Apple’s 50th anniversary is this week — and Fast Company’s Harry McCracken just published an 11,000-word oral history with some fun stories from Apple’s earliest days and the long and winding road to its very first home computers:

Steve Wozniak, cofounder, Apple: I told my dad when I was in high school, “I’m going to own a computer someday.” My dad said, “It costs as much as a house.” And I sat there at the table — I remember right where we were sitting — and I said, “I’ll live in an apartment.” I was going to have a computer if it was ever possible. I didn’t need a house.

Woz even remembers trying to build a home computer early on with a teenaged Steve Jobs and Bill Fernandez from rejected parts procured from local electronics companies. Woz designed it — “not from anybody else’s design or from a manual. And Fernandez was one of those kids that could use a soldering iron.”

Bill Fernandez: The computer was very basic. It was working, and we were starting to talk about how we could hook a teletype up to it. Mrs. Wozniak called a reporter from the San Jose Mercury, and he came over with a photographer. We set up the computer on the floor of Steve Wozniak’s bedroom.

Well, the core integrated circuit that ran the power supply that I built was an old reject part. We turned on the computer, and the power supply smoked and burnt out the circuitry. So we didn’t get our photos in the paper with an article about the boy geniuses.

But within a few years Jobs and Wozniak both wound up with jobs at local tech companies. Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell remembers that Steve Jobs “wasn’t a good engineer, but he was a great technician. He was pristine in his ability to solder, which was actually important in those days.” Meanwhile Allen Baum had shared Wozniak’s high school interest in computers, and later got Woz a job working at Hewlett-Packard — where employees were allowed to use stockroom parts for private projects. (“When he needed some parts, even if we didn’t have them, I could order them.”) Baum helped with the Apple I and II, and joined Apple a decade later.

Wozniak remembers being inspired to build that first Apple I by the local Homebrew Computing Club, people “talking about great things that would happen to society, that we would be able to communicate like we never did [before] and educate in new ways. And being a geek would be important and have value.” And once he’d built his first computer, “I wanted these people to help create the revolution. And so I passed out my designs with no copyright notices — public domain, open source, everything. A couple of other people in the club did build it.”

But Woz and Jobs had even tried pitching the computer as a Hewlett-Packard product, Woz remembers:

Steve Wozniak: I showed them what it would cost and how it would work and what it could do with my little demos. They had all the engineering people and the marketing people, and they turned me down. That was the first of five turndowns from Hewlett-Packard. Steve Jobs and I had to go into business on our own.

In the end, Randy Wigginton, Apple employee No. 6 remembers witnessing Jobs, Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne the signing of Apple’s founding contract, “which is pretty funny, because I was 15 at the time.” And it was Allen Baum’s father who gave Wozniak and Jobs the bridge loan to buy the parts they’d need for their first 500 computers.

After all the memories, the article concludes that “Trying to connect every dot between Apple, the tiny, dirt-poor 1970s startup, and Apple, the $3.7 trillion 21st-century global colossus, is impossible.”

But this much is clear: The company has always been at its best when its original quirky humanity and willingness to be an outlier shine through.

Mark Johnson, Apple employee No. 13: I was in Cupertino just yesterday. It’s totally different. They own Cupertino now.

Jonathan Rotenberg, who cofounded the Boston Computer Society in 1977 at age 13: People want to hate Apple, because it is big and powerful. But Apple has an underlying moral purpose that is immensely deep and expansive…

Mike Markkula, the early retiree from Intel whose guidance and money turned the garage startup into a company: The culture mattered. People were there for the right reasons — to build something transformative — not just to make money. That alignment produced extraordinary results…

Steve Wozniak: Everything you do in life should have some element of joy in it. Even your work should have an element of joy… When you’re about to die, you have certain memories. And for me, it’s not going to be Apple going public or Apple being huge and all that. It’s really going to be stories from the period when humble people spotted something that was interesting and followed it

I’ll be thinking of that when I die, along with a lot of pranks I played. The important things.

Kandou AI, a Swiss semiconductor company that builds chip-to-chip interconnect technology, has raised $225 million in what it calls a Series A round, led by Maverick Silicon with strategic participation from SoftBank, Synopsys, Cadence Design Systems, and Alchip Technologies. The round values the company at $400 million. The label is worth pausing on: Kandou was founded in 2011 and previously raised more than $163 million across Series B and C rounds under the name Kandou Bus. The “Series A” designation reflects a rebrand and leadership change, not a fresh start.

The company’s new chief executive, Srujan Linga, a former Goldman Sachs managing director, took over in 2025 from founder Amin Shokrollahi, an EPFL professor of mathematics and computer science who invented the core technology. Shokrollahi’s contribution, a signalling method called Chord that sends correlated signals across multiple wires to increase bandwidth by a factor of two to four while halving power consumption, remains the technical foundation. The rebrand to Kandou AI and the repositioning toward artificial intelligence infrastructure is Linga’s doing, and it appears to have worked: the $225 million raise is the largest in the company’s history and brings SoftBank, one of the most aggressive AI infrastructure investors, onto the cap table.

The bet against light

What makes Kandou AI’s position unusual is not the problem it is trying to solve but the material it proposes to solve it with. The AI industry’s interconnect bottleneck is real and well documented. As models scale to hundreds of billions of parameters and training clusters expand to tens of thousands of GPUs, the speed at which data moves between processors and memory has become the binding constraint on performance. At signalling speeds of 224 gigabits per second, traditional copper interconnects consume roughly 30 per cent of total cluster power, with signal degradation so severe that reach is limited to less than a metre without amplification.

The prevailing industry response has been to move to optics. Ayar Labs raised $500 million in March 2026 at a $3.8 billion valuation for its co-packaged optical interconnects. Marvell completed a $3.25 billion acquisition of Celestial AI in February, buying photonic fabric technology that claims 25 times the bandwidth of copper alternatives at a tenth of the latency. The optical interconnect market for AI data centres is projected to grow from $3.75 billion in 2025 to $18.36 billion by 2033.

Kandou AI is betting that copper is not finished. Its Chord signalling technology, the company claims, can achieve path-to-Shannon-capacity efficiency, reducing power consumption and system costs by a factor of ten while extending copper links to 448 gigabits per second and beyond. If that claim holds, it would mean that the billions being spent on optical interconnect transitions are at least partially premature, and that existing copper infrastructure can be made to work for several more hardware generations at a fraction of the cost.

The strategic investors tell the story

The composition of the investor syndicate matters more than the headline figure. Synopsys and Cadence are the two dominant providers of electronic design automation tools. Their participation is not purely financial; it signals potential integration of Kandou AI’s serialiser/deserialiser intellectual property into the design flows that chip architects use to build processors and memory controllers. Alchip, a Taiwanese ASIC design services company, provides a path to manufacturing. SoftBank, which has invested more than $100 billion in AI-adjacent companies through its Vision Fund and direct investments, adds the scale capital and the strategic network.

The practical implication is that Kandou AI’s technology could appear inside chips designed by other companies rather than requiring customers to adopt Kandou’s own silicon. This is a licensing and IP model, similar in structure to Arm’s approach in mobile processors, and it is a more capital-efficient path to market dominance than manufacturing and selling chips directly. Whether Kandou can execute on that model with a $400 million valuation and $225 million in fresh capital, against optical competitors valued at ten times as much, is the central question.

The valuation gap

At $400 million, Kandou AI is valued at roughly a tenth of Ayar Labs and an eighth of what Marvell paid for Celestial AI. That gap could reflect market scepticism about copper’s longevity in AI infrastructure, or it could reflect the fact that Kandou’s technology, if it works as claimed, does not require the industry to rip out its existing wiring. Copper is already in every data centre. If Kandou’s signalling technology can make it fast enough for another generation of AI workloads, the adoption curve would be faster and cheaper than an optical transition.

The risk is that “another generation” may not be long enough. AI model sizes and training cluster scales are growing at a pace that consistently outstrips infrastructure predictions. What is adequate at 448 gigabits per second today may be inadequate at the terabit-per-second speeds that next-generation models will demand within two to three years. Optical interconnects, for all their cost and complexity, offer a higher theoretical ceiling.

Kandou AI’s $225 million buys it time to prove that the ceiling can wait. The company’s 15-year history and the technical credibility of Chord signalling, which has been deployed commercially in consumer electronics since the mid-2010s, lend substance to the bet. But the AI infrastructure market has a pattern of rewarding ambition over incrementalism, and a company arguing that the existing material is good enough faces a harder narrative sell than one promising to replace it entirely. The investors on this round appear to be betting on engineering pragmatism. Whether the market agrees will depend on how quickly the optical transition matures, and whether Kandou’s copper can keep pace with an industry that has shown little interest in waiting for anything.

Meta is preparing to launch two new Ray-Ban smart glasses models designed specifically for prescription wearers, according to a Bloomberg report published on Thursday. The models, codenamed Scriber and Blazer, were first spotted in Federal Communications Commission filings and are expected to reach consumers as early as next week. They do not represent a new generation of hardware. They represent something potentially more important: a distribution strategy.

Prescription eyewear accounts for roughly 69 per cent of the $223 billion global eyewear market. Meta sold more than seven million Ray-Ban and Oakley AI frames in 2025, an impressive figure for a product category that barely existed three years ago, but a rounding error against the estimated 1.5 billion people worldwide who wear corrective lenses. The new models are Meta’s clearest attempt yet to move smart glasses from consumer electronics into mainstream optical retail, where the customers, the margins, and the scale are all substantially larger.

What the new models are, and what they are not

Scriber and Blazer are non-display AI glasses, similar in capability to the existing Ray-Ban Meta line: camera, microphone, speakers, and Meta AI integration, but no screen. Blazer will come in regular and large sizes; Scriber appears to be a single-size offering. Both include Wi-Fi 6 UNII-4 band support, an upgrade over current models, and will ship with charging cases.

The distinction matters because Meta already sells a display-equipped model. The Ray-Ban Meta Display, launched at Connect 2025, includes a full-colour heads-up display, a 12-megapixel camera with 3x zoom, and pairs with a neural wristband that reads muscle signals to navigate the interface. It costs $799. Orion, Meta’s full augmented reality prototype with holographic displays, remains a research project with no consumer launch date.

Scriber and Blazer sit below both in the product hierarchy. Their purpose is not to showcase Meta’s most advanced technology but to put Meta AI into the frames that people already need to buy. The insight behind the move is straightforward: if someone requires prescription lenses and is going to spend several hundred dollars at an optician regardless, the incremental cost of making those lenses smart drops significantly. Mark Zuckerberg made the strategic logic explicit on a recent earnings call, noting that “billions of people wear glasses or contacts for vision correction” and suggesting it is “hard to imagine a world in several years where most glasses that people wear aren’t AI glasses.”

The EssilorLuxottica question

The prescription pivot also runs directly into the most complex relationship in Meta’s hardware business. EssilorLuxottica, the Franco-Italian conglomerate that owns Ray-Ban, Oakley, LensCrafters, and Sunglass Hut, manufactures all of Meta’s smart glasses and controls the optical retail channel through which the new models will be sold. The partnership has delivered results, but it has also generated friction.

Bloomberg reported in February that the two companies are working through disagreements over pricing and strategy. EssilorLuxottica’s adjusted gross margin fell 2.6 percentage points in 2025 to 60.9 per cent, partly because of the higher component costs that smart glasses require compared with conventional frames. Meta wanted to offer Black Friday discounts in 2023; EssilorLuxottica, which guards its luxury positioning carefully, rejected the idea. The tension is structural: Meta wants to maximise adoption and lock users into its AI ecosystem. EssilorLuxottica wants to protect margins on a product line that is eroding them.

Prescription models could ease that tension. Prescription lenses carry higher retail prices and fatter margins than non-prescription sunglasses. The lens coatings, custom grinding, and fitting appointments that prescription orders require generate additional revenue at every stage of the value chain. If smart glasses move into the prescription channel at scale, the economics improve for EssilorLuxottica even as volumes increase for Meta. The companies are reportedly considering doubling their combined production target to 20 million units per year, up from an estimated 10 million capacity by the end of 2026.

The risks in the optician’s chair

Selling smart glasses through optical retail introduces complications that consumer electronics channels do not. Opticians are trained to fit lenses, not to explain AI assistants, camera privacy settings, or software updates. The customer experience in a LensCrafters is fundamentally different from the experience in a Meta Store or an Apple Store, and the staff training, product support, and return handling required for a connected device are orders of magnitude more complex than for a pair of Wayfarers.

There is also the legal exposure. Solos Technology filed a patent infringement suit against Meta and EssilorLuxottica in January 2026, claiming that the Ray-Ban Meta line violates several patents covering core smart eyewear technologies and seeking “multiple billions of dollars” in damages. A second patent front, on top of the partnership tension and the margin pressure, adds risk to a product line that Meta is treating as the foundation of its wearable AI strategy.

The smart glasses market itself is growing rapidly, from an estimated $2.5 billion in 2025 to a projected $14.4 billion by 2033 according to Grand View Research, but nearly all of that growth is speculative and dependent on whether consumers will choose connected frames when ordinary ones are cheaper, lighter, and carry no privacy concerns. Meta’s bet is that AI functionality, specifically the ability to ask questions, get real-time information, and interact with digital services without reaching for a phone, will be compelling enough to overcome those objections.

Scriber and Blazer are not the product that will test that bet definitively. They are the product that puts Meta’s AI into opticians’ fitting trays, onto the faces of people who were going to buy new glasses anyway, and into a distribution channel that reaches billions of potential customers. The technology is incremental. The strategic ambition is not.

The TV technology arms race is accelerating in 2026, and RGB MiniLED has quickly emerged as one of the key battlegrounds. Hisense is stepping directly into that fight with its newly announced UR9 RGB MiniLED TV lineup, offered in 65, 75, 85, and 100-inch screen sizes. The move puts it alongside Samsung, TCL, and LG, all of whom are pushing next-generation backlighting systems aimed at improving brightness, color accuracy, and contrast control, right as consumers continue to gravitate toward much larger displays.

That shift in demand is impossible to ignore. Screens that once felt excessive now look like the new normal, especially as prices fall and living rooms evolve into full-time viewing spaces. Hisense is clearly leaning into that trend with the UR9 series, positioning RGB MiniLED as a practical upgrade for buyers who want bigger screens and better performance without stepping into ultra-premium territory.

“The living room has become the social centerpiece of the home, with your screen starring at the center of it all,” said James Fishler, Chief Commercial Officer at Hisense USA. “Nearly 90% of Americans say bold, vibrant color makes them more interested in what they’re watching — and that’s exactly why we built the UR9. As the first to bring RGB MiniLED to market, we’re setting a new standard for color performance in home viewing experiences.”

RGB MiniLED Explained: Why This New Backlight Tech Matters

An RGB MiniLED TV is still an LCD-based display, but it takes miniLED backlighting a step further by using individual red, green, and blue LEDs instead of the traditional white or blue-only LEDs found in most LED and MiniLED TVs. This tri-color backlight structure allows for far more precise control over both brightness and color, rather than relying on filters to shape the image after the fact.

The result is a wider color range, up to full BT.2020 coverage, along with improved contrast and more accurate detail rendering. With Pantone Validated RGB MiniLED color support, the technology is designed to deliver more lifelike images with better separation between light and dark areas, exposing details that conventional LED backlit displays often miss.

For a deeper dive into RGB MiniLED and Micro RGB LED technology, check out our reference article: WTF Are RGB MiniLED and Micro RGB LED TVs? Breaking Down the Next Gen Display Tech.

Hisense was first to bring RGB MiniLED technology to market, getting out ahead of rivals with a consumer-ready implementation. The UR9 Series represents the next phase of that strategy, expanding the lineup with a broader range of screen sizes aimed at meeting growing demand for larger displays.

Hisense UR9 RGB MiniLED TVs: Key Features, Screen Sizes, and What Sets Them Apart

RGB MiniLED: This is the foundation of the UR9 series. Available in 65, 75, 85, and 100-inch screen sizes, it uses independent red, green, and blue MiniLED light sources to generate color directly, rather than relying on a white backlight and filters. The payoff is more accurate color reproduction, improved contrast, deeper blacks with better shadow detail, and brighter, more controlled highlights.

Hi-View AI Engine RGB: To support the RGB MiniLED backlight system, the UR9 series integrates Hisense’s Hi View AI Engine, which analyzes content in real time and adjusts brightness, contrast, and color temperature on the fly. It can recognize different types of content such as sports, movies, streaming, and gaming and optimize the picture accordingly, reducing the need for constant manual adjustments.

Obsidian Panel: Hisense’s low reflection screen surface is designed to reduce glare from windows and room lighting while maintaining strong contrast. Dark scenes hold onto their detail and depth even in bright environments, making daytime viewing far less of a compromise.

Up to 5000 Nits Peak Brightness: Combined with the low reflection properties of the Hisense Obsidian Panel, the UR9 series can deliver up to 5000 nits of peak brightness, depending on the model and screen size. This level of light output helps maintain image clarity and impact in bright rooms and daytime viewing conditions.

AI RGB Light Sensor: This feature automatically adjusts brightness and color temperature based on the lighting in your room, helping the picture stay balanced and natural whether you are watching during the day or at night. It works hand in hand with the UR9’s high light output to keep the image consistent without constant manual adjustment.

IMAX Enhanced and Filmmaker Mode: IMAX Enhanced support allows the UR9 to deliver optimized picture and DTS audio performance for compatible content, including the correct aspect ratio used in IMAX presentations. Filmmaker Mode takes a different approach by preserving the original aspect ratio, color, frame rate, and sound, ensuring content is presented as the director intended without added processing.

Native 180Hz Game Mode: For gamers, the UR9 series supports a native 180Hz refresh rate, delivering fast, responsive performance with reduced motion blur and input lag. Rapid camera movement, competitive gameplay, and live sports all benefit from sharper detail and smoother motion.

Enhanced Game Bar: Hisense’s Advanced Game Bar provides real time access to key settings such as FPS, VRR, and HDR. It allows for quick adjustments without interrupting gameplay, which is exactly how it should work.

AI Smooth Motion with MEMC: The UR9 also includes AI Smooth Motion along with standard motion estimation and motion compensation processing to reduce blur, judder, and stutter. It can improve clarity across sports, movies, and games, but there is a trade off. For films, it is best to turn it off if you want to preserve a more natural look. Filmmaker Mode handles that automatically and saves you from digging through menus.

Total HDR Solution: The Hisense UR9 is compatible with advanced HDR formats (Dolby Vision IQ, HDR10+ Adaptive), preserving creative detail and dynamically adjusting brightness based on both content and room lighting.

4K UltraHD Resolution & AI 4K Upscaler: The UR9 Series TVs support 4K UHD native resolution and also support AI 4K upscaling for the best possible image display from lower resolution content. 

3x HDMI 2.1: The Hisense UR9 TVs support HDMI 2.1 on all three of their HDMI inputs. For details on what HDMI 2.1 supports, refer to our reference article: WTF is HDMI 2.1?

Wi-Fi 6E: The UR9 Series is equipped with the latest WiFi 6E connectivity, provided you have high-speed broadband access. This provides support for high-resolution streaming, cloud gaming, and multi-device households.

4.1.2 Multi-Channel Surround & Tuned by Devialet: To provide a good foundation for TV listening, the UR9 incorporates precision-tuned speakers tuned by Devialet that provide layered, multidirectional room-filling audio. Clear Dialogue is supported while effects move naturally around and above you, providing a more natural listening experience. The UR9 series is also Dolby Atmos compatible. 

Hi-Concerto: In addition to Devialet tuning, UR9 TVs include Hisense Hi-Concerto. This allows the TV to work in tandem with compatible Hisense soundbars, or the HT Saturn Audio system enables the speakers in both the TV and external audio system to work together. This is similar to Samsung’s Q-Symphony, offering users a more integrated audio setup without needing to disable their TV’s own speakers.

Google TV with Gemini: The UR9 series runs Google TV, bringing together movies, shows, and live TV from your streaming services into a single interface with access to over 10,000 apps. Gemini adds a more conversational layer, allowing users to ask more natural questions and get useful responses, while also helping with voice control and basic automation.

Backlit Remote: Hisense includes a backlit voice remote with practical touches like a customizable favorite key for quick app access and a Find My Remote function. The backlighting adjusts automatically based on room conditions, making it easier to use in both bright and dark environments.

Minimalist Design: The UR9 features a clean, understated chassis with a slim profile that keeps the focus on the screen. It integrates easily into a range of setups, whether wall mounted or placed on a stand or media console.

The Bottom Line 

The Hisense UR9 series is one of the first serious attempts to bring RGB MiniLED into a full consumer lineup, not just a limited run of oversized flagship screens. That alone makes it notable. Hisense moved quickly, beating Samsung to market with a broader range of sizes from 65 to 100 inches, and positioned RGB MiniLED as a practical step forward in backlight precision, color performance, and brightness for real world viewing.

But there are tradeoffs. Pricing is aggressive, with the 65 inch model starting at $3,499, and there is no support for HDMI 2.2, which some expected to see at this level. That makes the UR9 feel a bit early adopter focused. Hisense is clearly aware of that, which is why the pre-order promotion matters. Offering a free 55-inch TV alongside the purchase could take some of the sting out of the price and give buyers a reason to jump in sooner rather than later.

The bigger picture is where things get interesting. This puts immediate pressure on Samsung, which has talked up Micro RGB LED but has yet to deliver a full lineup, and leaves the door open for TCL and Sony to respond with their own approaches. The UR9 is not a safe play, but it is a strategic one. If RGB MiniLED delivers on its promise, Hisense just bought itself a head start in what is shaping up to be the next major TV technology fight.

Availability & Pricing

Pre-orders for the Hisense UR9 RGB MiniLED TV have begun at Hisense and Best Buy as follows:

Pro Tip: Customers who register for pre-order a UR9 Series RGB MiniLED TV  between March 26 and April 22 will receive a unique redemption code for a 55-inch Hisense CanvasTV ($687.99 at Amazon) on Hisense with a qualifying purchase. Additional terms and conditions apply. 

Hisense Out Host 

“Out Host with Hisense” Campaign: Alongside the UR9 pre order launch, Hisense is rolling out its “Out Host with Hisense” campaign, timed with the FIFA World Cup 2026 coming to the United States this summer, where the brand is serving as an official sponsor. The campaign leans into a familiar message for Hisense, focusing on how TVs bring people together at home and anchor shared viewing experiences.

“Out Host with Hisense” highlights different hosting styles and ties them to the brand’s 2026 TV lineup, positioning its products as part of how people gather, watch, and share major moments. As part of the campaign, users can visit the official Hisense site to take a Hosting Style Quiz, identify their hosting persona, and get matched with a recommended TV setup.

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Like many others, I first used Instacart during the early days of the pandemic when it was a lifesaver. Literally. As the primary caretaker of my immunocompromised grandmother, I was at a loss for how to do something as simple as feed her without risking dangerous exposure. And although I love delivery from a restaurant, it’s expensive and unhealthy. With Instacart, I was able to get her healthy groceries and favorite comfort foods delivered to us right at home without having to risk exposure.

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Find the Best Instacart Promo Code for Massive Savings in March 2026

Here’s the best place to find the latest Instacart savings and Instacart discount codes, as we are constantly scouring the web to find things like savings for first-time users, deals on specific items or brands, discounts on Instacart+ memberships, and more. Make sure you check back often, we update these Instacart coupons when we find great new deals and add more when new seasonal deals pop up.

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Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition is a tough one. You’ll need to know a little about four very different sports in order to solve it. If you’re struggling with today’s puzzle, read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Make a racket.

Green group hint: Goooooal!

Blue group hint: Baseball stars.

Purple group hint: Toss the pigskin.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Tennis Grand Slams.

Green group: Premier League teams.

Blue group: Last four World Series MVPs.

Purple group: ____ football.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is Tennis Grand Slams. The four answers are Australian, French, U.S., and Wimbledon.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is Premier League teams. The four answers are Chelsea, Leeds, Liverpool and Sunderland.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is last four World Series MVPs. The four answers are Freeman, Peña, Seager and Yamamoto.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is ____ football. The four answers are American, fantasy, flag and total.

Amazon’s bet on “Project Hail Mary” has paid off handsomely, with the film recently surpassing “Creed III” to become the company’s highest grossing movie ever.

And it was a big bet, with a reported budget of around $200 million. That’s a big price tag for any film, but especially one that’s not a sequel or part of an existing franchise. Instead, it’s based on a bestselling science fiction novel by Andy Weir, whose book “The Martian” was adapted into a successful film a decade ago. 

And that’s not the only thing that makes “Project Hail Mary” feel unconventional. For long stretches of the film, Ryan Gosling is the only human actor on screen, as the scientist he plays works with a rock-like alien to solve the mystery of of why multiple stars — including our own — seem to be dimming.

But after 10 days in theaters, “Project Hail Mary” has brought in an estimated $164.3 million in North America, as well as $136.2 million overseas, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Domestically, it only fell 32% in its second weekend, to $54.5 million, so its final box office numbers should be significantly higher when it leaves theaters.

That makes “Project Hail Mary” the biggest hit of 2026 (so far), as well as one of the most successful non-franchise, non-sequel films of the past decade. 

And it’s good news for what’s now known as Amazon MGM Studios. The company’s cinematic ambitions have evolved over time, from distributing smaller, critically acclaimed titles like “The Big Sick” and “Manchester by the Sea” to more recently acquiring movie studio MGM (leading to a battle for control of the James Bond franchise) and declaring its intention to bring 14 movies into theaters every year.

Until “Hail Mary,” those movies — including “After the Hunt,” “Mercy,” and the controversial “Melania” documentary — seemed to be falling flat with audiences.

Amazon’s head of film Courtenay Valenti told The New York Times that “Project Hail Mary”‘s big opening weekend validated the company’s strategy of making “big, bold entertaining commercial films.” And it has more movies coming to theaters soon, including “The Sheep Detectives” starring Hugh Jackman in May, then a “Masters of the Universe” reboot in June.

Smart glasses were already under fire for privacy concerns. But now, there’s a new problem brewing. Cheating. And it’s surprisingly easy.

A recent report by Rest of World highlights how AI-powered smart glasses are being used to scan exam questions and display answers directly on the lens, essentially turning them into a real-time cheating tool. In some cases, students are even renting these glasses for as little as $6 a day, using them not just for navigation or translation, but specifically to gain an unfair advantage in exams.

How does this even work?

It’s a mix of hardware and AI catching up. Modern smart glasses come equipped with cameras, microphones, and AI assistants that can analyze what you’re looking at and respond in real time. That means a question on paper can be scanned, processed by an AI model, and fed back as an answer. All without pulling out a phone. And because these devices look like regular glasses, they’re much harder to detect compared to traditional cheating methods.

Adding fuel to the fire, devices like the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses have already sparked concerns around covert recording and privacy, with critics pointing out how easy it is to capture photos or videos without people noticing. Now, with cheating entering the picture, the concerns aren’t just about being watched but also about fairness, trust, and how institutions even enforce rules anymore.

When smart gets… a little too smart

This goes way beyond just exam cheating; it challenges the entire system. Experts warn that devices like AI-powered smart glasses could break traditional ways of detecting misconduct, since they’re subtle, always-on, and hard to track. Some regions have already started taking drastic steps, like temporarily disabling AI tools during exams, just to stay ahead.

At the same time, we’re stepping into an era of “invisible tech,” where these devices are genuinely useful but also easy to misuse. And that’s the real dilemma: when technology becomes this seamless, the line between helping and cheating starts to disappear.