Apple’s Foldable iPhone Arrives, Anthropic Researchers Sound the Alarm

Zaid Admani (0:00)

Public.com presents The Rundown, your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zaid Admani, and today is Thursday, September 10th. In today's episode, we'll break down the latest PPI inflation report. We'll also recap Apple's big hardware event yesterday, and their brand new $2,000 foldable iPhone. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why an AI researcher at Anthropic quit his job over fears of human extinction. We got a great show for you today.

Let's go.

Stocks had another rough day on Wednesday. The S&P 500 fell about half a percent, while the NASDAQ lost 0.6%. Stocks have now dropped for three sessions in a row, and the big story continues to be the oil market. Oil prices have now gone up for seven straight days as fighting in the Middle East picks up. And things continue to get uglier. Crude is now back above $100 a barrel, while Brent Crude is trading above $105 a barrel. Prices have now gone up 15% since the start of September. And that's obviously bad news for inflation. And speaking of inflation, we just got the producer price index report this morning for the month of August. This report measures inflation at the wholesale level, and they came in at 0.4% in August when compared to July, which was right in line with expectations. If you look at core PPI, which strips out food and energy, that actually came in a little cooler than expected on a monthly basis, rising just 0.2%. But when you dig a little deeper in the report, energy is clearly becoming a problem again. Energy prices jumped 4.2% last month, including a 24% surge in diesel prices. And again, when energy prices go up, that has a cascading impact across the economy because it's an input cost on pretty much everything. And what worries me about this PPI report is that it's already backward looking. Now, the numbers that I just talked about are August numbers, and oil is now back above $100 a barrel in September. So pressure from energy prices aren't going away. And remember, the Fed meets next week with a rate hike on the table. Now, we are getting another piece of inflation data tomorrow morning with the CPI report. So we'll be talking about that on tomorrow's show. Also, Oracle reports earnings today after the bell, so we'll cover that as well. So definitely get subscribed to the podcast if you haven't already, and tune in every day to stay in the loop.

Let's run through some headlines. And we're talking Apple. Apple had their big iPhone event yesterday, and we finally saw Apple's new foldable iPhone. Apple is calling this new phone the iPhone Duo, and it starts at just $1,999.

Now the reason that I say just is because earlier this week on here, I said that I expected Apple to price the foldable phone closer to $2,500, because that's kind of what Apple does. Well, Apple kept the price under $2,000, which was a shock to a lot of people, but it does make the iPhone Duo comparable to other foldable phones. And I think the fact that Apple is doing this is a sign that they really want a hit new product, which they haven't had in a while. The Vision Pro was a massive flop, and the iPhone Air didn't have great sales either, so Apple is pricing the foldable phone competitively to hopefully have a good launch. Now, $2,000 might still be too much for the average consumer to spend on a phone. Plus, the foldable category is still pretty niche. I don't know if people want foldable phones. The expectation from Wall Street is still all over the place when it comes to sales. I've seen estimates as low as five to eight million units sold this year, and others estimating as high as 14 million units. Personally, I think the iPhone Duo looks pretty cool. Now, I'm considering trading in my iPhone 17 and upgrading to it, but I wanna try it out first at the Apple Store. Unfortunately, this phone won't go on sale until October 23rd, so I'm gonna have to wait a couple of months before I try it. Now, the iPhone Duo wasn't the only thing announced yesterday. Apple also released an iPhone 18 Pro, which is pretty much like the iPhone 17 Pro, but with a slightly better camera and a higher price tag. This year's Pro starts at $1,200, and the Pro Max starts at $1,300. Both phones getting a $100 increase compared to last year. But I mean, this price hike was expected because remember earlier this year, Apple raised the prices on their other products, like the iPad and Max, due to the surge in memory prices. In fact, I think some people thought the price hikes would be worse for the iPhone 18 Beyond the iPhone, Apple showed off some new AirPods, which looked pretty great and started at a decent price, and they showed off a new Apple Watch. Surprisingly, Apple didn't spend too much time talking about AI or Apple Intelligence. The new series is coming next week with the iOS 27 update, but I think the reason Apple didn't hype it up too much is because Apple has learned not to over promise and under deliver, which they've done for the last couple of years when it comes to AI. In fact, the most interesting AI thing that was announced at the event was on the Apple Watch. There's a new feature on this new Apple Watch called Siri Recap that listens to your conversations all day, and then gives you a summary of what was said. Sounds pretty creepy, but I think it's Apple's answers to the AI wearables and pins that have become popular these days. Overall, as an Apple fanboy, I thought this was a pretty solid event, but as an Apple investor, well, I guess it wasn't as impressive. Apple stock barely moved yesterday, and it's only up 1% today at the time of this recording.