If you want to buy or sell a used EV right now, what’s the first step you’d take?
A startup called Ever wants to be the answer to that question. The company, which bills itself as the first “AI-native, full-stack auto retail business” for electric vehicles, already has thousands of customers buying and selling their EVs on the platform.
Now it’s looking to scale with help from a $31 million Series A funding round led by Eclipse, with Ibex Investors, Lifeline Ventures, and JIMCO — the investment arm of the Saudi Arabian Jameel family (an early investor in Rivian) — as co-investors.
Over the last decade, companies like Carvana and Carmax helped usher in the digital car-buying experience. More recently, myriad startups have tried to improve the car-buying experience with AI, pitching ideas like voice agents or smarter scheduling software. Eclipse’s Jiten Behl thinks this is the wrong approach if you want to really modernize the automotive retail experience, though.
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“These bolt-on AI tools are band-aids,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. He likened it to how many major automakers’ first EVs were essentially combustion vehicles that were repackaged to fit electric drivetrains. That approach came with major tradeoffs compared to designing a new EV from the ground up, which was the approach companies like Tesla and Rivian took.
“Auto retail is a perfect candidate for disrupting with AI, you know? It’s a lot of process, lot of labor, [very] rules-based,” he said.
Lasse-Mathias Nyberg, Ever co-founder and CEO, said in an interview that buying or selling a car typically triggers “hundreds or thousands of different actions” that a retailer needs to perform in order to complete the transaction. “There’s massive complexities or frictions on both sides.”
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Boston, MA | June 23, 2026
In 2022, he and his team set out to reduce or remove those complexities. What they settled on after a year of research was a digital-first auto retailer. The core tech is an orchestration layer or “operating system” that can handle all the different workflows behind a transaction, whether it’s processing information submitted by a prospective buyer or seller, or managing the vehicle inventory.
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“When you do appraisals, or pricing, or titling, it’s very deterministic in terms of what steps need to be taken. And today, there are lots of single point solution tools that are used,” he said. Most companies “use these tools together in a very inefficient manner, and you think that you are on a digital journey — but if you actually could clean-sheet it, and if you actually could use the power of agentic AI, and you can create one unified customer experience and remove all these micro-frictions.”
Nyberg claimed that building the company this way has allowed Ever’s sales team to be two to three times more productive than they would be otherwise, and he expects that to scale as the company grows. He said this extra efficiency and productivity beefs up their margins, which can be booked as profit or passed along to the customer by offering lower prices.
Ever applies this fresh approach to both its online marketplace and physical locations. Nyberg said the hybrid model is important because seeing and trying a car in person remains crucial to the shopping experience for a lot of buyers — especially those who might be assessing EVs for the first time.
Early reviews of Ever’s product have been mixed. Users on one particular Reddit thread from last year were split, with some drawn to how Ever is making EVs easier to buy, while others detailed struggles getting in touch with the startup’s team. Ever was just getting off the ground and was more or less operating in stealth, and so Nyberg chalks that up to a learning experience. He said his team is working hard to make sure its system can be flexible enough to accomplish everything the company has set out to do.
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The bigger challenge may be overall interest in EVs, which has cooled a bit in the United States. Nyberg said he hasn’t ruled out Ever buying or selling used combustion cars in the future, but wants to stick to EVs in the near-term since there isn’t a retailer that is laser-focused on these vehicles.
Behl, who spent eight years on Rivian’s leadership team, admitted he’s a “hopeless romantic when it comes to EVs,” and said he still believes the industry is moving towards electric propulsion because of the inherent benefits. And he said his “first thought” when started doing diligence on Ever was: “I wish Rivian was doing this.”
More broadly, Behl said, companies like Carvana are still in the single digits of market share when it comes to automotive retail. That’s why he sees so much upside in Ever.
“Customers are going to continue to gravitate towards better experience when it comes to buying cars, which means it is going to be a digitally-led customer experience which takes away all the friction of buying and selling a car,” he said.
When an AI agent visits a website, it’s essentially a tourist who doesn’t speak the local language. Whether built on LangChain, Claude Code, or the increasingly popular OpenClaw framework, the agent is reduced to guessing which buttons to press: scraping raw HTML, firing off screenshots to multimodal models, and burning through thousands of tokens just to figure out where a search bar is.
That era may be ending. Earlier this week, the Google Chrome team launched WebMCP — Web Model Context Protocol — as an early preview in Chrome 146 Canary. WebMCP, which was developed jointly by engineers at Google and Microsoft and incubated through the W3C’s Web Machine Learning community group, is a proposed web standard that lets any website expose structured, callable tools directly to AI agents through a new browser API: navigator.modelContext.
The implications for enterprise IT are significant. Instead of building and maintaining separate back-end MCP servers in Python or Node.js to connect their web applications to AI platforms, development teams can now wrap their existing client-side JavaScript logic into agent-readable tools — without re-architecting a single page.
AI agents are expensive, fragile tourists on the web
The cost and reliability issues with current approaches to web-agent (browser agents) interaction are well understood by anyone who has deployed them at scale. The two dominant methods — visual screen-scraping and DOM parsing — both suffer from fundamental inefficiencies that directly affect enterprise budgets.
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With screenshot-based approaches, agents pass images into multimodal models (like Claude and Gemini) and hope the model can identify not only what is on the screen, but where buttons, form fields, and interactive elements are located. Each image consumes thousands of tokens and can have a long latency. With DOM-based approaches, agents ingest raw HTML and JavaScript — a foreign language full of various tags, CSS rules, and structural markup that is irrelevant to the task at hand but still consumes context window space and inference cost.
In both cases, the agent is translating between what the website was designed for (human eyes) and what the model needs (structured data about available actions). A single product search that a human completes in seconds can require dozens of sequential agent interactions — clicking filters, scrolling pages, parsing results — each one an inference call that adds latency and cost.
How WebMCP works: Two APIs, one standard
WebMCP proposes two complementary APIs that serve as a bridge between websites and AI agents.
The Declarative API handles standard actions that can be defined directly in existing HTML forms. For organizations with well-structured forms already in production, this pathway requires minimal additional work; by adding tool names and descriptions to existing form markup, developers can make those forms callable by agents. If your HTML forms are already clean and well-structured, you are probably already 80% of the way there.
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The Imperative API handles more complex, dynamic interactions that require JavaScript execution. This is where developers define richer tool schemas — conceptually similar to the tool definitions sent to the OpenAI or Anthropic API endpoints, but running entirely client-side in the browser. Through the registerTool(), a website can expose functions like searchProducts(query, filters) or orderPrints(copies, page_size) with full parameter schemas and natural language descriptions.
The key insight is that a single tool call through WebMCP can replace what might have been dozens of browser-use interactions. An e-commerce site that registers a searchProducts tool lets the agent make one structured function call and receive structured JSON results, rather than having the agent click through filter dropdowns, scroll through paginated results, and screenshot each page.
The enterprise case: Cost, reliability, and the end of fragile scraping
For IT decision makers evaluating agentic AI deployments, WebMCP addresses three persistent pain points simultaneously.
Cost reduction is the most immediately quantifiable benefit. By replacing sequences of screenshot captures, multimodal inference calls, and iterative DOM parsing with single structured tool calls, organizations can expect significant reductions in token consumption.
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Reliability improves because agents are no longer guessing about page structure. When a website explicitly publishes a tool contract — “here are the functions I support, here are their parameters, here is what they return” — the agent operates with certainty rather than inference. Failed interactions due to UI changes, dynamic content loading, or ambiguous element identification are largely eliminated for any interaction covered by a registered tool.
Development velocity accelerates because web teams can leverage their existing front-end JavaScript rather than standing up separate backend infrastructure. The specification emphasizes that any task a user can accomplish through a page’s UI can be made into a tool by reusing much of the page’s existing JavaScript code. Teams do not need to learn new server frameworks or maintain separate API surfaces for agent consumers.
Human-in-the-loop by design, not an afterthought
A critical architectural decision separates WebMCP from the fully autonomous agent paradigm that has dominated recent headlines. The standard is explicitly designed around cooperative, human-in-the-loop workflows — not unsupervised automation.
According to Khushal Sagar, a staff software engineer for Chrome, the WebMCP specification identifies three pillars that underpin this philosophy.
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Context: All the data agents need to understand what the user is doing, including content that is often not currently visible on screen.
Capabilities: Actions the agent can take on the user’s behalf, from answering questions to filling out forms.
Coordination: Controlling the handoff between user and agent when the agent encounters situations it cannot resolve autonomously.
The specification’s authors at Google and Microsoft illustrate this with a shopping scenario: a user named Maya asks her AI assistant to help find an eco-friendly dress for a wedding. The agent suggests vendors, opens a browser to a dress site, and discovers the page exposes WebMCP tools like getDresses() and showDresses(). When Maya’s criteria go beyond the site’s basic filters, the agent calls those tools to fetch product data, uses its own reasoning to filter for “cocktail-attire appropriate,” and then calls showDresses()to update the page with only the relevant results. It’s a fluid loop of human taste and agent capability, exactly the kind of collaborative browsing that WebMCP is designed to enable.
This is not a headless browsing standard. The specification explicitly states that headless and fully autonomous scenarios are non-goals. For those use cases, the authors point to existing protocols like Google’s Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol. WebMCP is about the browser — where the user is present, watching, and collaborating.
Not a replacement for MCP, but a complement
WebMCP is not a replacement for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, despite sharing a conceptual lineage and a portion of its name. It does not follow the JSON-RPC specification that MCP uses for client-server communication. Where MCP operates as a back-end protocol connecting AI platforms to service providers through hosted servers, WebMCP operates entirely client-side within the browser.
The relationship is complementary. A travel company might maintain a back-end MCP server for direct API integrations with AI platforms like ChatGPT or Claude, while simultaneously implementing WebMCP tools on its consumer-facing website so that browser-based agents can interact with its booking flow in the context of a user’s active session. The two standards serve different interaction patterns without conflict.
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The distinction matters for enterprise architects. Back-end MCP integrations are appropriate for service-to-service automation where no browser UI is needed. WebMCP is appropriate when the user is present and the interaction benefits from shared visual context — which describes the majority of consumer-facing web interactions that enterprises care about.
What comes next: From flag to standard
WebMCP is currently available in Chrome 146 Canary behind the “WebMCP for testing” flag at chrome://flags. Developers can join the Chrome Early Preview Program for access to documentation and demos. Other browsers have not yet announced implementation timelines, though Microsoft’s active co-authorship of the specification suggests Edge support is likely.
Industry observers expect formal browser announcements by mid-to-late 2026, with Google Cloud Next and Google I/O as probable venues for broader rollout announcements. The specification is transitioning from community incubation within the W3C to a formal draft — a process that historically takes months but signals serious institutional commitment.
The comparison that Sagar has drawn is instructive: WebMCP aims to become the USB-C of AI agent interactions with the web. A single, standardized interface that any agent can plug into, replacing the current tangle of bespoke scraping strategies and fragile automation scripts.
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Whether that vision is realized depends on adoption — by both browser vendors and web developers. But with Google and Microsoft jointly shipping code, the W3C providing institutional scaffolding, and Chrome 146 already running the implementation behind a flag, WebMCP has cleared the most difficult hurdle any web standard faces: getting from proposal to working software.
It is no secret that we often use and abuse bash to write things that ought to be in a different language. But bash does have its attractions. In the modern world, it is practically everywhere. It can also be very expressive, but perhaps hard to read.
We’ve talked about Amber before, a language that is made to be easier to read and write, but transpiles to bash so it can run anywhere. The FOSDEM 2026 conference featured a paper by [Daniele Scasciafratte] that shows how to best use Amber. If you prefer slides to a video, you can read a copy of the presentation.
For an example, here’s a typical Amber script. It compiles fully to a somewhat longer bash script:
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import * from "std/env"
fun example(value:Num = 1) {
if 1 > 0 {
let numbers = [value, value]
let sum = 0
loop i in numbers {
sum += numbers[i]
}
echo "it's " + "me"
return sum
}
fail 1
}
echo example(1) failed {
echo "What???"
is_command("echo")
}
The slides have even more examples. The language seems somewhat Python-like, and you can easily figure out most of it from reading the examples. While bash is nearly universal, the programs a script might use may not be. If you have it, the Amber code will employ bshchk to check dependencies before execution.
According to the slides, zsh support is on the way, too. Overall, it looks like it would be a great tool if you have to deploy with bash or even if you just want an easier way to script.
We’ve looked at Amber before. Besides, there are a ton of crazy things you can do with bash.
A critical vulnerability in the WPvivid Backup & Migration plugin for WordPress, installed on more than 900,000 websites, can be exploited to achieve remote code execution by uploading arbitrary files without authentication.
The security issue is tracked as CVE-2026-1357 and received a severity score of 9.8. It impacts all versions of the plugin up to 0.9.123 and could lead to a complete website takeover.
Despite the severity of the issue, researchers at WordPress security company Defiant say that only sites with the non-default “receive backup from another site” option enabled are critically impacted.
Furthermore, attackers have a 24-hour exploitation window, which is the validity of the generated key required by other sites to send backup files.
This requirement limits realistic exposure; however, the plugin is commonly used for site migrations and backup transfers between hosts, so website administrators are very likely to enable this feature at some point, at least temporarily.
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Researcher Lucas Montes (NiRoX) reported the vulnerability to Defiant on January 12. The root cause is the improper error handling in RSA decryption, combined with a lack of path sanitization.
Specifically, when the ‘openssl_private_decrypt()’ function fails, the plugin does not halt execution and instead passes the failed result (false) to the AES (Rijndael) routine.
The cryptographic library treats this as a string of null bytes, creating a predictable encryption key that an attacker can use to craft malicious payloads that the plugin would accept.
Additionally, the plugin failed to properly sanitize uploaded file names, allowing directory traversal. This allows writing files outside the intended backup directory and uploading malicious PHP files for remote code execution.
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Defiant notified the vendor, WPVividPlugins, on January 22, following validation of the provided proof-of-concept exploit. A security update addressing CVE-2026-1357 was released in version 0.9.124 on January 28.
The fix includes adding a check to stop execution if RSA decryption fails, adding filename sanitization, and restricting uploads to allowed backup file types only, such as ZIP, GZ, TAR, and SQL.
Users of the WPvivid Backup & Migration WordPress plugin should be aware of the risks associated with the vulnerability and upgrade to version 0.9.124 as soon as possible.
Modern IT infrastructure moves faster than manual workflows can handle.
In this new Tines guide, learn how your team can reduce hidden manual delays, improve reliability through automated response, and build and scale intelligent workflows on top of tools you already use.
Completely redesigned with upgraded components and slightly better fit than XM5
Top-notch sound that’s accurate, well-balanced and natural
Excellent noise-canceling and voice-calling performance with 8 microphones (4 in each bud)
Decent battery life
Cons
Pretty pricey
Included eartips may not be a good match for all ears
Android-only spatial audio features
When I first heard that Sony was coming out with new sixth-generation 1000X earbuds, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Companies like Bose and Apple have basically stuck with the same design — or a similar one anyway — for their flagship noise-canceling buds for the last few years. But Sony’s new WF-1000XM6 buds are completely overhauled inside and out and look nothing like the models that preceded them.
The end result is impressive: While expensive at $330, the WF-1000XM6 not only features great sound and excellent noise canceling, but their voice-calling performance is also top-notch. Are they the best noise-canceling earbuds out there right now? Aside from a caveat or two, I’d say so, though the AirPods Pro 3 remain a safer bet for Apple users from a fit and features standpoint (not to mention a lower price tag).
The WF-1000XM6’s design shift
Both the buds and their case are a little plain-looking. I’m OK with that, and from a practical standpoint, I liked that the case is flat on both its top and bottom, making it easy to place down on a flat surface, such as a wireless charging pad.
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The XM5s have a partially glossy finish, but these have a full matte finish, which I prefer. That said, they don’t have anything to distinguish them as the XM4s did with their eye-catching copper ring that served as a microphone housing.
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Sony calls this color silver.
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David Carnoy/CNET
More intricately molded than your typical stemless buds, Sony says the new shape (11% slimmer overall than the XM5s and more aerodynamic to reduce wind noise) conforms better to the natural curves of your ears, and I agree with that. I also appreciated the little ridge along the top side of each bud that allows you to grip it better, so the bud is less likely to slip from your fingers when putting them in or taking them out.
The buds have touch controls that are nicely responsive and are equipped with ear-detection sensors that pause audio when you take a bud out of your ear and resume playback when you put it back in. They’re IPX4 splashproof and seem fine for gym use, though I probably wouldn’t recommend them for running because I wasn’t certain they’d stay in my ears with a lot of jostling.
The buds now have eight microphones (four in each bud) instead of six.
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David Carnoy/CNET
Like a lot of high-end buds, they’re a little beefy and will stick out of your ears a bit. That didn’t really bother me. But once again, I can’t say I was thrilled with Sony’s included eartips, which are the same firm foam tips that were included with the XM5s. I was able to get a fairly secure fit with them, but I didn’t get a truly tight seal, according to the seal test in Sony’s SoundConnect app for iOS and Android. I didn’t find the tips super comfortable, either, so I went with a pair of large-size silicone tips from another set of buds I’d tested (I favor tips from Sennheiser and Bowers & Wilkins, which are wider and more rounded). With the tip change, sound quality and noise-canceling performance improved noticeably, which makes me wonder why Sony doesn’t include more tip options.
To be clear, many people should get a good fit from one of the included tips. But my ears fall into the 10% to 20% of ears that just aren’t a great match for Sony’s tips. And, as you may have read or heard me say too many times, it’s crucial to get a tight seal to get optimal sound quality and noise-canceling performance. That’s especially true of these buds because they deliver some real wow factor if you get a tight seal.
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Sony’s tip on the left, my own on the right. Sound quality and noise-canceling performance improved when I swapped in my own tips and got a tight seal.
David Carnoy/CNET
Upgraded components lead to better performance
Aside from the external makeover, the XM6s are upgraded on the inside with new drivers, a 3X more powerful QN3e chip with improved analog conversion technology, eight microphones — up from six — and an improved bone-conduction sensor that helps with voice-calling performance. The “HD Noise Canceling” QN3e processor is paired with Sony’s Integrated Processor V2, which now supports 32-bit processing compared with 24-bit processing. The same V2 chip is also found in Sony’s XM5 earbuds and its flagship WH-1000XM6 over-ear headphones.
Sony says the new XM6 buds feature 25% “further reduction in noise” than the XM5s, with gains made in the mid-to-high frequency range. I spent a lot of time comparing the XM6s to other leading premium noise-canceling earbuds, including Apple’s excellent AirPods Pro 3, the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (2nd Gen) and Bowers and Wilkins’ Pi8. Both the AirPods Pro 3 and QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds have superb noise canceling. Sony says the XM6s have the best noise canceling for earbuds right now, based on international testing standards.
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I compared the WF-1000XM6 buds to the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (2nd Gen).
David Carnoy/CNET
Alas, I don’t have access to expensive technical equipment to test noise-canceling performance, so I have to rely on a few less scientific tests, including comparing how well each set of buds muffles the noisy HVAC unit in my kitchen and wearing the buds in the noisy streets of New York and on the subway. In the HVAC test, they were all really close, though I thought the Sony had a very slight edge.
In the streets of New York, it’s really hard to sense that the noise canceling is any better than what you get with those competing models. All three are very close, and your experience could vary with the quality of the seal you get. It’s quite possible that these Sonys are able to muffle a wider range of frequencies with slightly more vigor, but they still can’t muffle higher frequencies as well as lower frequencies. That means you can still hear people’s voices and higher-pitched noises, albeit at significantly reduced volume levels.
I do think Sony has also made some improvements to its transparency mode. Apple’s is still the gold standard, but Sony’s now sounds quite natural at its highest setting. Previously, you had to play around with the level to find the most natural setting (the sound from the outside world was actually augmented at the highest setting).
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Sony also now has an auto ambient mode that’s similar to Apple’s Adaptive Audio mode, which automatically adjusts the level of ambient sound filtered in, depending on the level of noise around you. Plus, you can toggle on a voice pass-through mode that filters in voices while suppressing ambient noise.
The buds have a little ridge on their side that help you get a better grip on them when putting them in you ears and taking them out.
David Carnoy/CNET
Superior sound
When it comes to sound, both the AirPods Pro 3 and Bose QC Ultras sound excellent, with the Ultras sounding smooth and clean across a variety of music genres. Some people complained that the AirPods Pro 3’s sound was a little too aggressive (not enough warmth) compared with the AirPods Pro 2’s, with more dynamic bass and treble and slightly recessed mids. I preferred the AirPods Pro 3’s sound — to my ears, it has a little more clarity and definition, and I was OK with the more energetic bass. But everybody has their own sound preferences, and you can experience some listening fatigue if you feel the treble has too much sizzle or the bass kicks too hard in the wrong way.
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I think the XM6’s sound is better and more special than both the AirPods Pro 3’s and QC Ultra’s sound. Music sounds more accurate and natural with better bass extension, overall clarity and refinement, along with a wide soundstage where all the instruments seem well-placed. Additionally, I found the XM6s came across slightly more dynamic and bold-sounding than the Bowers & Wilkins Pi8 buds, which also feature accurate, natural sound for Bluetooth earbuds.
As I said, all the models mentioned here sound impressive, but the tonal quality varies a bit. While companies often talk about how their buds and headphones deliver audio the way artists intended you to hear it, some do it better than others and are able to live up to audiophile standards — or close to them anyway. Such is the case for the WF-1000X6 buds.
I tested them with an iPhone 16 Pro and a Google Pixel 9, listening to a variety of music genres on Spotify using the lossless audio setting. They handled everything with aplomb (virtually no distortion) and didn’t cause any listening fatigue. My connection was also rock solid with no Bluetooth hiccups. While I didn’t experience, any major connectivity issues with the XM5s, some people apparently did, and Sony says it equipped the XM6s with a new wireless antenna that’s 1.5x larger than XM5’s antenna to improve the wireless connection, particularly in crowded signal areas (there are certain intersections in new York City that have a lot of wireless interference and can cause Bluetooth hiccups).
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Enlarge Image
Testing the WF-1000XM6 earbuds on the bone-chilling streets of New York.
David Carnoy/CNET
Top-notch voice-calling performance
They’re also hard to beat for voice-calling performance, which I also grade an A. Callers said my voice sounded mostly natural and clear, and they didn’t really hear any background noise when I wasn’t speaking (and only a little when I did speak). If you want to hear a test, check out the one I did with fellow CNET editor Josh Goldman in my video review of the XM6 buds.
It’s worth noting that the buds have a side-tone feature, so you can hear your voice in the buds when you’re talking. And like previous 1000X models, these have Sony’s speak-to-chat feature, which lowers the volume of your audio and goes into ambient mode when you start to have a conversation with someone.
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Watch this: Sony WF-1000XM6 Earbuds Review: Supreme Performance, Subdued Design
Also, Sony has redesigned the venting of the earbuds to increase airflow and reduce internal noises such as “footsteps and chewing sound.” I did notice some improvements there (yes, a lot of people don’t like having their ears feel occluded and hearing their footsteps).
As far as audio codecs go, the buds support AAC, SBC and LDAC as well as multipoint Bluetooth pairing, which allows pairing to two devices to the buds simultaneously. Sony says the buds are “ready for LE Audio,” which means that at some point they should support the LC3 audio codec and Auracast broadcast audio with a firmware update.
Sony has continued to streamline its SoundConnect app for iOS and Android, so it’s a little more user-friendly, though there are still a lot of settings to play around with, including scene-based listening settings and various equalizer settings.
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Battery life is rated at up to 8 hours at moderate volume levels, with an extra two charges in the case. That’s a little better than what competing models offer and, again, the case supports wireless charging.
Sony WF-1000XM6 final thoughts
The XM6s are noticeably improved across the board from the XM5s, which I still like. And while these buds are certainly expensive, they’re pretty hard to beat from a performance standpoint across all the key areas, including sound quality, noise canceling and voice-calling, which is why I’ve awarded them an Editors’ Choice.
The one thing I can’t tell you is just how well they’ll fit your ears. While the AirPods Pro 3 don’t offer quite as good sound quality, they’re less expensive and are in some ways a safer pick for Apple users, as their lightweight stem design tends to fit a wide range of ears comfortably. They also have more features overall, including a Hearing Aid mode, Apple’s new Live Translation feature and personalized spatial audio (Sony’s spatial audio features are Android-only).
That said, if you’re able to get a good fit with a comfortable seal, the XM6s are truly impressive earbuds. They may just be the best out there at the moment.
Building on its flagship 1528 series, Arendal Sound is back with the new 1610 loudspeaker series; a deliberately scaled-down range that targets serious performance without dragging flagship pricing along for the ride. Made in Norway and clearly engineered with restraint rather than corner-cutting, the four-model 1610 lineup slots into one of the most competitive segments in high-performance audio, where brands like Focal, DALI, Paradigm, Wharfedale, and KEF already fight tooth and nail for attention.
With prices ranging from $2,300 to $7,600 per pair and no subwoofers in sight for now, the 1610 series looks designed to lure buyers who want real three-way muscle, controlled dispersion, and home theater credibility without jumping straight to Arendal’s no-prisoners flagship tier. In other words, this isn’t about going cheaper, it’s about going smarter.
1610 Tower 8
New 1610 Series Models & Pricing
Arendal Sound’s 1610 series launches with four distinct three-way designs aimed at delivering rich, controlled sound across music and home theater. Here’s the lineup with U.S. MSRP (per pair):
1610 Center – Dedicated 3-way center-channel speaker — $2,300
1610 Center
Cabinet Design
The 1610 Series uses high-density HDF cabinets engineered to prioritize structural rigidity and acoustic control. A 46 mm (1.8-inch) thick curved front baffle is designed to optimize driver placement, improving phase coherency, transient response, and time alignment. Internally, extensive bracing and damping are employed to suppress cabinet resonance and unwanted vibration. Bass reflex ports are carefully tuned for smooth airflow, helping the speakers deliver controlled, articulate low-frequency performance without excess noise or bloom.
1610 Slim 8
Tweeter
High frequencies are handled by a 28 mm aluminum-magnesium tweeter designed to balance detail, extension, and dynamic capability. The tweeter is mounted in a controlled-directivity waveguide, which helps manage dispersion and improve integration with the midrange. This approach is intended to maintain clarity and precision while ensuring high-frequency energy is evenly and accurately directed toward the listening position.
Midrange
The tweeter is paired with a 5-inch carbon-fiber midrange driver that uses a light, stiff cone to maintain accuracy and dynamic range while keeping distortion in check. Tuned to handle the critical vocal and instrumental range, the midrange driver is designed to sound natural and unforced, integrating smoothly with the tweeter through the crossover to deliver a coherent and well-balanced presentation.
Røst Essence Acoustic Core
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The tweeter and midrange are housed within Arendal’s Røst Essence Acoustic Core, a design focused on controlling dispersion, phase coherence, and overall driver integration. Built around an elliptically shaped waveguide, the assembly positions the tweeter and midrange as close together as physically possible. This layout minimizes vertical lobing and promotes smooth, consistent vertical dispersion, contributing to a larger, more stable soundstage and more uniform listening experience across seating positions.
Low Frequency Drivers
For the 1610 Series, Arendal employs 8-inch aluminum low-frequency drivers featuring a surround structure with internal ribbing for improved control and durability. This design works in concert with the acoustically optimized HDF cabinet, helping the speakers deliver high output capability, strong dynamic performance, and deep, well-controlled bass without sacrificing clarity.
Jan Ove Lassesen, Founder of Arendal Sound, said: “Since we launched 1528, many of our customers have asked us for the same confidence, build quality, and sound philosophy in a more approachable system. With 1610, we’re deliberately moving the reference point. This is high-end sound built for customers who expect real value for their money—not inflated pricing justified by marketing narratives or tradition.”
Arendal Sound may still fly under the radar in the U.S., but the 1610 Series makes its intent clear: deliver much of the company’s flagship engineering mindset at prices that don’t require a leap of faith or a second mortgage. What’s unique here is the balance. These are fully realized three-way designs with serious cabinet work, controlled directivity, and a coherent family voicing that works just as well for two-channel listening as it does in a dedicated home theater.
The obvious omission is a matching 1610 subwoofer, which feels like a missed opportunity, even if Arendal’s 1961 ($1,050) and 1723 ($1,800) subs fill the gap. The 1610 Series is for listeners who want high-end fundamentals; build quality, dispersion control, and dynamic capability without paying for prestige pricing or marketing mythology. If a dedicated 1610 sub eventually joins the lineup, this series could become a very hard one to ignore.
Amazon engineers have been pushing back against internal policies that steer them toward Kiro, the company’s in-house AI coding assistant, and away from Anthropic’s Claude Code for production work, according to a Business Insider report based on internal messages. About 1,500 employees endorsed the formal adoption of Claude Code in one internal forum thread, and some pointed out the awkwardness of being asked to sell the tool through AWS’s Bedrock platform while not being permitted to use it themselves.
Kiro runs on Anthropic’s Claude models but uses Amazon’s own tooling, and the company says roughly 70% of its software engineers used it at least once in January. Amazon says there is no explicit ban on Claude Code but applies stricter requirements for production use.
CEO Mike Doustdar told Bloomberg its Athlone site will make the drug for non-US markets.
Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk is set to expand its Irish production facility in Co Roscommon, according to Bloomberg.
New investment in its Athlone site will see it manufacturing weight loss drug Wegovy for markets outside the US, CEO Mike Doustdar told the publication.
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He said that more than 240,000 Americans are already taking the drug since it was launched in January, but did not reveal the scale or timing of investment planned for Athlone.
Novo is facing strong competition in the weight loss space from rivals such as Eli Lilly, which also has Irish production facilities geared towards this market.
Last autumn, Novo implemented job cuts, both voluntary and mandatory, at the facility in Monksland, Athlone as part of a global round of layoffs.
A company spokesperson told SiliconRepublic.com at the time that Novo was “announcing a company-wide transformation to simplify our organisation, improve decision-making speed and reallocate resources towards the company’s growth opportunities in diabetes and obesity”.
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In 2024, the company purchased council lands worth €1.55m to further expand its Monksland site. This week, it said it plans to begin offering Wegovy in vials, rather than injection pens.
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Kent Survival arrives in a stretch of woodland in a truck with ten boxes of huge plastic bricks, a real-life LEGO project, and sets out to build a livable shelter out of them. These bricks are essentially the same as their traditional LEGO counterparts, but scaled up to a much larger size: they come in 8-stud and 4-stud versions, totaling 1400 pieces. His idea was simple: build the thing and see if it was possible to turn a child’s play into a real shelter.
Before he could begin building his shelter, the uneven ground in the woodland returned to haunt him, since the terrain was so uneven that he had to construct a temporary platform out of planks of wood. He cut and arranged them to level the base, but it was a constant battle to keep it solid because the pieces remained separate and required a lot of fussing to keep them from slipping on the dirt humps.
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Building with these oversized blocks was different than working with the smaller versions, of course, because the square block shapes do not lend themselves to the interlocking stagger that makes smaller LEGO builds so strong, so he had to be extremely careful about which blocks he placed each time, checking for any weak points in the structure.
He began by building his walls with the larger 8-stud blocks at the bottom to provide added solidity, then blended in some of the 4-stud pieces as he moved up to maintain balance. Corners were particularly difficult and required extra care to ensure that everything remained square. He eventually managed to erect an 8-stud-wide doorway and three windows; despite knowing where they were going all along, he left them open until the main construction was completed.
Then came the roof, which was the most difficult part since he went with a simple pitched design, but the real challenge was having it sit perfectly. This section kept sagging and leaning to one side or the other, and he had to make numerous adjustments to get it exactly right. It needed five internal braces to keep it up, and even then, it bowed inward somewhat. Every now and then, a support would move or topple, requiring him to do a fast patch to keep the entire structure upright.
After three hours of assembling bricks and another hour tinkering with details, the basic shape of the shelter was complete. Just as he was completing, the rain began to fall, the wind increased, and the light faded quickly. He filled the holes in the walls and roof with clear Gorilla tape before stretching and taping down greenhouse material to keep the rain out. The end product worked well for one night, but it was not a long-term answer.
Getting inside the confined room was a bit of a squeeze, but it felt like being in a little camper, so he set up a ground sheet on the majority of the floor, hung a bivvie table along the wall, and laid out his sleeping mat (albeit it was a bit of a squeeze to fit). He also turned on a gas heater (he selected gas over open flames because he didn’t want to risk melting his valuable plastic) and set up a meter to keep track of the oxygen and gas levels in the confined enclosure.
It survived the night without falling apart, albeit needing a lot of labor, regular changes, and a little luck against the weather and the constraints of the materials he was using. Kent packed up the next morning, satisfied with the experiment; he said it was a lot of fun, but it also served as a lesson that even large blocks can be used to make a temporary shelter if you put in the work.
It wasn’t that long ago that wireless earphones were a punchline. “Truly wireless” (TWS) only made it worse. A gold rush followed, quality collapsed, and the market flooded with flimsy, rebranded ODM junk sold at premium prices. Enough of it crossed my desk that I eventually stopped playing along and checked out of the mainstream audio scene altogether. It felt generic, cynical, and value poor. For a long stretch, that assessment was dead accurate.
Then something shifted. Quietly at first. The latest generation of truly wireless earbuds is no longer about gimmicks or excuses. They are genuinely good. In some cases, uncomfortably good. Sony enters that moment with the WF-1000XM6, a product they absolutely had to get right. Apple, Bose, and Sennheiser are all fighting for the same customers, the same mindshare, and the same billions.
There is no margin for a misstep. Strip away the overwhelming technical sophistication and the takeaway is simple and slightly unsettling for traditional audiophiles. TWS earbuds can actually sound quite good… even excellent. Good enough to force a serious rethink about value in personal audio. So did Sony stick the landing when it mattered most?
Sony WF-1000XM6 Wireless Noise Cancelling Earbuds in Platinum Silver
What is it?
Today (February 12, 2026) Sony released its new flagship wireless noise cancelling earbuds, the WF-1000XM6 for $329.99, which replace the WF-1000XM5 ($299.99) from mid-2023 — a previous Editors’ Choice winner. The street price of the older model now typically resides around $250, so it’s reasonable to ask: should you spend $80 more on the new model, or should you upgrade if you already own the WF-1000XM5? Let’s take a look.
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Tip: It’s easy to be confused by Sony’s model numbers. The Sony WH-1000XM6 (notice the “H”) is their latest over-ear wireless headphone we’ve also reviewed.
Unboxing
What’s Changed?
From a core feature standpoint, the WF-1000XM6 doesn’t reinvent Sony’s strategy. Codec support remains unchanged, covering SBC, AAC, LDAC, and LC3, with multipoint connectivity supported out of the box. Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) and Auracast functionality are also included, which were added to the XM5 late last year via a software update. Wireless charging returns, IPX4 water resistance is unchanged, and the earbuds are offered in two finishes: black and platinum silver.
The noteworthy changes exist mostly under the hood. The WF-1000XM6 introduces a new audio processor, paired with new driver units and a revised acoustic tuning. Call quality has also been improved thanks to additional mics with AI-based beamforming and a new bone-conduction sensor that further stabilizes voice detection in challenging environments. This helps to identify the wearer’s own voice while speaking, and eliminates other voices.
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Active noise cancellation (ANC) sees meaningful refinement as well. Sony’s updated Adaptive Noise Canceling Optimizer is better at handling changing acoustic conditions, allowing the WF-1000XM6 to maintain stronger and more consistent noise reduction across a wider range of environments.
Top: WF-1000XM6 | Bottom: WF-1000XM5
Physically, the earbuds have been redesigned for improved comfort, with subtle shape changes that make long listening sessions more manageable. Battery life remains unchanged at up to 8 hours per charge, with a total of 24 hours including the charging case—still competitive, if not class-leading, given the level of onboard processing at work.
The WF-1000XM6 uses four microphones per side, up from three on the WF-1000XM5, all embedded cleanly into the semi-matte earbud shell. Those microphones feed Sony’s new QN3e audio processor; a meaningful step forward in both raw performance. Sony puts that hardware to work with genuinely impressive results. Call quality is great for a truly wireless earbud. Even basic voice memos sound clean and intelligible.
Improved beamforming and a substantial upgrade to Sony’s onboard AI voice isolation make the WF-1000XM6 practical in places where most earbuds and headphones fail. I took calls while walking through crowded malls and sitting in busy coffee shops, handling meetings and interviews without issue. Even in noise-sensitive environments like a doctor’s office waiting room, calls are perfectly manageable. The WF-1000XM6 also captures speech reliably at lower speaking volumes, avoiding the clipped or hollow sound that still plagues many competitors.
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The WF-1000XM6’s charging case mirrors the earbuds’ restrained, monochromatic aesthetic. It uses a simple vertical housing with magnetic seating and traditional pin charging, keeping everything secure and reliable. Charging is handled via USB-C, with wireless charging support for those who prefer to ditch cables entirely.
Battery Life & Wireless Performance
I consistently logged 7.5 to 8 hours of listening time from the WF-1000XM6 on a single charge with no intermediate top ups. The charging case provided a little more than two full recharges, translating to an effective 24 hours of total listening time, depending on volume level, ANC usage, and ambient temperature. That’s an impressive result given how much real-time sensing and processing the WF-1000XM6 is doing in the background. Long flights, extended road trips, and even an entire night of sleep are all well within reach on a single charge. And when you do need more juice, a quick stint back in the case gets you up and running fast.
Connectivity is another strong point. The WF-1000XM6 delivers excellent range and stability. I was able to move more than 20 feet away, through multiple walls, and even step outside my home without a single hiccup when set to prioritize connection strength. Even while streaming high fidelity audio over LDAC, the WF-1000XM6 never once buffered or dropped out. That kind of reliability is no longer optional at this level, and Sony got the memo.
Real World Noise Cancellation
A major area of improvement Sony highlights with the WF-1000XM6 is its ability to process rapid changes in background noise and reduce transient intrusions. That has long been a weak spot for ANC, which traditionally works best in environments with predictable noise patterns like airplanes and trains. Sudden, sharp, sounds have a habit of weaseling through ANC’s isolation.
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While it’s still not perfect, the WF-1000XM6 adapts noticeably faster than many current competitors, including earbuds like the Master & Dynamic MW09. It’s also a clear step up from earlier generations such as the MW08, MW07, and even Sony’s own WF-1000XM5. One of my go to real world tests is sitting near the ordering line at a favorite coffee shop, a place that reliably fills with loud groups of office workers on lunch break.
Sudden bursts of laughter in that environment usually cut right through most ANC implementations. The WF-1000XM6 handled this better than expected, significantly reducing their presence and, in several cases, nearly erasing those outbursts altogether.
Companion App That Actually Improves the WF-1000XM6 Experience
Sony’s companion app is called Sound Connect, and in typical Sony fashion it prioritizes stability and functionality over visual flair. The design is unapologetically utilitarian, but it gets the job done. On first launch, the app walks you through the WF-1000XM6’s touch and gesture controls with a clear and genuinely helpful visual guide.
From there, control is deep and refreshingly flexible. Nearly every aspect of the WF-1000XM6’s behavior can be configured, and anything you don’t like can be disabled outright. Think gesture controls are dumb? Turn them off. Hate touch controls altogether? No problem. For power users, the menus are logically organized and easy to navigate, avoiding the clutter and guesswork that plague many competing apps. Sony also allows control schemes to change based on device state. As an example, the WF-1000XM6 can automatically disable touch controls when you’re lying down in bed; a small but thoughtful detail that shows this app was designed for real world use.
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Proper EQ Support?
If you’re not satisfied with the WF-1000XM6’s stock tuning, the Sound Connect app includes a built-in 10 band EQ. EQ settings are saved directly to the earbuds, so switching from your phone to a PC doesn’t reset your sonic tweaks. That’s a small but important detail that many competitors still get wrong.
For listeners who don’t want to dive into manual tuning, Sony also preloads a selection of sound profiles that can be toggled quickly. None of them improved on the stock tuning for my ears, but they’re there if you feel like experimenting or tailoring the sound to specific genres or use cases.
Do You Still Need Dedicated HiFi Gear?
As someone who’s been immersed in the audiophile scene for well over a decade, the question almost feels laughable. Of course I need high-end gear! I demand a lot from my earphones, headphones, and speakers. After all, fidelity matters. And, after spending a few weeks with the WF-1000XM6, it’s hard to imagine many listeners walking away needing more. Right out of the box, both the tuning and the technical performance are leagues better than I expected.
Sonic Performance
The WF-1000XM6 delivers a mild ‘W’ shaped sound signature, with a gentle emphasis on mid and sub bass, a lift through the upper midrange, and a smooth upward slope from the lower treble into the upper treble. Sony clearly aimed for an accessible stock tuning and wisely avoided aggressive upper treble peaks that can lead to fatigue. There’s no sharpness and no sibilance to speak of, which is especially welcome for treble sensitive listeners like myself.
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Sony also addressed one of the most common complaints about the WF-1000XM5 by reworking the bass response on the WF-1000XM6. The bloated, mid bass heavy presentation is gone. In its place is a more disciplined and better balanced blend of mid and sub bass. Electronic tracks like “Miracle Man” (Zeds Dead Remix) hit with authority and energy, landing just on the fun side of neutral without losing control. The new driver is genuinely resolving, and dense mixes make it clear how far truly wireless IEMs have come. Subtle background details are rendered cleanly, and contrasting textures are separated in a natural, unforced way.
While dedicated audiophile IEMs can still offer better price to performance or extract a bit more detail and immersion, the WF-1000XM6 isn’t nearly as far behind a typical hi-fi enthusiast’s setup as many believe. The added value of features like ANC and Gemini integration make a real-world difference–and that’s the force for pause.
The Bottom Line
The Sony WF-1000XM6 isn’t pretending to replace a dedicated audiophile IEM and that honesty matters. What it delivers instead is one of the most complete and convincing daily driver packages in the truly wireless space. Sound quality is far more refined than most mainstream alternatives, active noise cancellation is among the best available right now, call quality is genuinely class leading, and battery life is strong enough for real world travel and long days without anxiety. Add reliable multipoint, LDAC support, wireless charging, and one of the most flexible companion apps in the category, and the feature stack is hard to fault.
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The drawbacks are mostly about expectations. At $330, these aren’t cheap, and listeners chasing ultimate resolution per dollar will still find better value in wired audiophile IEMs. They also don’t radically extend battery life beyond the previous generation, and Sony’s app, while powerful, remains visually utilitarian. None of that undermines what the WF-1000XM6 does exceptionally well.
The WF-1000XM6 earns an eCoustics Editors’ Choice award for 2026 because Sony nailed the delicate balance between sonic performance and real-world usability. These buds are for listeners stepping up from AirPods, Galaxy Buds, or older Sony models who want real sonic credibility without giving up convenience. It’s also for audiophiles who need a no-compromise wireless option for travel, work, and daily use and don’t want to feel like they’re slumming it. In the current TWS landscape, few products blend sound quality, noise cancellation, call performance, and real-world usability this effectively. Highly recommended.
If you’ve been even casually following NASA’s return to the Moon, you’re likely aware of the recent Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) for the Artemis II mission. You probably also heard that things didn’t go quite to plan: although the test was ultimately completed and the towering Space Launch System (SLS) rocket was fully loaded with propellant, a persistent liquid hydrogen leak and a few other incidental issues lead the space agency to delay further testing for at least a month while engineers make adjustments to the vehicle.
This constitutes a minor disappointment for fans of spaceflight, but when you’re strapping four astronauts onto more than five million pounds of propellants, there’s no such thing as being too cautious. In fact, there’s a school of thought that says if a WDR doesn’t shake loose some gremlins, you probably weren’t trying hard enough. Simulations and estimates only get you so far, the real thing is always more complex, and there’s bound to be something you didn’t account for ahead of time.
Do Not Pass Go
So what exactly is a Wet Dress Rehearsal? In the most basic of terms, its a practice launch where everyone involved does everything exactly the way they would on a real launch, except when the countdown hits zero, nothing actually happens.
It’s the final test of the vehicle and the ground support systems, the last check of fit and function before launch. But there’a also a logistical element. In other words, it’s not just a test of whether or not the vehicle can be fully fueled, it’s also a verification of how long that process takes. Many of the operations that are performed in the WDR would have already been tested in isolation, but this may be the first, and only, time to practice running them concurrently with all of the other elements of the countdown.
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A real-time graphic displayed propellant load status during the Wet Dress Rehearsal live stream.
There’s also the human element. Hundreds of individuals have a part to play as the clock ticks down to zero, from the team in mission control to the driver of the astronaut transport vehicle. This is where the Wet Dress Rehearsal truly earns it name. In a sense, launching a rocket is a bit like a theater production. Every player needs to not only have their individual role memorized, but they need to work together effectively with the larger ensemble on the big night.
Although a WDR is meant to simulate an actual launch as closely as possible, the rules are slightly different. If the rocket was actually going to be released there are other variables to contend with, such as the launch window, which is the period of time in which the rocket can actually leave the pad to reach its intended orbit. On a real launch, a delay significant enough to keep the vehicle from lifting off during its pre-determined launch window would generally result in an automatic abort. There is no such constraint for a rehearsal however, which gives teams more flexibility to conduct tests and repair work.
It should be noted that the Artemis II astronauts were not aboard the vehicle for the recent WDR, although ground teams did simulate the process of loading the crew into the Orion capsule. This is partly for the safety of the astronauts should something go wrong during the rehearsal, but is also due to the fact that the Moon-bound crew is kept in quarantine until the actual launch day to reduce the likelihood they will get sick during the mission.
Light the Fires
As mentioned above, for the purposes of the Wet Dress Rehearsal, nothing actually happens when the launch clock hits zero. It’s a test of the pre-launch activities, so actually starting up the engines isn’t part of the exercise.
But of course, testing the engines is an important aspect of launch preparation as well. Such a test is generally referred to as a static fire, where the engines are briefly run while the vehicle is physically held down so as not to leave the pad. Operationally, a wet dress rehearsal could proceed directly into a static fire. On the other hand, a full WDR is not required to perform a static fire.
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An RS-25 engine during a test run.
While static fire tests are common for modern rockets such as the Falcon 9, NASA has decided not to conduct them during the Artemis I and II missions. The SLS rocket uses lightly modified RS-25 Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs), which are not only flight proven, but were individually tested before integration with the vehicle. There is also an argument to be made that a full-up static fire on the SLS, like the Space Shuttle before it, isn’t truly possible as the vehicle’s Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) can only be ignited once.
The Artemis I rocket did however conduct what NASA calls a Green Run back in 2021. This saw the first stage of the SLS fire its four RS-25 engines for eight minutes to simulate an orbital launch. The first attempt at the Green Run saw the engines shut down prematurely, but they did run for the full duration in a subsequent test.
Although such a test wasn’t conducted for Artemis II, and are not expected for any of the future SLS rockets, NASA is preparing for a Green Run test on the Exploration Upper Stage (EUS). This is an upgraded second stage for the SLS which is intended to support more ambitious missions after the Artemis III landing, although the timeline and status of those missions is tenuous at best.
The Road to the Moon
According to NASA’s latest update, the issues during the Artemis II Wet Dress Rehearsal has pushed the testing campaign back until at least March, at which point they will run a second WDR. But that certainly doesn’t mean it will be the last.
While admittedly no two missions are the same, Artemis I went through four WDRs before it flew. Even then, the last one was aborted before the countdown was completed. Interestingly it was a hydrogen leak that caused that final rehearsal to be cut short, indicating that it may be a more dynamic problem than NASA realized at the time.
Even if the second WDR for Artemis II goes off without a hitch next month, that doesn’t mean the actual launch won’t be hit with its own delays due to technical glitches, poor weather, or any one of a myriad of other possible issues. Getting a rocket off the ground is never easy, and it only gets harder when there are humans onboard and the destination is farther than anyone has flown since the 1970s. An almost endless number of things need to go exactly right before we’ll see Artemis II lift off the pad, but when it goes, you definitely won’t want to miss it.
