Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., during the first day of in-store sales of Apple’s latest products at Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York, US, on Friday, Sept. 20, 2024.
Victor J. Blue | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Apple announced a new iPhone model on Wednesday that is priced lower than its main iPhone models, which usually come out in September.
The new iPhone is called iPhone 16e, and it will retail for $599 when it goes on sale later this month.
The new iPhone 16e doesn’t have a home button and fingerprint sensor, instead, it uses Apple’s FaceID scanner and modern design including a sensor notch at the top of the screen. It uses Apple’s A18 chip, which is also used in the main iPhone 16 models. The updated processor means that the iPhone 16e can run all the same apps and games that more expensive iPhones can run. It comes in black and white.
The phone also includes Apple’s first cellular modem, which it calls C1. iPhones have used Qualcomm modems for the past few years. It also has a single camera lens, versus as many as three on the most advanced iPhones.
Apple is releasing a new low-cost iPhone as sales have been mixed in recent quarters and the company seeks growth for its most important product category. For the December quarter, Apple’s overall iPhone sales were down 1% on an annual basis. Apple still sold more than $69 billion of phones in the period.
Low-end iPhones are important to Apple as it gets new customers into their ecosystem, and the new device supports Apple Intelligence, making it Apple’s least expensive new phone that can access features like image generation and notification summaries.
Apple’s current models are the iPhone 16, which starts at $799, and the iPhone 16 Pro, which starts at $999. Before Wednesday’s launch, only the iPhone 16 and iPhone 15 Pro models were the only phones with access to Apple Intelligence.
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Apple has released a less-expensive iPhone model to round out the bottom of its lineup since 2016. The iPhone SE, as it was called then, got further updates in 2020 and 2022. Generally, the iPhone SE reuses an older design than the newest iPhones, but Apple updates its components such as its processor so it can receive ongoing software updates.
After the old iPhone SE sells out, there won’t be any new iPhones with a fingerprint scanner. It was also less expensive than the iPhone 16e at $429.
The launch also marks a new approach to Apple’s famous product launches, which garner media attention around the world. Previously, Apple would reveal new products live and onstage, at a presentation on its campus in California. In 2020, Apple stopped inviting people to live launches and started screening marketing videos on its website and YouTube instead.
In recent years, Apple has started to quietly release new products through press releases, such as the new Macs it announced last September. It may be testing how much buzz it can get for one of these quieter launches. Last week, ahead of Wednesday’s launch, Apple CEO Tim Cook posted a message on social media: “Get ready to meet the newest member of the family.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.
Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters
Tesla’s shares have finally turned positive for the year.
After a dismal first quarter, which was the worst for the stock in any period since 2022, and a brutal start to April, following President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping new tariffs, Wall Street has again rallied around the electric vehicle maker.
The stock rose 3.6% on Monday to $410.26, topping its closing price of 2024 by over $6. It’s up 85% since bottoming for the year at $221.86 on April 4. A new filing revealed that CEO Elon Musk purchased about $1 billion worth of shares in the company through his family foundation.
It’s the second straight year Tesla has bounced back after a down first quarter. Last year, the shares fell 29% in the first three months before ending up 63% for 2024.
In recent weeks, analysts have praised the EV maker’s proposed pay plan for Musk, which could amount to a $1 trillion windfall for the world’s richest person over the next decade. The company has also gotten a boost from its new MegaBlocks battery energy storage systems that Tesla ships preassembled to businesses looking to lower their power costs or make greater use of electricity from renewable resources.
Even with the rebound, Tesla is the second-worst performer this year among tech’s megacaps, ahead of only Apple, which is down about 5% in 2025. Tesla is still in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to an aging lineup of EVs and increased competition from lower-cost competitors in China, namely BYD.
Tesla has seen a consumer backlash, in part because of Musk’s political activities, including spending nearly $300 million to propel President Trump back to the White House and his work with the Trump administration to slash the federal workforce.
Tesla leadership has been working to shift investors’ attention to other topics such as robotaxis and humanoid robots.
However, the company has yet to deliver vehicles that are safe to use without a human onboard and ready to take control if needed. And while Musk is touting Tesla’s Optimus robots, which he says will be able to do everything from factory work to babysitting, a product is still a long way from hitting the market.
Shares of the search giant jumped more than 4% on Monday, pushing the company into territory occupied only by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.
The stock got a big lift in early September from an antitrust ruling by a judge, whose penalties came in lighter than shareholders feared. The U.S. Department of Justice wanted Google to be forced to divest its Chrome browser, and last year a district court ruled that the company held an illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.
But Judge Amit Mehta decided against the most severe consequences proposed by the DOJ, which sent shares soaring to a record. After the big rally, President Donald Trump congratulated the company and called it “a very good day.”
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Alphabet shares are now up more than 30% this year, compared to the 15% gain for the Nasdaq.
The $3 trillion milestone comes roughly 20 years after Google’s IPO and a little more than 10 years after the creation of Alphabet as a holding company, with Google its prime subsidiary.
CEO Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet in 2019, replacing co-founder Larry Page. Pichai’s latest challenge has been the surge of new competition due to the rise of artificial intelligence, which the company has had to manage through while also fending off an aggressive set of regulators in the U.S. and Europe.
The rise of Perplexity and OpenAI ended up helping Google land the recent favorable antitrust ruling. The company’s hopes of becoming a major AI player largely ride with Gemini, Google’s flagship suite of AI models.
The U.S. and China have reached a ‘framework’ deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.
“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid.
Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”
Bessent indicated that the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The comments came during the latest round of trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Relations have soured between the two countries in recent months from Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions.
At the same time, TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform’s U.S. business or face being shut down in the country.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that the deadline may need to be pushed back to get the deal signed, but there won’t be ongoing extensions.
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Congress passed a law last year prohibiting app store operators like Apple and Google from distributing TikTok in the U.S. due to its “foreign adversary-controlled application” status.
But Trump postponed the shutdown in January, signing an executive order in January that gave ByteDance 75 more days to make a deal. Further extensions came by way of executive orders in April and in June.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnicksaid in July that TikTok would shutter for Americans if China doesn’t give the U.S. more autonomy over the popular short-form video app.
As for who controls the platform, Trump told Fox News in June that he had a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy the app and could reveal their identities in two weeks. The reveal never came.
He has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison or Tesla CEO Elon Musk buying TikTok in the U.S. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has submitted a bid for an acquisition, as has businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty internet advocacy group, CNBC reported in January.
Trump told CNBC in an interview last year that he believed the platform was a national security threat, although the White House started a TikTok account in August.