TSMC record AI chip profit, Apple iPhone Duo foldable

Samantha: Welcome to The State of Tech, The European Edition, Friday October sixteen, 2026. I'm Samantha Lawrence.

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: TSMC posts a record quarter on the back of the AI hardware boom, Apple finally jumps into foldables with the iPhone Duo, Microsoft ships a record patch load including an actively exploited Windows bug, Amazon's new Bee wearables listen to your day and write it down, and to close two things you can try yourself, the free open-source note tool QOwnNotes and the free weather app MeteoSwiss. Let's start with Taiwan.

TSMC posts a record twenty-three point six billion dollar quarterly profit on relentless AI chip demand.

Samantha: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, better known as TSMC, has booked the biggest quarter in its history. Net profit for the third quarter came in at the equivalent of twenty-three point six billion US dollars, up almost sixty-nine percent on the same quarter last year. Revenue rose roughly fifty-one percent to about forty-six billion dollars. The company, which makes chips for Apple, Nvidia, AMD and most of the AI world, says demand for AI hardware is driving it, and the numbers blew past what analysts had expected.

Bob: And the mix tells the real story. Advanced processes, so the two-, three-, five- and seven-nanometer nodes, accounted for seventy-nine percent of wafer revenue. That is where the AI accelerators and top-end phone chips are made, and it is where TSMC has almost no serious competition. Intel is years behind, Samsung's foundry is struggling with yields, so when hyperscalers want cutting-edge silicon, there is essentially one address. That pricing power is what turns an AI boom into a sixty-nine percent profit jump.

Samantha: The scale of it is worth sitting with. In a single quarter, one company earned more than the annual gross domestic product of several European member states. And that profit is almost entirely a bet on AI continuing to need more compute, quarter after quarter. If that bet holds, TSMC keeps printing. If AI capital spending cools, the whole chain, from Taiwan to the Dutch machine makers that supply the fabs, feels it first.

Bob: For Europe the picture is awkward. The continent buys the AI servers these chips end up in, but almost none of the leading-edge manufacturing happens here. The European Chips Act is trying to change that, and ASML in the Netherlands is still the single most important supplier of the lithography machines TSMC uses. So Europe sits at both ends of the pipeline, selling the critical tools and buying the finished systems, with very little in the middle. A geopolitical shock around Taiwan would hit European industry fast.

Samantha: For listeners it also shapes what you will pay. The AI features showing up in your phone, your laptop, your car navigation, they all depend on chips that are now in extreme demand. Analysts expect that pricing pressure to keep working its way through to consumer devices and cloud subscriptions well into next year.

Apple launches the iPhone Duo, its first foldable, with a new Siri AI built in.

Bob: Apple's iPhone Duo, its first foldable phone, is the company's long-awaited answer to Samsung and Huawei in that category. Open it up and you get what Apple calls the largest iPhone display ever, around fifty percent bigger than the inner space of the current Pro Max. Fold it shut and there is a compact five point four inch outer screen. It runs on a new A20 Pro chip and ships with what Apple is branding Siri AI, powered by Apple Intelligence. Pre-orders start today.

Samantha: The AI pitch is the interesting part. Apple is leaning hard on personal context, so the assistant can use what it knows about your messages, calendar and apps to actually help, while keeping the processing as private as possible. That is the same privacy-first line Apple has used for years, and it is the main thing that separates its approach from Google's and Samsung's cloud-heavy assistants. Whether Siri can finally deliver on that promise after a bumpy couple of years is the real test, not the hinge.

Bob: Hardware-wise, Apple is late. Samsung is on its seventh or eighth foldable generation, and Chinese brands have been shipping thinner, cheaper folds for a while. But Apple arriving usually resets the category, because its supply chain and software ecosystem drag the whole industry with it. Expect app developers to finally take the folding form factor seriously, and expect accessory makers to pivot overnight.

Samantha: For European buyers, the Duo lands into a market that is now shaped by the Digital Markets Act. That means side-loading, alternative app stores and third-party browser engines are all legally required to work on this device from day one in the EU. So a European iPhone Duo is, on paper, a more open device than one sold in the US. Pricing has not been fully confirmed for every market, but expect this to sit comfortably at the top of the phone price range.

Bob: One practical note: foldables are still fragile and expensive to repair. Buyers will want to look carefully at AppleCare terms and at what independent repair shops can actually do under the EU's right-to-repair rules.

Samantha: Quick interruption. If you listen to The State of Tech regularly, hit that like button and subscribe, that way you'll never miss an episode. Okay, moving on.

Microsoft ships a record fourteen hundred patches, including a Windows bug attackers are already using.

Bob: Microsoft's October Patch Tuesday is the biggest the company has ever shipped: one thousand four hundred and thirteen fixes in a single release. Buried inside is a Windows shell vulnerability that is already being exploited in the wild, which lets attackers bypass the Mark of the Web warning, the little banner Windows shows when you open a file downloaded from the internet. If that defence is gone, a booby-trapped document can run without the usual click-through warning.

Samantha: And it is not just Microsoft. The US cybersecurity agency CISA has told federal agencies they must patch Ivanti Connect Secure appliances by today, because of an actively exploited bug that lets attackers skip the login step entirely and run commands remotely. Ivanti Connect Secure is widely used by companies and governments in Europe too, as a remote-access gateway. If yours has not been updated, this is a drop-everything moment for the IT team.

Bob: The sheer size of this patch cycle, more than fourteen hundred fixes in a month, says something about where we are. Software stacks have become so large and so interconnected that routine maintenance now looks like an emergency response every four weeks. For smaller European businesses without a dedicated security team, that is simply not sustainable with manual processes.

Samantha: For regular users the message is simpler. Open Windows Update, let it install this month's patches, and restart. On the Ivanti side, there is nothing a home user needs to do, but anyone using a corporate VPN that connects through one of those boxes should expect their IT team to force a reconnection or password reset in the coming days. Under the EU's NIS2 rules, operators of essential services have to act quickly on exploited vulnerabilities like this one, so regulators will be watching the response as well.

Amazon launches the Bee Frontier and Bee Eclipse wearables that transcribe your whole day.

Bob: Amazon has introduced two new AI wearables, the Bee Frontier and the Bee Eclipse, both built around a simple idea: a small microphone that listens to your conversations and meetings, then quietly transcribes them, writes notes, and surfaces reminders. They come from Bee, an AI wearable startup Amazon bought earlier this year. Basic summaries and memory are free. The deeper integrations, with Alexa plus and with your Amazon account, require a paid Bee Pro subscription.

Samantha: The privacy framing is going to be contested. Amazon says no one, including Amazon itself, can access user data, and that audio is deleted once it has been turned into text. The technical details of how that works matter enormously, because the device is, by design, listening to everyone around the wearer, not just the person who bought it. That is the same problem the earlier Humane Pin and the Rabbit R1 ran into, and neither of those devices survived contact with reality.

Bob: And it is the European angle that gets really interesting here. Under the General Data Protection Regulation, recording conversations with people who have not consented is a serious problem. Several European data protection authorities have already warned about always-listening devices in workplaces and public spaces. Expect regulators in Germany, France and the Netherlands in particular to ask Amazon very detailed questions before, or shortly after, this ships in Europe.

Samantha: There is also a cultural question. Many European workplaces have strict rules, often negotiated with works councils, about recording meetings. A manager wearing one of these to a one-on-one with an employee is not a neutral act. Reviewers who have tested early units describe the transcription quality as impressive, but the social friction as the real barrier. Useful tool, uncomfortable norms.

NVIDIA kicks off RTX Spark week with faster on-device AI for creators.

Bob: Let's shift to something more hands-on. NVIDIA today kicked off what it calls RTX Spark launch week, aimed at bringing more AI processing onto the device in front of you, rather than into a distant data centre. There is a faster version of its DLSS image-upscaling technology for gamers, and two new small language models called Nemotron three point five Bolt, designed to run locally on your own hardware. The headline for creators is a deeper partnership with Adobe.

Samantha: Adobe is optimising Photoshop, Premiere and the Substance 3D tools for the new RTX Spark chip, and claims up to twice as fast AI processing, editing, colour work and effects. In plain terms: if you work in those apps on a recent RTX machine, the generative fill, the automatic masking, the video effects, all the things that currently make your laptop fan scream, should run noticeably quicker and more of them should work without an internet connection.

Bob: And that is why this belongs in the practical half of the episode. Many European freelancers and small studios have been uncomfortable sending client work up to cloud AI services, for confidentiality reasons as much as cost. On-device AI gives them a way to keep sensitive footage and brand assets on their own machine. If you already own an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription and a reasonably recent RTX laptop or desktop, this update is free, and it rolls out through the normal Creative Cloud updater over the coming days.

Samantha: Alongside that, a genuinely useful free tool worth trying today is QOwnNotes. It is a free, open-source note-taking app from Germany that stores every note as a plain markdown file on your own computer, with optional sync through Nextcloud or ownCloud. Reviewers in open-source circles praise it for being fast, keyboard-friendly, and completely free of accounts, subscriptions or cloud lock-in. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. If you have been looking for a way out of a cloud notes service without losing your library, this is one of the smoother off-ramps, and installation takes about five minutes.

Bob: The nice thing is that your existing markdown files just drop in. There is no proprietary format to escape later. Many self-hosters use it as a lightweight knowledge base, with everything backed up through their own storage.

MeteoSwiss delivers precise European weather forecasts without ads or accounts.

Samantha: To close out, one more thing you can actually open today, and this one has nothing to do with AI. The free MeteoSwiss app, from the Swiss federal meteorological office, has quietly become one of the better weather apps in Europe. It covers Switzerland in extreme detail, with hourly forecasts, radar, warnings and mountain weather, but the forecasts also work across neighbouring countries and much of the Alpine region.

Bob: What makes it stand out is what it does not do. No ads. No account. No data harvesting pop-ups. It is a public-service weather app, funded by the Swiss government, and it shows. Reviewers consistently rank it among the most accurate forecasters for the Alps and central Europe, which matters if you are hiking, skiing, cycling or just trying to work out whether to carry a jacket. It is available free on iOS and Android.

Samantha: It is particularly useful for anyone travelling into mountain areas this autumn. The avalanche bulletins, lightning tracker and detailed wind forecasts are the kind of thing specialist paid apps charge for. Here they are simply part of the default view. For listeners in Germany, Austria, northern Italy and eastern France, the coverage is good enough to use as a daily default.

Bob: And if you want a second opinion, you can keep your existing weather app and just use MeteoSwiss for anything mountain-related or weather-warning-related. Two taps, no sign-up, done.

Samantha: Today we covered: TSMC's record AI-driven quarter, Apple's first foldable iPhone, Microsoft's record patch dump with an actively exploited Windows bug, Amazon's Bee listening wearables, and two things to try yourself: the free note-taking app QOwnNotes and the free Swiss weather app MeteoSwiss.

Bob: Want to know more or react? Visit stateoftech.eu or email us at info@doorzetters.net.

Bob: State of Tech, the tech world in 15 minutes.