Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my Wordle today, NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games.

The iPhone 13 Pro features a new camera capable of focusing closer than ever before—less than an inch away. This opens a whole new dimension for iPhone photographers, but it’s not without surprises. Let’s take a tour of what this lens unlocks, some clever details you might miss in its implementation, why its “automatic” nature can catch you off guard, and much more. At the end, we have a special surprise for you — especially those not using an iPhone 13 Pro.

The Wonderful World of Macro

So what is ‘Macro’, anyway? “Extreme closeup photography” is a mouthful, so photographers needed a shorter name. You’d think ‘micro’. You’d think anything but macro, since that actually means ‘big.’ Well, ‘macro’ came from an article written in 1899 about high magnification photography. The author called anything magnified more than 10× “photo-micrography,” and anything less was “photo-macrography.”

122 years later, we’re still stuck with that term. Sorry.

If you’re a beginner photographer, you might ask, “What’s so special about a macro lens? I already have a zoom.” Well, all lenses have a minimum focus distance, the closest a lens can get to its subject and still focus on it. It’s a principle that applies to any lens; if you bring your finger close to your eye, you’ll struggle to focus at a certain point.

The iPhone 13 Pro’s telephoto “zoom” lens has a minimum distance 60cm (about two feet). Let’s take a photo of my Apple Watch’s crown from that distance.

Now we’ll just crop and blow up the crown in our favorite image editor…

Not great. Let’s repeat the experiment with the wide angle lens of the iPhone, which can focus at 15 cm, about six inches.

As you can see, while a telephoto lens works great at taking photos from afar, it slightly underperforms against a wide angle lens that can get up-close. Now let’s use a macro capable lens at 2cm, less than an inch.

Wow. I can see every detail of every scuff and scratch. I need to take better care of my stuff.

Macro lenses let you see ordinary objects in a completely new way. You can get lost in the feather of a peacock…

Peek through the eye of a needle…

The page of a book becomes a landscape of fibers stained with ink…

This lens is like a window to a hidden world, and that’s why we’re excited to have this power on a phone we carry around all day. But macro photography on iPhone isn’t technically new. For years you’ve been able to buy lens add-ons (“secondary lenses“) which act like reading-glasses. These dongles cost anywhere from $10 to $125, but even the most expensive ones can’t match the real thing.

On a technical level, the problem is that these lenses reduce the depth of field— how much of your image is in focus. The closer you focus, the slimmer that in-focus area gets. Adding another lens on top of this makes it even slimmer. You can deal with this problem on regular cameras; adjusting the aperture increases the depth of field. Unfortunately, all iPhones have fixed apertures, so there’s nothing you can do.

Compare the true macro lens on the left to a lens attachment on the right:

Too much blur and too little depth interfere with macro shots. When you take a photo of a bumblebee, you usually want the whole bee in focus, not just the top-left corner of its eyebrow hairs. This is such an issue with extremely small subjects that advanced macro photographers go out of their way to increase depth of field through techniques like focus stacking.

The next problem are the slight imperfections in lenses. The colors in light refract differently when passing through glass, causing what is known as chromatic aberration. These create subtle color shifts and fringes along edges. If such imperfections exist on built-in lenses, iOS can automatically remove them because it know about these lens characteristics. It just can’t do that for accessories.

On top of that, from a purely practical perspective, it’s annoying to carry around dongles that you need to attach and detach from dedicated mounting hardware on your phone. There’s the old saying, “The best camera is the one you have with you,” and the same is true of lenses.

The Gotchas

While macro on the iPhone 13 Pro is a huge leap forward, it’s not without surprises.

If you push it to its limit and try shooting from an inch away, you’ll find it tricky to find a good angle because suddenly the iPhone itself casts a shadow on your subject. On top of that there’s that shallow depth of field at the absolute minimum distance. So don’t feel like you have to focus at the absolute minimum. An extra inch can make a big difference.

Another challenge is that macro is only available on the ultra wide lens. This isn’t a popular lens for everyday photography because of how it warps subjects. This is the full photo of my watch from earlier.

The first party camera defaults to cropping the image as if it were shot with the wide-angle camera. The question is whether most users will notice that it isn’t a “true” 4k image — it took the shot, zoomed in on it, and cut the rest off!

Believe it or not, Apple has pulled off silent cropping for years. If you tried to focus on something too close for the telephoto lens to handle, or the scene just requires more light, the iPhone quietly switches over to the wide angle lens and crops it to make the image look like a telephoto shot.

This is a very clever feature, because explaining minimum focus distance and lens properties is for blog posts like this, not a Camera app on an iPhone that lets people take photos. Photographers might disagree, and that’s fine: Apple’s designers and engineers don’t build the camera app for 1% of photographers. They build it for everybody on the planet.

This brings us to this year’s annual iPhone controversy: the jarring transition to macro.

What are we seeing here? The wipe-transition and jumping around is caused by the Camera app switching lenses, much like we saw with the telephoto lens earlier. Your ‘main’ iPhone camera can’t really focus all that close, but the new macro-capable ultra-wide camera can. Once Camera detects that you’re not able to get the shot with the selected camera, it swaps in the camera that can.

That isn’t great, but we think the backlash is a bit much. Let’s take a detour to explain what Apple is going for.

A long time ago, anyone who wanted to drive a car had to know a little bit about shifting gears. We call that ‘manual transmission’ now. That changed with the automatic transmission, which freed drivers to think about driving in a more abstract sense: press the gas pedal, go faster. The automatic transmission is an abstraction.

Now imagine you spent your entire life driving an automatic transmission in an area without any hills, so you’ve never heard your car change gears while applying the gas. One day you take a road trip to San Francisco. The first time your car climbs one of those steep hills, it shifts into a lower gear, and your engine makes a very loud sound. It would feel a bit jarring. “Why is my engine freaking out?” But after a while, you’d get used to it.

Let’s go back to talking about cameras and human vision. At a distance, objects shift less when you move. Objects up close shift a lot more.

If you’re trying to take a macro shot, by its very nature, your subject is close to the camera. When you switch lenses, an inch feels huge at that distance. Sometimes iOS masks the switcheroo by repositioning the new image to overlap the old one, and translating the new vantage point into position. Look closely at the seam at the bottom of this video…

This effect helps smooth things out, but doesn’t seem to happen all the time. If they work out the kinks, it’s possible that our brains will just get used to this transition like we’re used to the sound of our cars changing gears.

Some folks are complaining about the very nature of automatically switching lenses, and we get that. While testing these features in the first party camera, there were a few times I fought with the system to get the composition I wanted. I’m sure that’ll improve with updates, but I don’t envy Apple’s position. They could build a system that works 99.9% of the time, more than enough for the billion people using the app, but it will never be 100% perfect until it’s psychic.

That brings us to our niche. We aren’t constrained the same way as Apple’s camera. We build Halide, and we built it to give advanced photographers full control over their camera, rather than abstractions. When you press the 3✕ button, you always get the zoom lens. No switcheroo here.

Using the macro mode on iPhone made us think — what can we do as a camera app to make macro photography absolutely fantastic on iPhone for the less casual user? We quickly figured it out: we had to build a dedicated Macro Mode into Halide. Surprise: we used it to capture all of our macro photos in the post. Double surprise: This is actually a launch announcement!

Introducing Halide 2.5’s Macro Mode

Today, we’re launching Halide 2.5. It’s a big update with one of the coolest features we’ve ever packed into the app. We were close to just calling it Mark III, as with our huge update last year — it’s just that significant.

What makes Halide 2.5’s Macro Mode so special? For one, it brings Macro capabilities to all iPhones. Let’s dig in.

A Tour of Macro Mode

Unlike the built-in camera, we decided to really make Macro photography a deliberate ‘mode.’ Of course the ultra-wide camera in Halide will still automatically focus on very-close subjects, but a separate mode unlocks some very powerful tools and processing specific to macro.

To start, tap the “AF” button to switch from auto focus to manual focus. Since Macro is often best done with the focus fixed to a close subject or with some adjustment, Macro Mode lives in the manual focus controls. To then enter Macro Mode, tap the the flower icon — the universal symbol for macro. Ours is a tulip, because our designer is Dutch. They’re funny like that.

Entering Macro Mode, smart things start to happen in Halide. To begin, Halide examines your available cameras and switches to whichever one has the shortest minimum focus distance. Then it locks focus at that nearest point. You can tap anywhere on screen to adjust focus; unlike our standard camera mode, we configure the focus system to only search for objects very close to you.

If you’d rather adjust focus by hand, we increase the swipe-distance of our focus dial so you can make granular adjustments down to the millimeter. To nail that focus point, Focus Peaking draws an outline around the sharpest areas of your image. You can set it to automatically trigger when adjusting focus, or you can turn it on and off.

As we mentioned before, you usually want to crop macro shots. But if you just try to blow up your image in an editor, as we showed earlier, you’ll end up with a blurry or pixelated result. Not great.

We knew we could do better, so we’ve packed the science of super resolution into a feature we call Neural Macro. We trained a neural network to upscale images in a way that produces much sharper, smoother results than what you typically get in an editor. It’s available on all iPhone with a neural engine— anything made in 2017 or later— and it produces full 4k resolution JPEGs at either 2× or 3× magnification.

The results are incredible; here are two unedited photos taken with the fairly humble iPhone 12 mini, which has no macro lens:

This Neural Macro stuff sounds advanced and cool, but we understand that some of our users are purists. A mode like this does alter your image. We respect choices: If you change your mind about the cropped and enhanced version later, the crop is only saved as an edit in your camera roll. You can always go back to the un-cropped version by opening it up in the iOS Photos app, tapping “Edit” and “Revert.”

Oh, what about RAW files? RAW files are RAW, and we respect that. They are left untouched and unprocessed. That means that shooting in pure RAW will just give you the extra control of Macro Mode, but none of the fancy Neural Macro technology. In RAW+JPG mode, you get the best of both worlds, with an unprocessed RAW file and a Neural Macro enhanced JPEG shot.

That’s Macro Mode. Even if you don’t have the iPhone 13 Pro, you can now take cool Macro shots. This photo was shot on an iPhone 12 Pro:

But you can also use Macro Mode with the iPhone 13 Pro’s macro-capable lens, and those results are mind-blowing. Your macro camera becomes almost like a microscope:

Suffice to say we absolutely cannot wait to see what kind of shots our users will take with this — iPhone 13 Pro or not. We think it’ll enable photography of a whole unseen universe around us.

This wraps up a really big update that supports the latest and greatest. We packed a lot of quality features into this update for iOS 15, iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro. Overall, we’re super happy with the APIs Apple launched to support the new hardware.

All those goodies are out now, with Macro Mode — available to all Halide users, including the folks who bought Halide 1.0 over four years ago. When we introduced Halide Mark II last year, we gave that huge upgrade away for free for our existing users, with a year of free updates to boot. To those early supporters, this is a gentle reminder that this is the last month of free feature upgrades. While your Halide Mark II app will continue to work and keep all its features, if you’d like to keep receiving major updates like this, you should check out our renewal options inside Settings. We’re even running a sale!

For all of those just joining us: Halide Mark II can be tried for free for 7 days, and we offer a subscription or pay-once option. Check it out here!

Closing Thoughts

As photographers, we find the iPhone 13 Pro’s new macro capabilities an absolute joy. From a value perspective, this camera outperforms bulky lens accessories that cost over $100, and you’ll never leave it at home in a sock drawer. With this new Macro Mode in Halide, we hope many users discover the simple pleasure of photographing the little things around us.

We’re not nearly done yet: We are still deep in our research on the iPhone 13 Pro camera. Check in soon to see our full report, including how the 3× zoom stacks up. Stay tuned.

In the mean time, we’d love to see what you’re doing with Halide’s Macro Mode. Tag your photos #ShotWithHalide for a chance to be featured on our Instagram. Til next time!

At the Montalegre circuit in Portugal, electric vehicles and combustion engine cars are racing against each other in an FIA-championship event for the first time. The FIA, or International Automobile Federation, is the governing body behind some of the biggest motorsport championships, including Formula One. Billed as the “Battle of Technologies”, the FIA World Rallycross Championship sees both technologies compete on equal terms, with each vehicle having advantages and disadvantage that must be balanced in order to win races.

Rallycross races take place on mixed-surface racetracks, and while the electric cars have instant torque, and about 100 more horsepower, giving them an advantage on long straights, the internal combustion engine (ICE) cars – which run on sustainable fuel that is made of “70% of sustainable components”, the fuel manufacturers say – are around 160 kilograms lighter, giving them better handling around corners.

“The battle of technologies just adds a little bit more excitement to what we already call the most exciting world championship that we have within the FIA,” says Arne Dirks, managing director of FIA World Rallycross.

After going fully electric in 2022, the sport has been struggling to impress its long-term base of combustion fanatics, and following a fire in 2023 that destroyed two electric cars, the format needed a rethink. “The fire certainly didn’t help our sport,” says Dirks, “of course, it influenced the decision to go that way”.

So, despite Dirks telling New Scientist in 2022 that the electric transition meant “the old sport doesn’t exist anymore”, combustion engines are back. This time, however, the teams can choose their technology. Currently, about half the paddock has retained electric vehicles. “[The]combustion engine is technology of the past,” says Susann Hansen, team manager at Hansen Motorsport, who elected to stick with electric cars this season. “For us, it was not only a business decision to go into electric. It was also a personal belief that we need to do something. That I can look my children and my grandchildren in the eye to say we have done something,” she says.

For Dirks and others in the paddock, this is only the start of what is possible. “The battle of technologies is at the moment EV cars against ICE’s, but I think as a championship, we should be open also to new technologies,” he says.

Strands is a brand new daily puzzle from the New York Times. A trickier take on the classic word search, you’ll need a keen eye to solve this puzzle.

Like Wordle, Connections, and the Mini Crossword, Strands can be a bit difficult to solve some days. There’s no shame in needing a little help from time to time. If you’re stuck and need to know the answers to today’s Strands puzzle, check out the solved puzzle below.

How to play Strands

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strand answers

Today’s spanagram

We’ll start by giving you the spangram, which might help you figure out the theme and solve the rest of the puzzle on your own:

Today’s Strands answers

• ARENA
• STADIUM
• THEATER
• FESTIVAL
• NIGHTCLUB

This time around we’re comparing the the smallest flagships from the two largest smartphone manufacturers in the world. This is the Apple iPhone 16 Pro vs Samsung Galaxy S24 comparison. Granted, the iPhone 16 Pro is not the base model in the iPhone 16 series, but it is the smallest flagship in the series aka the smallest ‘Pro’ iPhone 16 model. So, this comparison does make sense, as the Galaxy S24 is by far the smallest smartphone in the Galaxy S24 family.

With that being said, the iPhone 16 vs Galaxy S24 comparison is also on the way. The iPhone 16 Pro is notably more expensive than the Galaxy S24, so keep that in mind. We will first list the specifications of these two smartphones, and will then move to compare them across a number of different sections. We’ll compare the designs of the two phones, their displays, performance, battery, cameras, and audio output. Let’s get down to it.

Specs

Apple iPhone 16 Pro vs Samsung Galaxy S24, respectively

– Screen size:
6.3-inch LTPO Super Retina XDR OLED ( flat, 120Hz, HDR, 2,000 nits max brightness)
6.2-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X (flat, 120Hz, 2,600 nits max brightness)
– Display resolution:
2622 x 1206
2340 x 1080
– SoC:
Apple A18 Pro (3nm)
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3/Samsung Exynos 2400
– RAM:
8GB
8GB (LPDDR5X)
– Storage:
128GB/256GB/512GB/1TB (NVMe)
128GB (UFS 3.1)/256GB/512GB (UFS 4.0)
– Rear cameras:
48MP (wide, f/1.8 aperture, 1/1.28-inch sensor, 1.22um pixel size, sensor-shift OIS), 48MP (ultrawide, f/2.2 aperture, 0.7um pixel size, PDAF), 12MP (periscope telephoto, f/2.8 aperture, 1/3.06-inch sensor, 1.12um pixel size, 3D sensor-shift OIS, 5x optical zoom)
50MP (wide, f/1.8 aperture, OIS, Dual Pixel PDAF), 12MP (ultrawide, 120-degree FoV, f/2.2 aperture, 1.4um pixel size), 10MP (telephoto, f/2.4 aperture, OIS, PDAF, 3x optical zoom)
– Front cameras:
12MP (f/1.9 aperture, PDAF, 1/3.6-inch sensor size, OIS)
12MP (wide, f/2.2 aperture, Dual Pixel PDAF, 22mm lens)
– Battery:
3,582mAh
4,000mAh
– Charging:
38W wired, 25W MagSafe wireless, 15W Qi2 wireless, 7.5W Qi wireless, 5W reverse wired
25W wired, 15W wireless, 4.5W reverse wireless (charger not included)
– Dimensions:
149.6 x 71.5 x 8.3 mm
147 x 70.6 x 7.6mm
– Weight:
199 grams
167/168 grams
– Connectivity:
5G, LTE, NFC, Wi-Fi, USB Type-C, Bluetooth 5.3
– Security:
Face ID (3D facial scanning)
Ultrasonic in-display fingerprint scanner
– OS:
iOS 18
Android 14 with One UI 6.1
– Price:
$999+
$799.99+
– Buy:
Apple iPhone 16 Pro
Samsung Galaxy S24 (Best Buy)

Apple iPhone 16 Pro vs Samsung Galaxy S24: Design

The iPhone 16 Pro is made out of titanium and glass. On the flip side, the Galaxy S24 utilizes aluminum and glass. Both smartphones have flat sides all around, which are curved towards the very edges. They both include flat front and back sides too, and have a similar curvature on the edges. Well, the iPhone 16 Pro is curved more in that area, but neither phone is close to having sharp edges.

Apple’s handset has a pill-shaped cutout at the top of the display, the so-called Dynamic Island. Samsung’s device has a small display camera hole up there. Both devices do have very thin bezels around the display, which are also uniform. On the right-hand side of the iPhone 16 Pro you’ll find a power/lock key and the Camera Control button. On the left, the volume up and down buttons are located, along with an Action Button. The Galaxy S24, on the other hand, has the power/lock key on the right, along with the volume up and down buttons, and that’s it.

Both smartphones have three cameras on the back, but those setups look considerably different. The iPhone 16 Pro has its recognizable camera island in the top-left corner. The Galaxy S24’s cameras protrude directly from the backplate and are vertically-aligned in the top-left corner. The iPhone 16 Pro does have a slightly bigger display, and it’s taller and wider than the Galaxy S24, while also being thicker and heavier. It’s over 30 grams heavier. Both smartphones offer an IP68 certification for water and dust resistance. They’re both quite slippery too, but very comfortable to hold.

Apple iPhone 16 Pro vs Samsung Galaxy S24: Display

The iPhone 16 Pro features a 6.3-inch 2622 x 1206 LTPO Super Retina XDR OLED display. That panel is flat, and it has a 120Hz refresh rate. HDR10 content is supported, as is Dolby Vision. The maximum brightness here is set at 2,000 nits. The screen-to-body ratio is at around 90%, while the display aspect ratio is 19.5:9. The Ceramic Shield glass is placed on top of this phone’s display.

The Samsung Galaxy S24, on the flip side, has a 6.2-inch 2340 x 1080 Dynamic LTPO AMOLED 2X display. This display has a 120Hz refresh rate and supports HDR10+ content. It also offers a 2,600 nits peak brightness. The screen-to-body ratio is at around 90%, while the display aspect ratio is 19.5:9. The Gorilla Glass Victus 2 from Corning is protecting this phone’s display.

Both of these panels are really good. They’re quite vivid and more than sharp enough. They also have very good viewing angles, and the touch response is very good. These displays do not have a high-frequency PWM dimming, though, so keep that in mind. The blacks are deep on both, and both have a high refresh rate. The Galaxy S24 can technically get brighter, but in practice, the difference is not that big at all. They’re both bright enough.

Apple iPhone 16 Pro vs Samsung Galaxy S24: Performance

The Apple A18 Pro is a 3nm processor which fuels the iPhone 16 Pro. That is Apple’s most powerful chip. The company also included 8GB of RAM here, along with NVMe flash storage. The Galaxy S24 is fueled by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (4nm) or Exynos 2400 (4nm) chips, depending on the market. We used the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 model. Samsung also included 8GB of LPDDR5X RAM inside the phone, along with UFS 3.1 or UFS 4.0 flash storage. UFS 3.1 flash storage is included in the 128GB storage option only.

Having said that, both smartphones do offer really good performance. In regular, day-to-day tasks, they both perform great. They’re snappy whatever you’re doing, and the high refresh rate helps keep things looking really nice while you’re scrolling around. Getting either phone to slow down is not that easy. They can jump between apps without a problem and are great for browsing, messaging, emailing, multimedia consumption, image editing, video processing, and so on.

The iPhone 16 Pro technically has more prowess on the gaming side of things. It has a more powerful chip and GPU, but the Galaxy S24 keeps up in terms of performance. No matter what game you throw at these two phones, they’ll do a great job. They will get warm after a while, but neither phone will get visibly affected by that, at all. Neither phone becomes to hot to hold either.

Apple iPhone 16 Pro vs Samsung Galaxy S24: Battery

The iPhone 16 Pro battery capacity has finally been revealed, the phone includes a 3,582mAh battery, so a 9.4% larger battery pack than its predecessor. The Galaxy S24 includes a 4,000mAh battery pack. Apple’s iPhones usually have smaller battery packs than their Android counterparts. In this case the difference is not that big, and the iPhone 16 Pro does offer better battery life in comparison… it’s not even close.

The Galaxy S24 can even struggle to get to the 6-hour screen-on-time mark, it tends to be closer to 5-5.5 hours. The iPhone 16 Pro can go above and beyond that. The iPhone 15 Pro offered really good battery life, and the iPhone 16 Pro flies above that. Getting to the 7-hour screen-on-time mark on this phone does seem doable, but it will depend on a number of factors, of course. Your mileage may vary.

When it comes to charging, the iPhone 16 Pro supports 38W wired, 25W MagSafe wireless, 15W Qi2 wireless, 7.5W Qi wireless, and 5W reverse wired charging. The Galaxy S24 supports 25W wired, 15W wireless, and 4.5W reverse wireless charging. Do note that neither of these two smartphones ships with a charger in the retail box. You’ll have to buy one separately if you don’t already own it.

Apple iPhone 16 Pro vs Samsung Galaxy S24: Cameras

You’ll find three cameras on the back of both of these phones. The iPhone 16 Pro has a 48-megapixel main camera (1/1.28-inch camera sensor), a 48-megapixel ultrawide unit, and a 12-megapixel periscope telephoto camera (5x optical zoom). The Galaxy S24 includes a 50-megapixel main camera (1/1.56-inch camera sensor), a 12-megapixel ultrawide unit (120-degree FoV), and a 10-megapixel telephoto unit (3x optical zoom).

Both of these phones do a good job in the camera department, but the iPhone 16 Pro pulls ahead. It has a more capable main camera, and that shows in the final product. Both phones tend to provide images with warmer tones, but the ones from the iPhone 16 Pro have a better balance overall. The Galaxy S24 can overdo it with sharpening and saturation at times, the photos also don’t look as well-rounded. The iPhone 16 Pro does tend to brighten up the darker portions of images in HDR situations a bit too much, which makes the images look flatter than it should. They both do a very good job in low light, but once again, the iPhone 16 Pro is better most of the time.

The iPhone 16 Pro has a telephoto camera that offers more versatility in comparison, and the shots from it mostly look a bit better. Its ultrawide camera also tends to provide more detail than Samsung’s, but both do a good job of keeping the color profile similar to what their main shooters provide.

Audio

Stereo speakers are included on both smartphones, and they both offer good performance. The sound output is well-balanced, and not too sharp or anything. They’re both loud enough and similar in that regard.

There is no audio jack on either one of these two smartphones, though. You’ll need to use their Type-C ports if you want to hook up your wired headphones. Alternatively, Bluetooth 5.3 is on offer for wireless connectivity.