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Amazon will join Asus, Lenovo in race to develop foldable display laptops
Reportedly, the Amazon laptop with a foldable display will feature a large 18-inch screen in a form factor comparable to the Apple MacBook Air 13-inch
New Delhi
Amazon is reportedly preparing to enter the foldable laptop market, joining the ranks of Asus, Lenovo, and Huawei. Reportedly, the maiden foldable laptop from the ecommerce giant will feature an 18-inch display, designed to fold into a form factor similar to that of a 13-inch laptop. Supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggests that Amazon's foldable laptop could make its market debut by late 2026 or early 2027.
In a post on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Kuo noted: 'If development progresses as planned, it (Amazon foldable laptop) is projected to enter mass production in late 2026 or 2027.'
Several foldable laptops – such as the Samsung Display prototype, HP Spectre, Asus Zenbook 17 Fold OLED, and Huawei MateBook Fold – have already been introduced, with some models currently available for purchase but in select regions only. Reportedly, US-based tech giant Apple is also working on a laptop with a foldable display in its MacBook series. Amazon is reportedly preparing to join this evolving segment.
Kuo estimates that Apple's foldable laptop may enter mass production by late 2027 or 2028. In contrast, Amazon is expected to move at a faster pace, targeting production as early as 2026 or 2027.
Huawei MateBook Fold
In related developments, Huawei has recently launched a foldable laptop, the MateBook Fold, in its home country. The device features a slim profile – measuring 7.3mm when fully opened and 14.9mm when folded – a ccording to the company's official specifications. It incorporates a flexible 18-inch OLED display within a chassis roughly the size of a conventional 13-inch laptop.
Powered by HarmonyOS 5, the MateBook Fold includes 32GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD storage. Huawei has priced the device at CNY 23,999 in China.
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Hans India
4 hours ago
- Hans India
The challenges behind producing iPhones in the U.S. – and why it's unlikely
In 2011, President Barack Obama asked Apple cofounder Steve Jobs what it would take to shift iPhone assembly back to the United States. Fast-forward 14 years: former President Donald Trump is resurrecting that same question with Apple's current CEO, Tim Cook. Trump has threatened a 25 percent tariff on Apple—and other smartphone makers—unless they build every iPhone sold in the U.S. domestically. 'I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhones that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,' Trump posted on Truth Social. 'If that is not the case, a tariff of at least 25 percent must be paid by Apple to the U.S.' Earlier this month, Cook confirmed that most iPhones bound for American customers will ship from India. That response underscores a tough reality: reassembling the iPhone's global supply chain on U.S. soil would dramatically upend how Apple produces its most profitable device. A Well-Oiled Overseas Manufacturing Ecosystem Currently, Apple relies heavily on factories in China and—more recently—India, where a specialized workforce has been honed to assemble millions of iPhones every year. Foxconn, Apple's long-standing manufacturing partner, employs up to 900,000 people at peak production. Their vast campuses, complete with dormitories and on-site support services, allow Foxconn to rapidly adjust output to match Apple's exacting timelines. 'China already has sprawling facilities designed specifically for electronics assembly,' notes Dipanjan Chatterjee, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. In these plants, teams of workers focus on narrow, highly skilled tasks—often programming industrial robots or performing precision component installation. That level of specialization and scale cannot simply be duplicated overnight in the U.S. David Marcotte, senior vice president at Kantar, adds: 'Each step of the iPhone's assembly requires expertise developed over many years. Replicating that on American soil would be an immense challenge.' Labor and Skills Gap Manufacturing in the United States today looks very different than it did in the latter half of the 20th century. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 8 percent of American workers were employed in manufacturing as of early 2025—down from roughly 26 percent in 1970. Moreover, modern factories increasingly rely on a blend of robotics, data analytics, and coding skills—areas where China and India currently hold an edge when it comes to electronics production. Carolyn Lee, executive director of the Manufacturing Institute, explains that 'the job has very much changed. Workers today need training in programming, data analysis, and advanced machine operations.' Apple CEO Tim Cook has echoed that point: at a 2017 Fortune event, he said that China offered a rare combination of 'craftsmanship, sophisticated robotics, and software talent.' He warned that meeting Apple's exacting standards without that unique mix would be nearly impossible. President Trump's Onshoring Push One of Trump's central economic objectives has been to bring manufacturing back to the United States. Within the first months of his second term, he levied tariffs on broad categories of imported goods, hoping to incentivize companies to build products domestically. Trump's threat of a 25 percent tariff on smartphones sold in the U.S. would, if enforced, make iPhones significantly more expensive for American consumers—or cut deeply into Apple's profit margins. Cook reportedly met with Trump last week to discuss these proposals. Trump, for his part, hailed Apple's February commitment to invest $500 billion in U.S. operations over the next four years—money earmarked for R&D, data-center facilities, and a Detroit 'Academy' to teach small and mid-sized businesses about advanced manufacturing and AI tools. Taiwan's TSMC has similarly pledged $100 billion to build or expand American chip-making plants, which Trump called a 'political win' onshoring U.S. tech production. Yet Apple's February announcement does not include training a workforce capable of iPhone-scale assembly. Instead, the Detroit academy will focus on helping other businesses adopt 'smart manufacturing' practices—not on building the trained, highly specialized labor pool that Foxconn has cultivated over decades in Asia. What It Would Take to Build in America Several analysts believe that Apple could shift at least part of its iPhone assembly to the U.S. within five years—but only by fundamentally changing the way each device is put together. Patrick Moorhead, founder and CEO of Moor Insights & Strategy, says Apple would need to introduce far more automation to offset the higher labor costs and skill gaps. That could mean redesigning certain elements—glue application, component placement, or precision machining—to be driven by robotic arms rather than hand-assembly. Ultrahuman, a smart health ring startup, offers a real-world example. CEO Mohit Kumar told CNN that when Ultrahuman moved production of its wearable from India to Texas last November, it leaned heavily on automation and cross-training workers to perform multiple tasks like casting and polishing. Even so, Ultrahuman accepts that mass-producing millions of units at the level Apple requires is a far bigger undertaking. Many core iPhone components—chips, camera modules, displays—still originate with suppliers based in China, Taiwan, South Korea, and elsewhere in Asia. Shifting assembly alone would break the synergy of having suppliers clustered near one another, intensifying logistical hurdles and rising freight costs. Dan Ives, global head of technology research at Wedbush Securities, estimates that 90 percent of iPhone production currently takes place in China; as recently as last year, that figure dipped to about 40 percent only after Apple began ramping up in India. Ives warns that assembling the iPhone in the U.S. might triple the device's price. Even if Apple were willing to redesign the iPhone for greater automation, recruit and retrain thousands of American factory workers, and reorganize its supplier network, the company would face significant political pressure from both sides. Trump's tariffs risk imposing punishing costs on Apple, but CEOs and shareholders alike may balk at the price increases or margin squeeze such a move would entail. A Tightrope Walk Forrester's Chatterjee sums up Apple's quandary: 'You cannot realistically, from an economic standpoint, bring iPhone production to the U.S., and you also can't simply refuse to do it.' Apple must carefully navigate between appeasing political demands to onshore manufacturing and preserving the cost efficiencies that keep iPhone prices competitive. At this point, the consensus among analysts is clear: Apple will continue to expand production in India and maintain its China base. Until there's a seismic shift in labor availability, automation technology, or supply-chain structure, making iPhones in America remains more aspiration than reality.
Mint
7 hours ago
- Mint
Resource war: How commercial assets turned into front line weaponry
Chennai: Recently, J.D. Vance, the US vice president, confirmed what the world feared. He termed the competition between the US and China in developing artificial intelligence (AI) as an 'arms race'. Policy makers in both the countries believe that whoever wins this race will dominate the world, going forward. At the core of this battle is computing power and this has given a fresh impetus to the chip war that began between the US and China five years ago. In May 2020, during his first term as the president of the US, Donald Trump fired the first salvo. The US commerce department added Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies to the 'Entity List', a measure which prevented the company that sells smartphones, telecom equipment and cloud computing services from accessing advanced computer chips produced or developed using US technology or software. The reason? The US feared that Huawei's attractively priced products, backed by Chinese government subsidy, would soon dominate the next generation telecom networks, ending American clout in the field. The move had a debilitating impact on Huawei. Its global expansion took a hit and revenue crashed. 'A corporate giant faced technological asphyxiation," Chris Miller, in his book Chip War, wrote. According to him, this development reminded China of its weakness. 'In nearly every step of the process of producing semiconductors, China is staggeringly dependent on foreign technology, almost all of which is controlled by its geopolitical rivals—Taiwan, Japan, South Korea or the US," he wrote. China began investing billions of dollars to develop its own semiconductor technology in a bid to free itself from America's chip choke, he added. But the US is in no mood to make this endeavour easy for China. It has progressively tightened restrictions on China's semiconductor sector. The 'Entity List' has since grown to include over 140 Chinese companies—fabrication units, semiconductor tool companies and even investment companies that operate in the sector. Restrictions have extended from chips with high bandwidth memory to semiconductor manufacturing equipment and software tools. China, which sees US restrictions as an attempt to deny it the technological greatness it deserves, has retaliated. It began imposing restrictions on export of critical and rare earth minerals that are crucial for production of weapons, semiconductors and electric vehicles. There are 17 rare earth minerals and China has absolute control on most of them (see chart). In October 2023, it introduced export permits for graphite needed to produce lithium ion batteries. In December that year, it banned transfer of rare earth minerals extraction and separation technologies and the technology to make magnets. China, over the years, has mastered these technologies. In the same month, it banned the export of antimony, gallium and germanium apart from imposing stricter review of graphite exports to the US. In February 2025, in response to Donald Trump imposing 10% tariffs on all Chinese products, the middle kingdom added five more critical minerals— tungsten, indium, bismuth, tellurium and molybdenum to the export control list. This meant that companies require special export licenses to export the minerals. On 4 April, after Trump's Liberation Day tariffs, China further added seven more minerals and magnets to the export restrictions list. There is no clarity whether these restrictions have been suspended after the recent US and China trade talks in Geneva. The US is now scrambling to find alternate sources for these minerals. All of a sudden, economic resources which were till recently seen predominantly as commercial assets, have acquired new edge as strategic instruments. They are no longer controlled just by the market— geopolitics has a greater say over them. A short history Demand for resources began to rise after the Industrial Revolution in 1760 which introduced the use of metals such as iron and steel. The rise of mechanized factory systems increased output and thus, demand for resources. As the demand rose, countries such as Great Britain, France and Belgium began colonizing the world in search of resources. 'Colonization was all about exploitation of natural resources," said S. Gurumurthy, writer and a corporate advisor. The British empire met its demand for cotton, tea, leather, coal and iron ore from India for almost two centuries, he added. Post World War II, resources were seen as market instruments. They were freely traded for a price. According to the World Trade Organization, between 1950 and 2024, global trade volumes grew by 4,500%. 'It was also a period when countries used trade to increase co-dependence in the hope that it would enhance peace and welfare," Dhruva Jaishankar, executive director, Observer Research Foundation — America, said. Europe bought gas from Russia in the hope that the latter would leave them alone. The US built a strong economic relationship with China on the assumption that the Asian nation could integrate with the global economy, eliminate poverty, and embrace democratic principles. Of course, trade in resources has not been entirely free. Nations have imposed restrictions. In the last 75 years, the US is the biggest culprit. As a sole super power, it denied various countries technology and resources that it deemed were dual use—for both civil and military applications. As the US-China rivalry intensifies, the weaponization is spilling beyond dual use technologies. China, it appears, is not loath to leveraging the domination it has built in the global economy. The new normal China accounts for more than 30% of global manufacturing output. This is the highest concentration of manufacturing in one place," said Jaishankar. The US had a similar share for a short period of time immediately after World War II when the protracted war had destroyed much of production facilities in mainland Europe and Japan. 'China has managed to achieve this without a war," he said, adding 'it is now trying to use its manufacturing power as a strategic leverage." It is not just manufacturing. Consider China's domination in the shipping space. It controls over 100 ports across 63 nations. As of 2022, it had 96% share in container production, 48% of global ship building orders and 80% of ship-to-shore cranes. It has similar domination across many sectors. 'What is worrying is that China has revealed its intention to weaponize goods, logistics or the entire supply chain," said an Indian government official who did not want to be identified. There is a conscious attempt by China to make the world depend on it. Simultaneously, it is reducing its dependence on the world. The restriction on export of rare earth minerals is just a beginning, he added. The resentment For more than four decades, China had silently focused on growing its economy. It eased rules to attract manufacturing taking advantage of its low wage costs. It invested in infrastructure—power, roads, ports and airports. It enabled building factories at unheard of scale which substantially reduced the cost of production. Global brands rushed to China to take advantage of it. Until a few years ago, 85% of all iPhone produced by Apple were assembled in China. At one point in time, almost all of Nike's shoes were produced in China. There were warnings within the US about this excessive dependence. Michael Pillsbury's book, The Hundred-Year Marathon, detailed China's secret desire to upstage the US as a global superpower. He, indeed many others, pointed out that China harboured a deep resentment and a sense of injury for losing its status as a middle kingdom when it dominated the world—economically, culturally and militarily. In the early 1700s, China (and India) had a large share of the world economy. On the eve of the Industrial Revolution, in 1760, it accounted for a third of the global economy. In the two centuries that followed, it lost out significantly. By 1979, China's share of the global economy was just 2%. Chinese consider the period between 1839 and 1945 a 'century of humiliation' that saw political fragmentation, decline and subjugation by foreign powers such as Russia, Japan and the West. The Chinese yearned to regain this lost glory. Today, China has 19% share in the global GDP, fast catching up with the US' 27%. Late wakeup call Policy makers in the US, for years, took a benign view of China's growth. Pillsbury pointed out that they saw their China policy as a commercial win and ignored the strategic dimension. Only when China began to assert itself, did they realise the depth of US' dependence on China and its real motive. It is not a surprise that Pillsbury, as Trump's advisor, is the architect of US' China policy now. Today, the US and China are engaged in a contest. The US is playing to its strength by denying advanced technology to China. By focusing on the massive $295 trade deficit (in 2024) and imposing massive tariffs, the Trump administration wants to reduce its dependence. China, for its part, is thinking long term to upstage the US. Lizzi Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Centre for China Analysis, best described its strategy in a recent Financial Times article. He wrote: 'Xi is not looking to win the trade war in a conventional sense. He's positioning China for a drawn-out, grinding, contest by building domestic capacity, hardening supply chain and rooting out perceived vulnerabilities to foreign pressure." India play As the US and China fight for supremacy, India needs to have a strategy to deal with the fallout. 'Countries, be it China or the US, have exclusive rights over their resources. Weaponizing such resources is the new normal," said Ajay Srivastava, founder, Global Trade Research Initiative, a trade focussed think tank. India needs to put in place policies to minimise the impact of such decisions. India should identify and develop resources that the world would need and use it as a bargaining chip, he added. 'India may lack such resources now but we need to identify those and invest now," Gurumurthy added. China, Jaishankar said, does not have all the resources within its nation. It had worked assiduously to tap these critical minerals across the world, especially from African nations. China's strength, he added, is in developing the ability to process them in an effective manner. 'India needs to follow a similar strategy. We should strike deals with nations which have these resources and import the mineral for processing in India. That will give us control over it," he explained. India has already drawn up a list of critical minerals and has taken steps to secure them. It is part of the Mineral Security Partnership, a multi-nation initiative led by the US comprising 40 countries. It has struck, or is close to striking, a few deals in Latin America and Africa. But processing the minerals is easier said than done. It is capital intensive and requires a long lead time. Investors don't support such projects unless there is a strong business case. Experts have also suggested that India should frame policies to suit its strengths. Some have questioned pushing electrification of vehicles in a big way. With India lacking the raw material to make batteries, the rise in electric vehicles will shift India's energy dependence from West Asia to China. Others have recommended that India should invest heavily in taking a lead in green hydrogen. India is blessed with abundant sunlight and focus on storage systems can help it use solar power to drive green hydrogen efforts. India's efforts, such as production-linked incentives, have cut its dependence on China for solar cells and modules. More needs to be done if India has to become self-sufficient. To make all this possible, the country, particularly its private sector, would need to invest in research and development. If there is one thing that can come in India's way is its hubris, warned experts. 'What is needed is a long term vision and a step-by-step approach to achieve it," GTRI's Srivastava said.
India Today
8 hours ago
- India Today
WWDC 2025 is in few days and here is everything we expect Apple to announce
Apple's annual event, WWDC 2025, is just around the corner, and several reports highlight what the company is about to announce. The tech giant has confirmed that the event will kick off from June 9 to June 13. The event, which will be livestreamed on YouTube, is set to kick off with a keynote on June 9, starting at 1 PM ET (10.30 PM IST). After announcing the date and time, the company has kept other announcements a secret so far. But the rumours and leaks have got you covered. The WWDC 2025 may shed light on the upcoming iOS, advanced Apple Intelligence features, an overhaul of the VisionOS and a glimpse of the iPhone 17 are sure that while the software will take centre stage, the hardware may just lurk behind the curtains. Let's look at the upcoming announcement at WWDC 2025 in 2025: What to expectNew interface: Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2025 is shaping up to be more about makeovers than major new tricks. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the company is preparing a sweeping visual refresh across all its platforms — iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS — with a design overhaul codenamed Solarium. Inspired by visionOS, users can expect softer aesthetics, including rounded icons and translucent menus, breathing new life into the interface last radically changed with iOS 7. iOS 26 to replace iOS 19 name: In a move to simplify its software naming scheme, Apple might also ditch the traditional version numbers. So instead of iOS 19 or macOS 15, we could see names like iOS 2026 and macOS 2026, aligning updates with calendar years — a sensible, if overdue, change for clarity across the redesign taking centre stage, Apple won't arrive empty-handed on the features front. iOS 26 is tipped to include simplified Wi-Fi sharing across Apple devices, AI-powered battery management, and even a desktop mode for iPhones with USB-C ports, allowing users to plug into external displays for a more PC-like experience. iPadOS 26 will reportedly gain a more Mac-like experience too, with a top menu bar and improvements to Stage Manager, Apple's multitasking interface. Meanwhile, macOS and other systems are expected to get visual consistency rather than headline-grabbing app for games: Gamers may get a little love too. Gurman hints at a new cross-platform gaming app that builds on Game Centre, adding friend lists, leaderboards and deep Apple Arcade integration, and it'll run across iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Intelligence: As for Siri and Apple Intelligence, the focus this year is on improving what's already in the works, including smarter, more context-aware responses and a new health-coaching tool. Developers should also expect new tools to better integrate Apple Intelligence into third-party update: And yes, there's still a chance for some shiny hardware, perhaps an M4 Mac Pro or even a sneak peek at those rumoured smart glasses. While WWDC is primarily a software showcase, Apple has previously used the stage for hardware reveals — such as the Vision Pro and new Macs in 2025, with the MacBook Air M4, iPad Air M3, and iPhone 16e already launched, major hardware announcements seem unlikely. However, a refreshed Mac Pro could still appear, given its relevance to developers. There's also quiet speculation about the iPhone 17 Air — tipped to be the slimmest iPhone yet. While a full unveiling is doubtful, Apple might offer a brief preview during the event, keeping excitement simmering for what's next.
