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What to expect at Apple’s iPhone 18 launch event on Wednesday
Apple’s annual iPhone launch event will take place on Wednesday, September 9. It is a staple of the tech scene every year, but this year’s iPhone event is arguably one of the most consequential for Apple in well over a decade.
Not only is the company expected to unveil its first-ever foldable iPhone, but this year’s showcase will also be the first under Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus. Here’s what to expect—and what to watch out for.
The world’s first foldable iPhone
Despite being nearly 20 years old, the iPhone has had only two major designs throughout its history. The first was the iPhone with the physical home button (on the wide bottom bezel “chin” of every iPhone from the original in 2007 to the iPhone 8 in 2017).
In 2017, Apple introduced the iPhone X, which eliminated the physical home button in favor of an all-screen design and Face ID.
Next week, the iPhone is expected to get its third and most radical redesign yet with the introduction of the so-called iPhone Ultra or iPhone Fold.
As the latter name suggests, the new device will turn the iPhone from a slab-only form factor into a foldable one, and comes at a time when foldables are more popular than ever. But unlike common compact-style flip and book-style fold Android phones, the first foldable iPhone is expected to adopt a passport-style design that will give it roughly a 4:3 aspect ratio when closed.
Given that Apple hasn’t had a hit new product in years (hello Vision Pro), a lot will be riding on how consumers react to the company’s first foldable. If things go well, it could make the iPhone lineup feel innovative again.
Some new iPhone 18s (but not others)
While the iPhone Ultra/Fold will likely generate the most hype, Apple is also expected to release new Pro versions of the iPhone, including the iPhone 18 Pro and the iPhone 18 Pro Max. However, these phones are likely to be mainly iterative updates over the current iPhone 17 Pro series, not revolutionary new products. Expect a faster A20 chipset, improved cameras, a smaller Dynamic Island, and some new colors (bye-bye Cosmic Orange).
But in a first for Apple, it will reportedly not release a base iPhone 18 model, or an updated iPhone Air, alongside the iPhone 18 Pro series. Instead, Apple is said to be using the 2026 launch to kick off a staggered release schedule for its iPhone lineup: Pro models in the fall, and base models in the spring. That means if you were wanting to buy an iPhone 18 or iPhone Air 2, you’ll likely need to wait until March.
New home products
The foldable iPhone might not be the only entirely new product Apple introduces this week. The event is also rumored to focus on the company’s home products, which have not seen substantial updates in years.
Reporting, mainly from Bloomberg, suggests that Apple has a long-expected update to its Apple TV set-top box waiting in the wings, with a faster chipset capable of supporting the new Siri AI and possibly more advanced games. The company’s excellent HomePod mini smart speaker is expected to include internal chip upgrades that allow it to support the new Siri AI.
But Bloomberg also says that Apple may introduce a new “home hub” product. This is most often described as essentially a HomePod with an iPad stuck to it—in other words, a smart speaker with a multitouch display that gives quick access to widgets that let you control all the smart home accessories and entertainment in your house.
The so-called HomePad has been rumored for years, but with Apple’s new AI focus, it makes a lot of sense to introduce the countertop computer now.
New wearables and operating systems
Apple is expected to round out the event by introducing some relatively iterative updates to the AirPods lineup and introducing the next models of the Apple Watch (Series 12 and Ultra 4). The Apple Watch models are expected to retain the same design but feature faster chips that enable enhanced fitness tracking.
Alongside these hardware announcements, Apple is expected to show off the final version of its iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27 operating systems, which it previewed earlier this summer. While major new feature reveals aren’t likely on the software side, it will be interesting to finally see the dual screen version of iOS 27 that runs on the foldable iPhone, which the company has not yet shown off.
John Ternus and higher prices
Of course, it’s not just new products that Apple will unveil. This event marks the first under the leadership of Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, who took the helm on September 1, ending 15 years of Tim Cook’s leadership.
While the average consumer might not care much about the new guy giving the opening keynote at the iPhone event, industry watchers and the media will likely scrutinize how Ternus presents himself and how well he comes across as Apple’s new figurehead. Still, I wouldn’t expect Ternus to mention any radical changes to Apple’s ethos. This event, as always, will mainly be about Apple pitching its new products to consumers for the first time.
And consumers will likely be paying close attention to how much the new iPhones will cost them. Thanks to the AI-fueled memory shortage, Apple—like nearly every other consumer hardware maker in the world—has had to hike prices this year. Over the summer, Apple raised prices on its iPads, Macs, and Home products, but left the price of iPhones unchanged.
Expect that to change on Wednesday. It is a near certainty that the iPhone 18 Pro series will cost significantly more than the iPhone 17 Pro series. The question we’re all waiting to have answered is, “By how much?”
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They paid $470,000 for a ‘boring’ business. Within days, almost everything went wrong
Andrea Palacio and her husband thought they were playing it safe. In a search for a passive income business, they paid $470,000 for a South Florida landscaping company a few years ago. It was, in their words, a “boring business,” which was hands-off and had good cash flow. Within days of the deal closing, though, the seller vanished, 10 of the 12 employees quit, and revenue took a sudden dive from $70,000 per month to $40,000.
Making matters worse, they had pledged personal assets as collateral on their Small Business Administration loan. Palacio, pregnant while raising a 7-month-old, was thrust into a role handling booking, marketing, admin work, and customer service.
“We got into this business thinking that we’re going to be these investors, that we’re going to acquire the companies and just eventually exit for millions of dollars,” Palacio said on The Side Hustle Show podcast. “And I end up just driving a landscaping truck that’s old without air conditioning. . . . Quitting was never an option because we would lose our home. I can tell you that it was the hardest moment of our lives, and that the pressure was—it got a few tears, a lot of tears out of us.”
Over the course of the next year, Palacio and her husband rebuilt revenue to $60,000 to $65,000 a month, sometimes hitting $70,000. The problem was, they were working 80-hour weeks, leaving Palacio feeling like she wasn’t present for her kids.
Her sister mentioned ChatGPT, a tool that had just come out, and the tech-curious Palacio began experimenting with it. She eventually hired a freelancer to create AI customer relationship software. She created an AI receptionist herself, which would forward calls to her if the client was upset, and book estimates on a calendar automatically. The automations saved her 20 hours a month, she said.
By December 2024, Palacio and her husband put the business up for sale. The couple were hoping to simply recover the money they had invested.
“The thought at this point is we can at least recoup what we paid for the business,” she said. “Maybe it’s not going to be a huge profit per se, but it’s better than it was, and we can kind of get out and try the next thing.”
An offer came in: $750,000—a 60% premium on what they had paid.
Ultimately, the couple decided not to sell, since doing so would leave them without an income source. But since the business was running so well, they moved abroad for six months, leaving the manager in charge.
When they got back, the bank account had just $2.50 in it, Palacio claims, a result of alleged employee theft.
“We just didn’t know how to lead a company. We were not good leaders,” she said. “Being a good leader is, like, are you able to see . . . the real important information, the real KPIs on your dashboard? Do you have those numbers? Are you keeping track of the key metrics? And we weren’t doing that.”
Palacio fired the manager, but the asking price of a good replacement was beyond their budget. That led to more AI-driven automation, including a dashboard that tracks the efficiency of crews, how long jobs take, and salaries compared with what clients are charged.
“AI just changed everything for me,” she said. “It’s the tool that allowed me to get my freedom back and really stop wearing so many hats as a business owner. You can delegate all these little tasks that you haven’t even thought of.”
In June of this year, the company posted $75,000 in monthly revenue with seven employees. Palacio’s husband now goes into the office just one day per week to handle sales appointments. And Palacio launched her own company, called Crewless, which helps other owners run AI-first ventures.
As nerve-fraying as the saga has been, Palacio says it has taught her some important lessons. For example, she said she won’t ever buy a company “if the seller is not willing to finance at least a portion of it. They need to have some stake in the game.”
Additionally, she said, when things become overwhelming, it’s important to take a step back and try to remove yourself emotionally from the situation and look at things logically.
“My dad has the saying, ‘Just climb up the highest tree you can possibly find and look at things from a different perspective,’” she said. “Look down and see how you can come out of the maze that you’ve gotten yourself inside of. . . . Don’t ask yourself, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ but ask yourself, ‘What do I need to learn from this?’ And just keep going, because things will get better.”
—Chris Morris
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This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com.
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America’s disposable workforce is growing. It comes with hidden costs
Below, Paul Osterman shares five key insights from his new book, Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment.
Paul is a Professor Emeritus of Human Resources and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
What’s the Big Idea?
The rise of disposable work is allowing companies to gain flexibility and cut costs while shedding responsibility for their workers. We need guardrails to keep that flexibility from coming at the expense of workers and the public.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Paul himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.
1. Companies do not want employees
Employers want to get out from under the obligations they owe their workforce. Companies want bodies to do the work, but they increasingly don’t want those bodies to be employees.
Disposable workers are everywhere nowadays. The concierge who greets me when I leave my condo in the morning works for a contracting company, not the building. When I do an interview at a downtown office building, that building is being cleaned by contractors. The person indexing my new book is a freelancer. If I get into an accident, the nurse who might treat me in the emergency room is possibly a traveling contractor, not a hospital employee. If I sue the city because a pothole led to that accident, the defense attorney may be a staff attorney hired for a single case, not on the partner track at the firm.
Disposable workers include contractors, freelancers, and what I call marginal workers: people who are technically on a firm’s payroll but whom the firm has no intention of placing on any kind of career ladder and wouldn’t much care about losing.
Why are companies doing this? Partly, it’s cost. They avoid paying benefits, and they can pit one staffing firm against another to drive prices—and wages—down. But management also wants flexibility. They want the ability to do what they want, when they want, without the constraints that come with a permanent workforce.
And the third element is a certain lack of respect for frontline employees. The consulting firm McKinsey issued a report claiming that 95% of a company’s value is produced by only 5% of its employees. That’s disrespect. When one major bank’s CEO attributed a round of layoffs to artificial intelligence, he referred to the workers he’d let go as “low-value human capital.” That phrase tells you everything.
2. More than a third of American workers are disposable
The disposable workforce includes people from various lines of work: Uber drivers, food delivery workers, staff attorneys, travel nurses. They don’t all look alike, and they’re often counted separately in official labor statistics, which makes the full picture easy to miss.
To get a real count, I conducted an original, nationally representative survey of well over 6,000 workers, asking detailed questions about the nature of their employment arrangements. The bottom line is that 35% of the American workforce are disposable workers. That is a very large number.
“The bottom line is that 35% of the American workforce are disposable workers.”
An important and sometimes overlooked portion of that figure is made up of marginal employees. Some are obvious cases, like adjunct faculty or staff attorneys on short-term contracts. But many part-time workers belong in this category too. Firms deliberately create part-time jobs because they know part-time workers have higher turnover than full-time workers. By engineering high-turnover positions, firms manufacture disposability, creating a workforce to which they owe no lasting employment commitment whatsoever.
3. The consequences reach well beyond paychecks
One way to measure the real cost of disposability is to ask workers how satisfied they are with their current employment arrangements. Satisfaction is a good metric because it captures wages, working conditions, health and safety, and a range of other factors all at once.
Freelancers, on average, report higher satisfaction than standard employees. They say schedule flexibility is genuinely valuable to them. But contractors and marginal workers are considerably less satisfied than standard workers. They are also far less willing to put in extra effort for their employer. When asked about commitment and willingness to work harder, freelancers and standard employees both score high, but marginal workers and contractors score much lower. That disengagement has real consequences for organizational performance.
The consequences extend to the public as well. One important study compared hospitals that used contractors for cleaning with hospitals that used regular full-time employees for the same work. Infection rates were higher in the contractor hospitals. Contractors are not embedded in the hospital’s communication networks. They exist on the margins of the workforce, disconnected from the protocols and relationships that keep patients safe. The same pattern holds for industrial accidents: Workplaces with high concentrations of disposable workers see higher injury rates.
4. AI is making it worse
There’s a great deal of speculation about what artificial intelligence will do to employment. Before engaging with that question, it’s worth establishing that the rise of disposable work preceded the rise of AI. This shift began decades ago, driven by cost pressures and management preferences—not algorithms.
“AI introduces significant uncertainty for firms about their future staffing needs.”
That said, AI is relevant to where things are heading. AI introduces significant uncertainty for firms about their future staffing needs. They do not know how many workers they’ll need two years from now, or what skills those workers will require. In the face of that uncertainty, the incentive to rely on disposable workers grows stronger, because disposable workers are easy to let go when circumstances change.
It’s unclear whether AI will cause mass job elimination. It is the uncertainty of an AI-powered future that increases firms’ appetite for fewer obligations—and fewer obligations come with more disposability.
5. We need guardrails, not abolition
Firms are profit-maximizing machines. That’s their primary objective, and within the current legal and regulatory environment, using disposable workers serves that objective very well. The solution, then, is not to abolish disposable work—that isn’t realistic, and for workers who genuinely prefer freelance arrangements, it wouldn’t even be desirable. The right analogy is sharks. Sharks are important to the ocean’s ecosystem. They serve a real function. But they will eat you if you let them. So we build barriers—not to eliminate sharks, but to limit their range.
What kinds of barriers work?
One powerful lever is clarifying who counts as an employee in the first place. Federal law is a tangle of inconsistent statutes, and enforcement shifts with every administration and every judicial appointment. 33 states have adopted what’s called the “ABC test”—a simple, three-part definition of employee status. If adopted at the federal level, it would cut through much of that complexity and make enforcement more straightforward. This matters especially for gig workers: drivers, delivery workers, and freelancers whose legal status is perpetually contested.
“We build barriers—not to eliminate sharks, but to limit their range.”
For contractors and marginal workers who are already classified as employees, the challenge is different. It’s about raising the floor on job quality. Unions remain the most effective tool for that. Unionized building cleaners earn significantly more than their nonunion counterparts, but only about 6% of private-sector workers are unionized, and that number shows little sign of growing.
So we need additional strategies. Workers themselves are organizing outside of traditional union structures. On both coasts, rideshare drivers have pushed cities and states to establish standards around wages, bathroom breaks, and travel time. And public pressure plays a role. When Nike faced sustained public scrutiny over sweatshop labor, it changed its practices. The same logic applies here. The Fight for $15 campaign raised wage standards in big-box retail, proving that organized pressure on large firms can move the needle. We don’t have to accept a world where a third of workers are treated as disposable. We just have to decide that we won’t.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Enjoy our full library of Book Bites—read by the authors!—in the Next Big Idea app.
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How women over 40 can use personal branding to reclaim their careers
For decades, Cindy Gallop worked in the advertising industry, building brands. But at 45, she stepped away from her career and built her own. Now, at 66, she’s known as the founder of sextech, has one of the most-watched TEDx videos on YouTube, and is building her own startup, Make Love Not Porn.
“I’m a great believer in using your personal brand to be your own filter. I sum up my personal brand with the tagline, ‘I like to blow shit up.’ I am the Michael Bay of business,” said Gallop.
Her words could well represent the sentiments of middle-aged women the world over. Across industries, women in midlife are turning decades of hard-won expertise into public-facing personal brands. Many have found it’s one of the few forms of career capital that doesn’t depreciate with age.The Visibility Problem Personal Branding Is Solving
Despite decades of experience, midlife women remain persistently underrecognized in traditional workplaces. Researchers call this “gendered ageism.” It’s the combined effect of sexism and ageism, and it leaves professional women feeling like there’s no “right age.”
A 2025 global survey of women across 46 countries found that roughly 78% had encountered age-related discrimination in their careers. But research also finds that most women say they don’t want to step down or exit the workforce. They want to advance.
When they can’t find that path inside their current organization, they’re increasingly building one outside it.
Angela Kenzlowe, psychologist and MBA, helps leaders build psychologically safe teams to drive performance. She believes that having a personal brand in her 50s has kept her career fresh and her opportunities abundant, including a CNN appearance with Anderson Cooper. She maintains that it’s visibility, not competence, that’s the actual bottleneck for midlife women’s careers.
One survey found that 63% of women between 40 and 59 find entrepreneurship appealing and 64% already had a business idea. However, 78% haven’t acted on it, held back by financial concerns and fear of failure.
Building a personal brand can help with visibility and be the first step towards becoming an entrepreneur and reclaiming your career. It doesn’t require quitting a job, raising capital, or writing a business plan. It requires something many midlife women already have: visible proof of their expertise.
It’s a deliberate strategy for three things.
First, to establish authority in a specific area of expertise. Second, to attract opportunities and revenue that don’t depend on a single employer. And third, to reduce dependence on any one job or company for financial security.The reframing of personal branding, from self-promotion to career infrastructure, highlights the value midlife women are finding in making themselves more visible.
Shae Byrnes is 49 and an executive advisor, speaker, and author. Her story illustrates all the dividends a personal brand can deliver once it’s in the public sphere.
“After 10+ years in corporate, building a personal brand created a path of opportunities beyond what I’d imagined,” Byrnes said. “What started as writing and podcasting eventually expanded into paid speaking and an executive advisory practice serving small business CEOs.”
Three Steps To Build Your Personal Brand
Having spent decades in working environments, women who are 40 and older already have a lot of experience to draw on. There are three steps they can take to create a personal brand that draws attention and opportunities.
First, own your lane of expertise. Where does your experience/knowledge lie, what do you care about, and what’s your distinctive point of view? Answering these questions honestly will help you create a niche where you truly become a category of one. For example, instead of your expertise being financial planning, you could establish yourself as the expert on financial planning for midlife professionals who have navigated a divorce and are rebuilding.Second, map your visibility path. A personal brand can do nothing for you if it’s not in the public domain. You don’t need to post on social media all the time, but you do need to put yourself in the spotlight. This can include publishing on your website, running webinars, speaking at industry events, and being featured in the media.
Finally, work to turn visibility into opportunity. Your personal brand gives you credibility. Use this to put yourself forward for opportunities, whether for keynote speaking slots, employment opportunities, or developing an advisory practice. Your personal brand will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, but you need to go after the opportunities you want.
Use Your Personal Brand to Reclaim Your Career
It remains to be seen whether personal branding marks a lasting shift in how midlife women build economic opportunity or is simply a workaround for ageism. What’s not in question is that personal branding has become something more than a buzzword.
By building a personal brand, midlife women are leveraging their decades of expertise and experience. This shift alone is evening the playing field and giving older women a fairer shot at opportunities.
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Great products don’t market themselves
At a recent board meeting, someone suggested that we needed to go hard on PR and marketing to “build hype.” When the phrase “build hype” came up, the rest of the room soured immediately. To many, hype was synonymous with snake oil.
The company in question is doing legitimately impressive technical work, work that will define the category it is in, and almost no one outside its immediate customer base knows about it.
Later that meeting, I asked the founder: Had anyone, anywhere, ever pulled off a similar technical feat before?
No, he said. This would be a world first.
That concern around self-promotion is something I see frequently among the technical founders I work with building deep tech and physical AI businesses, who want to be measured by the substance of their technical work, not their effectiveness at marketing them.
In software, it’s common practice for sales and marketing materials to outpace what the product is capable of. In fact, it’s often encouraged as a way to probe for product-market fit. Taking this strategy to the extreme, however, can result in serious blunders and even outright fraud. Companies like Cluely, which misrepresented its annual recurring revenue numbers; Delve, which experienced allegations of fake compliance audits; and most infamously, Theranos, serve as cautionary tales of hype without substance to back it up.
And so many of these founders remain silent, hoping the tech will speak for itself. But silence is not a strategy, and it creates its own risk. People will form an opinion of the company whether it does promotion or not. They simply do it with less information. This risk is especially high for tech companies, where the product may take years to mature and the market may not yet understand the category.
As a deep tech investor, here are the five marketing principles I share with founders to help them build their identity early (when the substance is there, of course):
1. Market the vision, not just a product
Technical teams tend to describe a product based on what it is, not the radical change it might bring about. Things like form factor, model architecture, manufacturing process are all important attributes . . . but all subject to change.
Take the defense startup Anduril Industries. The “Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy” manifesto from one of its cofounders, Palmer Luckey, came before most of Anduril’s current product line existed, and it described a vision of what American defense should be. That worldview is part of what allowed Anduril to raise the capital to be a force in reshaping the industry and granted them enough flexibility to adapt what that looks like in practice over time.
The first product may become a wedge into a much larger market, or evolve into something else as the company does more customer discovery. A durable identity needs to survive those changes.
2. A marketing strategy starts with defining the goal and the audience
Often, I hear founders say, “We should be in TechCrunch.” or “We need a launch video; we need to post more on LinkedIn.”
But these are wishes that are not anchored in business strategies. Ask yourself, what is the end goal? Do we want publicity because are we trying to fundraise? Hire a specific kind of researcher? Win a beachhead customer?
A founder preparing to raise a round has to communicate why-now, why-you, something suited for investor-facing publications like TechCrunch, or going direct with a launch video on LinkedIn. Founders recruiting talent must convey that the team is capable and employees’ work will matter, which is exactly what authentic team updates on X and LinkedIn are for. One selling to enterprise customers needs to focus on risk reduction signals like regulatory approvals or pilots and deployments with notable logos, clearly visible on its website as case studies and socialized in industry publications.
The strongest message changes with the audience, and so should the proof. Choose the story and format by starting with the decision you want someone to make.
3. Establish cadence, don’t aim for perfection
Tech founders often wait for a single perfect moment to launch, rather than prioritizing a steady drumbeat of communication. Then as months pass, competitors pull ahead.
Just as software teams find product-market fit through ship/measure/iterate, so too can companies build their identity through continuous storytelling.
One company that’s done this well is Physical Intelligence. They’ve barely engaged with traditional media but have shipped technical updates on X, open-sourced components, and long, unedited clips of robots folding laundry and making espresso—all of which are effective at addressing the growing skepticism of robotics amid competitors’ more polished demos. As a result, the company is about to close at an $11 billion valuation, even without a commercialization timeline!
If you don’t allow people to regularly update their view of your company, your less sophisticated competitor might, winning investors and customers before you ever had the chance to show them why you are better.
4. Make storytelling a real, in-house job with a direct owner
This is the biggest error I see. A serious storytelling function should not be a small slice of the CEO’s busy calendar, or the job of a PR agency on a three-month retainer.
Companies need someone on the task at all times, and that person needs to be in-house. Yes, agencies help with positioning, media, design, content, and execution. But they work best when someone inside the company can gather materials, share business priorities, and track the company calendar, and that someone has an allocated budget. This person has goals aligned to the company’s and is held accountable for achieving them.
Without this kind of function in place, communications can become episodic, a mad scramble to announce when a financing round closes, then silence until the next big moment.
5. Make sure there’s substance before turning up the volume
Before you do all this, consider whether your claims will survive interrogations with a Bloomberg reporter or a hostile board member, or a reference call to a customer. Claims can sit anywhere from “the result once worked in a lab experiment” to “the product performs reliably with customers, and economically at scale.” The claims might look similar in a headline, but critical eyes will know the difference. Ensure you know which one you are.
I say this all with deep empathy for the teams who are responsible for executing it. Having played both sides, I know exactly what it feels like to attend to marketing when you are heads-down trying to ship the next milestone. It feels indulgent, like something real founders are supposed to be too busy for.
But it is also wrong. The founders who treat communication as a discipline, with the same rigor they apply to their core road map, consistently get more shots in the goal than the ones who treat it as a side project or chore. Strong technical work gives you something worth saying, and building a brand helps the right people hear it.
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Tesla’s viral ad for its new Cybercab robotaxi has one glaring problem
The newest addition to Tesla’s fleet of robotaxis is now on the road. While the driverless taxi service previously offered only the Model Y, it recently introduced the Cybercab—a golden car with butterfly doors, interactive touchscreens, and no steering wheel.
So far, the Cybercab is available solely in Austin, Texas, but a viral advertisement for the new vehicles has social media users everywhere raising their eyebrows.
A maybe not-so-accessible ride
Tesla posted its now widely shared ad with the caption: “Cybercab is designed to be a great experience for every rider.” The video sees riders with mobility aids storing them in the Cybercab’s spacious trunk: One man rolls up to the car in a wheelchair, and another approaches on crutches.
But those scenarios raise one glaring question. If solo riders require a mobility aid to get around, how could they get into the car after putting their wheelchair, crutches, cane, or another accessibility device in the trunk?
Social media users were quick to call out the obvious issue. “Just pick up your wheelchair and place it in the trunk, and walk over to the door,” reads one sarcastic post. “Makes perfect sense.”
“DID THE CYBERCAB JUST HEAL THAT WHEELCHAIR USER?!?!” joked another user.
Other X users alleged that the ad is meant to promote an image of accessibility without providing an actually accessible product. “This is not the real world. It’s slop meant to tug at the wallets of able-bodied investors,” one user wrote.
“You can just tell not a single disabled person was consulted for this,” commented another.
Of course, some users of mobility aids are able to walk unassisted or may be taking a Cybercab with another passenger who’d be able to help them into the vehicle. But the ad doesn’t paint such a nuanced picture, instead letting its message of being for “every rider” fall flat for many viewers on social media.
Is the Cybercab actually accessible?
Though Cybercab isn’t the magically accessible vehicle it appears to be in the advertisement, it does have some accessibility features.
According to Tesla’s FAQ page for the Cybercab, its built-in accessibility features include audio and visual supplements, bench-style seating at wheelchair height, trunk space for wheelchairs and other accessibility devices, room in the cab for service animals, and braille labels on the doors and buttons inside the vehicle.
Solo riders who are wheelchair users, however, don’t seem to be accounted for in the Cybercab’s design. They aren’t addressed on the vehicle’s FAQ page, while Tesla’s broader support section for all its robotaxis says that customers in need of wheelchair-accessible rides can access third-party providers through the home screen of the Robotaxi app.
“We are actively developing accessible ride options tailored to the Robotaxi fleet to enhance our inclusive transportation solutions for all passengers,” the section continues.
Tesla has not responded to Fast Company’s request for comment.
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Target is under fire over another Halloween costume just weeks after apologizing for the last one
Just a few weeks after coming under fire for a children’s Halloween costume that drew comparisons to blackface caricatures, Target’s Halloween collection is under fire again, although this time around the retailer isn’t alone in the controversy.
Target, Walmart, and Amazon have pulled a “German Army Soldier Adult Costume” from their websites. Originally sold by Orion Costumes, the outfit features a vintage-looking jacket and pants set that resembles the uniforms of Nazi soldiers during World War II.
While the costume is no longer listed on any of the three retailers’ websites, links to archived pages reveal the product’s name and ties to Orion Costumes.
According to screenshots of the product listings shared on social media, the costume was originally available for purchase for $49.99 at Walmart and Target.
The product description indicates the costume includes a jacket, trousers, boot covers, and a hat. While the description does not mention Nazis, it does reference the 1940s; the Nazi party ruled Germany into the spring of 1945.
“If you’re looking for a vintage style look for your next fancy dress night, why not try a 1940s theme?” a screenshot of the product description says.
Fast Company was not able to independently verify the screenshots.
The product removal comes just weeks after Target had to pull another Halloween costume for insensitive historical allusions.
Back in August, a children’s costume listed on Target’s website as “Kids’ Glows Under Blacklight Circus Clown Halloween Costume Bodysuit” was called out for resembling imagery from Jim Crow-era blackface minstrelsy. On August 23, after screenshots of the costume went viral on social media, Target pulled the costume from its website.
“As a company, we know we got this wrong, and we are deeply sorry. The costume is offensive and should never have been part of our assortment. It is no longer available for sale,” Target said in a statement at the time. “We know this is especially hurtful for our Black guests, team members and partners. Removing the costume is an important first step, and the company is looking closely at how this happened and what needs to change to ensure this won’t happen again.”
Yet less than a month later, the national retailer is once again pulling a costume from its inventory, now joined by two other giants in the industry.
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Scientists found a surprising potential use for the psychedelic in magic mushrooms
The psychedelic compound that makes magic mushrooms so trippy shows serious promise for protecting cancer patients from years of chronic pain.
For people undergoing cancer treatment, the nerve pain associated with blasting the body with chemotherapy can be debilitating. Even worse, the pain and discomfort can last for years—well after the body is done fighting cancer—and there’s no effective treatment to relieve it.
Known as peripheral neuropathy, the condition is caused by damage to nerves in the extremities, often the hands, feet, arms, and legs. Clinicians and researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have found that psilocybin administered to mice prior to dosing them with chemo completely blocks the painful condition from developing.
Mice in the study received two doses of psilocybin, the compound in mushrooms that causes hallucinations. They then underwent six rounds of chemotherapy lasting six months. Animals in a control group not given psilocybin went on to develop hypersensitivity to pain, a dulled sense of touch in their paws, and “withered” sensory nerve fibers in their skin.
Miraculously, the animals treated with psilocybin made it through chemo without any of the reduced paw sensation or shriveled nerves. The chemotherapy worked just as well to reduce the tumors for mice in the psilocybin test group.
The results are so compelling that human trials are set to begin this month. Researchers believe that psilocybin is able to protect nerves from damage by keeping energy-generating mitochondria moving along its normal pathways.
“There is an urgent need for treatments that prevent nerve injury without interfering with lifesaving chemotherapy,” the research group’s coleader, Dr. Moran Amit, said. The groundbreaking research was published this week in Nature.
Lingering long-term pain
Because chemo works systemically, affecting parts of the body well beyond the borders of a patient’s cancer cells, nerve damage can be a painful side effect of the treatment.
More than a third of cancer patients treated with chemotherapy develop peripheral neuropathy. As many as 60% of patients who receive platinum-based chemotherapy, common for shrinking tumors in the ovaries and lungs, experience the painful side effect.
People with peripheral neuropathy describe it as a burning, prickling, or pins-and-needles-like sensation. Such sensations arise when sensory neurons in the outer layers of the skin are damaged, interfering with the way mitochondria travels through them.
“Depleted of energy, the neurons’ tips degenerate, dulling tactile sensation and sparking chronic pain,” the MD Anderson study explains.
Psychedelic renaissance
The breakthrough research on neuropathy is just the latest point of excitement in the cutting edge field of psychedelics research. Psychedelic drugs like psilocybin, long dismissed as purely recreational and blackballed in the medical world, are in the throes of a research renaissance.
The magic in magic mushrooms has shown promise for treating depression, anxiety, and substance use disorder in recent years, with more research on the way.
In May, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced a new clinical trial to evaluate MDMA (commonly known as the party drug Ecstasy or Molly) as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans.
Beyond psychiatric conditions, the new study in Nature shows that psychedelics could unlock powerful treatments in the broader medical world.
“These findings offer important insights into how psilocybin may protect nerves before damage occurs, rather than treating symptoms after they become persistent,” Amit said. “At UT MD Anderson, we are actively exploring the multiple facets of psychedelics to pursue interventions that improve the lives of our patients.”
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Forget granite countertops. Homebuyers now say this is their No. 1 priority
Some Americans are giving new meaning to the proverb that your home is your sanctuary.
The at-home wellness trend continues to evolve and grow, with the global market for wellness real estate projected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2030, according to the latest figures from the Global Wellness Institute. This market has nearly tripled since 2019, the organization found, and the U.S. alone accounted for nearly 29% of related spending in 2025.
While a sauna or a cold plunge were the go-to among many wellness-minded homeowners just a few years ago, things are changing. These days, “invisible wellness” is the next big home trend, as House Beautiful declared in March, which includes touches like circadian lighting, nature-inspired spaces, scent-scaping, and the choice of color palettes.
Furthermore, the traditional markers of what constitutes “luxury” real estate are shifting as aging millionaires, in particular, are prioritizing features that extend independent living, according to a midyear luxury outlook report released this week by Sotheby’s International Realty. Aging in place is a growing concern among homebuyers shopping for luxury homes that sell for $10 million and up, according to roughly 38% of real estate professionals surveyed for the report.
“In this era of longevity, luxury real estate is no longer just about where you live but how well and how long you can live there,” Tammy Fahmi, senior vice president of global servicing and strategy at Sotheby’s International Realty, said in the report. “Homes are becoming hubs for care, connection and continuity—where luxury is also defined by adaptability, wellness, and community.”
THE WELLNESS PREMIUM
How much are some people thinking about their home in a holistic sense? Wellness infrastructure and health-centered design are now playing a key role in many purchase designs for luxury homebuyers, according to Sotheby’s.
These homebuyers are specifically looking for design elements that ensure accessibility as their mobility changes over time, as well as properties that offer direct access to nature, optimized air and water systems, integrated health-monitoring tech, and spa-like amenities.
Because some of these systems are harder to retrofit, developers and builders are now thinking about how to thoughtfully integrate these elements into the design from the onset, according to reporting by Realtor.com.“Wellness and longevity features are moving from ‘nice extra’ to genuine buying criteria, and it makes sense,” Jennifer Chino, a real estate agent with Compass in Annapolis, Maryland, told the real estate site. “Buyers aren’t just shopping for square footage anymore; they’re shopping for how a home will make them feel and function day-to-day, especially as more people work from home and think longer term about aging in place.”
WELLNESS GOES MAINSTREAM
That’s particularly true of residences that embed age‑friendly design with sophisticated wellness tech, according to Sotheby’s Fahmi. “Homes with main‑floor suites, elevator stacks, slip‑resistant surfaces, smart monitoring, staff quarters, and wellness suites will be at a premium,” she said.
But even the hoi polloi can get in on the trend. There’s a whole niche of content online, for example, that explains the budget-friendly DIY route for turning a livestock water tank typically used for farm animals into a cold plunge tub. And Costco members can purchase a sauna for as little as $1,800.
As the definition of what’s considered “luxury” evolves, more and more homebuyers can expect to find integrated wellness elements in homes that are within their budget. In fact, many buyers are already focusing on homes that make it easier to live well day-to-day, as Jennifer Stickler, president and principal broker at Mountain Luxury Real Estate, told Realtor.com.
“The luxury market may introduce some of these ideas first, but like a lot of things in real estate, they eventually become much more mainstream and affordable,” Stickler said.
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‘Sam Almond’ becomes a meme after the OpenAI CEO’s comments on ChatGPT’s water usage
Thirty-eight thousand ChatGPT queries versus a single almond may sound like a strange sequel to the “100 men versus a gorilla” viral debate meme. Instead, it’s just Sam Altman’s response to public concerns over AI’s water usage.
In a recent podcast, the OpenAI CEO sat down with tech reporter Alex Heath to discuss the future of the technology while also addressing concerns over AI’s impact on society—with one moment in particular going viral.
When asked about public concerns over the water usage of large language models like ChatGPT, Altman tried countering the worries by offering a comparison to a more water-taxing product.
“I saw this thing going around about the water usage of ChatGPT and it was like, ‘every time you run a ChatGPT query, it’s like you ran your shower for six hours and the water never comes back,’” Altman told Heath. “I think the real number is something like . . . for every 38,000 ChatGPT [queries], that is the same amount of water that is used in the production of a single almond in California.”
“A robust meme”
Questions around AI-related water usage have become an increasingly hot topic on social media, despite the fact that tracking exactly how much water AI data centers use is extremely difficult. Yet, research reveals that despite a growing demand for water related to data centers, other industries like agriculture still top AI in terms of water consumption.
“The people that are scarfing down 12 almonds at a time don’t feel like they are doing something horrible from a water perspective,” Altman added. “That has been a robust meme and difficult to disprove, but I don’t think it holds up to any scrutiny.”
Either way, social media users have decided to turn Altman’s response into its own meme.
Some have opted to christen the tech boss “Sam Almond,” sharing AI-generated images of Altman as an almond.
Others have extended the references to the “almond mom” meme, which refers to mothers who impose unhealthy eating habits on their kids.
“Well an almond feeds my mom for a whole day unlike 38,000 chatgpt queries,” one user said.
Another replied with an AI-generated image of Yolanda Hadid—who gained notoriety for telling her then-teenage model daughter Gigi to chew on almonds on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, in a clip that later inspired the “almond mom” meme.
But many more surfaced a counterpoint to Altman’s almond comparison, referencing that while water usage for agriculture, or in this case, a single almond, can be higher than a query, agriculture ultimately fulfills a human need that ChatGPT can’t simply replace: food.
“Me eat almond. Me no eat data,” a user said on X. Another added: “Then maybe he should eat 38,000 ChatGPT queries for lunch.”