The Trump administration announced this week the U.S. government would work to build a $11.7 billion stockpile of critical minerals. That’s the headline; the subtext is more intriguing.
The stockpile initiative, branded as Project Vault, is the latest attempt by the administration to secure supplies of critical minerals for U.S. manufacturers and what President Donald Trump says will ensure “American businesses and workers are never harmed by any shortage.”
It follows recent investments from the administration into rare earth producers, including equity stakes in miners USA Rare Earth and MP Materials.
Individually, they can be interpreted as an administration taking steps to calm a part of the market that has been roiled by its own trade wars. Collectively, they’re an admission, however tacit or subconscious, that the future relies on electric technologies, including electric vehicles and wind turbines.
Advertisement
In his announcement, Trump alluded to the world’s dependence on China for a slew of critical minerals. Over the last year-plus, China has wielded its dominance to counter tariff threats from the Trump administration, restricting exports of rare earth metals and lithium battery materials to the United States. Eventually, China relented, but the episode made clear who held the trump card.
The spat also revealed just how integral critical minerals are to modern economies. Trump likened the new stockpile to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve maintained by the Department of Energy, which was set up in the wake of the oil embargo in the early 1970s.
“Just as we have long had a strategic petroleum reserve and a stockpile of critical minerals for national defense, we’re now creating this reserve for American industry, so we don’t have any problems,” Trump said.
Techcrunch event
Advertisement
Boston, MA | June 23, 2026
The oil reserve isn’t going away, but it’s not as important as it once was, diminished by productive U.S. oil wells and the increasing share of the energy market taken by solar, wind, and batteries. (Solar and wind continue to dominate new electric generating capacity, while more than 25% of new cars sold worldwide were EVs or plug-in hybrids.)
Advertisement
It’s not clear exactly which minerals will go into the reserve; Bloomberg reported that gallium and cobalt will be included. It’s possible that others like copper and nickel might get thrown in as well, though they weren’t mentioned.
The size of the investment is notable. The U.S. Export-Import Bank is providing a $10 billion loan, with private capital rounding out the rest. That’s about half the value of the oil currently in the Strategic Oil Reserve going toward a market that’s 1% the size of the global oil market, as Bloomberg columnist David Fickling pointed out.
The mismatch is either typical Trump bluster or an acknowledgement that the market for critical minerals is going to expand significantly in the coming years.
It is possible it’s both, with a greater chance it is the latter.
Advertisement
Much of the growth in critical minerals comes from clean energy technologies and EVs; without them, the market won’t be as constrained as experts have predicted. Demand for electronics, including data centers, will play a role, but more than half of global growth in rare earth element demand is expected to come from electric vehicles and wind turbines, according to the IEA. For cobalt and lithium, the figures are even more skewed, with EVs representing the vast majority of growth through 2050.
The Trump administration hasn’t been quiet about its distain for clean energy technologies, preferring to bet on the status quo with fossil fuels. But the rest of the world is continuing to move toward solar, wind, and batteries, driving up demand for critical minerals. The new stockpile shows that markets can be hard to ignore.
Anthropic on Thursday released Claude Opus 4.6, a major upgrade to its flagship artificial intelligence model that the company says plans more carefully, sustains longer autonomous workflows, and outperforms competitors including OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 on key enterprise benchmarks — a release that arrives at a tumultuous moment for the AI industry and global software markets.
The launch comes just three days after OpenAI released its own Codex desktop application in a direct challenge to Anthropic’s Claude Code momentum, and amid a $285 billion rout in software and services stocks that investors attribute partly to fears that Anthropic’s AI tools could disrupt established enterprise software businesses.
For the first time, Anthropic’s Opus-class models will feature a 1 million token context window, allowing the AI to process and reason across vastly more information than previous versions. The company also introduced “agent teams” in Claude Code — a research preview feature that enables multiple AI agents to work simultaneously on different aspects of a coding project, coordinating autonomously.
“We’re focused on building the most capable, reliable, and safe AI systems,” an Anthropic spokesperson told VentureBeat about the announcements. “Opus 4.6 is even better at planning, helping solve the most complex coding tasks. And the new agent teams feature means users can split work across multiple agents — one on the frontend, one on the API, one on the migration — each owning its piece and coordinating directly with the others.”
Advertisement
Why OpenAI and Anthropic are locked in an all-out war for enterprise developers
The release intensifies an already fierce competition between Anthropic and OpenAI, the two most valuable privately held AI companies in the world. OpenAI on Monday released a new desktop application for its Codex artificial intelligence coding system, a tool the company says transforms software development from a collaborative exercise with a single AI assistant into something more akin to managing a team of autonomous workers.
AI coding assistants have exploded in popularity over the last year, and OpenAI said more than 1 million developers have used Codex in the past month. The new Codex app is part of OpenAI’s ongoing effort to lure users and market share away from rivals like Anthropic and Cursor.
The timing of Anthropic’s release — just 72 hours after OpenAI’s Codex launch — underscores the breakneck pace of competition in AI development tools. OpenAI faces intensifying competition from Anthropic, which posted the largest share increase of any frontier lab since May 2025, according to a recent Andreessen Horowitz survey. Forty-four percent of enterprises now use Anthropic in production, driven by rapid capability gains in software development since late 2024. The desktop launch is a strategic counter to Claude Code’s momentum.
Advertisement
According to Anthropic’s announcement, Opus 4.6 achieves the highest score on Terminal-Bench 2.0, an agentic coding evaluation, and leads all other frontier models on Humanity’s Last Exam, a complex multi-discipline reasoning test. On GDPval-AA — a benchmark measuring performance on economically valuable knowledge work tasks in finance, legal and other domains — Opus 4.6 outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 by approximately 144 ELO points, which translates to obtaining a higher score approximately 70% of the time.
Claude Opus 4.6 leads or matches competitors across most benchmark categories, according to Anthropic’s internal testing. The model showed particular strength in agentic tasks, office work and novel problem-solving. (Source: Anthropic)
Inside Claude Code’s $1 billion revenue milestone and growing enterprise footprint
The stakes are substantial. Asked about Claude Code’s financial performance, the Anthropic spokesperson noted that in November, the company announced that Claude Code reached $1 billion in run rate revenue only six months after becoming generally available in May 2025.
The spokesperson highlighted major enterprise deployments: “Claude Code is used by Uber across teams like software engineering, data science, finance, and trust and safety; wall-to-wall deployment across Salesforce’s global engineering org; tens of thousands of devs at Accenture; and companies across industries like Spotify, Rakuten, Snowflake, Novo Nordisk, and Ramp.”
Advertisement
That enterprise traction has translated into skyrocketing valuations. Earlier this month, Anthropic signed a term sheet for a $10 billion funding round at a $350 billion valuation. Bloomberg reported that Anthropic is simultaneously working on a tender offer that would allow employees to sell shares at that valuation, offering liquidity to staffers who have watched the company’s worth multiply since its 2021 founding.
How Opus 4.6 solves the ‘context rot’ problem that has plagued AI models
One of Opus 4.6’s most significant technical improvements addresses what the AI industry calls “context rot“—the degradation of model performance as conversations grow longer. Anthropic says Opus 4.6 scores 76% on MRCR v2, a needle-in-a-haystack benchmark testing a model’s ability to retrieve information hidden in vast amounts of text, compared to just 18.5% for Sonnet 4.5.
“This is a qualitative shift in how much context a model can actually use while maintaining peak performance,” the company said in its announcement.
The model also supports outputs of up to 128,000 tokens — enough to complete substantial coding tasks or documents without breaking them into multiple requests.
Advertisement
For developers, Anthropic is introducing several new API features alongside the model: adaptive thinking, which allows Claude to decide when deeper reasoning would be helpful rather than requiring a binary on-off choice; four effort levels (low, medium, high, max) to control intelligence, speed and cost tradeoffs; and context compaction, a beta feature that automatically summarizes older context to enable longer-running tasks.
Opus 4.6 dramatically outperformed its predecessor on tests measuring how well models retrieve information buried in long documents — a key capability for enterprise coding and research tasks. (Source: Anthropic)
Anthropic’s delicate balancing act: Building powerful AI agents without losing control
Anthropic, which has built its brand around AI safety research, emphasized that Opus 4.6 maintains alignment with its predecessors despite its enhanced capabilities. On the company’s automated behavior audit measuring misaligned behaviors such as deception, sycophancy, and cooperation with misuse, Opus 4.6 “showed a low rate” of problematic responses while also achieving “the lowest rate of over-refusals — where the model fails to answer benign queries — of any recent Claude model.”
When asked how Anthropic thinks about safety guardrails as Claude becomes more agentic, particularly with multiple agents coordinating autonomously, the spokesperson pointed to the company’s published framework: “Agents have tremendous potential for positive impacts in work but it’s important that agents continue to be safe, reliable, and trustworthy. We outlined our framework for developing safe and trustworthy agents last year which shares core principles developers should consider when building agents.”
Advertisement
The company said it has developed six new cybersecurity probes to detect potentially harmful uses of the model’s enhanced capabilities, and is using Opus 4.6 to help find and patch vulnerabilities in open-source software as part of defensive cybersecurity efforts.
Anthropic says its newest model exhibits the lowest rate of problematic behaviors — including deception and sycophancy — of any Claude version tested, even as capabilities have increased. (Source: Anthropic)
Sam Altman vs. Dario Amodei: The Super Bowl ad battle that exposed AI’s deepest divisions
The rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI has spilled into consumer marketing in dramatic fashion. Both companies will feature prominently during Sunday’s Super Bowl. Anthropic is airing commercials that mock OpenAI’s decision to begin testing advertisements in ChatGPT, with the tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded by calling the ads “funny” but “clearly dishonest,” posting on X that his company would “obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them” and that “Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI” while serving “an expensive product to rich people.”
Advertisement
The exchange highlights a fundamental strategic divergence: OpenAI has moved to monetize its massive free user base through advertising, while Anthropic has focused almost exclusively on enterprise sales and premium subscriptions.
The $285 billion stock selloff that revealed Wall Street’s AI anxiety
The launch occurs against a backdrop of historic market volatility in software stocks. A new AI automation tool from Anthropic PBC sparked a $285 billion rout in stocks across the software, financial services and asset management sectors on Tuesday as investors raced to dump shares with even the slightest exposure. A Goldman Sachs basket of US software stocks sank 6%, its biggest one-day decline since April’s tariff-fueled selloff.
The selloff was triggered by a new legal tool from Anthropic, which showed the AI industry’s growing push into industries that can unlock lucrative enterprise revenue needed to fund massive investments in the technology. One trigger for Tuesday’s selloff was Anthropic’s launch of plug-ins for its Claude Cowork agent on Friday, enabling automated tasks across legal, sales, marketing and data analysis.
Thomson Reuters plunged 15.83% Tuesday, its biggest single-day drop on record; and Legalzoom.com sank 19.68%. European legal software providers including RELX, owner of LexisNexis, and Wolters Kluwer experienced their worst single-day performances in decades.
Advertisement
Not everyone agrees the selloff is warranted. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Tuesday that fears AI would replace software and related tools were “illogical” and “time will prove itself.” Mark Murphy, head of U.S. enterprise software research at JPMorgan, said in a Reuters report it “feels like an illogical leap” to say a new plug-in from an LLM would “replace every layer of mission-critical enterprise software.”
What Claude’s new PowerPoint integration means for Microsoft’s AI strategy
Among the more notable product announcements: Anthropic is releasing Claude in PowerPoint in research preview, allowing users to create presentations using the same AI capabilities that power Claude’s document and spreadsheet work. The integration puts Claude directly inside a core Microsoft product — an unusual arrangement given Microsoft’s 27% stake in OpenAI.
The Anthropic spokesperson framed the move pragmatically in an interview with VentureBeat: “Microsoft has an official add-in marketplace for Office products with multiple add-ins available to help people with slide creation and iteration. Any developer can build a plugin for Excel or PowerPoint. We’re participating in that ecosystem to bring Claude into PowerPoint. This is about participating in the ecosystem and giving users the ability to work with the tools that they want, in the programs they want.”
Claude’s new PowerPoint integration, shown here analyzing a market research slide, places Anthropic’s AI directly inside a flagship Microsoft product — despite Microsoft’s major investment in rival OpenAI. (Source: Anthropic)
Advertisement
The data behind enterprise AI adoption: Who’s winning and who’s losing ground
Data from a16z’s recent enterprise AI survey suggests both Anthropic and OpenAI face an increasingly competitive landscape. While OpenAI remains the most widely used AI provider in the enterprise, with approximately 77% of surveyed companies using it in production in January 2026, Anthropic’s adoption is rising rapidly — from near-zero in March 2024 to approximately 40% using it in production by January 2026.
The survey data also shows that 75% of Anthropic’s enterprise customers are using it in production, with 89% either testing or in production — figures that slightly exceed OpenAI’s 46% in production and 73% testing or in production rates among its customer base.
Enterprise spending on AI continues to accelerate. Average enterprise LLM spend reached $7 million in 2025, up 180% from $2.5 million in 2024, with projections suggesting $11.6 million in 2026 — a 65% increase year-over-year.
OpenAI remains the dominant AI provider in enterprise settings, but Anthropic’s share has surged from near zero in early 2024 to roughly 40 percent of companies using it in production by January 2026. (Source: Andreessen Horowitz survey, January 2026)
Advertisement
Pricing, availability, and what developers need to know about Claude Opus 4.6
Opus 4.6 is available immediately on claude.ai, the Claude API, and major cloud platforms. Developers can access it via claude-opus-4-6 through the API. Pricing remains unchanged at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, with premium pricing of $10/$37.50 for prompts exceeding 200,000 tokens using the 1 million token context window.
For users who find Opus 4.6 “overthinking” simpler tasks — a characteristic Anthropic acknowledges can add cost and latency — the company recommends adjusting the effort parameter from its default high setting to medium.
The recommendation captures something essential about where the AI industry now stands. These models have grown so capable that their creators must now teach customers how to make them think less. Whether that represents a breakthrough or a warning sign depends entirely on which side of the disruption you’re standing on — and whether you remembered to sell your software stocks before Tuesday.
The bundle includes Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza, two exclusive Switch 2 titles that showcase the fun ready to be had with the console this President’s Day. I’ve bought and played both games (not for $80), and I can say that they serve as perfect introductions to the Switch ecosystem, especially if you’ve not played many Nintendo games.
While I still own my Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS handheld, ready to be used for a bigger library of games, the Nintendo Switch 2 is the ideal device if you don’t always want to tweak power settings or graphics settings in games. With Nvidia‘s DLSS enabled on the custom T239 processor, games are surprisingly smooth to play, with consistent frame rates, and that’s a big difference compared to the Nintendo Switch.
Advertisement
A price hike might be close
(Image credit: Future / Isaiah Williams)
It’s not a big discount, but the Nintendo Switch 2 is another game console that’s at risk of a potential price increase. Multiple reports suggest the threat is from a combination of tariffs and the ongoing RAM crisis.
Since Valve is also hesitant to announce prices for the Steam Machine’s launch due to the high cost of memory, Nintendo will likely announce a price increase for its Switch 2 soon.
That makes now the best time to make a move if you’ve been considering a Switch 2 – and I can attest to it being worth every cent, especially since its life cycle has only just begun. Expect to see several exclusives launch later down the line, and The Duskbloods is already one that’s caught my eye.
Macropads can be as simple as a few buttons hooked up to a microcontroller to do the USB HID dance and talk to a PC. However, you can go a lot further, too. [CNCDan] demonstrates this well with his sleek macropad build, which throws haptic feedback into the mix.
The build features six programmable macro buttons, which are situated either on side of a 128×64 OLED display. This setup allows the OLED screen to show icons that explain the functionality of each button. There’s also a nice large rotary knob, surrounded by 20 addressable WS2811 LEDs for visual feedback. Underneath the knob lives an an encoder, as well as a brushless motor typically used in gimbal builds, which is driven by a TMC6300 motor driver board. Everything is laced up to a Waveshare RP2040 Plus devboard which runs the show. It’s responsible for controlling the motors, reading the knob and switches, and speaking USB to the PC that it’s plugged into.
It’s a compact device that nonetheless should prove to be a good productivity booster on the bench. We’ve featured [CNCDan’s] work before, too, such as this nifty DIY VR headset.
Anthropic’s most powerful Claude model is leveling up, with the company saying in a blog post Thursday that Claude Opus 4.6 will be even better at coding and creating projects on the first go.
Claude Opus 4.5 is already a powerful coding model, with its release in November setting up Claude Code’s viral vibe-coding moment over the holidays. Claude’s proven coding prowess and new Cowork feature have Wall Street anxious, with many tech stocks falling in recent weeks, over concerns that people won’t need software products in the future.
Anthropic said the new model is more focused on solving the biggest challenges, like the inner workings of complex apps, while also handling the easy steps more quickly. As a reasoning model, Opus 4.6 works by breaking down the steps it needs to take to do what you ask it to and putting together a plan before starting on it. It’ll also go back and check its work on those steps, sometimes making multiple attempts without you asking for it.
Sometimes the model can spend too much effort on a task, which Anthropic said can be resolved by reducing its effort level from the default “high” setting.
The Claude Opus models are available for paying Claude users on the Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans. The cheapest of those, Pro, costs $20 a month (or $17 a month if you pay annually). The Pro plan comes with usage limits for Opus, which users can hit after a few hours of vibe coding and then have to wait several hours for it to reset.
Aside from Opus, Anthropic has smaller, less powerful models in Sonnet 4.5 and Haiku 4.5.
The computer systems of La Sapienza in Rome, one of the largest universities in Europe with around 120,000 students, have been down for three days following an apparent ransomware attack.
In a post and stories on Instagram published Tuesday, the university said that it took down its systems out of precaution following the cyberattack, that it was investigating the incident and working on restoring all digital services, and that some communication channels such as email and workstations are “partially limited.”
The school also said that it was working to restore systems based on backups, which were not affected by the hack.
As of this writing the Sapienza website remains down.
Advertisement
Italian daily news outlet Il Corriere della Sera reported this week that the disruption is due to a ransomware attack, something that the school nor other authorities have confirmed so far. The hackers allegedly sent the university a link to a request for a ransom, which has a countdown of 72 hours, which would start only once the link is clicked.
Contact Us
Do you have more information about this attack, or the Femwar02 ransomware gang? From a non-work device, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram, Keybase and Wire @lorenzofb, or email.
La Sapieza did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment sent via email. It’s unclear if the university is able to accept email at the time we reached out.
Spokespeople for Italy’s national cybersecurity agency, Agenzia per la Cybersicurezza Nazionale (or ACN), which is investigating the incident, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, asking for more information and if the attack was caused by ransomware.
Techcrunch event
Advertisement
Boston, MA | June 23, 2026
In another article on Wednesday, Il Corriere reported that the hacking group behind the attack is called “Femwar02,” which was previously unknown prior to this incident. The gang used the BabLock malware, which was discovered in 2023 and is also known as Rorschach, according to the report.
Advertisement
La Sapienza said that exams are proceeding as normal, but students who want to sign up for exams must do so directly with professors. The school also set up “infopoints” on several locations on campus to provide information to students.
Like other types of organizations, universities and schools are frequent targets of hackers. Last year, the notorious hacking group ShinyHunters hacked Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania and stole data — without using malware to encrypt its systems — in an effort to extort the schools. The hackers revealed this week that the schools did not pay the ransom.
During the recent Cisco AI Summit, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan announced that the company has appointed a new “chief GPU architect.” Tan did not disclose the executive’s name at the event, but subsequent reports confirmed that former Qualcomm executive Eric Demmers will lead the new venture. Read Entire Article Source link
Astell&Kern is doubling down on the high-end with the launch of its most premium portable music player yet. It also comes with a suitably luxurious way to store it.
The company has unveiled the A&ultima SP4000 Copper, a limited-edition flagship digital audio player. It is launching the SP4000 alongside the Collector’s Atelier, a leather valet designed for serious head-fi collectors.
The headline act here is the SP4000 Copper. It’s based on Astell&Kern’s existing SP4000 platform but rebuilt using 99.98% pure copper. This is a material prized for its audio properties and notoriously difficult to work with.
According to Astell&Kern, the player requires a multi-layer stabilisation process and extremely precise machining to ensure long-term durability. All this is in the name of cleaner signal transfer and better shielding.
Advertisement
Image Credit (Astell&Kern)
Advertisement
Under the hood, it keeps the same class-leading internals as the standard SP4000, including a quad-DAC setup and octa-circuit architecture. However, Astell&Kern says the copper chassis directly shapes the sound with the result described as deeper, more authoritative bass, a richer midrange, and treble that decays more naturally. The device is tuned for listeners who want recordings to sound as close to the original performance as possible.
As you’d expect, exclusivity comes at a price. The A&ultima SP4000 Copper is a limited edition and is available now with a suggested retail price of £3999 / $4499 / €4699.
Image Credit (Astell&Kern)
Alongside it, Astell&Kern has introduced the Collector’s Atelier, a premium leather valet designed to house a player, earphones and accessories. It’s made using Perlinger leather, sourced from a German tannery that’s been operating since 1864.
The leather undergoes a specialised shrinking process that preserves its natural grain while improving durability. This means it should age gracefully with use rather than looking worn out. The Collector’s Atelier is available now for £229 / $260.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Rounding out the launch are two previously announced products that are now officially on sale. The AK HC5, a compact USB DAC priced at £399, targets portable listening setups. Meanwhile, STELLA, a reference-grade earphone developed with Volk Audio and Grammy-winning mastering engineer Michael Graves, sits at the very top of Astell&Kern’s in-ear lineup.
Taken together, it’s a clear statement of intent from Astell&Kern. This isn’t about mass appeal — it’s about pushing materials, sound quality and craftsmanship as far as possible for listeners who want the absolute best, even on the move.
Not everyone has the space for a surround sound system or even a full-sized soundbar. If that’s your situation, we’ve come up with several small options that will work for your crowded space.
We’ve tried to ensure with this list of the best small soundbars that even though they’re small, there’s still an option that will suit every need.
We’ve chosen Dolby Atmos soundbars, soundbars that work with older TVs that don’t have HDMI ports, or models that come with subwoofers. We’ve got an array of options to choose from.
Any soundbar we look at, we do so by watching lots of movies and listening to plenty of music. We examine how well each model handles dialogue, effects, and different genres of music. From these tests, we determine which ones are worth your cash.
Advertisement
Keep reading to discover all the best small soundbars available right now. We have other guides to have a look too which includes our best soundbars and the best Dolby Atmos soundbars.
We’ve also narrowed down the best surround sound systems for those with the space and budget to create a bigger sound system.
Advertisement
Best small soundbars at a glance
SQUIRREL_ANCHOR_LIST
Advertisement
Learn more about how we test soundbars
Soundbars were created to boost TV sound quality – which means we end up watching a lot of TV. We play everything – news reports for voices, movies for scale and effects steering – to ensure that the soundbars that come through the doors at Trusted Reviews are given a proper challenge. We’ll play different genres of music, too, since a good soundbar should be capable of doubling-up as a great music system.
More complex soundbars feature network functionality for hooking up to other speakers and playing music around the home, so we test for connectivity issues and ease of use. We cover the spectrum of models available, everything from cheap soundbars costing less than £100 to those over £1000, to ensure our reviews benefit from our extensive market knowledge. Every product is compared to similarly priced rivals, too.
Advertisement
Pros
Clean and balanced sound
Upgradeable
Excellent size
Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant support
Cons
HDMI eARC input only
Limited DTS support
Pros
Sharp, clear and spacious sound
Small footprint
Affordable at its current price
Wall-mount brackets included
Cons
LED menu is practically invisible from a seated position
No HDMI eARC
Pros
Clean and powerful TV audio
Surprising amount of bass
Wide soundstage
Optional surround sound
Cons
Remote setup can be fiddly
Better at TV than music
Pros
Exciting, dynamic sound (in the right mode)
Ultra-compact dimensions
Comes with a subwoofer
Good range of connections
Cons
Sub can hog the attention at times
Not truly immersive
Pros
Impressive nearfield Dolby Atmos effect
Clear, articulate voices
Solid feature set
Versatile footprint
Classy design
Cons
Short on meaningful bass
Fussy indicator light arrangement
Pros
Clear, detailed sound with decent bass
Decent with music
Neat and tidy design
Impressive SuperWide feature
Cons
Odd volume issues with sources
Clean and balanced sound
Upgradeable
Excellent size
Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant support
HDMI eARC input only
Limited DTS support
Compared to the original Beam, the Beam Gen 2 comes with addition of an eARC HDMI port that allows it to play full-fat lossless Atmos soundtracks.
That also means you’ll need an eARC compatible TV to get the best out of it.
Otherwise, things remain the same with the Beam 2nd Gen, with it best suited for TVs up to and including 49-inches.
Advertisement
The current Beam supports Wi-Fi and the Sonos S2 app, which offers access to a multitude of streaming services such as Tidal, Deezer and Qobuz, as well as Sonos’ own Radio service.
You can also call on voice assistance in Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, as well as initiate Trueplay (as long as you’ve got an iOS device), which optimises the Beam’s audio performance according to the environment it is in.
During testing we found it produced an excellent audio performance, offering a solid low end and a generally balanced sound across the frequency range.
It also handled music impressively, with no noticeable distortion, handling more subtle elements with nuance. The addition of Dolby Atmos isn’t achieved through upfiring speakers but through virtual processing, and it offers a good performance with a decent sense of dimensionality when we watched Captain Marvel on Disney+.
Like the Sonos both can be paired with a subwoofer for added ‘oomph’. A slightly more expensive but still impressive alternative is the Sennheiser Ambeo Mini.
While the Beam 2 is not perfect, as a means of getting Atmos into the home in a small form factor, the Sonos Beam Gen 2 is a very good way of doing so.
Advertisement
Sharp, clear and spacious sound
Small footprint
Affordable at its current price
Wall-mount brackets included
LED menu is practically invisible from a seated position
Its a compact speaker cabale of producing a crisp, clear and punchy sound. It offers plenty of energy and outright attack that easily betters anything a TV can produce.
Its built-in subwoofer provides impact to action scenes, and with Atmos content, the soundstage is bigger than the dimensions of the bar and TV, producing plenty of size and scale to go with Hollywood blockbusters.
Advertisement
It’s pretty solid performer with music content whether over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, though the former produces a clearer, more detailed performance. The lack of HDMI eARC is a disappointment as it means you won’t be getting the highest quality Dolby Atmos sound possible, and we’re not big fans of the design when it comes to placement of the LED screen. We can barely see it at the best of times given how small it is.
Features include Amazon Alexa voice control, though this would need another connected speaker to be able to use. AirPlay 2 is another means of playing audio to the system, while if you have a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, you can tap it on the surface of the soundbar and play music to it.
If after you’ve bought the speaker, you’re looking to upgrade and add more, the S61B does support the SWA-9200S wireless rear speaker system.
If you have a Samsung Q-Symphony compatible TV can also take advantage of that feature, whereby the TV and soundbar speakers combine for a bigger sound.
Advertisement
There are other options in the market if you are looking for a soundbar and subwoofer combo, most notably the Polk MagniFi Mini AX, but its Atmos performance isn’t as convincing as the Samsung.
New models have launched this one first went on sale, and we’ll be hoping to get reviews of those models at some point.
Advertisement
Clean and powerful TV audio
Surprising amount of bass
Wide soundstage
Optional surround sound
Remote setup can be fiddly
Better at TV than music
If you’re something with an older TV (say a Pioneer Kuro) or have a second, smaller TV without HDMI inputs, the Sonos Ray is tailor made for you.
It only supports audio through an optical connection, so you won’t have to worry about HDMI handshake issues.
Audio through an optical connection keeps things simple enough, though you do miss out on advanced 3D audio like Dolby Atmos and DTS:X. There’s only enough bandwidth for Dolby Digital and DTS soundtracks.
There’s no built-in microphones for voice control from the likes of as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. You can still have those smart features, but you’ll need to connect the Ray to another smart speaker.
Advertisement
The design looks a little different from other Sonos soundbars with its lozenge-shaped look and curved ends. Our reviewer felt it was a less in-your-face design that makes the Ray better to blend in with its surroundings more. You can also fit it into an AV rack if you wanted to conceal it from view.
The sound is surprisingly wide for its size, with effective bass performance too. It offers a clear and obvious improvement on a TV with dialogue making audio tracks much easier to understand. With music we felt it sounded decent, perhaps not quite as good as it is with TV series and films, but passable enough. For its primary job of making audio clearer, the Sonos Ray does a brilliant job.
Advertisement
Exciting, dynamic sound (in the right mode)
Ultra-compact dimensions
Comes with a subwoofer
Good range of connections
Sub can hog the attention at times
Not truly immersive
While a small soundbar is helpful in terms of reducing space, its size isn’t always great for producing a more cinematic sound, especially when it comes to bass. The Polk MagniFi Mini AX has you covered in that respect.
This an ultra-compact Dolby Atmos/DTS:X soundbar from American brand Polk, and it differs from other options on this list in that it is not just an all-in-one effort but one that comes with sizeable subwoofer.
This allows it produce and energetic and dynamic performance, and given the weight and power behind the subwoofer’s performance, it’s probably one that’s sure to alert the neighbours to what you’re watching.
In our opinion the Polk doesn’t full suffice as an immersive soundbar but performs better than the Creative Stage 360. It can do a decent impression of height effects but not with the greatest sense of definition, while its soundstage is front heavy, though you can add Polk’s SR2 surround speakers as real channels for a greater sense of space.
Advertisement
Dialogue can be enhanced with Polk’s VoiceAdjust technology, although we found that while it did its job of boosting voices, it also had a tendency to raise surrounding noise as well.
Tonally we felt the soundbar sounded accurate and there’s good levels of detail and clarity to enjoy when the soundbar is put into its 3D mode, which also gives a bigger, wider soundstage to Atmos and DTS:X soundtracks.
With music it’s a solid performer, playing music with a crispness that we found avoided sibilance or harshness.
With Chromecast available along with Bluetooth, AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect and a USB connection that can play MP3 music. With Atmos and DTS:X support for the same price as the Sonos Sub Mini, this is a good value soundbar/subwoofer combination.
Advertisement
Impressive nearfield Dolby Atmos effect
Clear, articulate voices
Solid feature set
Versatile footprint
Classy design
Short on meaningful bass
Fussy indicator light arrangement
Measuring in at 52 x 72 x 110cm (WHD) and weighing under 2kg, the SB700 is stocky yet lightweight enough to carry from room to room, which means it can double as both a sonic enhancer for small TVs and a companion for a workstation. We would advise against relying on the SB700 as the main audio source for a living room, though.
Included with the SB700 is a useful remote control that sports treble and bass controls, input selection and all the various EQ modes including voice, movie, music, night and neutral. Sharp also usefully throws in an HDMI cable, which plugs easily into the soundbar’s rear and shares a port alongside optical, USB (service) and 3.5-mm audio inputs.
Advertisement
Powering the four onboard 1.75-inch drivers is a Class D-based 140W of peak power. Plus, as well as Dolby Atmos decoding, the Sharp processes a 3D mode, also known as DAP (Dolby Atmos Processing). We especially appreciate how the SB700 is a plug-and-play device and supports Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity too.
Overall we were impressed with the SB700’s audio quality. While it does struggle with bass and doesn’t quite offer a satisfying loud movie night, it still offers plenty of prowess with midrange and high frequencies too. Plus dialogue sounds clear too.
Advertisement
Clear, detailed sound with decent bass
Decent with music
Neat and tidy design
Impressive SuperWide feature
Odd volume issues with sources
What the Creative Stage Pro lacks in features, it more than makes up for in terms of sound and design quality.
While the Stage Pro feels more like a desktop soundbar rather than a cinema bar, it does sport a smart appearance with a useful display at its front that can be seen from the sofa. Although undoubtedly compact, its height can block the TV’s IR receiver which means you might struggle to use your remote control with your TV.
Otherwise, the bar is paired with a similarly unassuming subwoofer that relies on a wired connection to the soundbar. Usefully, as it’s front-firing, you’re free to place it anywhere.
As mentioned earlier, despite its “Pro” moniker, there aren’t many features at play here. While there is Bluetooth 5.3 and support for Dolby Audio and Dolby Digital+ soundtracks, there’s no Wi-FI. Even so, it still covers the basic connections including an optical input, DMI ARC, USB-C and even an auxiliary input.
Advertisement
Having said that, there is one notable feature: SuperWide. This expands the size of the Stage Pro’s sound and pushes audio out wide in a way that’s much bigger than the speaker. Depending on how close you’re sitting to the speaker, you can choose between Near-Field and Far-Field too. The latter is especially impressive as it manages to keep voices clear while expanding the width of the soundstage.
Overall, although it’s not an immersive soundbar, we were pretty impressed with the sense of the height it can provide. Otherwise, the subwoofer does a good job at providing a punchy sense of bass.
We did struggle with the soundbar’s volume levels, especially when switching between sources, as the Stage Pro can veer from excessively loud to surprisingly quiet. It’s frustrating, as it seems as if there’s no way to minimise those swings in volume.
Advertisement
FAQs
Does a soundbar have to match your TV size?
No, but it’s best for them to at least be similar in size. For a full-size soundbar, it’s best to partner them with TVs 50-inches and above. With compact soundbars that TVs’ 49-inches and smaller would be the best fit.
Advertisement
Do soundbars have to be the same brand as the TV?
No, you won’t need a soundbar that’s the same brand as the TV. Any soundbar can work with any TV it is connected to. Where you may want to consider is whether the soundbar and TV have been optimised to work best with each other. LG and Sony both have soundbars that share features with their respective TVs.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Full Specs
Sonos Beam (Gen 2) Review
Samsung HW-S61B Review
Sonos Ray Review
Polk MagniFi Mini AX Review
Sharp HT-SB700 Review
Creative Stage Pro Review
UK RRP
£449
£329
£279
£429
£199
£129
USA RRP
$449
$349
$279
$499
–
$169.99
EU RRP
€499
€419
€298
€479
–
–
CA RRP
CA$559
CA$499
–
CA$699
–
–
AUD RRP
AU$699
AU$599
–
–
–
–
Manufacturer
Sonos
Samsung
Sonos
Polk
Sharp
Creative
Size (Dimensions)
651 x 100 x 69 MM
670 x 105 x 62 MM
559 x 95 x 71 MM
366 x 104 x 79 MM
x 110 x MM
420 x 265 x 115 MM
Weight
2.8 KG
2.7 KG
1.95 KG
–
1.9 KG
–
ASIN
B09B12MGXM
B09W66KSXN
B09ZYCBWYF
B09VH9C5VV
B0CR6M8RW3
–
Release Date
2021
2022
2022
2022
2024
2025
First Reviewed Date
30/09/2021
–
31/05/2022
–
–
–
Model Number
Sonos Beam (2nd Gen)
HW-S61B/XU
Sonos Ray
MagniFi Mini AX
HT-SB700
–
Model Variants
Black or white
S60B
–
–
–
–
Sound Bar Channels
–
5.0
5.1
–
2.0.2
2.1
Driver (s)
1x tweeter, 4x mid-woofers, 3x passive radiators
Centre, two side-firing
2 x tweeters, 2 x mid-woofers, 2 x low-velocity ports
two 19mm tweeters, three 51mm mid-range, 127mm × 178mm woofer
2 x 1.75-in full-range forward-facing drivers plus 2 x 1.75-in full-range up-firing drivers
–
Audio (Power output)
–
–
–
–
140 W
80 W
Connectivity
HDMI eARC, Optical S/PDIF (via adaptor)
–
Optical S/PDIF
AirPlay 2, Bluetooth 5.0, Chromecast, Spotify Connect
Is it finally time to upgrade that aging Apple Watch that you’re charging twice a day? I have some great news for you! The Apple Watch Series 11 is marked down at major retailers like Amazon and Best Buy to as low as $300 for the base version, or $400 for the upgraded GPS + Cellular version, depending on your finish and included band choice.
While we’ve enjoyed previous generations of Apple Watch, the Series 11 made one of the most major improvements yet to the popular line of smartwatches. With the upgraded battery and extra optimization features, the standard Apple Watch can now last an entire day and then some on a single charge. That’s great news for anyone who wants to get the most out of their watch during the day, and then use it to track their sleep at night.
That improved battery life also lets you take advantage of all the updated health tracking features found on the Apple Watch Series 11. The biggest new feature is monitoring for high blood pressure, which will keep track of your vitals over a two week period before alerting you if it thinks you should see a doctor. While it isn’t an official medical device, it’s cleared by the FDA, and at least gives you some helpful information from information it was already gathering anyway.
Otherwise, it has all the features you’d expect from an Apple Watch, including sleep tracking, fitness features for different sports and activities, and a close connection to your iPhone for messages and notifications. If you opt for the version that includes a cellular connection, it features both satellite and 5G messaging, with helpful tips for getting the best connection right on the watch.
I spotted the marked down GPS-only Apple Watch Series 11 at Amazon and Best Buy, with quite a few color and band options in stock at both retailers. Both Amazon and Best Buy also had the versions that support a cellular connection as well, albeit with fewer options at the discounted price. If you’re curious about all the changes to the latest version, make sure to swing by our full review for a complete hands-on experience.
While quantum computers continue to slowly grind towards usefulness, some are pursuing a different approach—analog quantum simulation. This path doesn’t offer complete control of single bits of quantum information, known as qubits—it is not a universal quantum computer. Instead, quantum simulators directly mimic complex, difficult-to-access things, like individual molecules, chemical reactions, or novel materials. What analog quantum simulation lacks in flexibility, it makes up for in feasibility: quantum simulators are ready now.
“Instead of using qubits, as you would typically in a quantum computer, we just directly encode the problem into the geometry and structure of the array itself,” says Sam Gorman, quantum systems engineering lead at Sydney-based start-up Silicon Quantum Computing.
Yesterday, Silicon Quantum Computing unveiled its Quantum Twins product, a silicon quantum simulator, which is now available to customers through direct contract. Simultaneously, the team demonstrated that their device, made up of fifteen thousand quantum dots, can simulate an often-studied transition of a material from an insulator to a metal, and all the states between. They published their work this week in the journal Nature.
“We can do things now that we think nobody else in the world can do,” Gorman says.
Advertisement
The powerful process
Though the product announcement came yesterday, the team at Silicon Quantum Computing established its Precision Atom Qubit Manufacturing process following the startup’s establishment in 2017, building on the academic work that the company’s founder, Michelle Simmons, led for over 25 years. The underlying technology is a manufacturing process for placing single phosphorus atoms in silicon with sub-nanometer precision.
“We have a 38-stage process,” Simmons says, for patterning phosphorus atoms into silicon. The process starts with a silicon substrate, which gets coated with a layer of hydrogen. Then, using a scanning-tunneling microscope, individual hydrogen atoms are knocked off the surface, exposing the silicon underneath. The surface is then dosed with phosphine gas, which adsorbs to the surface only in places where the silicon is exposed. With the help of a low temperature thermal anneal, the phosphorus atom is then incorporated into the silicon crystal. Then, layers of silicon are grown on top.
“It’s done in ultra-high vacuum. So it’s a very pure, very clean system,” Simmons says. “It’s a fully monolithic chip that we make with that sub-nanometer precision. In 2014, we figured out how to make markers in the chip so that we can then come back and find where we put the atoms within the device to make contacts. Those contacts are then made at the same length scale as the atoms and dots.”
Though the team is able to place single atoms of phosphorus, they use clusters of ten to fifty such atoms to make up a so-called register for these application-specific chips. These registers act like quantum dots, preserving quantum properties of the individual atoms. The registers are controlled by a gate voltage from contacts placed atop the chip, and interactions between registers can be tuned by precisely controlling the distances between them.
Advertisement
While the company is also pursuing more traditional quantum computing using this technology, they realized they already had the capacity to do useful simulations in the analog domain by putting thousands of registers on a single chip and measuring global properties, without controlling individual qubits.
“The thing that’s quite unique is we can do that very quickly,” Simmons says. “We put 250,000 of these registers [on a chip] in eight hours, and we can turn a chip design around in a week.”
What to simulate
Back in 2022, the team at Silicon Quantum Computing used a previous version of this same technology to simulate a molecule of polyacetylene. The chemical is made up of carbon atoms with alternating single and double bonds, and, crucially, its conductivity changes drastically depending on whether the chain is cut on a single or double bond. In order to accurately simulate single and double carbon bonds, the team had to control the distances of their registers to sub-nanometer precision. By tuning the gate voltages of each quantum dot, the researchers reproduced the jump in conductivity.
Now, they’ve demonstrated the quantum twin technology on a much larger problem—the metal-insulator transition of a two-dimensional material. Where the polyacetylene molecule required ten registers, the new model used 15,000. The metal-insulator model is important because, in most cases, it cannot be simulated on a classical computer. At the extremes—in the fully metal or fully insulating phase—the physics can be simplified and made accessible to classical computing. But in the murky intermediate regime, the full quantum complexity of each electron plays a role, and the problem is classically intractable. “That is the part which is challenging for classical computing. But we can actually put our system into this regime quite easily,” Gorman says.
Advertisement
The metal-insulator model was a proof of concept. Now, Gorman says, the team can design a quantum twin for almost any two-dimensional problem.
“Now that we’ve demonstrated that the device is behaving as we predict, we’re looking at high-impact issues or outstanding problems,” says Gorman. The team plans to investigate things like unconventional superconductivity, the origins of magnetism, and materials interfaces such as those that occur in batteries.
Although the initial applications will most likely be in the scientific domain, Simmons is hopeful that Quantum Twins will eventually be useful for industrial applications such as drug discovery. “If you look at different drugs, they’re actually very similar to polyacetylene. They’re carbon chains, and they have functional groups. So, understanding how to map it [onto our simulator] is a unique challenge. But that’s definitely an area we’re going to focus on,” she says. “We’re excited at the potential possibilities.”
