Apple iPhone Event September 9th; Telegram CEO Arrested in France; Threads Tests Expiring Posts; Meta Axes High-End Vision Pro Competitor

Apple will break with a tradition and have their iPhone event on a Monday…September 9th, to be exact. Previously, most prognosticators had guessed the day after, the 10th. Macrumors.com reports that the announcement came with a tease line of ‘It’s Glowtime.’ It will be at the Apple Park Cupertino campus at 10AM Pacific. Expect to see the new iPhone 16 lineup, as well as the updated Watch models, AirPods 4, and we should get drop dates for iOS 18, MacOS Sequoia and other software, too. All the new iPhones will get the customizable Action Button, and also a new Capture button that is for shooting photos…particularly in the horizontal orientation, for use on the Vision Pro as well as other uses. Expect a bigger screen on the Watch, but a thinner case. We’ll have a detailed wrap up after the hype fest ends on the 9th.

Over the weekend, Saturday night Paris time, the CEO and billionaire founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, was arrested at an airport near the French capital. According to Reuters, his private jet had just landed from Azerbaijan. There is apparently a joint investigation by several agencies into the alleged content moderation failures on the platform that have allegedly facilitated criminal activity. The crimes facilitated on Telegram include terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering, fraud, and child exploitation. French authorities had spotted Durov on the passenger list and moved to arrest him due to an existing warrant. Durov has been dubbed the Russian Mark Zuckerberg. He started Telegram in 2013 after leaving Russia when he refused to shut down opposition communities on his prior social media platform VK. 

Threads is test driving an option for users to put a 24 hour expiration on their posts…after which the post and replies to it would disappear like with Stories. Engadget.com says the feature is being tested by a group of users. Threads has already experimented with auto-archiving, but that hasn’t really caught on for users. Just this month, the Meta-owned platform rolled out an analytics tool called Insights. For users with large followings, it makes it easier to track their account performance. Meta says they also have an option to schedule posts coming out soon.

In other Meta news, the company has given its high-end mixed reality headset the chop. The device was planned to compete with Apple’s Vision Pro, but with the weak sales of the Vision Pro so far, Meta has decided to hold off on a rival device. They had been wanting to keep the price under $1000, too, but with the price of MicroOLED, that figure seemed unrealistic. The $1499 Quest Pro, like the more than twice as expensive Apple Vision Pro, didn’t really get a toehold in the market and was dinged with bad reviews. Meta will continue to work on mixed reality headsets, but for now will keep them well under $1000. A new one code named Ventura may bow late this year. Besides that, Meta hopes to show off some AR glasses next month, and is shooting to have a Quest 4 in standard and premium versions by 2026. 

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.