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    The Byte Back episode 2: the Tech Trailblazers awards, the iPhone Duo from A$3,499, and the AI slop wearing down PR’s trust

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    The Byte Back episode 2: the Tech Trailblazers awards, the iPhone Duo from A,499, and the AI slop wearing down PR’s trust

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    The Byte Back episode 2: the Tech Trailblazers awards, the iPhone Duo from A$3,499, and the AI slop wearing down PR’s trust

    Entries for the global enterprise Tech Trailblazers awards program close on 30 September and Apple’s first folding phone arrives in Australia from A$3,499

    Episode 2 of The Byte Back tied it all together. 

    I record the show for the UK Live network from my home in Canberra, or wherever I am in the world – Sydney, the US, Europe or Asia. My evening is a British morning, so anything that lands here gets a few hours to be picked apart before it turns up in a London living room. This week that mattered, because we recorded the second part of the show on iPhone launch day Australian time, with Rose Ross, detailed below, recorded earlier in the week. 

    Here’s the full show, upon which this article is based – please watch, and read on below!

    Two guests. First, Tech Trailblazers Awards, Founder and Chief Trailblazer, Rose Ross, who launched the global awards program for enterprise tech startups and scale-ups in June 2012 and also founded the London tech PR consultancy Omarketing back in 1997.  Second, Telsyte, Managing Director and Principal Analyst, Foad Fadaghi, who has spent more than 20 years measuring how Australians actually adopt technology, first as technology editor at BRW (Business Review Weekly), then as an analyst at Jupiter Research, and who co-wrote a book called Digital Nation about it.

    Here’s what stood out, with the numbers checked.

    Two disclosures before we start

    I’m a judge on the 2026 Tech Trailblazers Awards. Rose invited me on earlier this month, and judging runs through October.

    Rose and I are also both advisors to Cybermindz, the Australian-founded non-profit that runs mental resilience training for cyber defenders. The advisors page lists her as Communications and Media Advisor and me as Strategic Advisor, Media and Technology.

    Both of those come up later in this piece, so you should know about them now rather than at the end.

    Who can enter the Tech Trailblazers, and what it costs

    The rules are tighter than most awards programs, deliberately.

    “The awards run for nine years and below, so under 10, and Series C and below, and privately funded. So that’s who can enter,” Ross said on The Byte Back.

    Then there’s Firestarter, which is the category she, most appropriately, lights up about.

    “The Firestarters category is for those that are three years and under and have not yet received Series A VC funding. So they are in the very early part of their journey, and for them, it’s free of charge to enter across the board in whichever categories they see as important and where they are making their mark,” Ross said.

    For everyone else it’s US$345 for the first entry and US$195 for each additional category, per the Tech Trailblazers entry details. Four categories are free regardless of company size or age: Female CxO, Male CxO, Diversity Trailblazers and Investment Trailblazers.

    Put that next to the competition. The Stevie Awards for Technology Excellence charge US$520 per entry for organisation and product categories at early-bird rates, rising by US$45 after the deadline and another US$55 for late submissions. The Firestarter bursary covers the full US$345 for eligible pre-VC companies up to three years old, funded by themselves, angels, seed rounds or crowdfunding.

    For an Australian founder with 9 staff and a Sydney lease, the difference between US$520 and nothing is the difference between entering and not bothering.

    Entries close at 23:59 Pacific on 30 September 2026, which Ross confirmed on air. Worth noting because the date has moved: Enterprise Times reported on 20 August that the deadline had been extended to 17 September, and it has since shifted again to the end of the month. Winners are announced in December 2026.

    “We’re definitely on a mission to make sure all of the companies that are qualified to enter are at least aware and hopefully incentivised to be part of this year’s awards program,” Ross said.

    The awards started because a client said no

    The origin story is better than the usual founder mythology, mostly because it involves someone else’s budget meeting.

    Omarketing was doing PR for a trade show that needed a way to pull in early-stage enterprise startups from the US, Israel, Australia and elsewhere. Ross suggested an awards program as the mechanism.

    “They decided not to progress that for budgetary reasons. However, it was an idea that really spoke to me. I’ve always really supported the underdog. I’ve worked early in my career for a number of UK startups, and I knew how difficult it was for them to get traction,” Ross said.

    She had a working title, the Global Innovation Program, which she cheerfully described on air as “not a really exciting name, to be fair”. What she didn’t have was credibility yet as an awards event, and she knew a PR person promoting her own awards wasn’t going to supply it.

    So she asked Joe Baguley, now CTO EMEA at Broadcom and at the time CTO EMEA at VMware, to judge. She expected a polite no.

    “I said to Joe, expecting a no, I’m too busy. I said, would you be a judge? He said, oh, absolutely, yes. And his support has been the whole way long,” Ross said. “So I thought, well, if Joe’s willing to put his time and effort into something like this, we have to have something that is worthwhile.”

    Fifteen editions in, the alumni list does the arguing. Ross named Nutanix, Zscaler, ZeroFox and Abnormal Security on air. The awards’ own alumni roundup from late July covers 2025 Robotics winner Robust.AI deploying 24 collaborative mobile robots with O’Neill Logistics, 2020 Security winner Abnormal AI extending its platform, and 2024 Cloud runner-up CAST AI picking up a CloudX Award.

    Why an award should be a lens rather than a verdict

    This is the line of hers I’d been waiting to ask about, because it’s an unusually honest thing for someone who justifiably sells awards entries to say.

    “I think a lot of the awards programs will give people a bit of a shortlist to look at, and therefore they can see them more clearly. But ultimately, they’re going to have to rely on their own judgment and how it fits best into their organisation,” Ross said. “Because there’s not always going to be a great solution, even if it is a great solution. It’s not always going to be a great solution for yourselves.”

    That maps to how enterprise buyers actually behave. A shortlist saves you a fortnight of vendor discovery. It doesn’t tell you whether the thing works in your environment, with your data, under your compliance regime.

    I’ve won journalism awards in Australia run by a program that spotted plenty of today’s large companies when they were nobodies. At follow-up events years later, founders kept saying the same thing: the award won them meetings and credibility, and both were the thing they couldn’t buy. Credibility is a door opener, and that’s all it needs to be.

    What’s changed across 15 editions, and what’s harder

    Ross has watched this ecosystem since 2012. Her read on what’s got worse is funding, and her read on what’s got noisier is AI positioning.

    “We are seeing a lot of people who are identifying as being an AI or an AI-enabled solution, and that is valid, but I don’t think it’s always the most helpful way of describing your organisation,” Ross said. “I think it’s the how you’re going to do it, it’s not what you’re going to do, and what difference you’re going to make to an enterprise technology stack at the end of the day.”

    Any Australian founder who has watched a category fill up with companies whose pitch deck changed one word in 2023 will recognise that.

    On money, her advice cuts against the standard startup script.

    “I always try and encourage people to look really to their customers as their first and most important investors. And if you can unlock those and focus on those as much as you can, then I think that’s a really important thing,” Ross said. “But the whole VC and the funding landscape is changing considerably, and I think there is going to be a lot of developments there that are not going to make a lot of the VCs happy. Hopefully it will be good for the founders though.”

    Entries this year are running heavy on cyber and AI, she said, with quantum and robotics as the newer categories drawing interest.

    Cybermindz, and the number the security industry is starting to believe

    The organisation was founded by Peter Coroneos, who ran Australia’s Internet Industry Association from 1997 to 2011 and has twice been invited to the White House to advise on cybersecurity. Cybermindz uses the iRest protocol developed by Dr Richard Miller, which has decades of use with military personnel, first responders and medical staff, and is delivered as 8 weekly one-hour sessions over video.

    Ross’s reason for backing it is personal rather than professional.

    “I’m fortunate enough to know a lot of CISOs personally, consider many of them to be my friends. So there are plenty of discussions about the stress that they are under, and that is really one of the reasons why I’m supporting Cybermindz,” Ross said. “Burnout is a real issue for people in the cyber profession, both at the CISO level and within the SOC.”

    The May 2026 Cybermindz iRest Impact Study, which I covered for iTWire, took acute burnout crisis cases from 4% of participants to zero. At-risk burnout fell 77%. The attrition warning zone, the single best predictor of a resignation, fell 71%. Participants gained an average of 26 extra minutes of sleep a night and their global stress score dropped 25%.

    “We’re sort of seeing that become a standard part of what’s being reported upon and discussed, both publicly and behind closed doors in the hidden networks of CISOs and cyber security professionals, who are being a lot more open about the struggles that they face,” Ross said.

    For Australian security leaders the arithmetic is the interesting part. Replacing a senior analyst runs at roughly 1.5 to 2 times their annual salary once you count recruitment, onboarding and lost institutional knowledge. Eight hours of facilitated training is cheap against that.

    International Women in Cyber Day, and who Rose put on her list

    The day falls on 1 September, so it had been and gone the day before we recorded. It’s led by the Women CyberSecurity Society and recognised globally.

    Ross used her LinkedIn to name around 20 women she works with. On air she picked 3: IOActive Chief Executive Officer, Jennifer Sunshine Steffens; FlyingBinary Chief Executive Officer, Dr Jacqui Taylor; and PPRO Chief Information Security Officer, Bronwyn Boyle, who is also EVP Resilient Communities at Cybermindz. The first 2 are also Tech Trailblazers judges – an honour that is not bestowed lightly.

    “It’s important to shine a light on those really important women who have built incredible careers and are doing an amazing job of defending their organisations,” Ross said.

    The background number hasn’t moved much. ISC2 research puts women at 22% of the cybersecurity workforce, and the Center for Cyber Safety and Education’s Global 50×50 initiative is aiming for parity by 2050. In ISC2’s 2026 survey of 16,029 practitioners, 34% of women cited pay or promotion inequity against 19% of men, and 42% of men said they were unaware of the challenges women face, which is 2.5 times the 17% of women who said the same.

    My own view is the one I trot out every Internet Safety Day. One day a year is a prompt. The work is the other 364.

    The AI contamination problem, and why journalists have stopped trusting their inboxes

    This was the segment I most wanted, because Rose has been doing tech PR for nearly 30 years and has watched the trust between publicists and reporters get chewed through in about 18 months.

    Her position on AI in her own shop is specific. Research, reporting and monitoring, yes. Press releases and thought leadership, no.

    “You can’t have it be your thought leadership. You have to provide the ideas. Human in the loop, human at the beginning, and then to check at the end,” Ross said.

    Then she named the thing I have also seen myself. 

    “We’re starting to see what we see as AI contamination, where maybee, could be already AI’d, and that then can contaminate what you’re pulling together because you’ve got contaminated resources,” Ross said

    That’s a supply chain problem, and it compounds. Every generation of AI-writtenegrades the next output a little further

    The other half is uglier.

    “Now we’re seeing some disreputable organisations generating spokespeople, generating comments, and just a deluge of AI slop being fired at journalists,” Ross said. “So we’re seeing increasingly journalists who are putting out requests for comments saying no AI generated, no AI edited, which is absolutely fair enough. Some are requesting that they would like video comments rather than written comments.”

    She’s describing something that is already documented. In January 2026, Press Gazette named more than 50 apparently fake experts who had collectively appeared in over 1,000 articles across British newspapers, magazines and websites, deployed by PR campaigns chasing search rankings. One network of 3 related home services companies accounted for more than 20 invented experts across over 500 stories. One “psychiatrist” who does not exist appeared dozens of times. A headshot attached to another was rated 99% likely to be AI-generated by detection tool Pangram.

    Pressflow co-founder, Jelena Skene, told Press Gazette the platform had to build automated screening in response, and that 25 of 37 new applicants in one batch were rejected over authenticity concerns.

    Meanwhile Muck Rack’s 2026 State of Journalism report, based on 897 journalists, found 82% now use at least one AI tool, up from 77%, and 26% named unchecked AI as a top concern, up from 18% a year earlier. PR pitches still inspire at least some stories for 86% of them. The relationship matters, which is why damaging it is expensive.

    Omarketing’s countermeasure is simple and I wish more agencies copied it.

    “We certainly ensure that all of our spokespeople, we put their LinkedIn profile along with their bio,” Ross said. “Not that we think that people won’t believe that they exist, but I want them, particularly if they don’t know us really well, to just have that confidence that they can go and have a look and go, okay, this at least looks like a real person.”

    That costs nothing and it’s the cheapest trust signal available in 2026. It’s also why every person named in this article has a link attached to them.

    How I use these tools, since I’m asking everyone else about theirs

    Full transparency, because I asked Rose for hers.

    I use Claude for text work, always from originalripts I’ve recorded, press releases I’ve been sent. It’s trained on my style and told to avoid the giveaways, including the long dashes and the dead phrases that make a sentence smell synthetic. It finds LinkedIn profiles, digs up relevant prior coverage and sources everything so I can check it

    Then I check the links before, during and after. There’s always something to fix.

    Gemini and ChatGPT handle infographics and cover images. When I put a person’s photograph into a generated graphic I send it to them or their company for sign-off before publishing, because AI-generated images of real people are a consent question first and a design question second. If the answer is no, there’s always a stock image, a screenshot or the original photo.

    Anyone can boil water and tip a packet of two-minute noodles into it. Cooking something worth eating takes longer. AI is the same, and disclosure is part of doing it properly, which is what this section is.

    Is Britain still a good place to start an enterprise tech company?

    Ross has been a Tech London Advocate since 2014 and co-founded TechBritannia, so I asked her the honest version.

    “Absolutely. We’re seeing a lot of really exciting companies, and obviously we see those in the Tech Trailblazers as well,” Ross said, pointing past London to the university clusters around Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester and Cardiff, and up into Scotland and across to Belfast.

    Her criticism of government is measured, and more useful for it.

    “There is always more that government could do to support the entrepreneur. I think it’s a difficult task for an organisation which is ultimately very much focused on a civil service approach to the world, to try and understand what it is to be an entrepreneur,” Ross said. “But they’re taking steps, and I think it’s the industry’s responsibility to help inform them of what’s going on and what’s required.”

    Her first computer had a field for fax numbers

    I ask everyone this, and the answers are always better than the question deserves.

    “I had an IBM desktop. I think it may still have had floppy disks, but it certainly had the smaller ones, three and a half inch ones. And on that, I had the first database for Omarketing, which consisted of a Word document which had email addresses on probably about 10% of the contacts, and telephone numbers, and yes, fax numbers as well, because we were still faxing press releases to people at that time,” Ross said. “That was our IT infrastructure for a couple of years at the beginning.”

    A Word document as a CRM, before today’s advanced CRM systems existed. There are Series B startups today with worse data hygiene.

    Foad Fadaghi on Apple’s A$3,499 iPhone Duo

    We recorded the second half on iPhone launch day in Australia, hours after Apple showed the iPhone Duo.

    The name was the first surprise.

    “First and foremost, the name was a bit of a surprise. There were some leaks a couple of days ago that it might be called a Duo, but who would have thought that Apple would have taken on a naming convention that a competitor might have on a product line,” Fadaghi said on The Byte Back. “Having said that, they avoided the Fold name, which Samsung has been using for a long time.”

    Microsoft’s Surface Duo is the name he’s pointing at, a dual-screen Android device with a visible dividing line down the middle that arrived several years before anyone could manufacture a single folding panel at scale. That trademark had been sitting idle.

    Fadaghi’s read on who it’s for was immediate.

    “It clearly is targeting a certain marketplace, and I think it’s really the luxury market it’s targeting by the nature of the presentation and the machining and the effort that’s being put into that product,” Fadaghi said. “We know that in Singapore, in China, in other Asian cities and around the Asia Pacific region in particular, excluding Australia, luxury foldable products have been seen as expensive and a status symbol for many people.”

    Here is the Australian price ladder from Apple’s launch, all RRP inc. GST: A$3,499 for 256GB, A$3,899 for 512GB, A$4,699 for 1TB and A$5,899 for 2TB. Pre-orders open 11pm AEST on Friday 16 October, with retail stock on Friday 23 October.

    Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 starts at A$2,699 for 256GB and the Fold 8 Ultra at A$2,999. So Apple’s entry foldable costs A$800 more than Samsung’s entry foldable and A$500 more than the entry Fold 8 Ultra. Load Samsung’s foldables up to 1TB and they pass A$3,499 too, so the gap is really at the bottom of each ladder.

    Fadaghi reached for a comparison that should worry Apple.

    “If we turn the clock back and think about some of Apple’s products in the past, namely the Vision Pro, which took 10 years to put out. The best screens anyone’s ever seen on a face, the very best machining, the very best engineering in the VR space. But the market isn’t very big,” Fadaghi said. “So they kind of had a miss with this over-engineered, very expensive product to a certain extent. So I’m wondering if this product might not fall into that category as well, if it wasn’t for some of these luxury markets across the Asia Pacific region.”

    He stopped short of writing it off.

    “Nevertheless, it’s good for the category. We might see more devices like this from Apple in the future that enter the affordable space, and that might have more effects on Apple as a company than a very niche product at this stage,” Fadaghi said.

    Australians already pay premium prices, and Telsyte has the receipts

    None of this lands in a vacuum. Telsyte’s Australian Smartphone and Wearable Devices Market Study 2026, published 17 August, found 3.87 million smartphones sold here in the first half of 2026, with 56% of them priced above A$1,000 and more than one in five above A$2,000.

    Apple took 49.4% of the market. iPhone volumes rose 7% while Android fell 5%.

    The replacement cycle has compressed to 3.4 years from 3.9 years in late 2023, so Australians are paying more and keeping their phones for less time. Foldables sit at roughly 5% of annual sales. A third of iPhone users would consider an Apple foldable, rising to 46% among iPhone Pro series owners, and 17% of Pro users said they’d pay more than A$3,000.

    That last figure now reads like a pricing brief.

    Telsyte’s full-year forecast is 8.4 million units, down 3%, with the weakness in the second half driven by higher memory and component costs.

    The memory crisis is why your next phone costs more

    I put it to Fadaghi that the iPhone 18 Pro Max at 2TB is now A$4,699, up from the A$3,600 I paid for the same storage tier a generation ago. That’s a rise of over A$1,000 on one configuration.

    His answer was about buying behaviour as much as price.

    “The biggest challenge is, Alex, that the prices of the iPhone 17 went up after the launch as well, by anything from a hundred dollars in the US plus in other regions. So this explains why we saw a bit of a rush towards iPhone purchases in the first half of this year when we put out our research,” Fadaghi said. “A lot of people said, well, why are people buying phones now? They normally wait to the end of the year to buy a handset. Well, it was in anticipation of price rises.”

    Demand got pulled forward by people who read the memory market correctly.

    “In 24 hours prices just jumped on older model handsets,” Fadaghi said. “I suspect that this increased breadth of prices that you’re seeing now in iPhones will help people extend their current handset longer.”

    The cause sits upstream, in the memory fabs. Gartner forecasts a 130% surge in combined DRAM and SSD prices by the end of 2026, pushing smartphone prices up 13% and PC prices up 17%, with smartphone shipments falling 8.4% and PC shipments 10.4%.

    “This is the steepest contraction in device shipments witnessed in over a decade,” said Gartner Senior Director Analyst, Ranjit Atwal, in Gartner’s release of 26 February 2026.

    Atwal also expects the sub-US$500 entry-level PC segment to vanish by 2028, and basic smartphone buyers to leave the market considerably faster than premium buyers during 2026.

    Memory makers have shifted capacity to the enterprise AI market where the margins are much higher, and they’re in no hurry to build new fabs for consumer parts. Relief isn’t arriving next quarter. It may not arrive until the turn of the decade, and maybe not even then. 

    Fadaghi’s read on the cost-of-living squeeze was consistent across both markets we cover.

    “Everyone, particularly in this part of the region, is under cost-of-living pressure. I know that that’s the same in the UK. Rapid price rises, housing affordability, and things like that, and certainly the purchase of a luxury handset is not going to be a priority for many people,” Fadaghi said.

    Will people actually pay for AI on a phone?

    Telsyte’s Australian Artificial Intelligence Study 2026, published 2 June and covered here on iTWire, found 17.4 million Australians using AI, or 77% of everyone aged 16 and over, with 5.2 million using it daily.

    More than 11 million already use AI features built into their device. Only 33% say their next phone has to have advanced AI. Battery, performance and storage still win.

    Which makes Apple’s new charging model interesting. Siri AI rolls out with iOS 27, and server-side features carry daily usage limits, with more access tied to most iCloud+ plans and, per Apple’s own footnotes, available for a fee in future.

    “Will they pay for these AI features? There’s some clauses in the Siri intelligence that says that you might be charged beyond a certain amount of usage,” Fadaghi said. “I suspect that over time some of these more hidden aspects of the launch will become mainstream, and certainly will affect how people might purchase their next handset.”

    My own view is that paid iCloud+ tiers have a useful side effect. More people with a subscription means more people with an actual backup, and the number of Australians who lose a phone and discover their children’s photos went with it is depressingly high.

    The affordability argument, and why the MacBook Neo matters more than the fold

    This was the strongest thing Fadaghi said all segment, and it had nothing to do with folding screens.

    “I think the challenge with Apple is that their products that have been super successful have been the ones that have been value for money,” Fadaghi said. “If we’re talking about Mac Minis, if we’re talking about MacBook Neos, these products have created a bit of a buzz and have sold really well when they were priced extremely aggressively.”

    The evidence is on the scoreboard. Apple announced the US$599 MacBook Neo on 4 March 2026, a 13-inch machine running the A18 Pro chip from the iPhone 16 Pro, the first Mac powered by an iPhone processor, with education pricing from US$499.

    In the second quarter of 2026, IDC recorded Apple Mac shipments up 10.1% to 9.9% global share while the overall PC market fell 4.9% to 68.2 million units, its first year-on-year decline since 2024. IDC’s quarterly tracker commentary directly credited the launch: “Apple’s share gain coincided with its latest product launch, the MacBook Neo, and while the company did raise prices in line with the broader market, it still remains well positioned against rivals facing the same cost pressures.”

    IDC Research Director, Jitesh Ubrani, added the line that explains the whole sector right now: vendor revenue keeps climbing because “vendors are pushing through price increases faster than demand is dropping.”

    Fadaghi expects that playbook to travel.

    “Now they’ve done this with laptops, and one of the thinkings is that maybe this sort of initiative might be applied to other product categories,” Fadaghi said. “So I suspect that maybe we might have an event coming in six months’ time when Apple actually releases its affordable handsets, and instils some new technologies or new tricks up its sleeve in terms of product development.”

    The rumour he floated is that the iPhone Air 2 with 2 cameras becomes the iPhone 18, bringing a genuinely new form factor down to a mass-market price.

    “Some say it is the perfect size and the perfect weight, and with updated cameras, it could be the best deal,” Fadaghi said. “Ultimately, I think consumers are looking for a deal.”

    He’s sceptical that instalment plans solve it, which is worth hearing given how hard Australian telcos and Apple are pushing them.

    “I don’t think it changes people’s overall budget. Ultimately, they can only afford so much per month,” Fadaghi said. “Do you really want to pay a hundred and something, three hundred dollars a month, or whatever it might be, just for a smartphone? I suspect many people might not be comfortable with that.”

    For the record, Afterpay’s Pay Monthly went live at Apple Australia on 1 July over 6, 12 or 24 months, and telco plans typically run up to 36. You keep the device at the end, which beats the old lease arrangements, though read the standing rate rather than the promotional one.

    The Ternus era begins, and OpenAI is the target

    This was the first September keynote run by Apple Chief Executive Officer, John Ternus, who took the job on 1 September after Tim Cook moved to executive chairman. A hardware engineer of 25 years, opening with the hardest hardware problem Apple had left on the shelf.

    Fadaghi caught something in the framing that I’d half-noticed and not properly registered – but it’s obvious in retrospect.

    “There was clearly some shots across the bow from Apple towards companies like OpenAI, suggesting that you already have the AI device in your pocket. You don’t need another AI device,” Fadaghi said. “This is the central hub of AI and how you might live in the future. So I think clearly there’s a growing battleground there, particularly with Jony Ive moving over to OpenAI, and I suspect that so much time was given to this topic simply for that kind of reason, more marketing reasons as opposed to product reasons.”

    He’s right about the timing. OpenAI’s Ive-designed device slipped to no earlier than the end of February 2027 after a trademark dispute with audio startup iyO forced OpenAI to drop the io name. It’s reported as screen-free, pocket-sized and contextually aware of your surroundings, positioned as a third core device alongside phone and computer.

    Apple spent keynote minutes arguing that category doesn’t need to exist. Companies don’t usually do that about products that aren’t a threat.

    On Ternus himself, Fadaghi was positive without gushing.

    “I suspect that he’s going to do quite well as long as he follows the strategies that he’s followed to date to be successful where he is,” Fadaghi said.

    My own hope is that the Jony Ive-era decisions that aged worst, the butterfly keyboards a grain of sand could kill and the missing ports, are properly behind us. The iPhone 18 Pro’s larger vapour chamber and claimed 40% gain in sustained performance over the iPhone 17 Pro suggest engineering priorities have shifted back toward things that matter at 35 degrees in a Brisbane summer. I bought an iPhone Air and watched it dim aggressively in the Hong Kong and Las Vegas heat, so I’ll take sustained over peak every time.

    Where Fadaghi thinks Apple’s growth actually comes from

    The closing exchange is the one Australian readers should sit with, because Australia is the proof of his argument.

    “When they put out quality products and avoid people buying techno trash, then it builds loyalty over time. It creates lifetime customer value,” Fadaghi said. “How many of these loyal Apple customers are going to jump the fence and join OpenAI, if they’ve been looked after really well with high-quality products that have kept their value over time?”

    Then the Australian point.

    “This is why Apple’s been so successful in a market like Australia, because it has had products that have been for the average people, for the normal people, and that’s bred positivity and more widespread use, and that’s obviously stretched into the ultra and high-end markets as well,” Fadaghi said.

    I suggested not everyone can pull off affordable and luxury at the same time. He agreed, and put the answer back on manufacturing.

    “Using their existing supply chains, using their existing products to produce lower-end, low-cost, but just as powerful software in front of children and cost-conscious households, is a great way for them to grow into the future,” Fadaghi said. “It’s a long-trusted strategy for Apple, from the 80s and 90s, putting computers into schools and making it accessible.”

    “Growth is not necessarily going to come from this luxury segment. The impact on Apple’s bottom line is going to be how it expands, and expanding does come with the need for more affordability to reach the masses,” Fadaghi said.

    Which brings it back to the entry-level iPad, still the cheapest way into the ecosystem, still an enormous seller, and still a better machine for a 12-year-old, or any adult, than a Windows laptop at A$300 that struggles to open a browser with a bunch of tabs open or do proper multitasking across several apps. 

    Both guests were describing the same squeeze from opposite ends.

    Rose Ross is trying to keep a door open for companies that can’t afford US$520 an entry, at a moment when the cheapest way to look credible is to generate a fake expert and a headshot to go with it.

    Foad Fadaghi is watching a device market price its entry buyers out, at a moment when memory costs have made the cheap end unprofitable to build.

    In both cases the correction runs through the same thing, which is whether the people making the decisions can still tell what’s real. A judging panel of CIOs and CISOs. A reporter checking a LinkedIn profile before running a quote. A buyer working out whether an award is a lens or a verdict.

    The Byte Back airs on the UK Live network. Episode 1, with The Fifth Industrial Revolution author Dan Södergren and Red Oxygen Chief Marketing Officer Brett Levy, is here. Entries for the Tech Trailblazers close on 30 September at techtrailblazers.com.

    You can watch Episode 2 below!

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