Okay. Should I fold my legs? Yeah.
Last year, we predicted what would happen in 2025, and we got a lot of those things right. More interest in nuclear energy. Bringing nuclear power back. AI fitness. Got to be smart with your prompt. Scrapped their plans to build cheaper EVs. But there were things that even we didn't see coming. Everything's computer. Tesla car set on fire. Lyn sleek. His iPhone. So, we're going to try again for 2026. We asked our reporters what their predictions are for the next year. Let's talk about the future.
Yeah. So cursed. So unbelievably cursed.
2026 is going to be the year of the Apple folding phone. I'm going on the record now and calling it the iPhone. This a free idea, Apple. The rumors have been kind of back and forth of like, is it coming later? Is it going to come in 2026? I think it's going to be the year they're going to make it happen. The existence of the iPhone Air kind of alludes to it, I think, because what is an iPhone Air if not half of a folding phone? Samsung did the same thing with the ZFold 7 was preceded by the S25 Edge, which is super thin and light. So, there's a precedent for that. I think it's going to be a luxury item. I would put it up in the $2,000 price range if I was going to hazard a guess. But I do think it'll be the kind of thing that Apple's like going to put out as the coolest, best, like the most luxurious gadget you can buy and not plan to sell a ton of them. What I do think they will sell a ton of if they do it after the ifold is the iFlip, which I will just go ahead and say could be 2027 foldables all the way down.
So my prediction for 2026 is that an EV-only company will get acquired or will go out of business. With the $7,500 federal EV tax credit now eliminated and with Donald Trump's trade wars, experts are predicting that, you know, tariffs are going to add upwards of $6,000 to sticker prices. And EVs with their expensive batteries and extremely complex supply chains are certainly not immune from any of this chaos. What are these companies going to do? I think we're already starting to see some of them like Rivian and Lucid attach themselves to better finance partners. But then there are companies like Slate and Scout that haven't even started production yet. You know, we've already seen EV-only companies go out of business like Fisker and Canoo, and that was in a favorable regulatory environment. That environment has turned on a dime. It's now a very hostile environment. So I think it's very likely that we'll see one of these companies unfortunately either get acquired or possibly go out of business.
So more of this. This is my prediction for 2026 is that we are just going to see even more AI hardware, specifically AI wearable. Meta is just going to continue with the AI glasses. You can bet that since Google and Fitbit launched the Fitbit AI coach. Been a hot second since we've seen any new Fitbit specific hardware. Wouldn't be surprised if we saw that. Apple's rumored to be working on smart glasses. Samsung and Google are confirmed to be working on a pair of Android XR glasses. We recently saw a smart ring that you whisper into and it has AI. I really think you're going to start seeing companies just really pushing the whole AI companion as a wearable thing. They want you to have AI with you at all times, learning about you at all times. And the best way for those AI companies to do that is through wearable devices because you can always put your phone down. It's much harder to take a ring off. That's my cursed prediction for 2026. It's cursed all the way down.
I've seen a lot of laptops this year and reviewed a whole bunch and chips have gotten really good like across the board from Intel, from AMD, and even the stuff that Qualcomm put out with the Snapdragon XLE. They're all solid options, but I think that 2026 might end up being the most competitive year of laptop chips we may ever see. Intel has already pre-announced Panther Lake. AMD still has Strix Halo going, but you know, and I'm interested to see what that gets put into. We expect more AMD chips, maybe around CES. Qualcomm has pre-announced Snapdragon X2, and there's been rumors for a little while that Nvidia might get in the game with an ARM-based chip. That factor could really disrupt things and make it, you know, even more competitive than we've seen before. Now, mostly it's Intel and AMD, and Qualcomm has very little market share, but Nvidia could come in with an ARM-based chip that could also be good on battery life and maybe have graphics that we wouldn't expect from integrated. Strix Halo already proved integrated graphics can be great. It also proved they can be power hungry. It'll be interesting to see what new performance gains we can get while also maintaining good battery life and hopefully not getting too expensive.
In 2026, I predict we'll have more and better home robots, but maybe not a Rosie just yet. This will be a device with intelligence, personality, and perhaps a few physical skills. Think Samsung's Boly or Amazon's Astro, maybe with an arm, more than Tesla's Optimus or 1X's Neo. But my money is on Apple to surprise everyone here. I think it will bring its smarter Siri to life. We've already seen this year that it's been testing a home companion on a counter with a Pixar-inspired personality. Not a humanoid, but probably a charming companion that lives on your counter.
I think we're going to see OpenAI readying itself to IPO either in late 2026 or the first half of 2027. And with that, we're going to see it have to reckon with a lot of tough questions about how it's going to deliver a profit. You know, it already committed to about $1.4 trillion in infrastructure. So, investors are asking questions about that. Analysts are asking questions about how it's going to deliver a profit, whether that's, you know, starting to introduce ads and certain features within ChatGPT or drive up subscription costs or use this hardware device they're creating with Johnny IV to influence a lot of spend. We don't know exactly what that's going to look like. That's what Sam Altman has said he's excited about is the hardware, but yeah, we're going to see them have to answer a ton of questions about how they're going to make money in the next year, especially as all eyes are on them ahead of the IPO.
2026, I think, is going to be pretty dirty. One of the big factors at play is generative AI. It is raising electricity demand, which had previously flatlined for years. As a result, utilities and energy companies are proposing building out more fossil fuel infrastructure, gas-fired power plants and pipelines in the name of meeting growing demand for AI. We've also seen, for example, XAI build out gas turbines to its own data center to power itself. We're also seeing the Trump administration rolling back environmental protections. We've actually over decades have made pretty good progress on cleaning up air pollution and taking steps to address climate change. And suddenly we're seeing an about-face in that. And you know this isn't just a US story. This is something that has global consequence because you know pollution doesn't stay in one place. It crosses borders and the US is the second biggest polluter when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. And so what happens here will have impacts for people around the world.
Okay, here's my prediction. I think we're going to stop using the word podcast or at least it will start to feel outdated. At the end of last year, I wrote about how podcasts started to experiment with video, taking hosts you've only heard voices of and putting them into a well-lit studio, competing on a whole new playing field, aka YouTube and TikTok. I think next year will be really hard to define what is a podcast and what is just like a video show. Just like how no one really uses the phrase web series anymore, I think the word podcast will sound like a vintage internet term. This year, we've heard media executives and producers start to drop the word entirely, calling them just shows and linking up with Hollywood to have major stars hosting them. Netflix is going to add podcasts to their streaming platform, developing their own shows and working with major networks like Spotify, iHeartMedia, and Sirius. With TV shows like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert ending and the recent suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live, talk show style podcasts on YouTube are now considered to be the next generation of late night TV. I can imagine a podcast going into Colbert's time slot at 11:30 on CBS. All this also means is that a lot of the openness of podcast might go away unfortunately and become more centralized on platforms like YouTube and Netflix. I'm thinking next year you won't be recommending your friend your new favorite podcast, but something you watched on your TV. All right, those are our predictions. Let us know what you think. I want to know some of your predictions. Put them in the comments.
