Welcome back to the Technology newsletter 🤖
Apple's CEO says more expensive iPhones are now "unavoidable," and the reason is the same AI boom behind everything else in tech.
Also in today’s edition: Spotify starts going after YouTube, an AI image company surprised everyone by building a full-body medical scanner, and Rockstar finally revealed the GTA VI cover art and a pre-order date.
Let's get into it 👇
🎵 Spotify began letting musicians upload full-length videos directly into the app, a clear move onto YouTube's home turf. Musicians can now upload music videos, live sessions, and covers on the most popular music platform. For listeners, it means your favorite artists' videos may soon pop up right alongside their songs. Spotify just planted a flag on YouTube's lawn. The only question left: whose grass is greener?
🖼 Midjourney, best known for generating AI images, made a surprise jump into healthcare by unveiling its first physical product: a scanner it says can produce a detailed, radiation-free image of your entire body in about 60 seconds. The pitch is a fast, cheaper alternative to an MRI for routine check-ups, though it's unproven, and, for now, lives inside a single spa in San Francisco. Try explaining 'unproven AI body scanner' to your insurance company. We'll wait.
🎮 Rockstar unveiled the official cover art for Grand Theft Auto VI and confirmed that pre-orders open June 25, building toward the game's November 19 launch on PlayStation 5 and Xbox. It's the first new Grand Theft Auto in over a decade and shaping up to be one of the biggest entertainment releases of the year, not just in gaming.
📱 Apple confirmed that its next iPhone software update, iOS 27, will let CarPlay show video apps right on your car's built-in screen so you can watch something while parked at the airport or charging an EV (it stays locked while you're driving). It's a small but genuinely handy change for the millions of people who use CarPlay every day.
🚀 After SpaceX's blockbuster stock debut pushed it past Tesla in value, financial analysts have started openly speculating that Elon Musk could one day merge his two biggest companies into a single empire spanning rockets, cars, satellites, and AI. It's just speculation for now. But it's the kind of speculation that used to sound like science fiction.
For years, Apple held the starting price of a new iPhone remarkably steady, quietly absorbing rising costs to keep that headline number from creeping up.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Cook said price increases across Apple's products are now "unavoidable," explaining that the company has "been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable."
Translation: the iPhones, iPads, and Macs you buy later this year are likely to cost quite a bit more than they do today.
The culprit isn't tariffs or greed, it's the same artificial-intelligence boom driving headlines everywhere else.
Modern gadgets and AI systems alike run on memory chips, the components that store data while a device is working.
As tech giants race to build AI, they're snapping up a particular kind of memory used in AI servers, leaving less to go around for everyday phones and laptops and sending prices climbing.
"There's less supply at a time when consumers want devices, and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases," Cook told the Journal, adding that pricing "needs to return to reasonable levels for consumer products."
Because every phone and laptop needs memory too, those costs flow straight down to the gadgets in your hands.
Apple has already started nudging prices up. It quietly raised the starting price of its Mac mini from $599 to $799 by dropping the cheapest model. And iPhones could be next.
Apple's new lineup, reportedly including its first-ever foldable iPhone alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, is expected in September, which is likely when shoppers will feel the change most directly.
Cook signaled this is serious enough that Apple may even dip into its enormous cash reserves to help boost memory supply: "We're willing to use our balance sheet to help be a part of the solution."
The AI gold rush, so often discussed in terms of chatbots and trillion-dollar valuations, is starting to land in ordinary household budgets.
It isn't only an Apple problem, since every gadget maker buys the same chips. The very technology being marketed as the reason to upgrade your phone (smarter assistants, on-device AI features) is, indirectly, the reason that upgrade is about to get pricier.
For Apple, that's a delicate bind: it's counting on AI features to convince people to buy new devices, even as AI's hunger for chips makes those devices more expensive.
For everyone else, it's a simple heads-up: if you've been eyeing a new phone or laptop, waiting may cost you.
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