Marshall’s prolific 2026 continues with the launch of the Stockwell II wireless speaker, which boasts some pretty big specs.

The Stockwell II was one of our favourite Bluetooth speakers when it launched, so we’re looking forward to seeing how Marshall can improve, and on paper, there are some big improvements.

But before that, let’s start with sustainability. The Stockwell III introduces replaceable and modular components, a list which includes the battery, carry strap, silicone sleeve as well as the front and rear grilles to ensure that the Stockwell III can last as long as possible without the need for a full replacement if it gets damaged.

To help its longevity, battery life has been expanded from the Stockwell II’s 20+ to 40+, practically double the battery life than before. The speaker can also act as a powerbank for other devices (such as your mobile device).

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Marshall’s True Stereophonic 360 sound has made its way to the Stockwell III, offering consistent audio from whichever angle the speaker is placed to ensure there’s no ‘sweet spots’. Dynamic Loudness also features, taking care of managing bass, mid and treble at any volume and keeping them in balance.

The design remains practically the same, with its vertical silhouette and guitar-inspired PU leather strap and velvet lining. Controls have been updated to make it easier to access presets with the M-button or skip tracks with the media jog. An IP55 rating means that it’s not fully waterproof, but can survive a dip into water for a small amount of time. That’s still a jump up from the Stockwell II’s IPX4 rating.

Pricing is within reach of the older model in some markets, but overall it is more expensive. The Marshall Stockwell III has a price of £199.99 / $249.99 / €229.99 with availability in August (you can register interest in the speaker now). Colours are a choice of Black and Brass, and Cream.

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Reading my articles from the fellowship feels like reading diary entries. They’re raw, honest and they reflect how much I was struggling with teaching at the time. Overwhelm is apparent. So is frustration. As a teacher who was impacted by COVID-19 and the year of fully remote learning for students, the Voices of Change fellowship gave me the space to reflect and name the questions that had brought me to teaching in the first place. Since leaving the classroom almost two years ago, I’ve returned to writing frequently to work through the questions teaching left me with.

Having attended Title I public schools myself, I entered the classroom seeking a lens through which to understand my school experiences. As I became more interested in education as an engine of social mobility, I wanted to understand why some kids learned to read and some did not. I wanted to understand why some schools had more resources than others. I wanted to understand why some kids went to college, and some did not. Teaching felt like a way to move closer to those answers.

The process of learning these answers was swift and painful. The stark reality was playing out in front of me every day as I taught at a public charter school during the day and then drove to the suburbs in the evenings to tutor for extra cash. I quickly saw how rarely student success is the product of a single school or teacher, but rather an aligned system of supports that begins at birth.

So here’s what I learned: some kids can read because their schools taught phonics and screened for reading disabilities in kindergarten. Some schools have more resources because housing policy and decades of segregation shaped property values and neighborhood composition. Some kids go to college because they benefited from networks of financial and familial stability, giving them resilience through challenges like the SAT, the Common App and FAFSA. The questions I began with spun out into winding tangles of policy choices, zip codes, race and class.

I’ve come to understand that the grief I felt at leaving the classroom was more than being overwhelmed and overworked — it was the undoing of my belief that education was society’s great equalizer. It was also the realization that I had been lucky; my graduation from high school and matriculation to a four-year college was as much a function of my family’s assumption from birth that I would go to college as it was my academic performance or the opportunities my schools offered.

Achieving academically was easy because I had stable housing, good health care and a network of loving and supportive adults. Had I experienced any learning challenges, they would have been swiftly addressed by my white-collar parents, who are comfortable speaking with educated professionals. Students spend the vast majority of their lives before the age of 18 outside of school. Teaching revealed how profoundly the promise of education depends on systems beyond the classroom.

That isn’t to say that schools and teachers cannot move the needle for students. Teachers grow their students every day in ways that feel nothing short of miraculous. You’d be hard-pressed to find an adult who cannot name a teacher who made a difference in their life. But the biggest gains for students occur when the systems around schools align to support the work teachers are doing — when children arrive at school healthier, safer and more secure in their lives outside the classroom.

On this front, there are two movements I’ve been paying attention to, one that brings me hope and one that makes me nervous. In graduate school, I learned about place-based partnerships, initiatives that bring stakeholders in health care, housing, education, youth services, local government and philanthropy into alignment around shared goals for supporting children and families. The most famous example is the Harlem Children’s Zone, but the model has spread widely. Organizations like StriveTogether now support networks of communities working toward cradle-to-career outcomes. Partners for Rural Impact is helping rural communities coordinate services for children across schools and social supports. Here in Boston, the Boston Children’s Council is bringing together city agencies, nonprofits and schools to think more holistically about the conditions shaping children’s lives.

What gives me hope about these efforts is that they acknowledge something teachers already know: students do not arrive at school as blank slates each morning. They arrive carrying the cumulative effects of housing stability, health-care access, nutrition, family income and community safety. Place-based partnerships represent a policy approach that supports teachers by strengthening the ecosystems around them rather than asking schools to solve poverty alone.

What makes me more uneasy is the direction some of the frustration with public education has taken. If we spent decades telling ourselves that schools were the great equalizer, then the persistence of large racial and economic achievement gaps, especially in the wake of COVID frustrations, can feel like a failure of the institution itself.

In my home state of West Virginia, that frustration has helped fuel support for the Hope Scholarship, the nation’s only universal education savings account program, which has deleterious impacts on the public education system most students rely on. Policies like this are often framed as empowering families with choice, but I worry they also reflect a disillusionment with the project of public schools as engines of democracy. It is my belief that many of the inequities in public education were never fully within schools’ control to address.

My experience as a teacher, and now as a policy practitioner, has convinced me that the path forward is not to abandon public schools, but to surround them with stronger systems of support for children and families. The question I find myself paying closest attention to now is how policy can help build those systems: partnerships that allow teachers to do what they already do best, while ensuring the conditions outside the classroom make their work possible.

Apple’s iPadOS 27 update is shaping up to be less about one headline feature and more about pulling the whole system closer together with Apple Intelligence is running through the middle of it.

The biggest shift is Siri, which is getting a major upgrade into what Apple is now calling “Siri AI”. Instead of short, scripted requests, Siri AI can now handle natural conversations and follow-up questions.

Additionally, it can tap into personal context on the device. That means it can surface old emails, find specific photos from years ago, or pull up notes without users having to remember exact file names or locations. Apple is also pushing this further with actions inside apps. For example, Siri can do things like edit a recently sent message, add music to a playlist, or help manage reminders based on what you’re currently doing.

There’s also a new dedicated Siri app, which acts as a kind of hub for conversations across Apple devices. You can start a request on iPhone and pick it up on iPad without losing context. This feels like Apple trying to make Siri less of a one-off interaction and more of an ongoing assistant.

Samsung refreshed its smartwatch lineup with careful attention to daily comfort and practical health details that many people actually use. The Galaxy Watch 8, priced at $290 (was $350), arrives in two sizes and focuses on longer battery stretches, a brighter screen, and several new measurements that go beyond basic step counts or heart rate. For anyone eyeing an Apple Watch alternative while carrying an Android phone, this model presents a clear case worth examining closely.

The case now has a thinner cushion contour that sits very flat against your wrist. Its 8.6mm thickness makes it feel significantly lighter over long periods of use, and the aluminum body is available in both graphite and silver finishes, which look great and are really versatile. The bands now have an enhanced lug system that keeps the sensors close to your skin without pinching or leaving gaps. This causes many people to forget they are wearing the watch, even overnight, which is a huge step forward in terms of making it usable throughout the day.

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The 40mm model features a 1.34-inch Super AMOLED screen with 438 × 438 resolution. It has a maximum brightness of 3000 nits, allowing you to use it in direct sunlight while the competition fades out. Because to efficiency improvements elsewhere in the hardware, the always-on option now functions without depleting your battery’s life. The battery capacity has been increased to 325 mAh for the 40mm model and 435 mAh for the 44mm. Samsung claims up to 30 hours of use with the always-on display turned on, but real-world tests show ranging from 24-36 hours depending on how frequently you use features like workout tracking, notifications, and the built-in Gemini AI.

People who purchase these watches primarily for health tracking will discover some surprising capabilities built in. The BioActive sensor suite uses bioelectrical impedance to determine your heart rate, blood oxygen, ECG, and body composition, which is a fairly standard set of capabilities at this level. New features include an antioxidant index that shows how your skin is performing in terms of carotenoid levels; simply press your thumb on the sensor to find out where you are. The vascular load feature then analyzes your data overnight to assess how much strain your circulatory system has been under and suggests improvements to your sleep or exercise regimen. They also detect sleep apnea, which checks for dips in oxygen levels, and in countries where it is FDA approved, it works completely. In addition, you will obtain an energy score that offers a snapshot of your daily sleep and movement habits.

Fitness features have also been improved. Following a brief test run, the running coach develops a personalized plan for you and delivers real-time pace recommendations and progress reports as you exercise. The dual frequency GPS (L1 and L5) is very handy because it allows you to correctly locate your location even in challenging conditions, and the heart rate zones adjust to your specific data and track more advanced metrics if you enjoy cycling or swimming. These utilities can be used without a Samsung phone, although a recent Galaxy handset offers some additional features.

Wear OS 6 is the operating system, with Samsung’s One UI Watch 8 built on top; the interface helps to arrange all current information into tiles that may be modified to match your specific needs. Google Gemini sits on your wrist and can remind you of things, answer questions, and execute follow-up tasks all without requiring you to take out your phone.

Anthropic has begun rolling out a new model called “Fable,” which is based on the same underlying model as Mythos, its most powerful AI model class.

Anthropic previously said that it developed a model called “Mythos,” which is a state-of-the-art model that poses security risks to companies around the world.

At that time, Anthropic noted that Mythos was powerful enough to potentially help bad actors attack public and private software.

“The advantage will belong to the side that can get the most out of these tools,” Anthropic warned in April when it announced the Mythos model.

“In the short term, this could be attackers, if frontier labs aren’t careful about how they release these models. In the long term, we expect it will be defenders who will more efficiently direct resources and use these models to fix bugs before new code ever ships.”

In other words, it could have been abused to find and exploit vulnerabilities in apps like Firefox.

Because of those risks, Anthropic decided to limit access to models like Mythos and offer them only to cybersecurity experts and trusted companies.

Now, Anthropic says it has developed strong guardrails for the same model class, which means these powerful AI models can no longer be easily exploited by bad actors.

As a result, it’s launching a safer version called “Fable 5.”

According to Anthropic, this model has strict safeguards in place that will block or divert sensitive queries, like those involving offensive cybersecurity, biology, or chemistry, to its previous model, Opus 4.8.

Claude Mythos 5 is the unrestricted version of that same model, with those safeguards lifted.

Because of the risks involved, it is only available to a highly vetted group of trusted partners, such as government cyberdefenders and specific life sciences researchers.

Fable 5 is free for a limited time, and it consumes tokens faster than any other model.

Anthropic says Fable 5 is an expensive model because it requires a lot of compute, which means the company cannot afford to make it available as easily as Opus 4.8 or its previous models.

However, until June 22, Anthropic says Fable 5 will be offered to all Pro, Max, and Enterprise customers, but after the window expires, it’ll switch to usage-based pricing.

In our tests, BleepingComputer observed that Fable 5 uses a massive amount of tokens in a span of minutes.

I particularly noticed this behaviour when I used Workflow, a new execution system that allows Claude to break complex prompts into smaller tasks and spin up parallel subagents to implement them.

Claude Fable 5 exhausted my $100 Max subscription’s daily usage, which was at zero when I started using it, in just 9 minutes

This doesn’t happen when you casually interact with Claude Fable 5, but if you switch to Workflow mode and change model thinking to high, you’re going to consume all your tokens in minutes.

However, even if you don’t use Fable 5 with workflow in xhigh effort, you’re still going to consume it 2 times faster than Opus model.

This explains why Anthropic is hesitating to unlock Fable 5 in the same capacity as Opus and other models, but that could change in the coming weeks, as the company is known for nerfing its models and increasing the capacity later.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

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bootnotes

Aircraft at core of the Future Combat Air System canned as parties could not decide who leads on the work

One of Europe’s two major next-gen fighter aircraft programs has been hit hard by differences between France and Germany, the two main participants, leaving the UK-Italy-Japan’s Tempest as the main contender.

Reports say that the Future Combat Air System (FCAS, or Système de Combat Aérien du Futur – SCAF – in French) has been shelved by German Chancellor Merz and French President Macron.

The program dates back to at least 2017, and was expected to produce a test flight of a technology demonstration airframe by 2026 or 2027, with the aircraft coming in to operational service by 2040.

According to German publication Der Spiegel, the French firm ⁠Dassault ⁠and the European Airbus group could not agree on how to divide up the work on the project, nor on the patent rights for new developments.

However, it is also understood there were differences in the requirements, with France needing a replacement for the Rafale jet that must be capable of operating from an aircraft carrier, while the Germans were beginning to question the need for any crewed fighter aircraft in light of drone developments.

French publication Le Monde says Merz and Macron “reached the shared assessment that the companies will not be able to come together on building a joint combat aircraft.” It goes on to say that other parts of the wide-ranging project will continue.

This refers to FCAS being more than just about a single aircraft; the program also envisioned drone aircraft to accompany the crewed fighter, and a communications system “combat cloud” to link them together, described as a “nervous system that networks aircraft, drones and other components into an integrated whole.”

The program also drew participation from other European nations, such as Spain and Belgium, and it isn’t clear what these nations will choose to do next. It is likely that France will pursue its own next-gen aircraft that meets its own requirements, as happened with Rafale, while the Financial Times reports that Airbus is keen to lead a consortium to develop a new pan-European fighter jet to replace FCAS.

We asked both Dassault and Airbus to comment for this article.

There is another next-gen combat aircraft project already underway: the Global Combat Air Program (GCAP), which is a tri-partite effort between the UK, Italy and Japan. This aims to replace the Eurofighter Typhoon in service with the British and Italian air forces, and the Mitsubishi F-2 operated by Japan.  The British version of the jet is currently known as Tempest.

GCAP was proceeding well, but the current UK prevarication over defense spending is proving to be a roadblock to ongoing development, as a long-term multinational contract for the project cannot be signed until the Starmer government pulls its finger out and publishes its delayed defense investment plan.

If all goes well, GCAP/Tempest is expected to enter service by 2035, but the planned 2027 date for a demonstrator aircraft to fly is already looking unlikely.

Elsewhere, the US is developing its own sixth-generation fighter under the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, to be built by Boeing as the F-47 and expected to enter service possibly as soon as the early 2030s.

Questions have been raised over whether this will be chosen by European air forces, however, President Trump previously warned that the capabilities of any exported aircraft would be deliberately downgraded.

This follows issues with the in-service F-35, which has seen long delays in key software upgrades, preventing the RAF and Royal Navy from using European-made weapons with their aircraft. ®

This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free!

I’ve changed jobs more times than I ever imagined I would. In the past 12 years, I’ve worked at seven different organizations. Some of those moves were forced by layoffs. Others were deliberate bets on my own trajectory.

Job hopping, done strategically, is one of the fastest ways to accelerate your compensation and reinvent your professional identity. Engineers who understand when to move and when to stay tend to out-earn and out-rank their peers who simply wait for internal recognition.

Unfortunately, most engineers either job hop too much or not enough, and both mistakes are expensive. Here are the pros and cons of job hopping as an engineer, and when to make a leap.

Pro: It’s the fastest way to grow your salary

Internal raises and external offers operate on completely different logic, and most engineers don’t fully appreciate this until they make their first move.

Within a company, compensation is anchored to your existing salary and capped by organizational pay bands. A strong performance review might get you 5 to 8 percent.

An external offer is a clean slate. The company is bidding for your market value, not adjusting from your current baseline.

My first deliberate job hop doubled my salary in a single year. A later move, at the same job title, pushed my compensation floor to a level that I never would have reached by staying put. Neither outcome was available internally. The math simply does not work in your favor when you stay.

Pro: It lets you reinvent yourself

Every new company is a chance to walk in as a slightly updated version of yourself: the version that learned something from the last place. The version that does not carry the baggage of whatever decision you made two years ago that all your coworkers still remember.

Especially when you’re early in your career, this matters. You get to reframe your experience, take on a different scope, and establish a new reputation from scratch. That kind of reset is difficult to manufacture inside the same organization.

Con: You don’t see the long-term outcome of your work

This is the part nobody talks about, and it took me years to fully appreciate it.

When I joined one company, I built a component library for a website from scratch. Starting projects from scratch is exciting, and the initial implementation held up well for the early use cases. But as the organization scaled, the limitations of my original design became apparent.

I stayed long enough to address them rather than handing that problem to someone else. That experience taught me more about software architecture than any new project ever had.

Engineers who move every 18 months only ever experience the exciting part of building something. They never experience the part where their original decisions stop working. They just repeat the exciting part on a loop, never realizing the debt they are leaving behind.

Con: You cannot job hop your way to a promotion

Above a certain level, things can change significantly.

A new employer can evaluate your past performance through interviews, portfolios, and references. What they cannot do is evaluate your future potential the way a manager who has watched you grow over two or three years can. If you arrive as a senior engineer, you will almost certainly be hired as one.

The promotions that actually changed my career trajectory—from senior to staff engineer, then engineering manager—all happened at one organization over four years. Those transitions required someone to observe my growth over time and make a bet on where I was headed next. That kind of credibility cannot be transferred on a resume.

So when should you actually leave?

The threshold I use is straightforward. If I have produced at least one measurable, clearly definable outcome at an organization, I have a reasonable basis for leaving. Impact, not tenure, is my unit of measure.

I personally think that moving deliberately while early in your career will build a strong compensation baseline.

Then become selective.

Find an environment where real growth is available and stay long enough to build the credibility that job hopping cannot manufacture. Neither constant movement nor blind loyalty is the answer. The question worth asking at every stage is simple: Have I produced something meaningful here yet? If the answer is no, stay. If yes, it might be time to decide what’s next.

—Brian

What if robots didn’t just help us with physical tasks? USC Professor Maja Matarić helped define the era of socially assistive robotics, designed to provide personalized therapy and care through social interactions. Despite her influence in the field now, the award-winning roboticist didn’t see herself as an engineer at first.

Read more here.

Steve Jobs is best known as the co-founder and CEO of Apple. But the 12 years he spent away from the company taught him the lessons necessary for his success. A new book tells the forgotten story of Jobs’ “wilderness” years and what he learned while at NeXT Computer. IEEE Spectrum spoke to the book’s author about Apple’s most iconic CEO and the company’s future as it prepares for new leadership under John Ternus.

Read more here.

Cybersecurity consultants have never been more in demand, with data breaches and attacks costing organizations more than US $10 trillion annually to repair. To help you find the skills you need to stand out in the cybersecurity job market, the IEEE Computer Society offers a “What Makes a Great Cybersecurity Consultant” guide. It includes advice from experts, a list of certifications to pursue, and information on key cybersecurity conferences.

Read more here.