A rumored “Silo” spinoff could keep Apple TV’s dystopian franchise alive beyond its planned finale, but the books’ author is pushing back on the claim.

“Silo” is a dystopian science-fiction drama about a society living underground after humanity has been driven from the surface. The Apple TV series is based on the bestselling “Silo” trilogy, “Wool,” “Shift,” and “Dust,” by Hugh Howey.

While it was well liked, Apple TV had told the creators that the series would end after the fourth season. The third season just returned to the small screen in July, with the fourth season anticipated to release in Summer 2027.

Even though the series is facing down its inevitable end, it may not be time to say goodbye just yet.

Allegedly, there’s a chance “Silo” may be getting its own spinoff, set to begin pre-production in late 2026. It is expected to tie into Hugh Howey’s upcoming “Silo 40” trilogy, which is set to release in 2027.

This tantalizing tidbit was shared by Apple TV enthusiast Sigmund Judge on Threads.

One minute later, however, a very significant figure refuted the claim. Speaking up was the “Silo” author, Hugh Howey.

“Yo, this is news to me,” Howey says in the replies. “So probably not true.”

“I appreciate you wanting to keep a surprise,” Judge says in response. “Love everything you do.”

Judge says that he’s got some further evidence in response to “a denial,” presumably Howey’s. Judge says that hires for the upcoming project have begun, and that the main sets used for “Silo” have remained, even after production on the fourth season wrapped in March.

In a nutshell: Despite Nvidia losing fans over the last few years as its focus on gamers diminishes (or disappears), the company’s GPUs have dominated the sales charts. But that status quo is starting to change: Amazon’s top 10 best-selling GPU list is an even split between Team Red and Team Green, with the highest position held by a Radeon 9000-series card. Meanwhile, in Germany, AMD is the one that’s dominating sales – at least at one retailer.

The rise of RDNA 4 was highlighted by TechEpiphany on X.

– TechEpiphany (@TechEpiphanyYT) September 6, 2026

The Amazon best-selling list has changed slightly since the post, but the Radeon RX 9070 XT is still the top GPU. This Gigabyte version is priced at $749, which, of course, is considerably higher than the GPU’s $599 launch MSRP.

The other AMD cards in the chart are an Asus model of the 9070 XT, an Asrock 9070, and an Asus 9060 XT. Nvidia also holds four positions with its RTX 5070, RTX 5060 Ti, and two RTX 5080 models.

Things appear even more favorable for Lisa Su’s firm in Germany. The figures, which come from Mindfactory, show AMD accounting for almost 56% of all GPUs sold over the last week, while Nvidia holds a 40% share. Again, the RX 9070 XT is the most popular card by far, followed by the RX 9060.

It’s worth remembering that Mindfactory has a reputation for favoring AMD, offering promotions, discounts, and bundles featuring its products, which help push up sales figures. The store’s AMD cards have outsold Nvidia’s in the past.

However, these charts do illustrate the impact of the memory crisis on the graphics card market. All GPUs are more expensive, but AMD’s are often cheaper than equivalent Nvidia cards.

The other reason is likely simple availability. The Amazon chart shows three AMD cards in stock, while Nvidia only has one – a Gigabyte RTX 5080 for a colossal $1,599, and that’s with a 6% discount.

Only one company dominates the Steam survey GPU chart

TechEpiphany’s claim of AMD “dominating everywhere” might be a bit of an exaggeration, but there are signs of consumers opting for its cards because of the cheaper prices – or just buying them because there are no Nvidia alternatives. The most valuable company in the world still has GPUs in almost 73% of Steam survey participants’ machines, compared to AMD’s 18.6%, so we’re not seeing a red revolution just yet.

Create a strong password policy by prioritizing length and uniqueness, blocking compromised passwords, allowing password managers and autofill, removing arbitrary complexity and expiration rules, and requiring MFA for important accounts. Deploy the policy with a managed password vault, secure recovery procedures, and tests that confirm the written rules work in every covered system.

Quick Take

These requirements follow current NIST authenticator guidance. They are a security baseline rather than proof that a particular policy satisfies every law, contract, or industry framework.

Prerequisites and Ownership

Identify the accounts in scope

Inventory the systems that accept passwords before writing the rules. Include workforce accounts, customer accounts, administrator access, cloud services, remote-access tools, shared credentials, and legacy applications. Record which systems use single-factor authentication, MFA, or single sign-on.

Keep machine credentials in a separate category. API keys, database secrets, certificates, service-account tokens, and CI/CD credentials require secrets-management controls rather than an ordinary employee password vault. A dedicated article on business secrets management should cover those systems.

Assign responsibility

Name a policy owner, identity-platform administrator, security reviewer, help-desk recovery owner, and departmental access approver. A policy without named owners tends to fail at exceptions, recovery, and offboarding rather than during ordinary password creation.

Document technical constraints

Record each system’s minimum and maximum length, supported characters, MFA options, password-history rules, breached-password screening, paste and autofill behavior, recovery process, and session controls. Legacy systems that cannot meet the baseline should enter a documented exception process with compensating controls and a retirement or remediation date.

Step-by-Step: Create the Password Policy

1. Define which accounts the policy covers

   State whether the policy applies to employees, contractors, administrators, customers, service providers, and shared accounts. Classify higher-risk accounts such as email, identity-provider, financial, cloud-administrator, source-code, and password-vault accounts.

   Where possible, replace shared accounts with individually attributable accounts. If sharing is unavoidable, use a managed vault that records access and lets administrators revoke membership.

   Expected result: Every covered account type has an owner, risk classification, authentication method, and exception status.

2. Set length and input requirements

   Require at least 15 characters when a password is the only authentication factor. NIST permits passwords used only as part of an MFA process to be shorter, but they must contain at least 8 characters. Organizations may adopt a longer minimum when users can rely on a password generator.

   Permit passwords of at least 64 characters. Accept spaces and broad character sets, process the entire submitted password, and never silently truncate it. Systems that mishandle spaces or long generated values should be corrected or documented as exceptions.

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   Expected result: Users can create long passphrases or generated passwords without encountering unnecessary input restrictions.

3. Remove mandatory composition rules

   Do not require every password to contain a prescribed mixture of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. Current NIST rules prohibit these composition requirements because users commonly satisfy them with predictable patterns.

   Symbols remain acceptable when a generator selects them or a service requires them. The policy should not imply that a short password becomes safe simply because one letter was replaced with a familiar symbol. NIST’s public password creation guidance prioritizes length and recommends long passphrases when a password must be created manually.

   Expected result: Users can choose long, usable passwords without following predictable formatting recipes.

4. Replace scheduled expiration with event-driven changes

   Do not force users to change passwords every 30, 60, or 90 days without evidence of risk. Require a change when a password is known or suspected to have been disclosed, appears in relevant breach data, was transmitted insecurely, or may remain known to someone whose access has ended.

   A password change must be accompanied by session revocation when an attacker could already be signed in. Changing the secret alone may not invalidate active browser sessions, application tokens, or remembered devices.

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   Expected result: Password changes respond to compromise and access changes rather than an arbitrary calendar.

5. Block weak and compromised passwords

   Compare new and changed passwords against a blocklist containing commonly used, expected, and compromised values. Include context-specific choices such as the organization’s name, service name, username, and predictable derivatives.

   Explain why a proposed password was rejected and ask the user to choose a genuinely different value. Do not reveal whether another person uses that password. Avoid enormous blocklists that create excessive false rejections without meaningfully improving protection against rate-limited online guessing.

   Expected result: Users cannot enroll values that attackers are likely to guess early or already possess from breach collections.

6. Add controls around the password

   Require MFA for email, identity-provider, financial, remote-access, cloud-administrator, source-code, and password-manager accounts. Prefer phishing-resistant methods such as passkeys or hardware-backed security keys where the service and user environment support them.

   Rate-limit or progressively delay failed attempts. Monitor suspicious logins, protect account recovery, avoid knowledge-based questions as a sole recovery method, and provide a way to revoke sessions after suspected compromise. The OWASP authentication guidance treats password controls, MFA, recovery, session handling, and login monitoring as connected parts of account security.

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   Expected result: A guessed or disclosed password is harder to convert into persistent account access.

7. Require password-manager-compatible login forms

   Allow users to paste and autofill credentials. Use standard password fields and avoid scripts or form designs that block managers. NIST requires verifiers to allow password managers and autofill and recommends permitting paste when autofill interfaces are unavailable.

   Do not interpret clipboard blocking as a security control. It can push users toward shorter passwords they can type manually or toward storing credentials in insecure notes.

   Expected result: Users can generate, store, and enter unique credentials without weakening them for convenience.

How to Choose a Password Manager

Select a manager by deployment fit, recovery design, security controls, and usability rather than by the length of its feature list. The NCSC buyers guide emphasizes that an unusable manager will leave insecure workarounds in place.

Evaluate the following capabilities before deployment:

• Protection of credentials and metadata at rest.
• Who controls or can recover the vault’s decryption key.
• MFA, passkey, and approved-device support.
• Recovery options and the people authorized to use them.
• Secure sharing without revealing passwords in email or chat.
• Role-based administration, audit records, and offboarding controls.
• Restrictions or alerts for bulk export.
• Supported browsers, operating systems, and mobile devices.
• Update delivery and the provider’s vulnerability-disclosure process.
• A practical method for leaving the service without permanent lock-in.

Browser and device managers can be appropriate when convenience and ecosystem integration matter most. A reputable standalone manager may fit mixed-device environments or teams requiring advanced sharing and administration. The NCSC’s updated password-manager guidance recommends evaluating reputation, device security, recovery, MFA, and platform needs instead of assuming one type fits everyone.

How to Deploy and Use the Password Manager

1. Protect the vault account

Create a long, unique primary passphrase that is never used elsewhere. Enable the strongest practical MFA and secure every registered device with updates, automatic locking, and a local PIN or biometric unlock.

Store recovery keys or emergency instructions separately from the vault. Avoid circular recovery in which the only way to access the email account is through the vault while the only way to recover the vault is through that email account.

2. Import credentials carefully

Some managers migrate credentials through a CSV file. That export may contain readable usernames and passwords. Create it only on a trusted device, import it immediately, verify that the records arrived, and delete the exported file from the original folder, recycle bin, cloud synchronization, and temporary storage.

Do not perform a vault migration over an unfamiliar hotspot. Review the precautions in this public Wi-Fi security guide before accessing sensitive accounts away from a trusted connection.

3. Replace reused passwords in risk order

1. Secure the password-manager account and its recovery channels.
2. Change email and identity-provider credentials.
3. Change banking, payment, payroll, and financial credentials.
4. Change administrator, cloud, source-code, and remote-access credentials.
5. Change shopping, social-media, subscription, and lower-impact accounts.

Do not change dozens of accounts without confirming that each new password was saved. Keep the old session open until the new credential has been tested in a separate private window or another approved device.

4. Configure generation and autofill

Generate a different random password for every compatible service. Match the site’s supported length and character rules while avoiding needless manual edits. If autofill does not appear, check the exact domain before searching the vault and copying the password.

Autofill may help resist phishing because a manager should associate credentials with the legitimate domain. It is not infallible. Users must still inspect unusual addresses, subdomains, redirects, and browser warnings.

5. Configure team sharing and offboarding

Store business credentials in organization-controlled collections rather than personal vaults. Grant access by role, assign an accountable owner, review membership, and remove access promptly when someone changes roles or leaves.

Revoking vault access prevents future retrieval, but it cannot make a password unknown to someone who already viewed or copied it. Rotate credentials when a departing user could retain them. Teams protecting software repositories should connect this process to the controls in the guide to preventing source-code theft.

Verify That the Policy Works

Test the deployed controls instead of assuming a written setting was applied consistently.

Record exceptions and failed tests with an owner and target correction date. Repeat the checks after identity-platform changes, password-manager migrations, or major policy revisions.

Failure Modes and Troubleshooting

Operational Limits and Edge Cases

• Concentrated value: A vault makes unique passwords practical, but a successful vault compromise can expose many accounts. Protect the primary account and registered devices accordingly.
• Compromised endpoints: Malware or someone using an unlocked computer may capture credentials after the vault decrypts them. A password manager does not replace device protection. Organizations can evaluate those controls separately in this endpoint protection guide.
• Recovery trade-off: Recovery improves availability but creates another path that an attacker may target. Document who can recover a vault and what evidence is required.
• Shared accounts: A vault improves sharing, but individual accounts remain preferable because they provide attribution and cleaner revocation.
• Offline access: Emergency recovery material needs physical protection, named custodians, and periodic verification.
• Phishing: Passwords themselves are not phishing-resistant. Adopt passkeys where appropriate and evaluate the differences in a future passkeys versus passwords guide.

Key Takeaways

Frequently Asked Questions

Month-end Apple deals are in full effect at Amazon, with AirPods 4, AirPods Pro 3, and AirPods Max 2 discounted by up to $100.

Those looking for the lowest AirPods price this week can take advantage of Amazon’s $99 special on AirPods 4, reflecting a $30 price cut off MSRP.

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AirPods Pro 3 are reduced to $199.99 thanks to a $50 price cut, with delivery as early as today to select locations for Prime members.

The steepest discount can be found on Apple’s over-ear option, with AirPods Max 2 now $100 off at Amazon as well. With the triple-digit savings, you can pick up a pair in any of Apple’s five color options for $449.

Today’s top AirPods deals

Layoffs partially a cost-saving measure, sources told Bloomberg.

Payments giant Visa is cutting roughly 7pc of its workforce in a now familiar pivot towards AI. The layoffs translate to about 2,600 employees.

The job cuts are expected to primarily affect technology and product teams. Visa has European offices in Poland and the UK.

“To capture the opportunities ahead and best position Visa to lead this transformation, we must continue evolving how we work,” company CEO Ryan McInerney wrote in a memo to staff, parts of which were verified by multiple news organisations.

“AI is also helping to accelerate this evolution and shape the way work gets done at Visa.”

Visa’s layoffs come at a transformational moment for the tech industry, which has been rapidly evolving since generative AI’s mainstream popularity skyrocketed in recent years.

Tech leaders, including the likes of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Block’s Jack Dorsey, among several others, have shared their vision for slimmer teams powered with AI for better cost saving and added efficiency.

Fintech Block cut around 40pc of its company’s staff – or around 4,000 people – earlier this year. More recently, Microsoft announced 4,800 job cuts and the parent company behind the Reuters news agency laid off 500 engineering jobs. Even bigger layoffs, including 8,000 job cuts at Meta, were also announced in recent months.

According to technology and start-up layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi, 252 tech companies have cut more than 124,000 jobs so far in this year alone, already crossing the nearly 123,000 that were laid off in the whole of 2025.

Sources, however, told Bloomberg that AI-powered work efficiency was not the only reason behind Visa’s decision to cut jobs.

Visa intends to redirect the funds saved towards consumer payments, business and value-added services, including stablecoins, cross-border and business-to-business offerings, they added.

“I have deep conviction that we are doing what is right for Visa, our clients and our partners as we continue to focus on driving efficiency across the company in order to reinvest in our highest potential opportunities.

“As a result of the choices we have made over the past few years, we are entering a new era in commerce with a business that has real momentum,” McInerney said in the memo.

“We see this in our continued strong financial results, client satisfaction, employee engagement, and breakthrough innovation as we build and ship products better and faster than ever before.”

Net revenue at the company is up 14pc this quarter past to $11.6bn. Company shares gained more than 1pc by trading close on Tuesday (28 July), falling marginally in after-hours trading. Share prices have risen nearly 5pc over the past year.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Ryan McInerny at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, 2025. Image: World Economic Forum via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Visa aimed Anthropic’s Claude Mythos at the infrastructure behind billions of daily transactions, a network that spans more than 200 countries and territories, moves money in roughly 160 currencies, and connects nearly 5 billion payment credentials to more than 175 million merchant locations.

The model stitched minor weaknesses deep in the stack into working exploit chains that would traditionally have surfaced only late in penetration testing. Rajat Taneja, Visa’s president of technology, walked the VB Transform 2026 audience through what came next, including why Visa released the harness that governed the entire hunt as open source and why the company abandoned traditional remediation metrics for a measurement its team invented.

Taneja has run technology strategy, product engineering, and global infrastructure at Visa since 2019, after joining the company in 2013 from Electronic Arts, where he served as CTO following 15 years at Microsoft. He co-authored, with Visa chief information security officer Subra Kumaraswamy, the June 10 blog post announcing the release of the Visa Vulnerability Agentic Harness on GitHub as a reference implementation that any security team can inspect, adapt, and extend. Visa also published a technical white paper detailing the architecture, lessons learned, and 12 non-negotiable architectural practices for critical infrastructure.

Trust built on pessimism and paranoia

Taneja led with the arithmetic that makes Visa a target worth defending obsessively. Trust at the scale of global payments gets engineered through what he called pessimism and paranoia, by assuming failure and designing around it before failure arrives. The network has been hardened over many years through zero-trust architecture, layered defenses, and highly automated security operations built for the scale and reliability global payments demand.

So when Anthropic invited the organizations behind critical software to test Mythos under Project Glasswing, Visa said yes. Glasswing participants collectively identified more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities in the first month of testing across software underpinning critical systems industry-wide, according to Anthropic. Anthropic’s own conclusion placed the bottleneck after discovery, in verification, disclosure, and patching speed. Visa joined to test decades of hardening at AI speed and learn where advanced models could push its defenses further.

What Mythos showed at Visa

Inside Visa’s environment, Mythos demonstrated system-wide, context-aware analysis, surfacing vulnerabilities buried deep in the stack and flagging issues that grow more serious when chained together, with findings clean enough that engineering teams could act on them without wading through noise. Some findings carried critical severity ratings, and Visa credits its zero-trust controls, network segmentation, and layered safeguards with breaking the chain before any external actor could have acted.

That confirmation mattered, Taneja said, but the epiphany that followed mattered more. “In a world of agentic attacks, defense also has to be agentic,” he said. Even at a company that has invested decades in defense-in-depth, the model revealed assumptions the team had been operating under that needed rethinking. Traditional SAST tools keep their place as a first pass against known vulnerability patterns, Visa’s white paper notes, but pattern matching alone cannot follow an adversary who reasons through logic, data flow, and the exploit chains that live between the signatures.

A harness, not a scanner

Visa’s response was not another monolithic scanner. The team built the Visa Vulnerability Agentic Harness, now in its fifth generation, as a governed pipeline that directs frontier AI models through structured security tasks while enforcing deterministic controls, policy gates, and human oversight at every stage. Taneja walked through the design philosophy. The harness operates across four phases and eleven stages, from code ingestion and threat modeling through deep-dive verification, exploit chain synthesis, and finally remediation and fix validation.

Three design choices drive finding quality, per the project’s own documentation. Threat modeling runs before analysis to focus on the attack surface rather than scanning everything blindly, multi-agent deterministic voting requires convergence across independent reasoning chains before a finding advances, and structured triage artifacts compress the lifecycle from discovery to a result developers can actually ship. The payoff is a pipeline that runs hot by default. A plain scan in the shipped profile runs all eleven stages and edits source files in the target repository in fix mode, applying candidate patches unless the operator stops it at detection.

The harness is multi-model by design. An LLM abstraction layer lets Visa swap or combine providers without changing the control plane, and the open-source version works with Anthropic Claude, OpenAI-compatible models, or a mix. The repo’s documentation is candid about the exception. Applying a fix requires the file-editing tools that only the Anthropic backends expose, so the remediation and validation stages currently require Anthropic models for full functionality, and an OpenAI-compatible model in those roles is limited to report-only output. VentureBeat’s Q2 2026 Pulse research, presented earlier at the conference, reinforces why that provider flexibility matters. Among the enterprises surveyed, 82% rely on provider-native controls as their primary security layer, and 59% plan to adopt or switch agent security tooling within the year. The controls enterprises adopted last year are already becoming the controls they plan to replace.

Mean Time to Adapt replaces legacy metrics

Finding vulnerabilities is no longer the hard part, Taneja argued. The real challenge is how quickly a team can confirm an issue is truly exploitable, fix it, and prove the attack path is closed rather than just showing a patch was applied. Visa calls this Mean Time to Adapt, and the white paper tracks it along three dimensions. Inventory freshness measures how current and complete the organization’s view is of code, configuration, and runtime deployment. Exploitable paths per release counts how many end-to-end attack chains remain possible after each release, not just how many findings were closed. Validation cycle time tracks how long it takes to produce repeatable, evidence-backed proof that a fix works and stays working in production.

That distinction matters because legacy measures such as mean time to detect and raw CVE closure counts can look better on paper while actual exposure keeps growing underneath them. An organization can close hundreds of findings a month and still leave viable exploit chains open if nobody tested whether the patches actually break the attack. MTTA forces teams to measure the outcome that matters, and the white paper leans on CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities data to make the prioritization case, noting that fewer than 1% of CVEs are ever actively exploited. Visa’s SSDLC policy now assumes every exploitable path will be exercised in production and requires it to be remediated before code is promoted.

Supply chain risk accelerates under AI

The conversation moved past Visa’s own perimeter when Taneja turned to suppliers. A well-defended enterprise stays exposed through weak vendors and weak open-source components, the white paper warns, so Visa is making AI-specific security posture a non-negotiable dimension of supplier due diligence, with expectations for continuous vulnerability validation, living software bills of materials, and MTTA baselines across its technology stack.

Visa has also joined Project Lightwell, the $5 billion IBM and Red Hat initiative to harden widely used open-source components through AI-driven validation and coordinated patching, alongside financial institutions including Bank of America, JPMorganChase, Goldman Sachs, and Mastercard. The commitment extends the same logic upstream, because the MTTA clock does not pause at any single company’s perimeter.

When agents start buying things

Securing agentic commerce is Visa’s next problem. Taneja described a future where AI agents transact on behalf of consumers and enterprises, and said Visa is building the trust framework, identity layer, and agent readiness scoring that merchants will need before agents can safely complete transactions. Behind that work sits the Visa Payment Threats Lab, a simulation environment where real fraud scenarios get replayed against the authorization rules, thresholds, and configurations Visa actually runs, to surface AI-enabled failure modes as targeted hardening recommendations.

The identity challenge is not theoretical. VentureBeat’s Pulse research found that 69% of enterprises already run credential sharing somewhere in their agent deployments, and companies with shared credentials report security incidents or near-misses at a 63.5% rate, against 40.9% where every agent has its own scoped identity. Visa’s white paper addresses that gap directly, listing “AI agents are identities” among its 12 non-negotiable practices and requiring scoped permissions, least privilege enforcement, full audit trails, and inclusion in IAM governance for every agent that calls an API, reads data, or modifies a system.

Three priorities for defenders

Visa is organizing its defensive strategy around three priorities, Taneja said. Shift security left until exploitable flaws are designed out before they reach production, and replace high-risk, under-supported components before they turn into material exposure. The third is the heaviest lift at Visa’s scale, refactoring defenses to run autonomously under human governance so detection, validation, and response keep pace as threat volume grows and the models behind attacks improve.

None of it requires a payment network’s budget to start. The harness sits on GitHub with 595 stars and 97 forks as of July 20, MTTA needs a dashboard rather than a procurement cycle, and the white paper’s 12 non-negotiable practices map onto architecture reviews security teams already run. Visa’s own conclusion reads like a deadline. The opening to get ahead of machine-speed attackers is still there, the paper argues, and it will not stay open.

Not too long ago, PC gaming was still considered a niche hobby, stereotyped by the typical gamer who lives inside a basement and refuses to come out. Those times, fortunately, are long gone. Esports has grown massively in both viewership and competition, so much so that we have an esports World Cup currently happening in Paris. This popularity is driven mostly by games like Valorant. Even I, famously a MacBook user, have spent countless hours playing Valo with my friends because it’s so much fun. Around 20 million players play the game every month, and some are its biggest fans.

Playing PC games, though, isn’t cheap. You need a capable processor, a GPU that doesn’t throttle when you’re in the middle of a fight, and enough RAM to keep all tasks at bay. Not to mention a high-refresh-rate display, which is super important for hitting those headshots. If you’re in the market for a new machine to take your Valorant gameplay to the next level, I don’t see any better machine than the HP Omen 16 Valorant Edition. It’s the company’s top-of-the-line gaming laptop, complete with a Valorant-inspired design, the Ryzen 9 9955HX processor, an RTX 5070 GPU, and, even in this economy, 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM. Naturally, when HP sent over the laptop for review, I was very excited to get my hands on it. But is it worth your money? This review should help you answer that.

Design & Hardware

If you love Valorant, there is nothing I can say right now that’ll make you not love this laptop. I’ve tested many limited edition phones, and most times brands just slap a logo on the back and call it a day. That’s not the case with the HP Omen 16. The Valorant inspiration starts with the color. It’s painted VALORANT BLUE, a dark navy blue of sorts that looks very unique among the sea of grey laptops. In the center of the back panel, you’ll find the HyperX logo, which is encircled by the red Valorant logo. I didn’t think this combination would work this well, but it does, and it looks fantastic. But that’s not all. On the back panel’s left side is Valorant written in the iconic font, and the right side lists the game’s maps, along with a small logo.

Open up the laptop, and you’re greeted with the same design cues. The WASD buttons are painted red; there’s another logo on the right and a few other subtle design cues. I think it’s a very faithful attempt at making a special edition laptop that doesn’t go over the top. To confirm, it’s not just me fanboying the laptop; I put it on my Instagram story. Look, I post a lot of new tech to show my friends, and never once have I gotten so many likes on the story as with the Omen 16. People asked me all sorts of things about the laptop, with the main thing being it’s so pretty.

Besides all the Valorant stuff, the HP Omen 16 is made from aluminum. The color finish is matte, so thankfully it doesn’t pick up many fingerprints. However, if you’re like me and eat Doritos while watching a series, please keep your hands away because they will smudge the laptop. I had to give the laptop a thorough clean before taking the review photos. When it comes to handling, the Omen 16 is like a typical gaming laptop. All those powerful internals add weight, 2.47 kg to be precise. I wouldn’t call that too heavy, but carrying around a 16-inch laptop will hurt your back a bit. Still, I was able to take it to my nearby coffee shop for some work without much trouble. If I had to complain, it’d be about the charger, which is a hefty unit and a pain to carry around.

Beyond that, the hinge is a bit wobbly, but it keeps the laptop steady and can be opened with one hand. I also wasn’t worried about the durability since there was almost no chassis flex on the keyboard deck. You can chuck it inside your backpack, and it’ll be fine.

Let’s talk ports. With a gaming laptop, brands can’t get away with bundling just one USB-C port. And fortunately, that’s not the case with the Omen 16. On the left and right sides, there are two USB Type-A 5Gbps ports, coupled with a USB 3.0 Type-C port with charging support and a headphone/microphone combo jack. Is that it, you may ask? To which I’d answer no. There is a USB Type-A 10Gbps port, an HDMI 2.1 port, an Ethernet jack, and a barrel charging port on the back side for easier connectivity.

Keyboard & Trackpad

Given that you’d be spending most of the time using the keyboard when gaming, it quickly becomes an important subject. And as a surprise to maybe no one, the HP Omen 16’s keyboard is very good. Keys have a lot of travel, which I love, and there’s satisfying feedback when pressed. The actuation energy isn’t much, and you won’t be disturbing your colleagues with the sound inside an office. Since this is a 16-inch device, HP also bundled a dedicated number pad row.

While I’m not the biggest fan of this layout as it shifts everything to the left, I can see the appeal for gamers and professionals. In classic gaming laptop fashion, the keyboard has RGB backlighting, which can be configured using the Omen Light Studio app. There are four zones, and you can choose to go all the way in the funky territory if you wish. For me, I’m more of a white-backlit guy to keep everything classy.

Moving over to the trackpad, I have nothing to complain about here, as well. It’s a big, glass-topped surface that does the job when navigating the UI. The surface is smooth enough to not cause much friction. The physical buttons feel nice to press, and the energy required for a press isn’t so much that it causes strain.

Display & Cameras

What’s the one thing about the display that matters with games like Valorant? If your answer was high-refresh rate, then you’d be absolutely correct. HP thinks the same, which is the reason the Omen 16 houses a 240Hz refresh rate screen. It’s hard to put that feeling into words, but there’s some genuine advantage that you will get. Beyond that, the panel spans 16 inches and has a resolution of 2.5K and a 3ms response time.

To hit that 240Hz refresh rate, HP had to go with an IPS panel, which is fine to me. Do I miss the deep blacks and vibrant colors of an OLED display? Yes. Still, the Omen 16’s display is fantastic. Colors feel natural, and watching a movie on that big screen is a delight. I finally got around to watching Ted Lasso, and it was a very enjoyable experience, thanks to the 500 nits of peak brightness. For all my creative friends, the Omen 16’s display does cover 100% of the sRGB color space. So, you can edit videos/photos and not worry about them looking messed up on others’ screens. The anti-reflective coating proved quite capable as well, keeping most of the reflections at bay.

As far as the camera is concerned, it won’t be winning any competitions. It’s 1080p, thankfully, and works well for quick video calls or classes. The sharpness in low light can be missing, and colors are washed out compared to my MacBook.

Performance

It’s no secret that a gaming laptop isn’t just for playing games. It’s also a tool for creative and coding professionals who need the extra horsepower. Under the hood, the HP Omen 16 packs the latest AMD Ryzen 9955HX processor, which has 16 cores and 64 MB L3 cache, and can boost up to 5.4 GHz in demanding tasks. It’s paired with 24 GB DDR5-5600 MT/s RAM and a 1 TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD. Graphics are handled by the RTX 5070 GPU, with 8GB of VRAM. Since you can’t have the thirsty RTX graphics running all the time, and people do need more battery life than just one hour, there’s integrated AMD Radeon 610M graphics for lighter tasks.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the Omen 16 is a very powerful machine. You can throw any workload at it, and it’ll handle it like a champ. I did my usual writing and researching on the laptop, and it never once hesitated when opening another application. Everything felt effortless, and I just couldn’t push the laptop with my office work even if I tried. As this was the case, I also installed Da Vinci Resolve to do a spot of video editing. Even with multiple 4K streams, some advanced effects and color grading work, the timeline preview was pretty smooth, and the render times were some of the fastest in my testing. The same happened when running a long Python script, marked by exceptionally quick compile times. Not to mention how smooth everything feels on the 240Hz display.

Benchmarks, however, are where you see the real power of the Omen 16. In Geekbench, the Ryzen 9955HX scored 2,751 in the single-core test and 18,266 in the multi-core test. The closest competition I have tested is last year’s Zephyrus G14, which ran on the Ryzen 9 HX 370. The Omen 16 scored more than 20% higher in multi-threaded workloads. Moving to Geekbench’s GPU test, the score reached a pretty remarkable 120,517 points.

Gaming & Thermals

It’s time to talk about the things you came here for: gaming. After all, that’s the biggest reason to buy the Omen 16. And it would be a shame to start with anything else except Valorant. There, the Omen 16 delivered easy 250+ FPS on high settings. With Red Dead Redemption 2, I could max out the resolution at 2.5K with very high graphics and still get around 80 FPS. Cyberpunk 2077 was a bit more challenging, pushing the laptop to its very limit. On maxed-out settings, I observed around 50 FPS. If that’s not enough for you, there’s always DLSS. It’s a very clever way to get over 100 FPS without losing much detail. Some purists may argue those frames are not real, but you’d be hard-pressed to find the difference playing on a laptop screen.

I employed DLSS once again, with Indiana Jones: The Great Circle, to get an average of 100 FPS, with 1% lows around 80 FPS. If you’re a racing fan, Forza Horizon and Motorsport both worked flawlessly at highest settings, with RTX reflections turned on. Even Call of Duty fans will be pretty pleased with this setup.

As far as thermals are concerned, the bottom plate is a large intake, and the hot air comes out from the sides and back. Regardless of the game I tested, there were no signs of thermal throttling inside a temperature-controlled room. HP also bundles its OMEN app with the laptop to control the metrics. It has ads, which is something I absolutely despise in a first-party app. They should not have ads. That said, it was pretty good at controlling different metrics of the laptop, and you can manually tweak different aspects of the performance.

Battery Life & Speakers

Battery life is usually the Achilles’ heel of gaming laptops, simply because running all those internals takes a lot of power. The HP Omen 16 tries to combat that with an 83 Wh cell. In my daily use, which is mostly on Chrome, along with some spreadsheet work and YouTube, the laptop lasted roughly 4 hours on a single charge. I wouldn’t call that groundbreaking, but it’s enough to get you through a work session inside a cafe. Fortunately, there’s a fast charger bundled, albeit with a massive one. With it, you can recharge the battery to 50% in 30 minutes. If you’d rather not carry the large brick, the USB-C port supports charging.

I can say almost the same about the speakers, which you get two of. They are decent if you want to watch a quick YouTube video with clear dialogue and vocals. Just don’t expect them to fill a room with music. The highs and lows do get slightly muffled, and the treble was a little less than what I like. They also sounded quieter than my MacBook.

Verdict

At ₹299,990, the HP Omen 16 Valorant edition is certainly a premium laptop, but for the right person, I believe it’s a no-brainer. I think it’s one of the better special edition laptops, with a really striking yet sophisticated design that pays homage to Valorant. All the little details are excellent. The build quality is solid, and the performance is just next level. I don’t think there is any workload the Omen 16 can’t handle, and even AAA games run smoothly, albeit sometimes requiring DLSS. Rounding things out is a sizeable 16-inch 240Hz display that keeps things fast, and the excellent-feeling keyboard. I do think the speakers could have been better, but that’s a tradeoff with most gaming laptops.

According to reports, Vivo has started preparations for launching its S series phones back in India with the release of the Vivo S2 smartphone. While Vivo hasn’t officially confirmed a release date, some reports indicate the phone could launch on August 6th, with sales expected to begin on August 11. This would mark the revival of the S series of phones in India following the debut of the Vivo S1 phone back in 2019. Reports have also given an early look at its design while revealing details about its expected specifications, color options, and launch plans.

Expected Specifications and Camera Features

Leaks suggest the Vivo S2 will feature an OLED display with a refresh rate of up to 120Hz. The phone may use the MediaTek Dimensity 7360 chipset, built on a 4nm process. Reports also suggest the phone will come in 8GB + 128GB and 8GB + 256GB variants. On the camera front, the Vivo S2 is tipped to include a 50MP Sony main sensor. Some information also suggests that the phone would be capable of recording videos in 4K quality through both front and rear cameras.

According to some recent leaks, the Vivo S2 would come with a sleek design. It would have a 3D curved display with narrow borders and a punch-hole selfie camera at the center of the device. On the back side, there would be a camera module in the shape of a pill with two big rings and an LED flash. Unlike many smartphones, the camera module matches the rear panel color for a more seamless finish. Vivo could offer the phone in Sapphire Blue, Regal Bronze, and Silk White. Its design closely resembles the Vivo X300 FE. Vivo has not shared any battery details yet. However, one report suggests the Vivo S2 may pack a 7,000mAh battery. This information is still based on leaks and awaits official confirmation.

Expected Price of Vivo S2

The Vivo S2 could target India’s premium mid-range smartphone market. It might cost anywhere between ₹40,000 and ₹50,000, though Vivo has not yet officially announced its pricing. Some leaks also reveal internal listing prices, but they may differ from the final retail price. On launch, the Vivo S2 will challenge the OnePlus Nord 6 and the Motorola Edge 70 Pro smartphones. It will also take on the Realme 16 Pro series and Vivo V70 FE.