Tech Express | October 27, 2026: Apple Acknowledges iPhone Duo Inner-Display Issue, Offers Replacements

1. Apple Acknowledges iPhone Duo Inner-Display Issue and Offers Replacements

Days after its first foldable phone went on sale, Apple's iPhone Duo is drawing reports of cracked inner displays. In a statement provided to media on Oct. 26, Apple said it was aware of an issue affecting a small number of iPhone Duo units and that affected users can contact AppleCare to arrange a replacement. The company added that the vast majority of devices are unaffected, and that faulty units typically show the problem early in use.

According to users, unfolding the phone can produce a cracking sound, followed by a visible crack along the crease; some also report white patches on the right side of the screen. Complaints first surfaced on forums such as Reddit in the United States, and media reports say more than six users' cases have been independently verified. User Tom Battle said unfolding felt stiffer and harder than usual, after which lines appeared on the screen and he could feel a bump or loose component beneath the display.

Teardown specialist iFixit believes a failed hinge component may be causing the screen to crack rather than a defect in the display panel itself. Apple staff said no formal guidance had yet been issued to retail stores and support staff, but a team is investigating and some engineers are trying to recover affected devices for analysis. Replacements have not been smooth for everyone: a user in Virginia said a store confirmed the fault was a product defect, but Genius Bar appointments were full, and after completing diagnostics at another store he was still waiting due to a lack of stock.

Source

2. Ant Group Launches Lingguang 2.0, an AI Assistant That Manages Tasks

Ant Group officially launched Lingguang 2.0 today. With user authorization, the assistant can draw on connected information and services to proactively identify needs, then start analysis, monitoring and follow-up, alerting users at the moments that require attention. The upgrade is built on improved cross-session memory, long-horizon task scheduling and tool connectivity.

Running on a dedicated cloud host, Lingguang can work beyond a single conversation: tasks keep running after the user leaves the chat and follow up as new information and conditions emerge, shifting the AI from one-off execution to long-term management. Lingguang 2.0 connects with data and services across the Alipay ecosystem and can also call tools such as MCP and CLI in open environments, extending cross-platform collaboration.

The assistant now includes Alipay bills, membership and travel services, along with DingTalk, Feishu, email and Mijia, extending its scope from personal information and online errands to cross-platform workflows and smart-home device control. The Lingguang app, Ant Group's omni-modal general AI assistant, launched on Nov. 18, 2025 and passed 2 million downloads within six days.

Source

3. DeepSeek Raises Nearly 100 Billion Yuan, Led by Tencent and CATL

DeepSeek has raised another 100 billion yuan, a domestic record for a single AI funding round, with Tencent and CATL leading, according to Huxiu. The round overshot an initial 50 billion yuan target to reach nearly 100 billion yuan, at a pre-money valuation of about 500 billion yuan; two rounds within half a year have brought in more than 150 billion yuan combined.

Tencent invested heavily in both rounds (10 billion yuan in the A round and more this time), while CATL raised its contribution to about 10 billion yuan. The money is headed somewhere ambitious: DeepSeek plans a data center in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, deploying at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend chips to pretrain frontier models on domestic compute for the first time — a move Liang Wenfeng himself calls his biggest gamble.

On almost the same day, Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok offered a contrasting set of numbers: excluding the tech giants, AI has delivered zero financial return for corporate America. Revenue per employee across the S&P 493 has flatlined in the 450-550 range, with margins and productivity growth also flat. The article notes spending is highly concentrated too, with the top 10% of enterprises accounting for 99.5% of model serving and inference costs.

Source

4. Apple Adds Hidden Watermarks to AI Images and Edits in iOS 27.2

Images created with Image Playground, along with some photos edited with Apple Intelligence, now carry a SynthID watermark, MacRumors reports. Apple announced plans to add SynthID support in June, and the feature is live in iOS 27.2.

SynthID is a Google-created tool for identifying AI-generated content. It watermarks images and videos at the pixel level rather than through metadata; Google says it does not affect image quality and is designed to survive cropping, filters and compression. It is used by Google, Apple, OpenAI and others.

There is no option on the iPhone for detecting SynthID watermarks — checking requires the SynthID Detector website. In MacRumors' testing, images altered with Extend and Reframe carried watermarks, while Clean Up depended on the size of the edit: small edits added no watermark, larger ones did. All images created with Image Playground carry the SynthID watermark.

Source

5. Four Intel Raptor Lake Next CPUs Surface, Staying on LGA1700

Four Intel Raptor Lake Next processors have appeared in Vietnamese customs shipping records, filed on Aug. 18 and 19 under the identifiers 99DLMV, 99DLMT, 99DLMW and 99DLMX, all listed as FCLGA-packaged desktop processors. Base clocks range from 2.1GHz to 3.5GHz, with cache configurations of 24MB, 30MB and 33MB.

The 99DLMV runs at a 3.5GHz base clock with 30MB of L3 cache and an 8 performance-core plus 8 efficiency-core layout for 16 cores at 125W, positioned to replace the Core i5-14600K. The 99DLMT has a 2.1GHz base clock and 33MB of cache with 8 performance and 12 efficiency cores for 20 cores at 65W. Both the 99DLMW and 99DLMX list a 2.6GHz base clock and 24MB of cache, expected to be 10-core parts with 6 performance and 4 efficiency cores at the Core i5 level — 4MB more cache than the current i5-14400F's 20MB.

Raptor Lake Next is another refresh of the architecture, expected to be branded as Core 200 series and to stay on the LGA1700 platform, meaning the socket will span at least six years since Alder Lake arrived in 2021. The chips keep DDR4 and DDR5 support and are expected in early 2027; Gigabyte has already released BIOS updates for Z790, B760 and H610 boards to prepare for them.

Source

6. ABF Substrate Lead Times Hit 48-56 Weeks as AI Squeezes Gaming GPUs

ABF substrates are becoming the tightest bottleneck in the AI chip supply chain. According to the latest TrendForce data, ABF substrate lead times have stretched to 48-56 weeks — about 4 to 4.7 times the 12-week baseline at supply-demand equilibrium — with new orders waiting up to roughly 13 months. Packaging now takes longer than wafer fabrication itself.

The constraint is equipment, not money. Expanding high-end substrate capacity involves building facilities, buying tools and tuning processes, with lead times for key equipment components running as long as 40 months and deposition equipment parts stretching from about 4 months to 10. Chip giants are locking in capacity with prepayments: Nvidia, AMD and Intel have together paid more than $5 billion (about 33.3 billion yuan) in deposits to high-end IC substrate makers in Taiwan. That has driven Unimicron, Kinsus and Nan Ya PCB to announce a record 161.2 billion New Taiwan dollars in plant investment this year.

Gaming GPUs are being structurally squeezed as a result. Nvidia has said it aims to raise substrate capacity for its products to 2.5 times current levels within three years. AI accelerators use larger packages with more layers, consuming far more ABF substrate area per chip than gaming GPUs, so new capacity is absorbed by AI product lines first. Analysts note Nvidia has shifted advanced-node capacity at scale from consumer GeForce to AI chips. Prices reflect it: channel prices for the RTX 5090 have climbed from about 15,000-16,000 yuan at launch to 55,000-60,000 yuan, the RTX 5080 has doubled from about 8,000 yuan to 17,000 yuan, and the RTX 5060 is up more than 55%.

Source

7. Apple Expected to Launch M6 iMac and 14-Inch MacBook Pro This Week

After announcing a new iPad mini on Monday, Apple is expected to introduce updated iMac and 14-inch MacBook Pro models on Tuesday, both with the M6 chip that debuted in the new Mac mini in August, MacRumors reports. No design changes have been rumored for these Macs.

Higher-end 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with touch-enabled OLED displays are expected to be announced on Wednesday, according to the report.

Source

8. Private Rescue Fails, NASA Ends the Swift Space Telescope Mission

NASA has officially ended the mission of its Swift space telescope after a private satellite failed in its bid to rescue the aging spacecraft. The rescue was led by Arizona company Katalyst Space Technologies, whose LINK spacecraft tried to meet up with Swift this summer and boost its orbit. That did not work out, and NASA said in an Oct. 23 statement that the telescope is expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere in the next few weeks.

Swift launched to Earth orbit in November 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the cosmos. It was designed to operate for two years but kept studying the high-energy universe for more than two decades. In September 2025, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million rescue contract. LINK launched on July 3 and, about three weeks after liftoff, suffered problems with its propulsion system and orientation-maintaining reaction wheels, causing it to spin at an unexpected rate. That prevented it from capturing and boosting Swift, though it did get within 12 to 15 kilometers of the observatory and photograph it. LINK fell back to Earth on Sept. 25.

Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, said Swift played a major role in advancing understanding of the changing universe and leaves an extraordinary archive of multiwavelength observations. The telescope gathered its last scientific data on Oct. 20. Over its career it observed more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts and more than 1,400 supernova explosions, and its data has contributed to about 7,000 published scientific papers.

Source

9. Xiaomi Unveils 21-Degree-of-Freedom Bionic Hand Weighing 324 Grams

Xiaomi's technology team published progress on a new high-degree-of-freedom bionic hand today. The design is based on real production data from the pilot center of Xiaomi's automotive smart manufacturing division, and is positioned as a general-purpose dexterous manipulation solution for flexible manufacturing.

The team captured multi-angle video and motion data for 1,827 of the 2,579 standard operating procedures across 16 typical factory work sections, covering more than 70.8% of manual operations in those sections. Analysis of freedom utilization, joint coupling and grasp simulation confirmed 21 degrees of freedom as the best balance of coverage and engineering return for factory scenarios — improving average stable grasp success by 15% to 38% over 6-to-15-DOF versions, with returns flattening noticeably beyond 23 DOF.

The design relies mainly on tendon-driven actuation, combined with 5 direct-drive degrees of freedom for a 26-motor hybrid drive. The tendon motors sit in the forearm, leaving the hand itself at just 324 grams, which reduces end-effector inertia and improves control response. Tactile sensing covers 1,500 points across the palm, with 1mm resolution between fingers and 2mm on the palm, and the modules are replaceable. To handle heat from the dense motor layout, the team built a thermal prediction model that forecasts temperature changes 5 to 10 minutes ahead with accuracy better than 3°C.

Source

10. Pokemon Unite Announced for Global Shutdown in 2027

The Pokemon Company has announced that Pokemon Unite, the Pokemon MOBA co-developed with Tencent's TiMi Studio Group, will end service worldwide, with the Nintendo Switch and mobile versions shutting down together.

Service outside mainland China will end at 00:00 UTC on March 23, 2027 (8:00 a.m. Beijing time the same day). Mainland China will close earlier, at 11:00 Beijing time on Jan. 28, 2027, when the game stops operating, servers and the official website close, and users can no longer log in.

Pokemon Unite first arrived on Switch on July 21, 2021, followed by mobile in September that year; the mainland China mobile version launched in November 2024, putting total operation at close to six years by the global shutdown. The game features classic Pokemon characters in 5v5 matches, where the team with more points within the time limit wins.

Source