For years, a new iPhone meant a device that was thinner, faster, and had a camera that came with incredible upgrades. At some point (and Apple devotees can debate which year's model this was!), a new iPhone became an incremental upgrade. Slightly better, slightly faster. Maybe there was a new button to learn, a new charging cable, or a new notch on the screen, but the iPhone itself remained the same rectangular glass and metal handheld it always was. It's hard to say when the urge to acquire the iPhone Duo first kicked in. I'll admit that it wasn't during the official announcement, which left me feeling puzzled about the device's potential. Do I actually want a phone that folds, I wondered' Was propping up the phone as a little tent to watch Netflix worth all that extra money' (The Duo starts at $2,000). As it turned out, the desire for the Duo grew on me as I saw developers embracing the new foldable design to create Duo-optimized apps. Apple's software development community, after all, is what keeps me locked into the iPhone. Apple developers are active, creative, engaged, and still often build for iOS first ' a must if you like trying things early....

The latest use case for AI' Dumbing down your smart TV to get rid of the bloat. A number of developers and vibe coders have recently been sharing solutions for 'vibe-coding' your TV to get rid of sponsored ads, speed up the app launcher, redesign the home screen, disable tracking features, and more. One such solution, called 'dumbtv,' describes its mission on its GitHub page thus: 'Your TV should do what you paid for: your apps, your HDMI inputs, and nothing else. No ads from the TV itself, no watch tracking, no update you did not ask for.' While hacking consumer electronics devices to gain more control over their systems is hardly a new idea, the latest advances in AI technology have made such efforts much more accessible to anyone. With smart TVs in particular, the hacks come at a time when people have grown frustrated with being forced to watch ads and put up with their devices surveilling their viewing habits. Modern smart TVs ship with a technology called automatic content recognition (ACR), which identifies what's playing on the screen using screenshots, audio clips, or other forms of digital fingerprinting....

The nearly three-hour movie ' first revealed last month at a secretive screening at the Telluride Film Festival ' is only playing in 855 theaters this weekend. (In contrast, the weekend's number one movie, 'Street Fighter,' is playing in 3,575.) But it had a reported 2,000 sellout screenings, and the reviews are overwhelmingly positive; 'You Can See Everything' currently has a score of 99% on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. The story of Elizabeth Holmes' rise and fall ' founding blood-testing startup Theranos, attracting support from many of Silicon Valley's biggest names, then ultimately being sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding investors ' has already been told in books, podcasts, TV shows, and other documentaries. But 'You Can See Everything''s filmmakers were given extensive access to Holmes and her family in the month before she went to jail, and the involvement of 'The Rehearsal' creator Nathan Fielder ' who co-directed the film with Lance Oppenheim ' made the whole thing even more intriguing....

It's a great time to be alive if you follow tech news and love messy drama. We're not just getting a Nathan Fielder documentary about Elizabeth Holmes this fall. Netflix's 'The Altruists,' which follows Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison through the scandal that crushed FTX and landed them in prison, is coming out on November 19. We can't say we ever expected that the ethical disconnects behind effective altruism were going to pique the interest of Hollywood, but hopefully, Netflix will do the strangeness of this story justice. 'From the very beginning, I was so fascinated by both Sam's and Caroline's real stories,' co-showrunner Graham Moore said in an interview with Netflix this summer. 'Those are both characters I could not have possibly made up had I tried ' I'm not nearly a good enough writer to create characters as fascinating as either Sam Bankman-Fried or Caroline Ellison.' Get 50% off a second passThe Disrupt experience is meant to be shared. Get your pass and bring a colleague, partner, or peer at 50% off. Cover more ground by making connections, building momentum, and discovering what's next in the startup ecosystem....