Transformer by Mint | iPhone day frenzy: Why people still queue up outside Apple stores

In the evening, when I visited Apple’s store in Delhi’s Select Citywalk mall in Saket, there were easily 200 customers in attendance—including those who managed to get in after standing in the queue for over 90 minutes.

One gentleman, who requested anonymity, said the wait was totally worth it. “I’ve used every device that Apple has launched for close to a decade now. My son turned 17 this year and is on his way to college. I’m here to buy him an iPhone 17, and I thought that it’s totally worth the wait to give him the full-blown Apple experience."

A second buyer, expecting her first childbirth in the next two months, was equally thrilled. “I got my first iPhone when my husband gifted me one on the day we got married, almost four years ago. Since then, I’ve been a fan. This is my third upgrade in four years. We drove for over two hours to reach, and close to another hour just to enter—but I’m so happy! I’ve called four of my friends and told them about this already," she said, after having decided that the black iPhone Air is her new device.

Interestingly, it wasn’t just buyers catering to themselves. I met at least two people who travelled nearly 150 kilometres from Uttar Pradesh's Muzaffarnagar to the Select Citywalk store. “There are almost 100 people in our neighbourhoods who want the new iPhones. All of them have told us which ones to buy. Of course we can’t get them all what they want, but we’re hoping to buy at least five each—including for ourselves," one of the two people said.

Why not buy online? “We’re seeing delivery times of a month for some of the new phones, and even some who preordered their phones are being told that it’ll take a few days for them to get their devices. (We) thought we might as well give the physical store a shot," he added.

Since the start of this calendar year, I have reported for Mint that consumer demand for smartphones is lukewarm at best. The first quarter of this year was particularly bad for sellers. Funnily enough, Apple—which sells at over 3X the average market pricing—is seeing quite the opposite in India.

Analysts and retailers I spoke with last Friday all expect Apple to outsell its India expectations for this year, paving the way for an all-time record quarter of iPhone sales this festive season.

Walking out of Apple’s Delhi store last week, it was clear to me that buyers weren’t just purchasing devices—they were buying into its aspirational aura.

A story of two major cyberattacks

Reports of airports across Europe struggling with regular operations have been surfacing since Friday. It didn’t take long before the obvious was ascertained—a cyberattack of significant proportions was behind it.

If you didn’t read about it, here’s a gist: There’s a software provider (Collins Aerospace) that helps run myriad check-in and baggage systems at airports worldwide. This includes Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Goa, too. Turns out, one of Collins’ platforms faced a cyberattack of undisclosed origins—and things started going dark.

The airport disruptions come just as Jaguar Land Rover, which generates over $8 billion in quarterly revenue, endures a global manufacturing shutdown lasting more than three weeks. Here, too, a cyberattack has taken out key systems that coordinate operations on smart factory floors and globally managed retail systems.

This Sunday, we began the week with a thorough, 1,400-word explainer on how these hacks are happening, what they could mean, their geopolitical links, and where India stands in relation to these attacks. It, we dare say, is a must-read.

WhatsApp: The gateway to Digital India

This Sunday was clearly a productive day in the Mint newsroom. Veteran journalist Shadma Shaikh produced a 2,000-word Long Story on how a shopkeeper in Bhopal, a mother to a just-born in another town in the hinterlands, and myriad others are using WhatsApp as a gateway to digital services—powered by voice bots and customer-end deployment of AI.

There are collateral effects too: As more businesses tap WhatsApp’s massive user base in India, Meta embeds itself more deeply into the consumer economy. The outcome is comparable to restaurants’ heavy reliance on platforms such as Swiggy and Zomato.

Over $100 million for an Indian AI firm

Last week marked a landmark for a company dedicated to building AI models—and funnily enough, this one’s registered itself as a non-profit. Born out of IIT Bombay, BharatGen wants to build a trillion-parameter large language model indigenously—purely from scratch. Now, it has the equivalent of $112 million backing it.

I sat down with Rishi Bal, executive vice-president of BharatGen, Ganesh Ramakrishnan, chair professor for computer science, and Shireesh Kedare, director, IIT Bombay, for a chat on their business. This is their story—of how they raised $27 million from the Centre’s department of science and technology, used that to build a 2.9-billion-parameter small but foundational model from scratch, started creating a local language repository of 22 Indian languages, and are now here courtesy of the IT ministry’s India AI Mission.

Interestingly, India now has 11 startups and one non-profit looking to build foundational models. For many of them, the work so far has depended on building a custom model on top of one of the myriad open-source foundational models available from the West today. Can you really call that truly indigenous? More importantly, what will being truly indigenous achieve?

All of this and more, in Mint’s chat with BharatGen last week.

In other news: No more call drops, and the rise of Hyderabad

Mint’s resident telecom correspondent Jatin Grover wrote this week about discussions within the government about enforcing regulatory requirements for telecom operators. While this itself sounds unimpressive, here’s why you should care about it: The government is looking to force telcos to comply with the fact that the presence of network connectivity in any area has to mean sustained, usable network coverage—even in remote areas, or along a rail route or highway. Will it go through? Here’s what you should know.

Finally, my colleague Jas Bardia and I wrote about how Hyderabad is seeing an increasing uptick of high-value tech jobs. Google, Amazon, and Apple are all hiring senior resources for their engineering operations—and others are following suit in Hyderabad, too. To be sure, Bengaluru remains in the lead for now, but there’s an increasing push to decentralize tech jobs across the country.

As veterans weigh in, we bid adieu to you with the story of India standing at the precipice of having many tech job hubs, and not just one. Until next week.

Transformer by Mint is a weekly newsletter that brings India’s most important and interesting technology updates under one umbrella. As the world transforms with every day of innovation, Transformer will keep a tab on the impact that technologies will make in each of our lives. Published every week, the newsletter brings some of India’s tech landscape’s most insightful coverages until date.