If you just need a reliable Windows laptop for everyday use, this Lenovo deal is a genuinely good price – it’s an easy recommendation for remote and hybrid workers, and for my money, it ticks all the boxes for general business work.

So, right now, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3i has dropped to £499 (was £599) at Argos. For an all-rounder business laptop, this one of the best budget picks around for under £500.

Inside, the machine is equipped with an efficient Intel Core i5 13420H processor and 16GB RAM, so essential office tasks, photo editing, browsing, and streaming won’t be a problem – no slowdowns or sluggishness here.

This is a budget-friendly configuration built around Intel’s Core i5-13420H, an 8-core, 12-thread chip from the 13th-gen Raptor Lake-H family, with four performance cores boosting up to 4.6GHz and four efficiency cores.

The 15.3in WUXGA (1920×1200) IPS panel uses a 16:10 aspect ratio, which gives you a bit more vertical space for documents and browsing than the more common 16:9 laptops in this price range. It’s rated at 300 nits with an anti-glare coating, with decent contrast and color accuracy (provided you calibrate it). That makes it ideal for creating images for, say, your work’s social media pages, though I wouldn’t recommend it for colour-critical tasks required by creative professionals.

16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD is a sensible balance for this price point — enough headroom for normal multitasking across browser tabs, office apps, and streaming without feeling cramped. The laptop weighs 1.59kg and measures 17.9mm thick, with Lenovo quoting up to 14.5 hours of battery life, though real-world use — especially on the Intel variant — will likely fall short of that figure.

Also consider

As a current high school student, the first thing I noticed about chemistry was that it was not only hard because of math or vocabulary. It was hard because so much of it was invisible.

In class, I could write a chemical formula. I could memorize that a molecule had a certain shape or that a reaction moved in a certain direction. But much of chemistry did not feel like something I could touch, move, test, or explore. The most important parts happened in a way I would never see.

A Two-Dimensional Perspective

Chemistry is a subject built on relationships. Atoms connect, electrons move, bonds form, molecules bend, acids and bases shift equilibrium, gases respond to pressure and temperature, and reactions balance because matter must be conserved. When those ideas stay flat on a page, students memorize answers without understanding the system behind them.

As a rising 12th-grade student at Suitland High School in Prince George’s County, Maryland, I set out to build a solution because I wanted a serious chemistry workspace students like me could use. I wanted something visual and interactive that could run on school devices without complicated setup — without the need for students to create accounts, download resources, or collect student data. I also wanted something that could open in a browser and allow students to begin learning right away.

Atomency started from a simple question: What would chemistry look like if students could build, manipulate and test ideas instead of only reading about them?

I began by building a workspace where students could create molecules and see structure-based information. From there, I added VSEPR-style analysis so students could connect formulas to molecular geometry instead of treating shapes as something to memorize from a chart. Then I kept expanding it: I incorporated reaction simulations, nuclear decay tools, kinetics tool, acid–base and pH tools, gas-law models and assignment workflows to help teachers bring the platform into the classroom.

I built all of this independently while still being a high school student. That meant I was not just designing a product in theory; I was building from inside the problem. I knew what it felt like to sit in a classroom and need a better way to see what was happening. I knew what it felt like when a concept almost made sense, but the missing piece was the ability to interact with it.

A Three-Dimensional Solution

Students usually receive educational tools instead of imagining or creating them. But students notice things adults can miss. We notice when a website is too slow on a school Chromebook. We notice when a platform requires an account before we can try it. We notice when a tool looks impressive in a presentation but does not align with the way a classroom actually works.

Access shaped how I built Atomency. A chemistry platform should not require expensive software or perfect devices. It should not require students to provide personal information. It should not assume all students have tutors, can pay to access resources, and have personal laptops powerful enough to run advanced programs. If a tool is meant to help students, it should reflect students’ reality.

For me, that reality was a public school classroom where students needed more ways to understand chemistry. Chemistry can become a gatekeeping subject. If students fall behind early, later topics become harder because everything builds on earlier ideas. Atomic structure connects to bonding. Bonding connects to molecular geometry. Geometry connects to polarity. Reactions connect to stoichiometry and equilibrium. Once one link in that chain breaks, the whole subject can start to feel impossible.

I wanted Atomency to help repair those links by making the relationships clearer. Instead of only telling students that a molecule has a certain shape, the platform can help them see how structure connects to geometry. Instead of only practicing reaction-balancing in steps, students can work with reactions as systems. Instead of treating acids, bases, gases, kinetics and nuclear decay as separate units, students can see chemistry as a connected field where patterns repeat in different forms.

Early usage showed me that students and teachers were looking for a platform like this. Atomency’s aggregate GoatCounter analytics indicated 25,162 visits from Feb. 24 to May 24, 2026, with strong engagement in the builder and simulations, the molecular workspace where students can create molecules and see structure-based information. This mattered to me not because it made the platform look popular but because it showed that people were using the parts of the platform that matched the original reason I built it: to give students a place to experiment with chemistry visually.

Atomency has been featured by Eric Curts in Control Alt Achieve and mentioned by Middle School Matters. My AP Chemistry teacher, Dr. Glenn Soltes, described the platform as having meaningful instructional potential. These moments helped me understand that the platform was not just something I made for myself. Other educators could see value in it too.

Still, the biggest lesson I learned was that students should be taken seriously as designers of learning environments. We are close to the problems because we experience them every day. When students say a tool is confusing, inaccessible, slow or disconnected from the way they learn, that feedback is not a complaint. It is design information.

Educational technology should not only be built for students but also with students and by students. That does not mean every student must become a software developer. It means schools and education companies should recognize that students have insight, creativity and lived experiences that can improve tools inside real classrooms.

I built Atomency because I needed a better way to learn chemistry. But as the platform grew, it became about something larger than my own classroom. It became a way to ask what happens when a student is trusted not only as a learner but also as a builder.

Chemistry became easier for me to understand when I could make it visible. Maybe school technology can become better when student experience becomes more visible too.

Friendly home robots have been the dream of sci-fi for a long time. Docile, helpful machines that do your laundry, take out the trash, maybe make dinner, and clean up afterward too. But if robots are going to do all that, they’re going to need some hands to make all that happen.

1X, a Norwegian-American robotics company, today revealed details about the five-finger hands attached to its soft, helpful robot companion, Neo.

The hands are built with actuators designed to replicate how tendons in the arms move human hands. 1X says this gives Neo’s hands 25 degrees of freedom of movement, which is just a little less than the 27 degrees of freedom human hands usually have. Cameras and AI smarts help sort out the broader context of what the fingers are trying to grab. It’s a dexterous mix that gives the Neo bot a very broad range of motion. 1X says the hands can grip odd shapes and detect when something is slipping out of its grip. The fingers can also move extremely quickly and hyperextend in directions human digits can’t. They also have an IP68 waterproof rating, meaning the robot can wash its own hands.

It’s a range that the engineers have aimed to dial in to align with what a human can actually do. Jonathan Terfurth, 1X’s director of actuators and hands, says the range of motion might even be better than a human’s, enabling it to open doors, lift heavy objects, and even plug itself in when its battery starts to die.

“You want to be able to operate with a human who has never worked or interfaced with a robot, and you still want it to be safe and compliant and soft,” Terfurth says. “Range of motion can be a bit extreme, but we try to be very close to what humans can do so that we can live in the world.”

Together, this is part of a growing ChatGPT-esque moment for robotics, where bots have gone from clumsy claw machines to capable handlers, able to gently carry fragile objects and become increasingly helpful for managing menial daily tasks and boring office chores.

The humanoid robot market tends to be dominated by tough, hulking Terminators meant to be paraded out for some defense industry contract or another. 1X is taking a different tack for its robot. The Neo is a soft, supple robot wrapped in a 3D lattice shell. Its design is inspired by characters like Baymax, the affable robot from the Disney movie Big Hero 6. In limited quantities, early access pricing is $20,000 or $500 per month to have it in your home, though the lump sum will prioritize delivery for 2026.

Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab is giving Rush’s classic 1974 to 1985 studio run the audiophile treatment with a multi-year reissue campaign on UltraDisc One-Step vinyl, 45RPM 2LP sets, and Hybrid SACD, beginning this summer with Fly By Night and A Farewell to Kings. I have not stopped grinning since seeing Grace Under Pressure, Moving Pictures, and Power Windows on the schedule. Take my money, MoFi. Take it now.

Rush fans have spent decades arguing over pressing variations, bass pedals, drum fills, Ayn Rand references, and whether Signals still gets treated unfairly because the keyboards started ordering bottle service. Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab has now handed them fresh material to debate for the next 30 years.

By the time the arguments over these new editions are finally settled, Geddy and Lerxst may well be reunited with the Professor somewhere beyond the drum riser — or, more appropriately, in some old-school basement in Willowdale, Ontario, where the amps are too loud, the time signatures are suspicious, and nobody has any interest in playing it safe.

This is not the entire Rush catalog, and it does not include the band’s later Atlantic-era albums. The series focuses on the first decade-plus of Rush’s recorded evolution, from the bluesy hard rock of Rush and Fly By Night to the widescreen progressive architecture of 2112, A Farewell to Kings, Hemispheres, Permanent Waves, Moving Pictures, Signals, Grace Under Pressure, and Power Windows.

According to the announcement, most titles in the series will be released as UltraDisc One-Step vinyl sets, while every title in the campaign will receive a numbered Hybrid SACD edition. The first wave begins in summer 2026 with Fly By Night and A Farewell to Kings, followed by Rush in fall 2026. The remaining titles are scheduled to roll out through 2028.

The timing is not exactly subtle, and that is the obvious part. Rush are back in the public conversation in a way many fans probably never expected after the final R40 show at the Forum in Los Angeles on August 1, 2015, and Neil Peart’s death in January 2020. The Fifty Something tour is not Rush trying to pretend nothing changed. It is Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson stepping back onto the stage together after 11 years, carrying the music forward while honoring the friend, lyricist, drummer, and impossible standard who made the whole thing feel larger than rock music.

The tour is presently on a short interruption after Geddy Lee was diagnosed with laryngitis and bronchitis, forcing the postponement of two Fort Worth shows originally scheduled for June 30 and July 2. Those concerts have been rescheduled for July 11 and July 13, with the tour currently listed to continue in Chicago on July 16.

That makes the MoFi announcement feel less like a random catalog exercise and more like a very calculated moment. Rush are selling tickets, reintroducing their music to arena audiences, honoring Neil Peart’s legacy, and bringing Anika Nilles into one of the most intimidating drum chairs in rock history. At the same time, MoFi is preparing premium physical editions for the exact period of the catalog most likely to send Rush collectors into pre-order behavior normally associated with emergency storm preparation.

Pricing and Formats

MoFi’s current product listings confirm the pricing for the initial releases.

Fly By Night is listed as a numbered 180g 45RPM 2LP set priced at $59.99, with the numbered Hybrid SACD priced at $34.99.

A Farewell to Kings is getting the deluxe treatment first, with MoFi listing it as a limited UltraDisc One-Step 180g 45RPM 2LP box set priced at $125. The Hybrid SACD edition is listed at $34.99.

The 1974 debut Rush, scheduled for fall 2026, is listed as a numbered 180g 45RPM 2LP set at $59.99, with the Hybrid SACD priced at $34.99.

That gives buyers a fairly clear pricing structure for the first wave: standard 45RPM 2LP editions at $59.99, Hybrid SACDs at $34.99, and UltraDisc One-Step titles at $125 when the album receives that treatment. Future title pricing has not yet been fully confirmed by MoFi, so assuming every later One-Step title will remain at the same price would be a little too enthusiastic, even for Rush fans who can count in 7/8 before coffee.

The Mastering Chain Matters

There is another important detail here: MoFi is being specific about the mastering chain on the listed vinyl titles. The Fly By Night 45RPM vinyl page lists the source chain as “1/4” / 15 IPS analog master to DSD 256 to analog console to lathe.” The Rush debut vinyl listing specifies “1/4” / 15 IPS Dolby A analog master to DSD 256 to analog console to lathe.”

That means these are not AAA vinyl reissues. They are sourced from analog master tapes with a DSD 256 step in the chain before the analog console and lacquer cutting. For some collectors, that will be a deal-breaker. For others, it will be less important than the quality of the tapes, mastering choices, pressing quality, and whether Geddy Lee’s bass finally gets the scale and articulation it deserves without turning the upper midrange into a dental procedure.

MoFi also says A Farewell to Kings was mastered at its California studio from tape boxes marked with both “master” and “safety copy,” pressed at Fidelity Record Pressing, and limited to 5,000 numbered copies in the UltraDisc One-Step 45RPM 2LP box set configuration.

Why These Albums Matter

The 1974 to 1985 window is the logical Rush era for this kind of treatment. It captures the band’s most dramatic transformation: the raw bar-band thunder of Rush, the arrival of Neil Peart on Fly By Night, the growing ambition of Caress of Steel, the breakthrough scale of 2112, the fantasy and architecture of A Farewell to Kings and Hemispheres, the leaner precision of Permanent Waves, and the commercial and sonic peak of Moving Pictures.

Then things get more complicated, which is usually where Rush became more interesting. Signals, Grace Under Pressure, and Power Windows pushed the band deeper into synthesizers, sequencers, colder textures, and more layered production. Some listeners still want to pretend that was some kind of betrayal. They are wrong, but at least they are persistent.

For MoFi, those albums present different challenges. The earlier titles need weight, separation, and better organization without sanding off the urgency. The later albums need clarity and space without making the production sound sterile. Rush records are not supposed to sound polite. They need precision, but they also need velocity.

2026 Rush Audiophile Reissue Schedule

• Fly By Night (1975): 45RPM 2LP and Hybrid SACD, coming summer 2026
• A Farewell to Kings (1977): UltraDisc One-Step 2LP and Hybrid SACD, coming summer 2026
• Rush (1974): 45RPM 2LP and Hybrid SACD, coming fall 2026

2027 to 2028 Rush Audiophile Reissues

• Caress of Steel (1975): 45RPM 2LP and Hybrid SACD
• 2112 (1976): UltraDisc One-Step and Hybrid SACD
• Hemispheres (1978): UltraDisc One-Step and Hybrid SACD
• Permanent Waves (1980): UltraDisc One-Step and Hybrid SACD
• Moving Pictures (1981): UltraDisc One-Step and Hybrid SACD
• Signals (1982): UltraDisc One-Step and Hybrid SACD
• Grace Under Pressure (1984): 45RPM 2LP and Hybrid SACD
• Power Windows (1985): 45RPM 2LP and Hybrid SACD

The Bottom Line

The MoFi Rush series arrives at exactly the right moment. Rush are back on the road, the Fifty Something tour has reignited interest in the band’s catalog, and the presence of Anika Nilles has added a new chapter to a story many fans assumed had ended with Neil Peart’s final performance.

The audiophile angle also makes sense. Rush records are built on musicianship, density, movement, and tiny details that disappear quickly when the mastering gets too compressed, too bright, or too polite. If MoFi gets this right, the series could become one of the most important rock reissue campaigns of the next few years.

It will not be inexpensive. The SACDs are the most accessible path at $34.99 each, while the 45RPM 2LP sets are priced at $59.99 and the One-Step titles begin at $125. But this is Rush, not a forgotten soft-rock side quest from 1978. The audience is there, the tour has put the band back in the spotlight, and the catalog deserves serious treatment.

Just remember: all titles are getting Hybrid SACD editions, but not every album is getting the UltraDisc One-Step treatment. That difference matters. So does the DSD 256 step in the vinyl mastering chain. Rush fans notice details. Our review copies are expected shortly.

Where to pre-order: mofi.com

Related Reading:

If a new estimate is correct, and we suspect it is, then Apple is paying dramatically more to produce each iPhone 18 Pro Max compared to its predecessor, and that will mean price rises of $200 or more.

Apple left all iPhone models untouched in its recent and unprecedented price rise, but it was already likely that the forthcoming iPhone 18 Pro range would be affected. Now according to estimates from Counterpoint Research, the bill of materials (BOM) that Apple will pay for the iPhone 18 Pro Max is $300 more than for the current model.

Component costs are always increasing, which is why the iPhone 15 Pro Max cost 12% more than its predecessor, and the iPhone 16 models also had a slight rise. But because of the global chip shortage, Apple is having to pay significantly more for certain components.

It’s specifically the memory that will account for the higher costs for Apple. Counterpoint Research does not give detailed estimates, but on a 12GB iPhone 18 Pro Max with 1TB storage, it is expected that compared to the previous model:

• NAND will cost four times more
• DRAM will cost almost four times as much
• Processor costs may remain the same
• Camera costs will rise slightly
• Display costs may decrease slightly

Estimated component costs for the iPhone 18 Pro Max – image credit: Counterpoint Research

Apple has previously tried to hide price increases with a strategy of removing lower-cost configurations. With the iPhone 15 Pro Max, for example, Apple dropped the 128GB model and had its starting price be the same as the previous model’s 256GB configuration.

The new report expects that Apple will make similar changes for the iPhone 18 Pro range. It predicts an average $200 price rise for consumers, although even that is said to mean Apple will see reduced profits.

All of these estimates are reportedly based on information regarding each separate component that is expected in the iPhone 18 Pro Max. However, the bill of materials is only useful as a comparison to the BOM of previous models.

It takes little account of Apple’s buying power meaning that it can sometimes negotiate better deals than its rivals. There’s also no calculation of development and marketing costs, which won’t have risen because of the chip shortage, but will certainly have gone up.

Consequently, Apple is juggling much more than the BOM with this iPhone launch, and we won’t know the outcome until the phones are released in September.

This does, though, seem like the worst year for Apple to launch its potentially exorbitantly-priced iPhone Fold.

The internet loves a good usage dashboard, and today Anthropic is releasing one for Claude designed to help you “reflect” on the time you’ve spent with its chatbot. Think of the new feature as something of a cross between Spotify Wrapped and Apple’s Screen Time tool. You can generate your first report by opening Claude’s settings menu and navigating to the new “Reflect” tab. For now, the dashboard is only available through the Claude web client and desktop app.

At the top, you’ll see a paragraph-long summary of your recent conversations with the chatbot. By default, Claude will collate your last month of interactions, but you can also see your last three, six or 12 months of usage. Under that, the interface lists your most active day, peak hour and total chats over your selected time period, with a visual representation just below. In the future, you’ll also be able to see how much time you’ve spent chatting with Claude, but for now that metric isn’t available. If you continue scrolling, there’s a toggle to configure break reminders and time limits. You can independently set these of the Reflect interface by navigating to the “Time and focus” tab, and dismiss the nudges if you’re in the middle of something.

Anthropic

Further down, there’s a breakdown of topics you’ve discussed with Claude, with a percentage assigned to the ones you bring up most often. If you’ve been following along with the screenshots, all of this should feel broadly familiar. The penultimate section does things a bit differently, offering a set of AI “fluency” recommendations designed to streamline your usage of Claude, which are grouped around guidelines Anthropic co-created with a group of academics. For example, if Claude finds you frequently re-establish the same or similar context when you go to write a question or request, it will recommend you use its Projects feature to group your prompts together, so that you don’t need to repeat yourself so often.  

For a more specific example, I’ve been working on a story about inference costs — the amount of AI labs like Anthropic pay for their trained models to process data — and I’ve turned to Claude a few times to track down statements from executives like Dario Amodei and Sam Altman. Based on that usage, the Reflect dashboard recommended creating a custom fact-checking skill for Claude. When I went ahead with that suggestion, the chatbot devised a text template to ensure it would always list its source for a claim, as well as its confidence in the information it had found alongside any caveats. I’ll admit I found the template helpful, and it wasn’t something I would have thought to ask Claude to do on its own.

Anthropic

According to Ryn Linthicum, Anthropic’s head of wellbeing policy, Reflect came out of a study the company’s Societal Impacts team recently completed where participants expressed a mixture of optimism and anxiety around Claude and other AI products. “We were really intentional about building [the dashboard] with an eye toward how we can upskill people’s usage of Claude, not in a way that encourages them to spend more time with it, but instead enables them to get more efficient at meeting their goals, and hopefully get off of Claude or preserve the things that they want to think about,” Linthicum told Engadget.

Linthicum says part of the reason the dashboard doesn’t currently display the exact amount of time you’ve used Claude is because it wasn’t a metric Anthropic had been tracking internally, due to it being something the product team “didn’t want to maximize.” Looking forward, they note Anthropic plans to surface that information for users so they can use it alongside the usage management settings. In the future, the dashboard will also be available mobile, and reflect your usage there.

Anthropic is releasing Reflect in beta today. Notably, the company is making the feature available to Free accounts, in addition to Pro and Max subscribers.

from the pay-no-attention-to-the-formaldehyde-plumes dept

Civil rights groups like the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) have noted how Elon Musk’s Colossus xAI data centers in Memphis disproportionately pollute the air in minority neighborhoods. A joint lawsuit by SELC, Earthjustice, and the NAACP filed last April argued that Musk and friends didn’t bother to get the necessary permits to run the 57 gas turbines powering the system.

As is so often the case, Musk’s “innovation” is quite often just a combination of media manipulation, opportunism, crony capitalism, and openly ignoring public safety. The more you look, the more of a theme it becomes across Musk’s entire post-IPO delusionverse.

Anyway, the lawsuit points out that his Memphis-area data centers are violating the Clean Air Act, funneling all manner of pollutants into minority neighborhoods that already see a disproportionately high number of pollution-caused childhood illnesses:

“xAI’s power plant in Southaven has the potential to emit more than 1,700 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) each year. The staggering emissions numbers likely make the facility the largest industrial source of NOx in the greater Memphis area, an area already failing to meet national smog standards. The illegal turbines also have the potential to release up to 180 tons of fine particulate matter, 500 tons of carbon monoxide, and 19 tons of formaldehyde—a toxic, cancer-causing chemical—each year.”

Musk also promised to build a next-gen water filtration system so that the xAI data center doesn’t imperil the local water supply, but he simply decided to apparently not do that. Instead, Musk ran crying to the Trump administration, whose DOJ is trying to have the pollution case-dismissed on national security grounds, because the administration sometimes uses Musk’s shoddy fifth-place AI services.

Hoping to quell growing anger in Memphis at the fact he’s openly violating environmental law, Musk is leaning on his other company, Starlink, to try and calm down locals. Starlink announced last week they’d be offering Memphis-area locals half-off the typically expensive Starlink monthly rate for an unspecified amount of time:

“The unique capabilities of the Colossus datacenters could not be accomplished without the partnership and support from the local Memphis community.” SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink engineering, Michael Nicolls, wrote on X on Tuesday.

“Happy to bring affordable and great @SpaceX @Starlink connectivity to our neighbors,” Nicolls added.

I’m sure a temporary (these sorts of discounted rates never last) internet access discount will definitely help the kids with formaldehyde-driven asthma. There are a few other layers of irony: one being that data has repeatedly shown that Starlink is routinely too congested to be of help in more densely populated areas like Memphis. Hidden “congestion” fees also ensure the service isn’t really affordable.

Meanwhile, you have guys like Mark Andreessen pretending to be confused why civil rights groups like the NAACP wouldn’t be big fans of discriminatory environmental pollution. As with all (bipartisan) opposition to AI data centers, the very legitimate complaints going on outside of Memphis are being portrayed as unreasonable attacks on innovation by radicals:

These people are, in case you’ve not been paying attention, just foundationally not good human beings, who simply love to engage in phony surprise at the width and breadth of the public backlash to AI.

Filed Under: ai, ai data centers, automation, broadband, elon musk, memphis, naacp, pollution, southern environmental law center

Kylian Mbappe, Erling Haaland and Lionel Messi are among the stars aiming to fire their countries one step closer to glory in the FIFA World Cup 2026 quarter-finals — and you can live stream all four games around the world for free.

France face Morocco, Spain play Belgium, Norway take on England and Argentina go up against Switzerland in four days of football action.