Tech Express | October 23, 2026: iPhone Duo Goes on Sale as Apple Says Stores Have Stock

1. iPhone Duo Goes on Sale as Apple Says Stores Have Stock

Source: 9to5Mac

Today is launch day for the iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable iPhone, after a messy pre-order period left many customers wondering whether they could simply walk into a store and buy one. Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Greg Joswiak, told TechRadar that the company did not ship out all of its stock during pre-orders: “we have them available at the stores, we're excited.”

Joswiak said last week's pre-order demand was “extraordinary” and that “people got it. They understood what we were doing.” Earlier this week, Apple confirmed to 9to5Mac that stores in launch countries would have “limited” iPhone Duo availability for walk-in customers.

Joswiak will be at Apple's Fifth Avenue flagship store in New York for the launch, and is likely to be joined by other executives, including CEO John Ternus.

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2. Canva Releases Its First Image Generation Model, Canva Craft

Source: TechCrunch

Design platform Canva has released its first image generation model, Canva Craft, built by its research team to compete with models from Google, OpenAI, ByteDance and Meta.

The model works in two stages. It first interprets a user's prompt and creates a plan covering the spatial relationships of elements, relative scale, visual hierarchy and information for text generation. It then produces an image of up to 2K resolution in any of 30 aspect ratios. Canva says this approach yields accurate object details and legible text, and lets users make precise edits without changing the rest of the image.

Rather than photographs, Canva trained the model on human-designed templates from its library, including posters, social posts, presentations, infographics, menus and typography-heavy layouts. Outputs can be turned into layered designs with Canva Magic. Canva Craft is available to all users through the Dream Lab tab and via the Canva API, and the company plans to support image generation in third-party chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini through its MCP.

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3. 1Password Lets AI Agents Log In Without Seeing Your Password

Source: TechCrunch

Password manager 1Password on Thursday launched 1Password for Agents, a tool that lets users have AI agents log into their personal accounts without the agent ever seeing their credentials.

The system sets up a line of communication between the agent, the user and the password manager. When an agent tries to log in, a unique digital key is sent to 1Password to confirm its digital identity. The user then receives an alert about the login attempt and confirms it personally, after which 1Password signs the agent in by filling in the credentials so it can finish the task.

In a blog post, 1Password said handing a password, secret or credential to an agent is a common shortcut, but it can leave sensitive information in places users no longer control. The service supports agents including Anthropic's Claude Duet, OpenAI's Dots and ChatGPT Work, Grok Bot, Meta's Muse and agents from startup Town, and the company says it is working with other companies to expand support.

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4. ByteDance's Volcano Engine Releases Seedance 2.5 4K

Source: 驱动之家

ByteDance's Volcano Engine officially released Seedance 2.5 4K on Oct. 23. The company says the model received dedicated training that lets it learn facial expressions, subtle movements and visual detail more fully, making it the strongest version in the Seedance 2.5 generation.

The 4K version focuses on rendering textures, contours and detail, and adds 10-bit color depth for richer color gradation and smoother transitions. In dialogue-heavy tests for film and TV clients, the 4K model captured subtle human reactions more fully, making it easier for viewers to read emotion beyond the lines.

The model supports a Draft mode: users can validate storyboards and refine shots with 480P previews before generating the final 4K footage. The 4K version is not yet broadly available to ordinary users; it is invitation-only and has been offered first to 20 film and TV studios and directors worldwide for pre-production on series and film shots. The report also notes that 30-second clips remain short, and full-length films still require extensive manual editing.

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5. TSMC Weighs Replacing Chinese Rare-Earth Magnets in Chip Tools

Source: 驱动之家

TSMC has sent preliminary technical questionnaires to several factory automation equipment suppliers, assessing the feasibility of replacing Chinese rare-earth permanent magnets in cleanroom machinery motors, according to reports.

Rare-earth permanent magnets play an obscure but irreplaceable role in fabs. Permanent-magnet synchronous motors deliver high torque with very low heat, driving overhead hoists, vacuum transfer robots and precision optical stages. Neodymium, terbium and dysprosium inside those motors keep the magnets from losing magnetism under constant thermal stress. China accounts for about 90% of global rare-earth refining and about 95% of finished permanent magnets; in April 2025, its Commerce Ministry placed samarium-, dysprosium- and neodymium-related products and sintered magnets under export licensing.

Alternatives exist technically but carry high engineering costs. Induction motors can eliminate permanent magnets entirely at the price of much more heat and bulk, while switched reluctance and ferrite designs are limited by lower magnetic energy density. Replacing motion components also requires 12 to 24 months of requalification. Three people familiar with the matter said the discussions are still at an early stage, and that TSMC has not issued a formal replacement directive or signed any commercial replacement contracts with suppliers.

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6. Western Digital Says Storage, Not GPUs, Is AI's Real Bottleneck

Source: 驱动之家

Western Digital's CEO said on a recent earnings call that AI is fundamentally a data system and that any workload generates massive amounts of data, creating a more durable market opportunity for hard drives than for compute, according to Digitimes. Order visibility from the company's top seven core customers now extends to 2030-2031.

The view is already reflected in capacity: Western Digital's 2026 HDD output is fully sold out, and long-term supply agreements run through 2028. Revenue in the first quarter of fiscal 2027 rose 55% year over year and guidance for the next quarter came in well above expectations, but management acknowledged that revenue and shipments are constrained by supply capacity rather than weak demand.

The report notes that AI's storage pull goes beyond GPUs needing HBM and high-speed SSDs: GPUs handle training and inference, enterprise SSDs carry hot data, and HDDs store training datasets, historical versions, logs, video and backups. A single AI server carries up to 1.7TB of storage, more than three times the 0.5TB in a traditional server.

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7. Switch 2 Hit by Software-Only Jailbreak Enabling Homebrew

Source: Ars Technica

Security researcher Sammy Hajhamid, known online as Pepsipu, has demonstrated a software-only partial jailbreak of the Switch 2, gaining “userland” access that he says lets users run homebrew, reverse engineer and mod Switch 2 games, back up save files and reach most of the console's peripherals through MMIO.

The hack relies on the original Switch version of the SmileBasic 4 programming environment and is a “tethered” exploit, requiring a macOS or Linux PC on the same network to run a node.js package. Hajhamid said he used OpenAI's Codex to probe SmileBasic's interpreter and, after about two weeks, found a 32-bit integer overflow triggered when removing items from an array. He then found a buffer overflow in the console's FileSystem services module that granted arbitrary read and write access, and eventually achieved native code execution through a faked filesystem process. He showed custom characters in Mario Kart World as a proof of concept.

The exploit works on the latest Switch 2 firmware, 23.0.1. SmileBasic 4 has already been delisted from the Switch eShop worldwide, though a Japanese demo version remains accessible, which may slow the exploit's spread; other community members are already teasing similar exploits using different games. The report says the hack falls short of kernel-level control and is far less severe than the “unpatchable” original Switch exploit of 2018.

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8. NASA Updates Artemis Moon Plans Today

Source: Space

NASA is holding a press conference on Friday, Oct. 23, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, starting at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT), with Administrator Jared Isaacman taking part to outline the latest Artemis moon plans.

According to an earlier NASA media advisory, the “Artemis Acceleration” event will include details about Artemis III, which will send four astronauts to low Earth orbit next year to test critical systems needed for future lunar landings, and about progress toward returning American astronauts to the moon by 2028.

Artemis III is currently targeted for mid-2027 and will test rendezvous and docking between NASA's Orion capsule and one or both of the private landers selected for the program: SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon. Artemis IV would follow with a landing near the lunar south pole in early 2028, the first crewed moon touchdown since Apollo 17 in 1972. The report notes that China has similar lunar ambitions.

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9. Huawei Details HarmonyOS 7 “Super Space” Storage and Memory Tech

Source: 驱动之家

Huawei today detailed the “Super Space Storage” and “Super Space Memory” technologies in HarmonyOS 7, both built on the latest iteration of its Ark Engine. After upgrading to the official release, the system can automatically clean up and reclaim tens of gigabytes of idle storage, extending the useful life of older devices.

Super Space Memory focuses on improving the efficiency of Huawei's in-house memory compression algorithm, dynamically slimming down apps resident in the background. Huawei says more than 60 existing models have received the background-retention upgrade, and devices with 16GB of RAM can gain up to an equivalent 3GB of additional usable memory, noticeably increasing how many apps stay alive in the background.

Super Space Storage automatically identifies identical redundant files across different apps and deduplicates them, keeping a single core source file on the device while preserving each app's access points and shortcut mappings. The system also learns usage habits and compresses rarely used apps in place in blocks, decompressing only the needed modules on demand. The features cover the Mate, Pura, Pocket, nova and Enjoy phone series, as well as MatePad tablets and devices such as the MateBook Pro.

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10. China's MIIT Says Autonomous Driving Is Nearing Commercial Rollout

Source: 联合早报

Guo Shougang, director of the First Equipment Industry Department at China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said at the 2026 World Intelligent Connected Vehicles Conference in Beijing on Oct. 22 that the global industry has entered a new stage where assisted driving is scaling up while autonomous driving is still being explored, and that autonomous driving is at a critical point in moving from “usable” to “good to use.”

Guo noted that L3 autonomous driving products from Changan Automobile and BAIC received conditional market access approval last December as the first batch of approved products, and that a second batch of pilot approvals is now underway. He said the ministry will keep strengthening vehicle operation monitoring and safety safeguards and will summarize experience in time.

He also said the innovation and integration of intelligent connected vehicles are creating new demands for industrial governance: systems are more complex, testing and validation harder, and responsibility more widely distributed, which requires the global auto industry to address the issues together. Nine ministries, including MIIT, proposed last month that by 2030 vehicles with autonomous driving features achieve large-scale application, with new energy passenger cars and commercial vehicles accounting for 70% and 40% of new vehicle sales in their respective segments.

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