💸 Your next iPhone will be very expensive

Plus, Google Gemini leader quits for OpenAI

June 18, 2026

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Welcome back, AI Admirers!

Breaking News: Apple is facing soaring costs for memory and storage chips due to the global AI boom. Tim Cook says the company has tried to shield customers, but rising prices are now “unsustainable.”

Get ready to dive into the latest happenings in AI.

📢 Today's Headline:

iPhone Prices Climb with AI
NASA Backs Schmidt Over SpaceX
Shazeer leaves Google, joins OpenAI
Microsoft expands in China
Latest AI Tools & Resources
Today’s Poll and Results

Read time: 3.5 minutes!

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Hand-picked News

The AI tax is real, and Apple is passing the bill to you

Apple is preparing to hike prices across its hardware lineup because the skyrocketing cost of building AI-ready devices has become unsustainable.

The $270 premium: Analysts estimate Apple must raise flagship iPhone Pro prices by roughly $270 just to protect its current profit margins.
The stealth rollout started: Apple quietly axed its 128GB Mac Studio and bumped the base price of the Mac Mini last month to prep for this transition.
Apple’s leverage failed: Even though Apple uses massive prepayments to lock in cheap component pricing, global demand for AI memory is so high that manufacturers hold all the cards.

On-device AI requires specialized, high-bandwidth memory. Because the entire tech industry is hoarding these components for data centers, hardware manufacturing is entering a multi-year hyper-inflation cycle.

⚠️ The Takeaway: The "AI Tax" isn't just a software subscription fee—it is a physical manufacturing bottleneck that will make all premium consumer electronics significantly more expensive through 2027. If you need a hardware refresh, buy your workstations and devices now before the autumn product cycles lock in these higher baseline prices.

NASA just gave a Mars contract to a rocket company that has never reached orbit

NASA is bypassing established players to partner with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s cash-strained rocket startup for a high-stakes 2028 Mars mission.

Zero successful orbits: Relativity Space has exactly zero successful orbital launches under its belt, its only test flight in 2023 failed mid-flight and crashed into the Atlantic.
The ultimate interplanetary debut: The upcoming Aeolus mission will be the very first flight of Relativity’s unproven Terran R rocket, skipping traditional Earth-orbit test milestones to fly straight to Mars.
Billionaire philanthropy funding: Instead of a standard government payout, the mission’s heavy development costs are being quietly bankrolled by an anonymous philanthropic backer tied to Schmidt’s network.

By using this public-private framework, NASA gets its atmospheric instruments to Mars on an accelerated timeline, but it is shifting massive operational risk onto a company that is still building its factory tanks.

⚠️ The Takeaway: This sets up a direct, billionaire-backed race between Eric Schmidt and Elon Musk's SpaceX for the 2028 Mars window. Watch closely to see if Relativity can even hit its late 2026 test launch pad, because missing this tight planetary alignment by even a single week delays the entire project by 26 months.

🚀 Keep track of the timeline: If you are tracking the commercial space economy, bookmark the Terran R launch manifest to monitor production delays, as this hardware is deeply tied to upcoming orbital data centers and next-generation satellite infrastructure.

A billion-dollar breakup: Why Noam Shazeer just abandoned Google Gemini

Google's high-stakes gamble to secure the industry's top AI talent completely backfired after brilliant researcher Noam Shazeer abruptly abandoned the company for OpenAI.

The ultimate payday: Google previously spent a massive $2.7 billion to license technology from Shazeer’s startup, Character.AI, purely as a legal loophole to recruit him back to lead Gemini.
He co-wrote the Bible of AI: Shazeer is one of the main masterminds behind the legendary 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" research paper, which invented the transformer architecture that makes every modern LLM exist.
An unmatched personal net worth: Thanks to Google’s desperate buyout, Shazeer’s net worth has exploded past $1 billion, giving him total freedom to walk away from corporate golden handcuffs whenever he wants.

For context, Shazeer left Google the first time back in 2021 because management refused to launch his conversational chatbot, Meena. He built Character.AI out of spite, proved the market wanted it, and forced Google to buy him back.

⚠️ The Takeaway: This is an absolute disaster for Google's Gemini roadmap. By losing Shazeer to Sam Altman, Google didn't just waste billions of dollars—they handed unparalleled technical leverage straight to OpenAI right as the race to build true artificial general intelligence reaches a boiling point.

💡 Keep your eyes on the talent: If you are tracking which AI labs will win the next generation of model development, stop looking at corporate balance sheets and start watching where the original 2017 transformer authors choose to work.