Apple's Foldable iPhone Ignites Biggest Keynote Buzz in Five Years

People love to hate on Apple (AAPL) following a keynote.

This one drew more attention than any Apple event in five years.

We measured consumer reaction after Apple showed its first folding iPhone: what they searched, what they said on Reddit and X, and most importantly, whether or not they plan to purchase.

We ran every measure on last year's keynote too, so you can see what changed.

Inside:

• How this keynote stacks up against Apple's last four

• Which phones buyers are talking about ordering, and at what price

• What happened to Apple Watch after it copied a subscription rival

• Price complaints rocketed; What that means for buyers

• What Apple's stock did after each of its last three keynotes

• What we watch from here

Preorders open Saturday morning. Read it before then.

Download Apple Keynote: LikeFolio Special Report here

LikeFolio Weekly Roundup: Tesla’s Next Test Is Here

Plus: Amazon’s huge chip deal and Google’s race for more AI compute…

Some of our biggest tech holdings are being pushed into their next phase right now.

Tesla’s (TSLA) Cybercab is facing its first regulatory test after last week’s public launch. Amazon (AMZN) just struck a major new chip deal for AWS. And Google (GOOGL) revealed just how big its homegrown AI chip business has become, right before a massive new source of computing power comes online next month.

Behind each headline is a bigger question about where demand goes from here – and our consumer data can help us answer it.

Here’s what we’re watching.

Tesla’s (TSLA) Next Test Is Already Here

Tesla got Cybercab onto public roads last week. Now it has to prove it can put a lot more of them there.

Just hours after the Austin launch, federal regulators opened an investigation into how Tesla certified a vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals for public roads.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is reviewing whether Cybercab complies with federal safety standards. It’s an early hurdle for a vehicle Tesla hopes to roll out at much larger scale.

We’re watching the investigation, but Cybercab is a much bigger story than one regulatory review.

Tesla now has to show it can take a purpose-built autonomous vehicle from a small Austin rollout to something that works at real scale.

Consumers were interested before the first public ride even happened.

As we showed you last week, Google searches for Cybercab hit an all-time high in August after climbing sharply since January. Tesla’s own website traffic is up 21% since January, too.

Now we get to watch what happens after the launch – whether that early interest keeps building as more Cybercabs hit the road.

Over the past few weeks, Tesla has been rolling out its 2026 Summer Release, a software update that adds new features to cars owners already have. One of the biggest upgrades is Grok, the AI assistant from Elon Musk’s xAI, which Tesla has built into its vehicles.

Grok can now do more than answer questions. Drivers can ask it to adjust the climate, play music, make calls, or control other parts of the car. One Model Y owner recently gave it five commands at once – and Grok handled all five.

Tesla has spent years making its cars better through software updates. Now it’s putting AI deeper into the driving experience while Cybercab pushes toward a future where the car drives itself.

We saw consumer interest building before Cybercab ever carried its first public passenger. Now our data gives us a front-row seat to what matters next: whether that interest turns into lasting demand as Tesla puts more of these cars on the road.

Amazon (AMZN) AWS Adds More Muscle for the AI Race

This week, Amazon and Qualcomm (QCOM) announced a multiyear deal to develop custom chips for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud-computing business.

The focus is AI inference, the computing work that happens when you actually use an AI model: asking a chatbot a question or sending an AI agent off to complete a task.

As part of the agreement, Qualcomm gave Amazon warrants to buy up to 25 million shares for roughly $4 billion. Some of those warrants are tied to Amazon buying as much as $60 billion worth of Qualcomm server chips and other technology.

AWS already develops its own AI chips, including Trainium. Adding Qualcomm gives Amazon another source of custom silicon as AI demand keeps eating up available computing capacity.

Amazon keeps putting itself wherever demand is growing fastest, and this Qualcomm deal gives AWS more capacity to chase one of the biggest opportunities on the board.

Google’s (GOOGL) 2x Lead in AI Accelerators

Google built its own AI chips. Demand is growing so fast it still needs somebody else’s.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian revealed that Alphabet’s business selling its custom AI chips – called Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs – is already more than twice the size of the next-largest hyperscaler’s accelerator business.

TPUs are Google-designed chips built specifically to handle AI workloads. And they’re becoming a serious business of their own.

Google Cloud revenue jumped 82% year over year to $24.77 billion last quarter, driven by AI workloads. Its cloud backlog reached $514 billion, representing business customers that have committed to spending money with Google that hasn’t become revenue yet.

And starting next month, Google is bringing in a massive amount of outside computing power to help keep up.

Google agreed to pay SpaceX (SPCX) $920 million per month from October through June 2029 for access to roughly 110,000 Nvidia (NVDA) GPUs and other computing equipment. Google said it needs the extra capacity because demand for its Gemini Enterprise AI platform came in higher than expected.

Google already spends heavily building its own AI infrastructure. It designs its own chips. And it still needs more computing power.

For us, the spending only gets interesting if people actually use what all those billions are building. That’s why we keep coming back to our consumer data. It lets us track the adoption behind the AI boom instead of relying on corporate spending plans alone.

Google is scrambling to add capacity because customers are showing up faster than expected. We’ll keep watching the demand behind that buildout – because ultimately, that’s what has to justify all this spending.

But with a blistering Main Street Score of 86 out of 100, the data says Google has plenty of reason to keep spending.