After a weekend and a Monday night of highly compensated quarterbacks airing it out, today is Tim Cook’s turn.

The Apple leader is expected to introduce the first significant iPhone design in years, the iPhone 17 Air. The slimmed-down version of its flagship smartphone is likely to be the highest-profile debut at the company’s annual September product launch presentation, billed this year as an “awe dropping” event.

Air It Out

It’s been a good run of late for the iPhone: Sales of Apple’s top moneymaker surged to $44.5 billion in the quarter ending in June, besting analysts’ $40 billion expectations and rising 14% year-over-year. That represented nearly half of the company’s $94 billion in revenue, not to mention that the iPhone drives sales of compatible devices like Apple Watches and AirPods.

The positive news followed research by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, which showed iPhone users have slowed upgrades of their phones since 2014, meaning there is no guarantee of a record stampede after new launches. In fact, it was fear prompted by President Donald Trump’s tariffs that led to a surge in upgrades earlier this year, a unique phenomenon that’s unlikely to recur. But, in keeping with another phenomenon of the age, Ozempic, the Air model will see the iPhone slim down. Whether that’s as well received as the GLP-1 craze is a different matter:

• The iPhone 17 Air is expected to have a thinner and lighter frame, taking after the Air models of Apple laptops and tablets, though it will keep the 6.6-inch screen. The size convenience, however, will necessitate sacrifice, namely a single rear camera (compared with as many as three lenses on other iPhone 17 models or rival smartphones) and a diminished battery life.
• The main iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, meanwhile, will introduce redesigns for the first time since 2020 and come with upgrades to their processor, battery and camera lenses. That could leave the Air in a consumer limbo, depending on how Apple prices the new line, if the difference between a thinner phone and one with significantly better hardware is only a few hundred bucks.

Priced In: Short of Cook introducing a revolutionary new consumer-ready flying hoverboard today (upgrades to the Apple Watch, AirPods and other accessories are expected), Apple shares are viewed as having little room to grow. The company has added $430 billion in market value since late July, and is facing questions about its slow-going artificial intelligence strategy, which has raised concerns in some quarters and sparked cautious optimism in others.

Google’s ad tech monopoly is still in the crosshairs of antitrust regulators, with remedy orders from a US judge expected later this month. But competitor Pubmatic grew weary of waiting.

On Monday, the online ad firm filed a lawsuit against the search titan, seeking billions of dollars in damages it says have been caused by Google’s illegal monopoly.

Ad It All Up

After successfully arguing that Google held an illegal monopoly in the search industry, antitrust regulators at the US Department of Justice pushed for radical solutions such as a forced divestiture of its Chrome browser. Instead, a federal judge last week ordered comparatively light-touch remedies, including a ban on “exclusive” search engine deals with third parties and forcing the company to make available one-time snapshots of its treasure trove of search data. The remedy orders for Google’s search monopoly were essentially an admission that the DOJ’s recommendations were roundabout solutions, and that shifting market dynamics — in this case, primarily the rise of AI chatbots — could crack Google’s search monopoly better than regulators ever could (light touch or not, Google has vowed to appeal the remedy orders).

Breaking up Google’s ad tech business, however, appears more clear-cut:

• Google’s ad tech unit consists of three pieces: One platform that allows advertisers to buy ad space, an ad server side that allows publishers to sell ad space, and software that connects ad buyers with sellers, the ad exchange known as AdX.
• The company was found to be illegally maintaining a monopoly in the latter two spaces in April; in one smoking gun email found amid the lawsuit, a Google executive compared the company’s ad tech market power to “Goldman or Citigroup owning the New York Stock Exchange.” Since the monopoly ruling, the DOJ has pushed for Google to divest AdX and make its tools able to interact with rivals ahead of remedy orders later this month.

Enter Pubmatic. The company says it is routinely victimized by the current monopoly. “Google’s systematic abuse of its vast resources and immense power has harmed our business and distorted a marketplace that should have rewarded innovation and fueled transparency and competition,” CEO Rajeev Goel said in a statement Monday. “Instead, anticompetitive practices limited monetization for publishers, raised costs for advertisers and ultimately reduced choice for consumers.” Pubmatic is preceded by OpenX Technologies, another ad exchange that filed a similar lawsuit last week.

Die Hard: As it did with search, Google seems to be making the appeal that the rise of AI is already cracking its ad tech business. In a court filing from last week, Google posited that “the open web is already in rapid decline,” and that breaking up its ad business could only fuel the decline more. Web publishers and businesses have been hammered by slowing web traffic and subsequent falloffs in display ad revenue. Still, the “rapid decline” may be news to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who argued the opposite was happening during an interview with The Verge published in May.

When equities went tumbling in the spring due to a maelstrom of trade policy announcements, plans for IPOs were shelved faster than canned goods at a superstore.

It was uncertain then when those IPO plans would re-materialize, but this week offers an answer: Ticket reseller StubHub, one of the firms that temporarily canned its listing plans in April, said Monday that it will target a valuation of up to $9.2 billion in its IPO. Meanwhile, a slew of other companies are preparing for debuts this week, including much-ballyhooed fintech Klarna.

Off the Shelf

Equities have climbed out of their spring slump, and the S&P 500, as of Monday, is up 10% on the year, with upbeat tech earnings to thank. The resurgence, replete with all-time high valuations, has left many analysts hoping this fall will mark a long-awaited awakening of the IPO market, which has been quiet since hitting a record in 2021 (before interest rates and inflation went up, and the SPAC bubble lost its altitude).

In recent months, there have been signs of nascent activity, much of it from crypto and tech IPOs. And that’s what makes the investor appetite for StubHub and Klarna especially compelling at a time when consumer sentiment is slumping. StubHub, which lets users resell tickets for concerts, sports games and other live events, plans to raise up to $851 billion at a $9.2 billion valuation by offering 34 million shares for $22 to $25. Klarna, arguably the best-known buy now, pay later firm, is aiming to raise roughly $1.3 billion at a $14 billion valuation through a sale of 34 million shares priced at $35 to $37. In any case, the performance of newly listed stocks this year suggests one should think before buying, whether now or later:

• While many IPOs have rocketed out of the gate this year, they’ve also moderated with time. Stablecoin firm Circle closed at $112 on Monday, more than 60% below its $298 high. Crypto exchange Bullish, which jumped 83% on its debut last month, is now trading at $50, down about 57% from its $118 peak. And Cloud-based interface design company Figma, which closed at $52, is down 63% from its $142 high.
• Klarna shares could trade on the New York Stock Exchange as soon as Wednesday, while other stocks slated to debut this week include crypto exchange Gemini Space Station, engineering firm Legence, blockchain fintech Figure and cafe chain Black Rock Coffee.

The Waiting Game: The standard lockup period for IPOs, during which company insiders can’t sell shares, is 180 days. After this time, by which point newly listed firms will have also made their first public financial report, shares often fall. In StubHub’s case, it’s worth noting the company said it lost $76 million in the first half of 2025 on $873 million in revenue, more than the $24 million it lost in the same period last year. Klarna disclosed a second-quarter loss of $53 million, up from $18 million in the same period a year earlier.