies to patch an actively exploited maximum-severity flaw in the Adobe ColdFusion commercial web app development platform by Friday. [...]

In the brief history of AI security, the prompt injection has quickly become the top threat. Large language models are inherently unable to distinguish between legitimate instructions provided by users and malicious ones sneaked into emails, source code, and other third-party content the models are processing. This makes it trivial to surreptitiously inject malicious commands that the LLM readily follows.

With no way to enforce this crucial boundary between trusted and untrusted sources, AI engine developers are left to erect elaborate guardrails designed to mitigate the damage rather than solve the root cause.

To date, most prompt injections have fallen into a class known as push, in which each potential victim is targeted. For example, the adversary injects malicious instructions into an individual email or calendar invitation. Because the injection must then be sent (or pushed) to each specific target, the scale of the attack is limited, hampering mass exploits that hit the Internet at large.

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