If your vintage gaming system eats through batteries in a hurry, this is for you.

The right rechargeable batteries

Panasonic / IKEA

USB-C battery mods

Handheld Legend

RingConn has always been a solid challenger to Oura in the smart ring space, and after spending two weeks testing it, I can safely say the new RingConn Gen 3 continues that trend. You’ll get most of the same health, sleep and recovery tracking features as rivals in our best smart rings guide here, but without the monthly subscription that puts some people off buying a smart ring altogether.

The Gen 3 tracks heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), blood oxygen levels, skin temperature, respiratory rate, stress, activity and sleep. New additions include a haptic motor for some alerts and reminders, improved battery life and new vascular health trend insights, which are designed to give you a picture of your cardiovascular wellbeing over time.

For smartphones selling at over $600, Apple owns 65% of that market and grew 9% year over year in the first half of 2026. However, Chinese brands are making a dent in local market share.

Apple ships 23% of all smartphones sold globally and captures 49% of all profit. It’s a behemoth on its own, but when accounting for smartphones in the $600 plus range, it’s the clear leader in market share.

According to a report from Counterpoint Research, Apple captured 65% of the global premium smartphone market. It grew 9% year over year during the first half of 2026, though its market share is still down when compared to the 74% held in 2022.

The decline since 2022 can be attributed to the premium Chinese smartphone market growing in popularity. When a Chinese consumer is presented with an option between an iPhone and a smartphone from Huawei, Xiaomi, or Oppo, they choose the local brand.

That said, Apple still holds most of the market globally at 65% and Samsung at 19%. The other OEMs make up the remaining 16%.

Apple holds onto 65% of premium market share even as the rest of the market increases prices. Image source: Counterpoint

The premium smartphone market grew 5% overall year over year for the first half of 2026 and makes up a record 29% of the global market. The global RAM shortage driving up prices has pushed more smartphones into the premium $600 plus segment and price hikes on lower-end models are driving customers to more premium models.

The report suggests these trends are why smartphone manufacturers are leaning further into financing options. Samsung recently launched its Galaxy Card while Apple has introduced Apple Upgrade.

Trade-in prices have also gone up, as was seen with Apple earlier Thursday. Everything is meant to entice customers holding onto their more expensive devices for longer to upgrade sooner in spite of price increases.

It’s going to be an interesting fall as everything seems to be creating quite the hurdle for Apple to overcome. iPhone 18 Pro sales could be limited by the RAM shortage and Apple reports that it’s already selling as many iPhone 17 models as it can make.

Demand won’t be the issue, but supply held back by global supply chain instability. Consumers may be feeling the impact of economic uncertainty, but that may not matter if financing options continue to be plentiful.

CYBER-CRIME

Cancer diagnostics breach spills personal and health info as extortion crew says healthcare giant ‘should’ve paid the ransom’

Hackers have dumped data stolen from Abbott’s cancer diagnostics business after the healthcare giant apparently declined to pay up, with the leak containing 10.9 million unique email addresses alongside personal and health information.

Have I Been Pwned added the Exact Sciences breach to its database on Friday after data stolen by the ShinyHunters extortion crew was published online. The leak includes names, email and physical addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, genders, and personal health information belonging to customers, patients, and healthcare providers.

Abbott, which acquired cancer diagnostics outfit Exact Sciences earlier this year, first disclosed the break-in on July 16. In an update on August 5, it acknowledged that some of the files accessed contained personal information and/or personal health information, but said it was still analyzing the data and had yet to determine who needed to be notified.

The company also revealed that the intrusion began with a vishing attack, and stressed that this was “not an encryption malware event.” It said only a limited number of internal systems within its cancer diagnostics business were affected, with no disruption to products, manufacturing, laboratory operations, or patient services.

ShinyHunters has a rather different way of describing what happened. On its dark web leak site, seen by The Register, the extortion crew told Abbott it “should’ve paid the ransom” and claimed the company had failed to reach an agreement despite being given multiple chances to do so.

The crooks claim that they made off with more than 30 million rows of customer information, including more than one million Social Security numbers and 7.5 million dates of birth. More concerning are claims that the haul includes 22 million-plus rows of client notes containing confidential doctor-patient conversations and health information, as well as more than 20 million medical-order records containing patient IDs, prescription types, order dates, and refill information.

ShinyHunters also claims to have siphoned more than 425 million rows of assorted data from Databricks, 130,000 files from SharePoint, and 89,000 contracts from Coupa, though those figures have not been independently verified.

Abbott has not said how the vishing attack led to the theft of the data, how long the intruders had access to its systems, or whether it received an extortion demand. Its latest update says the investigation remains ongoing and that affected individuals will be notified where required.

For those caught up in the breach, however, that review may come a little late. Whatever number Abbott eventually puts on the incident, a sizeable chunk of the stolen data is already in the wild. ®

For more than a decade, the cybersecurity industry has been assigning names to different hacking groups. Some of them, like Fancy Bear, have crossed over into the mainstream because of their prominent hacks and memorable names. Others are only known within the cybersecurity industry. 

Oftentimes, even industry insiders can’t keep track. In part, that’s because every company names hacking groups differently. That’s why there are resources like this one, which attempt to be a one-stop shop where cybersecurity professionals, government officials, policymakers, journalists, and the wider public can make sense of who is who. 

Last month, Google became the latest company to revamp its naming system for hacking groups.

Gone are the days APT1, APT41 or APT whatever number, which was the system adopted by Mandiant, once an independent security firm that’s now part of Google. Mandiant was the first to adopt a naming scheme.

From now on, Google’s system is relatively simple: A hacking group will have a first name that is memorable and random, and a second word whose initial indicates the country of origin: Castle for China, Ion for Iran, Neptune for North Korea, and Relic for Russia.

According to Shane Huntley, the chief technology officer of Google Threat Intelligence Group, the company’s in-house hacker hunting team, the revamp was necessary to bring clarity to security researchers both inside the company and externally. 

In the early 2010s, when companies started publishing reports on cyberattacks and naming the hackers behind them, Huntley told TechCrunch that, “we were not expecting to have as many threat groups as we do today.”

It had become hard to keep track of everyone. Google now tracks more than 5,000 “activity clusters” in several countries, according to John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group. Huntley said that there are very few developed nations that don’t have their own cyber capabilities and hacking groups. 

But what is the point of naming hacking groups? It’s not just an academic exercise, Huntley explained. The goal is to have a baseline understanding of who is attacking who, and how they are attacking them. That way organizations can recognize threats more quickly, prepare against them, ideally stop them, or at least investigate incidents more promptly. 

All that, he said, it’s possible only if you name the hackers and track them consistently. 

“If you actually get hacked by them or you’re dealing with some incident, knowing how that actor behaves, what they do, what they’ve done in the past, all of these details become critically important to help the response and also work out your coverage against these threats as well,” said Huntley.

Knowing how the North Korean government hackers known as the Lazarus Group behaves, what their goals usually are, and who they work for, gives defenders a starting point in dealing with these hackers. 

Tracking state-sponsored hackers, while challenging, is easier than tracking cybercriminal groups and hackers-for-hire, Huntley explained. The government hackers tend to have more consistent targets and activities, while cybercriminal groups have members that come and go, sometimes splinter, and otherwise are more amorphous. Hacker-for-hire groups and spyware makers tend to have a lot of customers in different parts of the world, making them slightly harder to track. 

A common criticism whenever a new naming system gets announced is: Why don’t all companies and organizations just use the same codenames? While that seems like an easy question to answer, the reality is that every company has a slightly different view of every group, based on their own sets of data and telemetry. Huntely said this is an inescapable reality that can’t be avoided just by sharing more information among companies and groups of researchers. 

“No one has perfect visibility,” he said. “We are building our model and our best understanding, but we will never know everything about what’s going on.”

By unifying the naming scheme of Google’s old Threat Analysis Group, which Huntely headed, and Mandiant, at least now there’s one fewer scheme to remember. For everything else, refer to this gargantuan list.

You may like Pages and you may tolerate Microsoft Word, but text editor BBEdit has been rightly earning devotees on the Mac for 34 years. Here’s how.

There are very few Mac apps that go back this far, and even fewer that remain both actively developed and actually beloved by its users. And there is only one with the trademark “It doesn’t suck.”

BBEdit is just a text editor, but rather than this meaning it is limited, it means that BBEdit is focused. It is and always has been a plain text editor, it does not also try to be a mind-mapping tool or an image editor or a chatbot.

This is going to read like an unqualified hymn of praise, although there are actually a few qualifications. But this is what BBEdit does to you. While there are other apps I write in for many different purposes, BBEdit does what it does extraordinarily well.

I don’t remember when I first came across it, but it would’ve been before 2000 and possibly before Steve Jobs came back to Apple. Its original version was written in 1989 because of a problem with editing text on the Mac.

After it was released as BBEdit in 1992, Bare Bones Software never stopped developing it.

The problem back then was just that Apple offered an API for handling text, but it couldn’t handle large files. The creators of BBEdit were working on a version of the Pascal programming language for Mac that effectively demanded longer files.

While Apple’s Pascal faded away, their text editor grew into this favorite for programmers and writers.

If you’ve never used it, though, it’s hard to convey just why BBEdit is so popular among its users. There are people who will never leave the Mac because there isn’t a PC version of BBEdit, for instance.

And as you use it, you have such a clear sense that so do its developers. This is not a day job or a side project, BBEdit keeps getting better because its developers add what they want it to do themselves.

“I use BBEdit for everything I produce that involves text: code (C, C++, Objective-C), web site content (HTML, Markdown, Textile), and more,” said Rich Siegel, developer of the app, in a 2011 interview. “In a very real sense, BBEdit is written using itself — my daily-use build is the same one that’s being beta tested or used in the field by our customers.”

If BBEdit’s search feature can’t find something, it isn’t there.

Advertisement

So an app that has been available for more than three decades, two hardware architectures ago, is still being actively developed. An app that was meant to be just a “bare bones” text editor is still simple to use, yet it has so many features a keystroke away that it’s hard not to gush about this app.

To be fair, there are actually reasons not to use it, there are writers for whom BBEdit is just the wrong choice. But if it suits your writing or it suits how you like to work, BBEdit can make you into a passionate fan.

“BBEdit is legendary because we keep improving it to serve the needs of our customers,” Siegel said on the release of version 9. It’s now on version 16, which is promoted as having “millions* of new features and refinements (*estimated).”

With marketing like that, BBEdit remains a taste of those early times with the Mac some 34 years after it was first launched. It’s serious software that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

What BBEdit does and how

The short version is that BBEdit is a text editor. That’s not the same thing as a word processor which offers formatting options like styles or margin control, as a text editor is just for getting the words down.

There aren’t countless settings you can choose in BBEdit, but there are more than you’d like to count.

As such a text editor, BBEdit is fast and responsive, and it generally doesn’t get in your way. You don’t have to set any settings, you can just open it and start typing.

When you have written a lot of text, maybe even over several years, you will start to appreciate a feature called grep. This is a form of regular expression, the feature takes you beyond normal search and replace.

For instance, in any word processor you could search for a date like 01/12/2026. But in BBEdit, you can search for all dates in the document, matching every one of them simultaneously.

It’s a form of regular expression. As well as being powerful, though, the BBEdit version includes an on-screen guide to help you through it as simply as possible.

“Our base started as Mac software developers, scientists, system administrators, and other technical users,” Rich Siegel told Apple in 2019. “The first big change was popularity among HTML authors and web back-end developers.”

Web designs can write CSS files in BBEdit – image credit: Bare Bones Software

Advertisement

“As word spread, we were able to help folks understand that the internet was built with text that you could treat as data or you could treat it as a document,” he continued. “So the next wave brought in internet architects, cryptanalysts, and scientists from unexpected disciplines.”

Thos unexpected disciplines, he said, included “writers and other content creators-folks who see their text not as data but as words, and who want as little as possible between them and their words.”

Overall design

Beyond the simplicity of writing in BBEdit, part of this get-on-with-it design is in how it stores your documents. Unlike most apps other than Ulysses, BBEdit can in theory be a single repository for all of your writing.

So rather than opening and saving documents all the time, you can just open BBEdit, press Command-N and be writing in a new document. Everything you’ve written before is still there, listed in a navigation bar on the left, until you choose to close it.

You don’t even have to save that previous work before you start a new one.

But then if you want to, you can. Anything you write can remain in BBEdit’s list on the left of the screen, but you can also save any of it out to separate, individual .txt files.

You can keep all of your recent documents open in BBEdit. Or don’t even ever save them, just write in this text editor and export the final text to wherever you need it to go.

Then it might not require you to set anything up, and it might not get in your way, but BBEdit is built to help you. So for example, if you type an opening quote mark, BBedit immediately adds a closing one right after it and leaves your cursor in the middle.

It’s the same with brackets. Type an opening bracket, and you get that plus a closing one for free. That’s chiefly convenient in that it means you can’t ever forget to include a closing speech mark or bracket, you’d have to choose to delete them.

If you’re a programmer, that can also make the difference between your code working or not. It’s easy to forget to close brackets, unless you’re writing in BBEdit.

But it is also a little pain when you’re writing dialog. So often you’re going to follow a speech with a phrase like “she said,” and to do that you have to cursor over the automatically-inserted end quote mark.

You can set BBEdit to wrap words and it also supports Markdown, plus a split-screen view.

Advertisement

You may well have just shrugged at that, and if you did, it’s because you are the true target audience for BBEdit. While any type of writer can use it, and every type of writer does, it is best for coders and programmers.

These are people whose writing tends to be in short lines rather than paragraphs. So they may never even need to notice something about BBEdit lines that will strike a novelist or a journalist immediately.

That’s how, by default, BBEdit does not wrap text at the end of the screen or at some margin stop. You could write a novel on the same long single line if you wanted to.

But then you could alternatively go to Settings, Editor Defaults, and turn on Soft Wrap. Set it to wrap your text at a specific character count, at the width of your default page size for printing, or the width of the window.

There are hundreds upon hundreds of settings you can change, but none that you have to in order to start writing. You can readily believe the gag that it has “millions” of new features, but this is still not an app where you have to study the manual.

Although, actually, there is a manual. In another throwback to the early days of the Mac, there exists to this day a 456-page BBEdit manual, and it is constantly updated.

How it got here

BBEdit began as this way to address a problem on the Mac. Today you know TextEdit as the name of Apple’s free text editing app, but back in the day, it was what the company called its text handling API.

If you wanted to include text in your app, from a word processor to just labels on a drawing, you could use this API and it did the job. But it wouldn’t handle anything over 32K, it wouldn’t handle anything long.

BBEdit was made to show that longer files could be handled on the Mac. It did the job, it was popular, and in 1992 when it first came out, BBEdit was also free.

As well as automatically adding closing brackets for any user, if you’re a programmer or web designer then BBEdit will offer auto-completion suggestions – image credit: Bare Bones Software

That didn’t last. Around a year later, Bare Bones Software launched version 2.5 and began selling it for $99 (around $230 in today’s money). Users of the previous free ones, or owners of various programming languages such as THINK Pascal, could buy it for $49.

At the same time, Bare Bones Software released a cut-down edition called BBEdit Lite. That was free, and users of it could upgrade to the full BBEdit for $49.

They could get it on a floppy disk by mailing — not emailing, regular postal mailing — the developer on an Massachusetts address. Please enclose a check for $5.

BBEdit Lite no longer exists, and nor does its brief replacement, TextWrangler. That was released in 2003 for $49, offering what Bare Bones Software thought would be a compelling mix of BBEdit features for programmers and database administrators.

Compared to some apps, TextWrangler did well, sticking around 14 years, even if it quickly became free. It may have seemed like it spent much of that time nagging users to upgrade to BBEdit, but come 2017, there was no longer any choice.

TextWrangler was ostensibly folded back into BBEdit and users were encouraged to move to the full app.

“We promise that you will feel right at home, because BBEdit and TextWrangler are identical in every way that you’re used to,” said the company at the time. “They’re built on the same foundation, by the same developers, with the same care; and they work the same way.”

Behind the scenes, that must’ve been a reason to drop TextWrangler. Maintaining the same code base across two apps was surely taking up time that could be spent developing new features.

It certainly wasn’t the lure of cash from upgraders that made Bare Bones Software do this. As welcome as that would doubtlessly be, the company also sweetened the deal.

If you bought or upgraded to BBEdit at that time, you could use it for free for 30 days. It’s not unusual to have such a trial period, but what happens afterward is much more rare.

Bare Bones Software made it so that you could continue using the app for free, with just a limited feature set. What it left in was generous, and really it created what was effectively a new, free, BBEdit Lite in all but name.

BBEdit and Apple

If you’re a long-time Mac user, you may distantly remember technologies such as OpenDoc, but you’re unlikely to have used any of it. Bare Bones Software has, it even added OpenDoc support to BBEdit.

BBEdit has been a good Mac citizen from the start but sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. That happened with Apple and BBEdit over the Mac App Store.

While it’s never really seen a fraction of the business that the iPhone App Store has, the Mac version has been around longer than you think. It debuted in 2011 and BBEDit was right there as one of the very first products on the Mac App Store.

By 2014, though, it was gone.

The reasons given at the time were not very specific, but they centered on how the Mac App Store sandboxes apps. Any app on the store is deliberately limited to prevent it being able to control the user’s Mac or other apps.

In BBEdit’s case, the app was reportedly not allowed full access to the user’s files and folders. It needed to be able to open and save wherever the user wanted, and at the time, Apple put limits on this.

There was also, though, an issue of money. While BBEdit was a one-time purchase, Bare Bones Software has always issued paid upgrades at intervals.

The Mac App Store did not allow for paid upgrades once a user had bought the app. So the company could have gained a true believer but never know it, never profit from it, and that user would never know what new features were available.

By 2019, enough developers had complained about sandboxing that Apple made some changes. They were sufficient to mean that BBEdit came back on the Mac App Store, but perhaps chiefly because there was now a solution to the upgrade problem.

Apple welcomed BBEdit back to the Mac App Store with a trio of promotions – image credit: Apple

While Apple still does not allow paid upgrades, it both allows and encourages subscriptions. So today you can buy BBEdit 16 from the developer for a one-off $60, but you can subscribe via the Mac App Store for $5/month, or $50/year.

And if you were looking when BBEdit returned to the Mac App Store in 2019, you will have seen Apple rushing to make up for arguably ignoring it. That return saw an App Store front page profile of its main developer, Siegel, plus an article about BBEdit’s search features, and another about its overall feature set.

At that time, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing was Phil Schiller, who oversaw the App Store. He tweeted a welcome back to BBEdit, although that tweet is no longer available since Schiller quit Twitter/X back in 2022.

There’s something missing

BBEdit sounds perfect. Unless you’re a novelist or a screenwriter, or perhaps even a non-fiction author, maybe it is. And if you are any of those things, you can make BBEdit work for you if its comprehensive yet no-nonsense feature set appeals.

What you can’t do is make BBEdit work on anything other than a Mac. There’s no PC version, for example, although if you cared about that you wouldn’t be reading this far into an AppleInsider article.

The real missing piece is the iPad.

It’s been some years since Bare Bones Software has talked about why it’s stayed Mac-only. So perhaps things will change, but 37 years after starting it, and 34 since it went on sale, BBEdit is a legend among macOS apps.

Enough so that it’s one of the very, very few apps I would enthuse about this much. Bare Bones Software and Naomi Pearce helped out with finding images like that ancient photo of the boxed version, but they haven’t read this prior to publication, and they certainly didn’t pay for it.

Try it out for yourself. Once again, it may not be the right writing tool for you, but if it is, you’ll become a fan.

BBEdit 16 for Mac is available for $60 direct from the developer as a one-time purchase. You can also get it from the Mac App Store on subscription for $5/month, or $50/year.

Someone has to pay for all this AI, nothing is foolproof, and Apple’s lawsuit with OpenAI is only just beginning, all on the AppleInsider Podcast.

As Wesley briefly covered on the previous episode, artificial intelligence is costing companies billions with very little return. Every new tool comes with a new cost, sometimes money, sometimes privacy.

It’s a grab bag of topics with people putting iPhones in freezers, getting Uber email scams, and Google Health gaining Apple Health syncing capabilities. There’s also talk about Apple’s lawsuit with OpenAI, which doesn’t seem to be going well for OpenAI even though court hasn’t even convened yet.

Your hosts discuss what’s expected for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Fold, which should be announced in just under six weeks. The event itself could be announced at any time, but it most certainly won’t be live.

BONUS: Subscribe via Patreon or Apple Podcasts to hear AppleInsider+, the extended edition. This time, speaking of payments, the discussion is on technology and money, specifically how we need to manage our finances and how options like Apple Card can usually help.

Links from the show:

More AppleInsider podcasts

Tune in to our Smart Home Insider podcast covering the latest news, products, apps, and everything HomeKit related. Subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or just search for HomeKit Insider wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast artwork from Basic Apple Guy. Download the free wallpaper pack here.

Those interested in sponsoring the show can reach out to us at: [email protected].

Subscribe to AppleInsider on:

Keep up with everything Apple in the weekly AppleInsider Podcast. Just say, “Hey, Siri,” to your HomePod mini and ask for these podcasts, and our latest HomeKit Insider episode too. If you want an ad-free main AppleInsider Podcast experience, you can support the AppleInsider podcast by subscribing for $5 per month through Apple’s Podcasts app, or via Patreon if you prefer any other podcast player.

SCIENCE

MAST Upgrade installation hit highest pressure ever achieved without the super-hot plasma destabilizing

Scientists at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) say that they have overcome plasma instability issues standing in the way of commercial fusion power plants.

The boffins overseeing the MAST (Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak) Upgrade installation at UKAEA’s Culham Campus in Oxfordshire conducted a fifth series of experiments on it during 2025 and 2026 and produced more than 1,100 fusion plasmas.

During these experiments, the team demonstrated the highest pressure ever achieved with the MAST Upgrade machine, without the super-hot plasma destabilizing, they say.

One of the challenges they set out to address is to figure out how to suppress instabilities known as Edge Localised Modes or ELMs. These are described as “sudden bursts at the plasma’s outer edge” that can cause a loss of plasma pressure and also lose up to a tenth of its stored energy in a single event.

Over time, these occurrences will damage the tokamak’s inner wall and exhaust components, and were therefore seen as a serious obstacle to commercial viability.

To cure this, the team adopted two techniques already previously tested to avoid these damaging heat bursts; Quasi-Continuous Exhaust mode (QCE-mode) and Resonant Magnetic Perturbations (RMP).

With QCE, the plasma edge experiences high-frequency, low-amplitude filaments that act to bleed off pressure before it can build to a destructive level. Likewise, RMPs use a magnetic field to induce small perturbations at the edge of the plasma that bleed off the pressure leading to ELMs.

The team also accessed two additional stable operating regimes known as Quiescent H-mode (QH-mode) and I-mode (Intermediate-mode), improved plasma confinement techniques that deliver better energy confinement while mitigating issues associated with large ELMs.

QH-mode is understood to tackle ELM using an edge electromagnetic instability called the Edge Harmonic Oscillation (EHO) to steadily remove excess heat, while I-mode is a confinement technique that features a steep thermal barrier at the edge that allows particles to escape, again preventing the buildup of pressure.

The Culham scientists also claim to have developed a technique for controlling the plasma’s position. This involves measuring visible light created by deuterium emitted from the machine’s upper and lower outer divertors (the exhaust system), allowing minute positional imbalances to be detected in real-time.

Detecting changes in position is a step towards automated, real-time control systems that future commercial power plants will need to operate without constant manual intervention, according to the team.

The series of experiments also explored “negative triangularity” plasma shapes that allow high-power operations without ELMs. This is said to be an approach being closely watched by the international fusion community.

This MAST Upgrade installation is set to get further enhancements this year. These will include two new neutral beam injectors, doubling the machine’s heating capacity, and the installation of an Electron Bernstein Wave (EBW) system that will provide an additional 1.6 MW of heating power.

Following this further upgrade, a sixth series of experiments is planned for 2028.

EBW systems use high-frequency, electrostatic plasma waves to heat and drive currents in dense fusion plasmas, and the technology is planned for use in STEP, (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production), the UK’s pilot fusion power plant to be built at the site of a former coal power station in Nottinghamshire.

“These findings take us another step closer to practical fusion energy,” claimed James Harrison, head of MAST Upgrade science at UKAEA.

 “The results genuinely shape the design of future fusion power plants. Accessing four stable high-performance plasma regimes demonstrates that MAST Upgrade is producing science at the leading edge of what is possible.”

Earlier this year, the UKAEA published a roadmap of targets it wants scientists to hit before the end of the decade, in order to drive forward development of working commercial fusion reactors.

Reg readers will no doubt be aware of the old chestnut that working fusion power is perpetually 30 years away, but there have been developments in recent years, such as “ignition” being achieved at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, while UK fusion firm Tokamak Energy said it expected to deliver commercial fusion energy in the next decade. ®

Amazon is again offering steep price cuts on Apple’s current MacBook Pro line, with a $500 discount in effect this weekend on a high-end M5 Max model with a spacious 2TB SSD.

This weekend’s $500 discount applies to the M5 Max MacBook Pro 14-inch with an 18-core CPU, 32-core GPU, and 36GB of RAM. The Space Black laptop also has 2TB of storage, providing extra space for files and apps over the entry-level 1TB M5 Pro.

Save $500 on M5 Max 14″ MacBook Pro

Normally retailing for $4,099, Amazon’s discounted $3,599 price is the lowest available, according to our 14-inch MacBook Pro M5 Max Price Guide, which is updated throughout the day.

If you don’t need the power of the M5 Max chip, Amazon has the 2TB M5 Pro 14-inch MacBook Pro on sale for $2,499, also $500 off.

You can save on 16-inch models too, with a loaded M5 Max spec with a 40-core GPU marked down to $4,499, a $500 discount as well.

Latest 14-inch MacBook Pro deals

• 14″ MacBook Pro M5 (10C CPU, 10C GPU, 16GB, 1TB, Standard Display): $1,847.50 ($152 off)
• 14″ MacBook Pro M5 Pro (15C CPU, 16C GPU, 24GB, 1TB, Standard Display): $2,346 ($153 off)
• 14″ MacBook Pro M5 Pro (15C CPU, 16C GPU, 24GB, 2TB, Standard Display): $2,499 ($500 off)
• 14″ MacBook Pro M5 Pro (18C CPU, 20C GPU, 24GB, 2TB, Standard Display): $2,899 ($300 off)
• 14″ MacBook Pro M5 Max (18C CPU, 32C GPU, 36GB, 2TB, Standard Display): $3,599 ($500 off)

Weekend 16-inch MacBook Pro sale

• 16″ MacBook Pro M5 Pro (18C CPU, 20C GPU, 24GB, 1TB, Standard Display): $2,758.49 ($241 off)
• 16″ MacBook Pro M5 Pro (18C CPU, 20C GPU, 48GB, 1TB, Standard Display): $3,299 ($300 off)
• 16″ MacBook Pro M5 Max (18C CPU, 32C GPU, 36GB, 2TB, Standard Display): $3,999 ($400 off)
• 16″ MacBook Pro M5 Max (18C CPU, 40C GPU, 48GB, 2TB, Standard Display): $4,499 ($500 off)