Daily Brew // Morning Brew // Update

June 26, 2026

Happy Friday. The final season of The Bear reportedly takes place over one night’s dinner service, like how each episode of The Pitt is one hour in a single ER shift.

That got us thinking about what a season of The Brew would be like:

Episode 1 (8am–9am): Adam and Abby get to the office for an hour of peace before the writers arrive.
Episode 2 (9am–10am): Matty sends a link to her friend’s short film, tries to play it off like it’s something she found on the internet.
Episode 3 (10am–11am): Sam fills up his coffee. Takes gentle sips.
Episode 4 (11am–12pm): The team has a meeting in a conference room that’s too cold.
Episode 5 (12pm–1pm): Molly is asked to hold a big stick for a social video, unclear what for.
Episode 6 (1pm–2pm): Someone drops a hot take about a movie. Several people are typing...
Episode 7 (2pm–3pm): Brendan and Matty (WFH) are hard at work, we assume.
Episode 8 (3pm–4pm): Flood of “sorry, story is gonna be late today” messages pour into editors’ Slacks.
Episode 9 (4pm–5pm): Dave scrambles to catch up after spending an hour talking about a $6 parlay he won.
Episode 10 (5pm–6pm): Season finale. The team subways home. Night shift (Holly) logs on.

—Sam Klebanov, Molly Liebergall, Matty Merritt, Dave Lozo, Adam Epstein, Holly Van Leuven

In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into Apple’s price hikes, SCOTUS shielding Bayer from cancer lawsuits, and the NCAA’s new eligibility model.

MARKETS

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*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 4:00pm ET. Here's what these numbers mean.

Markets: Like your voice even after $1,200 a week for singing lessons, stocks were flat, so flat yesterday as the Nasdaq dipped for the fourth day in a row. But Micron gave the tech sector some hope, soaring after the semiconductor company crushed Wall Street’s earnings estimates.

IFLATION

Apple hikes prices as AI fuels inflation

Nick Iluzada

Today’s hottest gadget is a time machine that will take you to an Apple Store before the company raised prices on its laptops and tablets yesterday.

Conceding that it’s “not welcome news,” Apple announced it has to charge shoppers more as the cost of memory and storage chips skyrockets amid Silicon Valley’s AI data center boom. In a statement, an Apple spokesperson said that the company has “never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.”

Apple’s stock dipped more than 6% yesterday as investors learned that you’ll now hate yourself even more when you spill coffee on your MacBook:

Apple’s budget laptop, the MacBook Neo, is now $699, up from $599 (for 256 GB).
A MacBook Air (512 GB) is now $1,299, up from $1,099.
An iPad Air (128 GB) is now $749, up from $599.

While iPhones are spared for now, analysts expect Apple to charge as much as $200 more for iPhone 18 models coming out this fall.

When ‘AI’ stands for ‘accelerating inflation’

Some factories that make components for consumer devices are now busy producing the computer chips that power AI data centers, giving them greater pricing power. For instance, Micron, a major supplier of Apple’s memory chips, celebrated blockbuster quarterly earnings this week.

The cost of memory chips has spiked “more than fourfold” since Q4 of last year, one expert told TechCrunch. The MacBook maker isn’t alone in passing these costs onto consumers: Computers and other electronics prices rose around 6% from December to May, per government data.

The other Cook is watching. Fed Gov. Lisa Cook recently noted that AI companies plan to keep spending on data centers, meaning prices for electronics and other products could continue to spike. This could strengthen the case for the central bank to keep interest rates elevated—or raise them higher.

Meanwhile…Fed Chair Kevin Warsh is hopeful that the AI boom will boost productivity, leading to tamer prices—though many economists caution that this could take years.—SK

READER POLL

Will Apple’s price hikes keep you from buying a new device?

No, if you need it, you need it.
Yes, I’ll tough it out with my old tech for a while longer.
I wanted an Apple product, but I’ll buy a cheaper alternative.
No, I wouldn’t buy an Apple product anyway.

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WORLD

Tour de headlines

Cheng Xin/Getty Images

The race to succeed Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan took a turn. It may not be as juicy as Tom stealing the Waystar CEO gig from Kendall, but JPMorgan Chase’s succession drama ramped up yesterday, when the banking giant promoted Doug Petno and Troy Rohrbaugh to co-presidents, seemingly pitting them against each other to succeed 70-year-old Jamie Dimon as head of the US’ biggest bank. Simultaneously, Marianne Lake, a longtime deputy to Dimon who had been seen as the favorite to replace him, announced she was retiring. Dimon, whose 20-year reign atop JPMorgan included guiding the company through the 2008 financial crisis, plans to stay in the role for three more years, the Wall Street Journal reported.—AE

Death toll from Venezuela earthquakes could surpass 10,000, according to USGS. The United States Geological Survey used predictive models to make its estimate, which is based in part on the fact that people in the affected areas mostly live in “vulnerable building types,” it said on its website. The official death toll rose to 235 late on Thursday, and the number of people injured had reached 4,300, according to Venezuela’s health minister. Countries around the world continued to pledge aid to the afflicted nation. A US military command arrived in Caracas late yesterday to assist, and Pope Leo sent “an initial €100,000 emergency donation” to Venezuela, according to Vatican News.—HVL

Anthropic accused Alibaba of Claude malfeasance. In a letter sent to US officials, Claude maker Anthropic alleged that the Chinese tech company “brazenly” and “illicitly” accessed the AI model in an attempt to extract its capabilities. Anthropic called it “the largest known distillation attack” to date (distillation refers to training a less-advanced model on a smarter one). Like most US AI companies with consumer chatbots, Anthropic restricts access to Claude in China for national security and regulatory reasons. The news comes as Anthropic tries to patch up its rocky relationship with the federal government.—AE

MOWED DOWN

Bayer wins protection from Roundup cancer claims

Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

The Supreme Court weeded Bayer’s garden yesterday with a 7–2 ruling that the company can’t be sued in state courts over claims that it failed to warn customers that its herbicide Roundup causes cancer.

This is a major victory for Bayer, which has been mired in litigation since it bought Roundup maker Monsanto in 2018. The decision overturns a Missouri jury’s $1.25 million award to a gardener who claimed he got cancer from repeated Roundup exposure and shields Bayer from tens of thousands of similar lawsuits. It also likely clears the way for a proposed $7.25 billion class-action settlement that would largely put Bayer’s Roundup crisis to bed.

Here’s why the court did what it did:

Though the World Health Organization considers Roundup’s key ingredient, glyphosate, “probably carcinogenic,” the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) deems this “unlikely” and doesn’t require cancer warnings on Roundup.
Because federal law bars states from imposing pesticide label requirements that differ from the EPA’s, Bayer is protected against state-level failure-to-warn claims, the court’s majority opinion, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, said. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

Trouble in MAHA-dise: The decision is a win for the pesticide industry—and for the Trump administration, which urged the court to side with Bayer. But RFK Jr.’s followers are staunchly opposed to glyphosate and aren’t happy with the Trump-supported decision.—ML

Friday trivia

Name three animals whose names move through the alphabet at a constant rate. In other words, the letters are in alphabetical order and are evenly spaced out throughout the alphabet.

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ANSWER

Emu, fox, gnu

(Source)

Word of the Day

Today’s Word of the Day is: malfeasance, meaning “wrongdoing or misconduct.” Thanks to Regina from Philadelphia and several others for the suggestion. Submit another Word of the Day here.

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