Apple has unveiled its latest iPhone range, including the company’s first foldable smartphone, as new chief executive John Ternus made his first major product presentation since taking over from Tim Cook.

Ternus, who became Apple’s CEO on September 1, introduced the new products at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. After presenting updates to the iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods, he surprised the audience at the Steve Jobs Theater by saying, “actually there is one more thing,” echoing the famous phrase associated with Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs.

The announcement was the foldable iPhone Duo, which Apple says has the largest display ever fitted to an iPhone while remaining pocket-sized.

The device opens to a 7.6-inch display, about 80% larger than the screen on the new iPhone 18 Pro. It also supports the Apple Pencil, a feature previously associated with the iPad range.

Duo allows users to divide the screen between two different applications or operate two windows of the same website, which could be useful for tasks such as comparing products online. The device will start at $1,999, making it the most expensive iPhone Apple has released.

Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, said the device was likely to dominate attention at the event because it introduces a new design to the iPhone family and takes Apple into the foldable smartphone market.

However, Wood noted that foldable devices remain a small part of the global smartphone market, accounting for less than 5% of sales.

Apple also introduced the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, priced from $1,199 and $1,299 respectively. Preorders will open on September 12, with the phones going on sale on September 18. The Duo will arrive later, with availability scheduled for October 23.

The new Pro models feature improved battery life, cameras and performance. Apple said the Pro Max can provide up to 45 hours of video playback and supports faster charging.

Camera upgrades include new cinematic effects, expanded manual controls and smart focus tracking, designed to keep a moving subject in focus.

Apple also highlighted new Siri capabilities powered by artificial intelligence, while stressing privacy and security as it attempts to narrow the gap with rivals in AI.

Samsung, Motorola and Google have already launched foldable smartphones, but Apple has taken a slower approach to the technology.

Forrester analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee said Apple’s strategy was to enter the category after competitors had helped establish its potential, while allowing the company to shape the market with its own product.

The launch also gave Ternus an opportunity to begin defining his leadership of Apple, following Cook’s long tenure. Analysts said the company’s established hardware, software and services business would remain central to its future as the leadership transition gets under way.

Researchers in Spain have developed a new design for zinc-air batteries that can increase their power output by up to 80% without changing the chemistry at the heart of the technology.

The work was carried out by scientists at the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB-CSIC), in collaboration with the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) and the National University of La Plata in Argentina.

The researchers introduced conductive elements inside the battery that function as wireless bipolar electrodes. The elements are not connected to the battery’s existing electrodes or external electrical circuit, but can improve the movement of charge and reduce internal resistance.

The findings, published in the journal Energy Storage Materials, challenge conventional assumptions about how batteries should be designed.

Batteries generate electricity through the energy difference between their two electrodes, while an electrolyte allows ions to move between them. Conventional battery designs generally require the electrolyte to prevent electrons from passing directly between the electrodes in order to avoid a short circuit.

The research team, led by Nieves Casañ-Pastor of ICMAB-CSIC, found that isolated conductive metal pieces can be placed between the electrodes under specific conditions without causing a short circuit.

The researchers said the electric field created between the electrodes while the battery is operating polarises the conductive elements. Opposite charges accumulate at either end of the pieces, creating additional pathways for charge transport.

This process reduces the battery’s internal resistance and allows energy to be delivered more quickly.

“What is remarkable is that these conductors are not wired to anything: they are simply inserted into the system and they produce beneficial effects,” Casañ-Pastor said.

The research forms part of the doctoral work of Marc Mosqueda and focuses on the potential of zinc-air batteries, which use materials that are relatively abundant, inexpensive and considered safer than some alternatives.

Zinc-air batteries have attracted interest for energy storage because of these characteristics, but their performance has been constrained by the slow oxygen reaction involved in their operation.

The new architecture addresses part of this limitation by using wireless bipolar electrodes to improve charge transport and reduce internal resistance. Tests showed that the approach could raise power output by as much as 80%.

The researchers said the design principle could extend beyond zinc-air batteries and potentially be used in other energy storage technologies.

Casañ-Pastor’s group has already observed similar effects in other battery systems and plans to continue studying wireless bipolar electrodes.

The findings could offer a new approach to battery design by showing that carefully positioned conductive components do not necessarily need to be physically connected to a circuit to improve performance.

AMD has unveiled a powerful new workstation in Berlin that it describes as a personal supercomputer, designed to bring data-centre level artificial intelligence capabilities to desktop users.

The American chipmaker introduced the Threadripper Halo Station at the Internationale Funkausstellung technology event on Friday. AMD Senior Vice President Jack Huynh presented the system as part of a new generation of computing hardware built around the growing demand for AI.

The workstation is designed for demanding AI workloads and can be configured with up to two terabytes of system memory and 576 gigabytes of high-bandwidth HBM3E memory. It also features 96 Threadripper Pro CPU cores and two MI350P data-centre accelerators, with liquid cooling used to manage the system’s high performance requirements.

Huynh described the machine as the world’s most powerful workstation and said it would be capable of running artificial intelligence models containing more than one trillion parameters.

During a demonstration in Berlin, Huynh showed the system generating an entire 3D environment and flight simulator from a single prompt. The presentation was intended to demonstrate how advanced AI tasks could be performed locally without depending entirely on remote cloud infrastructure.

AMD plans to release the Threadripper Halo Station early next year, although the company has not announced a final price. Analysts expect the system could cost more than €100,000, placing it firmly in the corporate, research and institutional market rather than the consumer PC sector.

The workstation is aimed at organisations that want to operate large language models and AI agent systems on their own hardware. Running these workloads locally could reduce dependence on cloud services, particularly for businesses and institutions facing rising AI subscription and computing costs.

AMD’s closest rival in this market is Nvidia’s DGX Station, which also brings powerful AI computing capabilities into a desktop-sized system. The two machines take different approaches to local AI performance.

AMD’s system has a major advantage in memory capacity and bandwidth. Its larger memory pool is designed to allow trillion-parameter models to run locally, while Nvidia’s machine offers tighter integration between local systems and cloud-based computing environments.

Nvidia’s DGX Station is already available and sells for around €100,000, giving it an early advantage in the emerging market.

AMD’s entry could intensify competition as companies seek alternatives to cloud-based AI computing. The growing ability to run increasingly large models on local hardware could also change how businesses manage AI development and deployment.

By using standardised components while targeting data-centre class performance, AMD is betting that powerful local AI systems will become an increasingly important part of the next generation of computing.