The next time an album comes out, you may need to change your mobile carrier to get a listen. Today, Sprint and Tidal announced that the fourth largest mobile carrier in the world has purchased a 33-percent stake in the on-demand music subscription streaming service.
As part of the deal, Tidal and its artists will make exclusive content for Sprint customers. There are currently no details about what that exclusive content may look like, but it will be available to new and current Sprint customers.
Read More: Tidal’s new Track Edit feature is fun, but with a few limitations
Sprint reportedly paid $200 million for the 33-percent stake in Tidal, which is a hefty profit for owner Jay Z who bought the company in 2015 for approximately $56 million. Sprint’s involvement in Tidal’s day-to-day operations may purely relate to marketing. While Sprint’s chief executive officer, Marcelo Claure, will join Tidal’s Board of Directors, Jay Z and the artist-owners will continue to run the platform. Sprint will be involved in a marketing fund for artists.
The two companies will announce more information on the partnership at a later date, but the announcement does hint at the deal’s particulars. The press release states the partnership will “make Tidal available to its 45 million post and prepaid customers.” This suggests Jay Z’s streaming service may be pre-installed on Sprint phones.
Mobile carriers have been riding the music streaming wave recently. Spanish-based mobile carrier Telefonica purchased a stake in Rhapsody in 2013 (which has since been rebranded globally as Napster) to provide its streaming service to subscribers. T-Mobile does not count streams against data usage from any of the major on-demand subscription music streaming services as part of its Binge On program.
Tidal has built its brand on exclusives, offering albums and live concert streams from Beyonce, Kanye West, Rihanna, and dozens of other artists last year. If the deal proceeds as planned, Sprint customers could soon be enjoying exclusive tracks from some of the most popular artists on the planet.
Merely days after the iPhone Duo hit the shelves, images of broken screens on the phone started popping up across social media. Until now, it’s been unclear what’s causing the line of defective pixels that appears vertically along the crease, as well as horizontally, on the phone’s inner display.
Apple has finally acknowledged the issue, which has shown up on iPhone Duo units owned by customers as well as demo units in stores. In a statement shared with Bloomberg, Apple says that not all iPhone Duo units are affected and that those that are tend to show the display fault early on. The company added that users who experience problems with their iPhone Duo display should contact AppleCare for a replacement.
Not long ago, Apple treated independent repair like an act of outright hostility. The Cupertino giant locked down parts with serial-number pairing, while repair tools remained firmly out of reach of anyone outside its authorized repair network. More importantly, the company waged a legal and lobbying battle against right-to-repair legislation.
I've covered enough of these fights over the years to know what a shift looks like. That's why what happened in October 2026 genuinely caught me off guard. The day the iPhone Duo went on sale, what may be the most mechanically complex iPhone to date, Apple pulled off a surprising about-face. It published teardown-style repair manuals for a handful of major components.
Apple's first foldable phone is now on shelves, in short supply, but with an unreal amount of buzz around it. After all, it's the first foldable iPhone, and there's plenty that this phone gets right. But there's also a lot that is either broken or underwhelming. What's peculiar is the dialogue around this phone, and how it has completely overshadowed every other attempt at making a phone with a similar form factor.
I've spent some time with the iPhone Duo, and I've used the Galaxy Z Fold 8 for almost three months now. In my opinion, Samsung deserves more credit. When the Galaxy Z Fold 8 arrived earlier this year, it was celebrated in some circles and ridiculed in others for supposedly copying what Apple would eventually deliver with the iPhone Duo. The dialogue was pretty odd, for multiple reasons. Samsung has been making foldable phones for years, so claiming that it copied a product Apple hadn't even launched was simply absurd.