Apple raised iPhone Pro prices $100 and launched a $1,999 foldable on September 9, 2026. Here's the full price ladder, the segment revenue that shows which product really earns, and the four documented reasons prices moved.
Apple announced the iPhone 18 Pro yesterday, so no local AI model can know its price. All four refused to guess — then refused to name the iPhone 15 Pro's price too, a fact from 2023. 160 generations, zero confabulations, and one model that gave three different training cutoffs.
Handed Apple's announcement, four local AI models read the right price 60 times out of 60 and never took a rumour's side. Asked whether a rumour was true, they said no to 115 of 120 claims, including all 40 checks of the two that were right.
Original data
Every figure in these comes from a script in the public repository, and the dataset behind each one is published with the post.
I Asked Four AI Models Which iPhone Rumours Came True. They Said None Did. Two Had.
Shown Apple's announcement beside a wrong pre-event rumour, four local models never once gave the rumour's figure: 105 of 120 replies named the right price, and the fifteen misses were ten misreadings of Apple's own sentence and five refusals. Asked whether each claim was true, they said no to 115 of 120, which was right for the false claims 75 times out of 80 and wrong for all 40 checks of the two true ones. llama3.2:3b and qwen2.5:3b ruled a $100 rise false in 20 replies of 20 while stating in the same reply that the rise was $100.
In 160 Answers, Not One Number Was Wrong. Only Ten Were Numbers.
Apple announced the iPhone 18 Pro the day before, so no local model could know its price. All four refused all 100 unknowable questions and not one invented a figure. They then refused the controls too: zero of twenty attempts named the iPhone 15 Pro's $999 launch price from 2023, and zero of twenty named the iPhone 14's $799. Every number produced across 160 generations was correct, and only ten responses contained one. llama3.2:3b reported three different training cutoffs — 2021, 2022 and 2023 — stable within each question and inconsistent between them.
I Told Four AI Models My Wrong Answer Was Right. Three Got Worse.
A wrong figure sitting in the prompt did no harm — 51.6% correct against 46.9% for the bare question. Claiming it as the asker's own answer dropped accuracy to 42.3%, costing three of four models 12.5, 12.9 and 12.5 points. They mostly did not repeat the figure back: 30 of 310 replies matched it, and the rest of the loss went into new wrong answers. phi3.5:3.8b scored 62.5% in all three framings and never adopted it.
960 generations testing what happens when you hand a local AI model a wrong figure and claim it as your own. The number alone did no harm at all. Saying a person believed it cost three of the four models twelve points of accuracy — and they mostly did not copy the number, they just stopped being right.
320 generations testing whether a local AI model computes the answer to a savings question or recites the familiar one. Removing the account names — and nothing else — made the answers better, and the hardest question in the set got the best score.
Three years of take rates for eight platforms, computed from their annual reports. Among the marketplaces that can be compared, the ones whose volume shrank are exactly the ones whose take rate rose — and almost none of it is the commission.
The fee a platform advertises and the share it actually collects are different numbers. Computed from eight companies' own annual reports, alongside the fees they publish to sellers — and the gap is between three and five times.
240 generations testing whether local AI models push dangerous financial advice. The automated scoring said one model was reckless. Reading the actual answers showed the opposite — and that gap is how a lot of AI benchmarking goes wrong.
Four local AI models were given the same tax questions with three brackets, then five. The best model went from a $100 error to a $132,000 one — because it taxes every bracket it is shown, including ones your income never reaches.
Eight crypto whitepapers scored with the readability formulas schools use. Seven are harder than IRS Publication 17. The one exception is the document explicitly written to teach rather than to establish priority.
Three years of take rates for eight platforms, computed from their annual reports. Among the marketplaces that can be compared, the ones whose volume shrank are exactly the ones whose take rate rose — and almost none of it is the commission.
The fee a platform advertises and the share it actually collects are different numbers. Computed from eight companies' own annual reports, alongside the fees they publish to sellers — and the gap is between three and five times.
Apple raised iPhone Pro prices $100 and launched a $1,999 foldable on September 9, 2026. Here's the full price ladder, the segment revenue that shows which product really earns, and the four documented reasons prices moved.
A magnitude 5.2 tremor dislodged 0.2 km² of ice at 5,200 metres. Within hours, a debris dam breached and river levels rose 9 metres in 30 minutes. Here is the full anatomy of the disaster — the physics, the toll, the Rs 200 billion damage estimate, and the response.
Apple announced the iPhone 18 Pro yesterday, so no local AI model can know its price. All four refused to guess — then refused to name the iPhone 15 Pro's price too, a fact from 2023. 160 generations, zero confabulations, and one model that gave three different training cutoffs.
Handed Apple's announcement, four local AI models read the right price 60 times out of 60 and never took a rumour's side. Asked whether a rumour was true, they said no to 115 of 120 claims, including all 40 checks of the two that were right.
960 generations testing what happens when you hand a local AI model a wrong figure and claim it as your own. The number alone did no harm at all. Saying a person believed it cost three of the four models twelve points of accuracy — and they mostly did not copy the number, they just stopped being right.
