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TSMC is working to build two plants in Arizona faster, a move that could bring more Apple chip production to Arizona quicker -- but don't expect the newest chips.

A worker passing a TSMC sign

The TSMC facility in Phoenix, known as Fab 21, is the chip foundry's first factory in Arizona dedicated to chip production. However, while two others are under construction, TSMC plans to have them up and running sooner than first thought.

According to Nikkei, TSMC intends to speed up construction of the two sites considerably. The factories will be accelerated "by several quarters," TSMC claims, with the intention of bringing them online faster.

TSMC says it is to meet the demand from U.S.-based customers for smartphone and AI computing chips.

"After completion, around 30% of our 2-nanometer and more advanced [chip] capacity will be located in Arizona," said TSMC chairman and CEO CC Wei on Thursday. It will create "an independent, leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing cluster in the U.S."

Closer to Taiwan tech

The assertion by TSMC that it will be cutting "several quarters" off the construction time for its two factories is a big thing for U.S. chip production in general. Something that is severely lagging behind Taiwan.

In March, it was said that the second Arizona plant would be ready for 3-nanometer chip production by 2028, while the third plant would be used for 2-nanometer chips. That third plant, which broke ground in April 2025, was thought to be ready by 2030.

With 2-nanometer production already in progress in TSMC's Taiwan facilities, that effectively meant that TSMC's U.S. facilities were five years behind Taiwan.

By cutting down the construction schedule by a considerable amount, this could bring the overall lag for U.S. production down to as few as three years.

Faster by investment

The acceleration of construction follows months after TSMC pledged a $100 billion investment in the United States. The investment, intended to take place over four years, was to be used to increase TSMC's manufacturing footprint in the country.

TSMC had already made an initial investment in Arizona to the tune of $12 billion in 2020. It has also received a $6.6 billion package from the Biden administration as part of the CHIPS act.

The latest high-value pledge will almost certainly be used in part to speed up the building of the facilities. Processes which, due to the size and complexity, take a long time to complete.

The U.S. iPhone chip dream

The acceleration of construction at the facilities should be well received by the administration of President Donald Trump. He has repeatedly campaigned for more manufacturing to return to the United States, and has called out Apple to do the same.

There are roadblocks. Notably, a lack of U.S.-based resources and an educated local workforce needed for iPhone assembly to take place at all are the main hindrances.

It is highly plausible that the smartphone and AI chip demand could be from Apple, as the Cupertino company is one of TSMC's biggest chip clients. Such a move will make the construction of an iPhone entirely in the United States a little bit closer to reality.

Until that happens, Apple has no choice but to accept that its chips have to be built in TSMC's more up-to-date facilities in Taiwan. At least, for its more advanced chips.

The $100 billion won't necessarily allow the U.S. projects to catch up to Taiwan completely, but a few quarters closer is still a lot when it comes to manufacturing.



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The iPhone Fold is expected to be very thin, with a Chinese leaker claiming the flexible smartphone could have a frame that's just 4.8mm thick.

Render of a possible iPhone Fold - Source AppleInsider

The iPhone Fold is an engineering challenge for Apple, but one that it seems to be meeting. One of those challenges is making it thin, without being too thick while folded up, something a leaker believes Apple has solved.

In a Wednesday post to Weibo, serial leaker Instant Digital said that the frame for the folding iPhone is measured at 4.8mm. For comparison, the iPhone 16 is 7.8mm thick, while the M4 iPad Pro is 5.1mm thick.

While this would theoretically mean the iPhone Fold could be as slim as 9.6mm thick when folded up, Instant Digital warns against this. They say that the actual thickness of the "inner screen frame pad" but also be taken into account, but they don't say how much that would be.

In the right ballpark

While 4.8mm sounds like an extremely thin smartphone when unfolded, this is actually a measurement that has cropped up in the past. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo issued various specifications in March, including that the unfolded iPhone Fold would measure between 4.5mm and 4.8mm.

Kuo also added that the folded thickness for the device would be between 9mm and 9.5mm, which isn't much thicker than a current-gen iPhone.

Instant Digital doesn't have the best reputation, in part due to the generally poor accuracy of Weibo-based leaker accounts. Instant Digital did manage to be correct about the camera control button on the iPhone 16, but they have also claimed that an all-glass Apple Watch is on the way.

Aside from the thickness, there's also some agreement between leakers in terms of the overall screen size.

In June, Weibo leaker Digital Chat Station said the screen size was 7.58 inches, smaller than their April 2025 claim of 7.76 inches and their March 2025 claim of 7.74 inches.

Kuo, meanwhile, went for 7.8 inches in March 2025.

Resolution-wise, the rumors are more consistent, with expectations of the internal display reaching 2,713 pixels by 1,920 pixels.

On the back, there are expectations of a dual camera system, though Digital Chat Station said in June that Apple will use 48MP sensors.

Rumor Score: Possible

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A game developer has accused Apple of undermining the cultural value of games by threatening to pull an app that hasn't seen a single update for seven years from the App Store.

Wheels of Aurelia is facing removal from the App Store

Apple is repeatedly under fire for its App Store policies, but occasionally the complaints against it are questionable. One developer in Italy is declaring that Apple's warning it will delist a game from the App Store is an affront to culture itself.

Santa Ragione, a developer of Horses and Saturnalia, was told that its game Wheels of Aurelia will be removed from the App Store on July 25, 2025. Speaking to Game Developer, the studio took the news extremely poorly.

Apple warned the studio that the game would be delisted, but the studio insists that the reasoning for the removal was unclear. After appealing twice, studio co-founder and director Pietro Righi Riva was then called by a member of Apple's team, who told the developer to file another appeal.

Despite the repeated appeals, Apple is still seeking to remove the game from the App Store.

A "lack" of justification

In its response to the warnings, Riva insists that Apple has been unclear as to why the app will be taken down. Or at least, not clear enough in a way that suits the company's needs.

He says Apple "has not provided clear justification for this removal." Granted, Apple does have a history of not being great with developer communications, but this time it seems more clear-cut.

This is especially true when that sentence continues to say that Apple cited "only" its policy for removing apps deemed "obsolete" or "outdated." This shouldn't apply to the game in question because it is still fully functional and compliant with current standards, Riva claims.

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Riva then goes on to insist that Apple's move is anti-art and anti-culture.

"We firmly believe that removing fully functional artistic works simply due to infrequent updates undermines the value and sustainability of games as cultural and artistic products," he declares. Just like books and films, games represent creative works that "do not inherently require continual updates beyond maintaining basic functionality."

Updating Wheels of Aurelia would demand "very significant resources" to update the engine and other elements. All without making any "meaningful enhancements" to either the user experience or artistic value.

Forced updates represent a "substantial financial burden" that draws resources from other new projects, he adds.

Removing the apps also impacts the visibility of developers, Riva continues, affecting their recognition in a "very competitive industry." Apple's approach puts smaller developers at risk due to needing to continuously update their projects to meet changing demands.

Riva also jabs at Apple's apparent gatekeeping, saying its "dominant position" makes such practices "especially troubling." He then commends EU regulations like the Digital Markets Act designed to make a fairer market and prevent monopolistic behaviors.

"This obsoletion [sic] policy further reinforces a vision that does not recognize games as an art form," Riva concludes. "It is a view that, unfortunately, is becoming increasingly common across the industry."

Ahead of the scheduled pulling of the game, it has been made available as a free download in the App Store.

Clearing the digital storefront

Apple has quite a few policies in place that impact how an app is added to the App Store, and how it must act while included within it. What is less talked about are policies that can see an app removed from the App Store.

There are the more obvious rules, such as content, which can get an app kicked out. But there are also rules that titles such as Wheels of Aurelia have fallen afoul of.

In this instance, the policies stem from "App Store Improvements" that Apple first introduced nine years ago, in September 2016. For apps that no longer functioned as intended or followed current review guidelines, Apple said they would evaluate the apps for issues, notify the developers of them, and potentially remove abandoned apps from the App Store.

This also included apps that "have not been supported with compatibility updates for a long time," in Apple's own words. "Compatibility updates" include device resolution adds, of which there have been three since the last time the game was updated.

By 2022, Apple clarified the criteria surrounding the process. This included justifications for maintaining security and compatibility with current hardware, but also for underperforming apps.

The last update in the App Store for Wheels of Aurelia was over seven years ago

Apple warned that developers of apps that had not been updated within the last three years and had failed to meet a "minimal download threshold" would receive an email warning about potential removal.

That threshold is further clarified to mean an app that had not been downloaded at all or "extremely few times" during a rolling 12-month period.

Developers were also given more time to update their apps, up to 90 days, to comply with the rules. The timeline continues to be adhered to by the current App Store Improvements policy.

When it comes to determining whether Wheels of Aurelia has fallen afoul of the rules, we can check at least one of the variables.

The game was released in 2016, but it's only had a few version updates since then. The last one was to version 1.1.2, on December 6, 2017.

By the time of the 2022 clarification of the policy applying to apps without updates for three years, the game hadn't been updated for over four years. At the time of publication, that's now stretched to seven years without an update.

Timeliness is a virtue

Riva's arguments for updates have a point, and it can be summed up by the adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Taking that approach can certainly apply in many areas, but app development isn't one of them.

Software security continues to be an important factor of modern-day computing, and making sure your software isn't contributing to the problem is just good policy.

Ensuring the apps continue to work properly on newer models of iPhone is also a very consumer-first approach. The iPhone 7 family of devices was released at that time, and there have been many releases -- with different screen resolutions -- since then.

Wheels of Aurelia - Image Credit: Santa Ragione

Updates ideally could be made to take into account some of the changes, such as the aforementioned resolution or other internal specifications. Occasional compatibility updates would keep the app fresh in users eyes too, even if there were no material changes made to it.

There was enough justification in performing even one minor change to the app and updating it in the App Store, just to reset that three-year clock.

This would certainly pull a small amount of resources away from other projects as the developer says. But at least the game would be kept alive and in the store.

There is the counterargument that no one wants to resubmit a game update to the App Store Review process without justification, especially if it's in an already usable state.

Periodically doing so will at least ensure that the app will work for a few more years without any more tweaks needed.

It's Apple's store

Apple's policies to remove titles from the App Store due to age and unpopularity are well within its rights as a retailer. It doesn't have to list your products, but it tends to do so since it will make some money off it in most cases.

At the same time, it has to ensure that its consumers are kept safe, but also offered products that are both current and popular.

A game that hasn't received updates in multiple years is not what you can consider "current," even if it functions fine.

Likewise, with Apple having to deal with hundreds and thousands of new apps and app updates every day, there is a lot of apps trying to become the most popular.

Apple's removal of old and unpopular apps also means there are fewer items on its infinite shelf space for consumers to choose from. It helps nudge consumers toward apps that others use and that they may also want to purchase, instead of old apps no-one else really uses anymore.

There is no value to Apple recommending an app that no one else has downloaded for months, since the market has already demonstrated the app no longer has a perceived value to the App Store. Removing it is a better option for Apple than keeping it around and wasting consumer attention, with a high likelihood of it not being bought anyway.

The argument that this is Apple denying the artistic value of a game is also not really applicable here. This is a policy based on schedule and hard data, not opinion.

While you may think an app or a game is considered art and should be included in the App Store, Apple doesn't have to abide by that. It's playing by literally different rules.

One door closes, others stay open

Apple's pulling of an app from an App Store because no one's downloaded it in ages doesn't stop you from being able to acquire the game elsewhere.

It is still available on modern consoles, including the Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation storefronts. It's also on the Epic Games Store and Steam for macOS, and even Google Play if you have an Android device.

While it won't necessarily be available from the App Store once the deadline passes, you can still get the game from many other venues. If you already have it for iOS, you'll also still be able to play it after its removal.

The best defense against the removal is actually something that Santa Ragione should've done. It had literally years to update the game, and it chose not to do it.

At this point, Apple has seemingly been very generous in allowing the game to exist in the App Store until now.

It has led the proverbial horse to the trough, filled it with clean and cool water, and even offered a sugar lump. Santa Ragione loudly complains that it is extremely thirsty, but won't take a sip.

We have reached out to Apple for comment. We are not expecting an answer.



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Apple has seeded the third tvOS 26 developer beta, with the new build arriving one day after the rest of the 26-generation operating systems.

An Apple TV set-top box

Apple tends to bunch together its operating system build releases, both for the final public versions and while they are still being tested. For the "26" generation being tested out, tvOS 26 has lagged behind the rest of the pack.

Apple seeded the third developer betas of iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and visionOS 26 on July 7, with tvOS 26 being the only absent build. That was corrected on July 8, with the issuing of the third developer beta build of tvOS 26.

• tvOS 26 beta 3 is build 23J5306g, replacing the second build, 23J5295e

Unlike the other operating systems, tvOS doesn't tend to have many changes. However, this time around the updates include the Liquid Glass UI, iPhone-based karaoke, and new Aerial screensavers, among other tweaks.

AppleInsider and Apple strongly advise against users installing test operating systems or beta software onto primary or "mission critical" hardware. The higher likelihood of major issues in these early beta releases can potentially result in the loss of data.

Testers should use secondary or non-essential hardware, and ensure they have sufficient backups of their critical data at all times.

Members of the public keen to try out the features of the inbound generation should ideally wait until the initial public betas are issued, due to the significantly lower risk they present to your data.

Find any changes in the new builds? Reach out to us on Twitter at @AppleInsider or @Andrew_OSU, or send Andrew an email at andrew@AppleInsider.com.



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Tim Cook has constantly been criticized, most recently over Apple Intelligence, but always for just not being Steve Jobs -- yet the fact that he isn't Jobs is what has made Apple the technological and financial juggernaut it is today.

Tim Cook (left) with Steve Jobs -- image credit: Apple

There was criticism right back at the start in 2011, when Tim Cook was no longer the temporary stand-in for Steve Jobs, but was getting the CEO job permanently. Today there's criticism of Cook over how Apple Intelligence has seemingly stumbled.

And in between, say around 2018, there was criticism for the now forgotten weak sales of the HomePod. Plus before even then, the Apple Watch was branded a failure, it was called a device without a point.

No living CEO of any company is universally praised, and it took Steve Jobs's passing until he was truly beloved. But then after his death, it was revealed that Jobs didn't think his replacement was a product person, and it's not as if Cook could exactly argue.

Cook's tenure at Apple has seen the launch of a slew of products that now help define the company. He's spread the company wider, predicting that services would become crucial.

And he's also taken Apple first to a $1 trillion valuation -- and then to a $3 trillion one. In both cases, it was the world's first company to reach those milestones.

Yet after the first one, Cook took time to repeat the kind of argument that Jobs had often made before. Jobs would claim to not think about money, and trust that if you do good work, the results follow.

"Financial returns are simply the result of Apple's innovation, putting our products and customers first, and always staying true to our values," Cook wrote in a memo to staff about Apple reaching $1 trillion.

Tim Cook (left) with Steve Jobs -- image credit: Apple

"Steve [Jobs] founded Apple on the belief that the power of human creativity can solve even the biggest challenges -- and that the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do," Cook continued. "Just as Steve always did in moments like this, we should all look forward to Apple's bright future and the great work we'll do together."

Financial success gives Apple an edge

Money isn't everything, but it's a lot. Apple has grown so much under Cook's aegis that it's actually hard to definitively say, for instance, what your shares would be worth if you'd bought $1,000 of them on the day he took over.

However, if you ignore additional money from the dividends Apple has paid shareholders over the years, you can get one measure of the company's growth. A $1,000 investment in 2011 would now be worth around $18,500.

That's nice for shareholders, and the board. It's also a very clear sign that Cook will never be forced out.

It's also's Cook's financial acumen that has put the company where it is now. It's because it has this money that it could scrap the decade-long Apple Car project. That money wasn't thrown away, it was spent on material science, on computer vision, and so forth.

And all that will be, and has been, used in other Apple products. That cash reserve is how Apple can play a long game and profit from that Apple Car research, despite it being a cancelled project.

It's because it has this cash and such a strong financial base that Apple can out-wait any rival over any issue. This is also why Apple is then able to repeatedly be late to a market, yet then totally own it.

Apple thinks of what technology can be used for, and how it can be used, rather than creating technology first and trying to find users. So by the time it enters a market, it has spent years thinking about it while other firms have become entrenched in whatever their first idea was.

Consequently, Jobs may well have meant it when he kept saying that money wasn't the focus. It is money that enables Apple to focus.

Plus, never forget that right back at the start of Apple, it was Steve Wozniak who wanted to give away his blueprints at the Homebrew Computer Club -- and Jobs who insisted on selling them.

So Jobs was far from unconcerned with money, and far from being willing to let some potential profit go.

Steve Jobs is not turning in his grave

Still, you can, and folks critical of Cook repeatedly do, make any point you like about Apple and then add that Jobs is turning in his grave. Steve Jobs would never have done this or that. Steve Jobs would never have had a failure like Apple Intelligence, and so on.

That he did have, say, Antennagate, but the truth is that no one does and no one can say what Jobs would or wouldn't have done.

You can compare, say, his response to the iPhone 4's antenna problems to Tim Cook's reaction to the poor launch of Apple Maps. And you could make some parallels between how Jobs dealt with the failure of Mobile Me to how Cook now appears to be dealing with Apple Intelligence.

And Jobs had his other failures too. The predecessor to the Mac, the Lisa, was a spectacular one.

But yet, Apple waited.

Anyway, you cannot predict anyone, and it is impossible to even really guess how Steve Jobs would be acting if he were facing today's issues given that he has been gone for over a decade. You cannot predict, nobody can, how he'd manage a company that has grown at least eight times in market capitalization, but actually more, given stock buybacks and so forth.

Saying "Steve Jobs would never" or similar permutation is a logical fallacy. The argument is almost always used by somebody who personally disagrees with Cook's approach to something.

According to then-Apple board member Al Gore, Steve Jobs himself said no one at the company should ever ask "what would Steve had done?"

Because, simply, nobody knows. Not even those closest to him.

And don't forget -- Cook was hand-picked by Jobs. Cook is literally the man that Jobs wanted running the company after he was gone.

Moving on from Steve Jobs

Whether under Jobs or Cook, Apple only rarely looks back at its past, at least publicly. But it does now routinely make an exception for Steve Jobs. Cook puts out statements on every anniversary of Jobs's death, and on his birthday.

An original Apple Watch from 2015

Then together with Laurene Powell Jobs and Jony Ive, Cook helped launch the Steve Jobs Archive in 2022.

But if people criticize Cook now, they tend to do it by saying Apple would or wouldn't have done something if Jobs were still alive. Or they say that really Apple is coasting on the success that Jobs created.

What that really means is that Apple launched the iPhone on Jobs's watch and nothing since then has come close to its success. That's fair -- and also unfair, since the iPhone is the single biggest selling product of any kind, in the world. Ever.

And if nothing can match the iPhone's sales numbers, Apple under Tim Cook has regularly equalled that device's success in terms of ubiquity. Despite being so often called a failure, there is simply no smartwatch that rivals the Apple Watch, which Cook announced in 2014.

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That wasn't the first smart watch in the world, just as the iPhone was far from the first smartphone. In both cases, though, Apple's device became the one to beat.

And it was the same with AirPods. While Apple wasn't the first to produce wireless earbuds and today there are many competitors, but AirPods set the standard.

Left: an unactivated AirTag. Right: an activated one in an accessory

So did AirTags. Yet again, there were trackers like it before, but now AirTags is the common term for all of them, and now they are a global hit.

Only the HomePod, Apple Pencil, and Apple Vision Pro have failed to become ubiquitous. But while no figures, or even really recent estimates, are available, you know that their sales would surely sustain most small companies.

And you suspect that right now, Sonos would like to have the HomePod's sales for its audio devices.

The products keep coming

Then there have been significant developments of devices that originated under Steve Jobs's watch -- such as the iPad Pro. There is an argument that it is only in 2025 with iPadOS 26 that the iPad Pro truly became a pro device, but tell that to the artists who've been using since it launched in 2015.

The long-standing criticism of the iPad Pro was that the hardware was vastly more powerful than the software. But key to this claim is how Apple pushed ahead with making an ever-more powerful tablet.

And that ties in to one more thing that Cook has done for Apple which was and is revolutionary. He moved Apple on from Intel to its own Apple Silicon processors, and the difference for the Mac has been transformative.

Curiously, though, this is perhaps the single area where a direct comparison can be made between Tim Cook and Steve Jobs. They both pulled off an immensely complex move of processors -- with Jobs taking Apple from PowerPC to Intel -- and both did it so well that it's easy to forget what a task it was.

In this one case, Tim Cook appeared to follow Steve Jobs's playbook to the letter, sometimes even using the same words in presentations.

It's a new world

If Cook is still believed to not a product person in the way that Jobs or Jony Ive would obsess over them, he is said to claim that he uses every product, every day. Steve Jobs famously cut Apple down to four main products, but under Cook the firm has ballooned.

There was no Apple TV+ under Jobs, for instance. Nor Apple Music, nor Apple Arcade, Apple News, and definitely not films in movie theaters.

And if Cook oversees so many products that he cannot truly obsess about them all, there have been reports that he obsesses about one of them. In early 2025, an anonymous source claimed that Cook "cares about nothing" except the Apple Vision Pro, and more recently the company is said to have seven devices in the works.

Tim Cook dons the Apple Vision Pro | Credit: Vanity Fair

Cook sees a world in which spatial computing is everywhere. But then Cook is also working in a world now that requires him to be something that his predecessor could chiefly afford to ignore.

Tim Cook is a politician.

That does now include all of his dealings with Trump -- both successful and unfortunately also not -- plus he will lend his voice to lobbying officials.

But it's also visible in his interviews. Whether he's criticized, or it's put to him that Apple is doing something wrong, he has a very well-crafted phrase that he leans on.

"The way I see it..." he'll begin, before presenting how Apple would like its actions to be perceived. It's such a short phrase, but it's armed -- he won't disagree with you, won't challenge you, will just so very reasonably present an alternative and make it sound personal.

Cook is usually said to be reasonable and calm and even unflustered. There has been evidence that Cook isn't so calm as to be a pushover, though.

And there has been evidence that he doesn't follow Steve Jobs's example or even preferences.

The clearest example of both of these, though, is in how in 2012 he fired Scott Forstall, despite him being a favorite of Jobs's.

But then you don't get to run a $3 trillion company by trying to keep everyone happy. You do it by having "the skin of a rhinoceros," which Cook once said "comes in handy when you're the CEO of Apple."

Sure, you can wish Cook to be gone, you can yearn for a halcyon idealized past where Jobs never had a failed product release or a fumbled product. All those wishes are, is looking at Apple through six-colored glasses yearning for a past that never existed, and a future where your own perfect Apple, your own perfect Apple product, can't and won't exist because there are more workflows than your own.

We know that Apple swings by AppleInsider routinely. Beyond IP logs, we get the periodic nastygram email or call when we criticize them, or they don't prefer a coverage angle we take.

And, we know that they read our forums, and poke through social media. We know that they see some of our more vocal commenters calling for Cook's ouster.

We also know, as we've been told, that they get a kick out of the mental contortions and verbal gyrations that some of the Cook bashers go through to justify their wacky arguments.

Cook is here to stay, regardless of what you, or I, or stock analysts, think. He alone will decide when it's time to go.

And he's earned that right, based on what he's accomplished, and, frankly, the immense wealth and success that he's generated for shareholders and the company.



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