Smart glasses may look cool but there’s absolutely no place in our schools or classrooms for them.

Sabine Winton said that on Tuesday. Western Australia’s education minister was announcing what she called the country’s most comprehensive ban on the devices.

It is not a policy statement. The same day, the department’s director general Jay Peckitt issued an instruction to every public school principal in the state. It takes effect on 12 October, the first day of Term 4.

What the instruction actually orders

The CEO Instruction is short and unusually specific.

Principals must stop students and staff wearing, using, charging or storing the glasses on school premises. The same applies at any school organised event or activity. The charging clause matters, because it closes the locker.

Principals must also bar parents, carers, visitors and contractors from bringing the devices onto school grounds at all. The instruction says the ban should reach government residential colleges too, through separate mechanisms.

It runs on real legal authority rather than guidance. The director general issues it under section 233 of the School Education Act 1999. Principals enforce it under regulations 69 and 70. Those let a principal direct people on school premises, and bar an item from coming in. Both rules say the school must display the order publicly.

The risk nobody expected on the list

The instruction names six risks. Four are the ones you would guess: privacy, child safety and wellbeing, unauthorised recording, and cyber security.

The fifth is disruption to teaching. The sixth is examination and assessment integrity.

That last one reframes the device. The instruction’s own definition runs well past a camera. It lists audio recording, video, photography, artificial intelligence functionality and live streaming. Then internet connectivity, facial recognition, information retrieval and communication.

Principals can still approve the glasses for medical, accessibility or assistive technology use, and for educational programmes they authorise themselves. Students who break the rule fall under the student behaviour policy, staff under staff conduct and discipline. Principals can tell visitors and contractors to take the devices off, and to leave if they refuse.

No incidents, on the record

Winton said the education department has recorded no instances of smart glasses being used irresponsibly in WA schools.

Prevention is the stated driver. Callum Liddelow and Courtney Withers reported the ban for ABC News. Winton pointed to growing community concern about careless, criminal and malicious use, not to anything that has happened in a classroom.

Kya Graves runs the WA Principals Federation. She told the ABC that principals had been writing their own school-level policies, with no departmental decree to work from. Some had incidents on their sites and put measures in place themselves.

Tama Leaver teaches internet studies at Curtin University. The worst outcome would be indecent recording of children, he told the ABC. He raised deepfakes as the second risk, and said it takes about 30 seconds of footage to make one with rudimentary tools.

Canberra asked the councils to do it

The federal government is the one part of this not acting.

Attorney-General Michelle Rowland ruled out an import ban on 31 August. Erin Handley reported for the ABC that Rowland said the government was not consulting on one, though it was not ruling anything out on other measures.

In its place she offered a privacy overhaul. The draft laws carry a right to erasure from large platforms and search engines, a fair and reasonable test on data collection, and meaningful consent rules. An identity document service called IDLock is due in 2027.

Rowland also encouraged councils to restrict the glasses in their own facilities, and suggested retailers could police change rooms.

The eSafety commissioner put the other side. The devices help people with disability, through speech to text for deaf users and scene descriptions for people with low vision.

The councils took the invitation

Matthew Taylor reported for Lawyers Weekly that the City of Sydney and Canterbury-Bankstown have now barred the glasses from their pools and fitness facilities, joining Brisbane and Yarra.

Councillor Matthew Thompson put the motion on Monday. It directs the chief executive to review the council’s conditions of entry and update them, covering leisure centres, libraries, council childcare centres and community centres. The document notes the pools already excluded the glasses.

Canterbury-Bankstown got there first and wrote in enforcement. Its staff can order patrons to remove the eyewear, confiscate it, and move on anyone who refuses. Women and parents raised the concerns that started it.

Brisbane barred non-consensual use of camera-enabled devices at its 21 public pools, a category taking in phones and ordinary cameras. Gold Coast is considering the Brisbane model, Adelaide is weighing its own, and the City of Vincent in Perth ordered a report last week.

Thompson wants the import ban Rowland declined. He told TechRadar that Canberra has left the problem with councils. Federal crossbenchers asked for the same ban in late August.

The office is next

Employment lawyers are now telling Australian employers to write their own rules.

Paul O’Halloran, a partner at Dentons, told Lawyers Weekly the technology exists in public and workplace settings for one practical reason, which is to record people without their knowledge or consent. He said it should be banned outright.

He called the technology insidious, because unlike a phone or a camera there is no obvious moment of recording. That is the feature rather than the flaw, he said.

O’Halloran argues employers already carry the risk. Privacy law and work health and safety codes oblige them to protect staff from harm, including covert surveillance. An employee could be recorded all day, in meetings, in break rooms, even in bathrooms and change facilities, and neither the employer nor the person filmed would know.

Michael Byrnes, a workplace relations partner at Swaab, put it more plainly. Employers should have no hesitation in banning the glasses, he said, and telling staff not to wear them is a reasonable and lawful direction.

His specific worry is audio. Secretly recording private conversations potentially breaches surveillance devices legislation.

Byrnes allows two exceptions. Employees with a visual impairment should be able to use them as far as the work requires. Where the glasses reduce a genuine safety hazard, that may also justify them, with rules on retaining and using any recording.

Three statutes already cover this ground: the NSW Workplace Surveillance Act 2005, the Privacy Act 1988 and the Fair Work Act 2009.

What the evidence says

A University of Sydney study sampled 350 public Instagram videos shot on smart glasses. It found that around 60% could potentially count as harassment of a person or people. We covered that research in August, and the way the algorithm pushed those videos.

Independent testing published this week found a second problem. A hacker can get into some ultra-cheap smart glasses without a password.

People have started building their own defences. A Polish developer released an app that detects the glasses over Bluetooth.

Not only Australia

Courts in England and Wales barred the glasses in August. New York state courts did the same in July. In the United States, cinemas, schools and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have all restricted them.

Australia already banned social media for under-16s, and Victoria bars wearables in schools from January 2027. South Australia’s attorney-general, Kyam Maher, is taking advice on whether state law is adequate, and has been talking to Rowland about nationally consistent rules.

The rapid growth of extra-large TVs measuring 85 inches and larger has put real pressure on the home projector category. Today’s biggest TVs are brighter, smarter, and increasingly affordable, making them a compelling alternative for buyers who once would have automatically considered projection.

Projectors still hold one major advantage, however: sheer image size. In dedicated home theaters and larger multipurpose rooms, projection can deliver a 100-inch, 120-inch, or even larger image without pushing prices into the stratosphere.

Following the launch of its higher-end Pro Cinema Q-Series 4K Laser Projectors in 2024, Epson is now bringing more attention to its step-down Home Cinema lineup with the new LS5000, LS6000, and LS7500 4K HDR laser projectors. The three models sit below the flagship Q-Series but retain a number of the technologies and features that made those projectors noteworthy.

The new LS Series models are built around Epson’s 3-Chip 3LCD technology and use a laser light engine. For owners of older lamp-based projectors, the move to laser brings a longer-lasting light source, more consistent brightness over time, and faster startup and shutdown.

The new models complement Epson’s established Home Cinema projector lineup, which is currently headed by the Home Cinema LS11000, introduced in 2022. Epson says the new Home Cinema projectors are designed to balance image performance with flexible installation and easier integration across a wide range of home entertainment spaces.

“As TVs get bigger, they can also become a design challenge, leaving a large black rectangle that dominates the room when not in use. Projection offers a discreet alternative that virtually disappears when the entertainment ends, while creating immersive experiences not possible with a traditional TV – from everyday 16:9 content to cinematic 21:9 and IMAX-style viewing,” said Fernando Tamashiro, product manager at Epson America, Inc. “By expanding our Home Cinema lineup with these new 4K HDR laser projectors, we’re offering an even broader range of solutions for today’s home entertainment spaces. Combining our unique 3-Chip 3LCD technology with our latest laser light source, Epson projectors are the optimal choice for customers looking to create a big-screen experience tailored to their viewing preferences, space and budget.”

Designed for movies, sports, and immersive gaming, Epson’s new Home Cinema laser projector lineup can display 4K HDR images at screen sizes ranging from 40 to 300 inches.

What the Epson LS5000, LS6000, and LS7500 Have in Common

Image Display Technologies: All three projectors use an advanced Epson Picture Processor, proprietary 4K display technology that produces a full 8.29-million-pixel on-screen image via Quad Pixel Shifting, and a 3-Chip 3LCD projection engine powered by a laser-array light source.

Light Output: The three projectors produce between 2,500 and 3,500 lumens of equal Color Brightness (IDMS Rated) and White Brightness (ISO Rated), depending on the model. Epson says the result is a bright, vivid image with strong color performance and deep black levels.

Advanced HDR Capability: Full 10-bit color processing supports HDR10 and HLG content. Additional HDR processing is provided by Epson’s Automatic HDR Scene Correction.

Multiple Aspect Ratios: From 16:9 HDTV content to cinematic 21:9 presentations, the new Home Cinema LS projectors are designed to support a range of screen formats and viewing environments.

Lenses: The Home Cinema LS5000 and LS6000 incorporate Epson Cinema standard-throw lenses, while the Home Cinema LS7500 features a short-throw lens that allows the projector to be positioned closer to the screen than conventional long-throw models. That makes the LS7500 better suited to larger screen sizes in rooms where projector placement is more limited.

High Black Contrast: Producing convincing black levels while maintaining shadow detail has long been a challenge for projectors. Epson specifies dynamic contrast ratios ranging from 800,000:1 to 1,200,000:1 across the three new LS models, depending on the projector. The goal is greater differentiation between bright and dark portions of the image while preserving detail in darker scenes.

HDMI Connectivity: All three projectors include dual HDMI inputs supporting refresh rates up to 120Hz, with one HDMI port providing eARC for audio passthrough to a compatible AV receiver or soundbar.

Gaming: In addition to supporting refresh rates up to 120Hz, the new LS projectors include Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM) and input lag rated below 20ms. That combination makes them suitable for gaming with compatible consoles and PCs where faster response times are important.

Flexible Installation: A compact design with quiet, front-exiting airflow provides additional placement flexibility. Manual lens shift of ±21% horizontally and ±59% vertically also makes it easier to position the projector in a variety of home theater and multipurpose spaces.

Bluetooth: Bluetooth connectivity is still not standard across the projector category, but the Home Cinema LS5000, LS6000, and LS7500 include Bluetooth 6.0. This allows audio from HDMI-connected sources to be streamed to compatible wireless headphones or speakers.

Comparison

The Bottom Line 

Epson’s position as the world’s top-selling projector brand did not happen by accident. Its lineup stretches from classrooms and conference rooms to dedicated home theaters, and the new Home Cinema LS5000, LS6000, and LS7500 fill an important spot just below the company’s more expensive Pro Cinema Q-Series.

What makes these three interesting is not simply that they use laser light sources or can throw a 300-inch image. Epson combines its 3-Chip 3LCD architecture with equal rated color and white brightness, output ranging from 2,500 to 3,500 lumens, Quad Pixel Shifting for an 8.29-million-pixel 4K image, HDR processing with tone mapping, and gaming features that include 120Hz support and ALLM. The LS7500 also adds a short-throw lens for installations where putting a conventional projector farther back in the room simply isn’t practical.

That combination gives the LS Series a legitimate point of differentiation from many single-chip DLP competitors, where white-light output and color-light output can differ substantially. It also gives buyers much of the functionality they actually need for movies, sports, and gaming without forcing them into Epson’s considerably more ambitious Pro Cinema Q-Series.

Competition from Sony, Hisense, Leica, JMGO, Optoma, and others is substantial, and some alternatives offer more light output, different installation options, or integrated entertainment features. But for someone trying to build a genuinely large-screen home theater without entering flagship-projector territory, the LS5000, LS6000, and LS7500 make a strong case for staying with traditional projection. A 98-inch TV might be getting easier to justify; a 150-inch one remains something of a financial incident.

Pro Tip: None of the three projectors includes a built-in speaker system or projection screen, so those need to be factored into the total system cost. Bluetooth is available for wireless audio, but anyone building a serious home theater will still want to budget for an external audio system and an appropriate screen.

Price & Availability

The new Epson Home Cinema LS Projectors are available through Epson’s Online Store and Select Retailers. 

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MediaTek is taking its first proper step into desktop-style computing, with its new Dimensity CX C10 Max confirmed for an upcoming premium Googlebook.

The new chip is the first member of MediaTek’s Dimensity Compute Experiences (CX) family, and it’s built around a fairly serious set of hardware. Manufactured on TSMC’s 3nm process, the C10 Max uses an octa-core all-big-core CPU, an 11-core GPU and MediaTek’s eighth-generation NPU.

Beats’ new 360 headphones are different from any Beats pair we’ve seen before. They’re designed around an adaptable core frame with easily swappable earcups and headband cushions in multiple colors and styles, along with features like much-improved noise canceling compared with the Studio Pro and IPX4 water resistance.

Their $350 MSRP is the same as the 2023 Beats Studio Pro and considerably less than competing models from Bose, Sony, and others. But can they really be your everything headphones?

Skip the reading? Click play above or watch the Beats 360 review on YouTube.

The 360’s unique form factor takes a cue from true wireless earbuds, with a battery and circuitry in each earpiece, allowing for a thin, flexible headband. They’re still relatively heavy at nearly 300 grams, but the balanced design fits well and remained comfortable for hours of wear. The four-piece control system is simpler and more elegant than the Studio Pro’s. There are nine microphones in total; eight are used for noise canceling and transparency mode, while three contribute to excellent call quality alongside DSP and AI-powered noise suppression.

The headphones ship with diamond-knit textile earcups designed for durability, and they work reasonably well for workouts. The core frame comes in four colors: Black, Cloud, Sky, and Pink. The swappable earcups and pads add Navy and Volt Green, along with faux-leather options in white and black. Introductory pricing starts at $10, rising to as much as $50 per set afterward. Custom 40 mm drivers are powered by what Beats calls a “high dynamic range amplifier.”

Features include iOS options like Audio Sharing and hands-free Siri, while both Android and iOS users get one-touch pairing, audio switching between connected devices, and finder functionality. There are no auto-pause sensors, manual EQ, or line-in playback options of any kind. Battery life is rated at 32 hours per charge, with an hour of playback from five minutes of charging, which matched my testing. Unfortunately, the battery continued to drain after the headphones were powered down, at a rate of around 0.5 percent per hour. Beats assumed this was due to the always-on Find My feature, but the issue persisted with Find My turned off. I’m hoping Beats offers a fix soon.

Noise canceling is excellent for the money, testing just a notch or two below top models like Bose’s QC Ultra Gen 2 and Sony’s WH-1000XM6. Transparency mode is also solid, though not as clear or natural-sounding as Apple’s AirPods Pro or AirPods Max.

Sound quality is generally balanced and includes head tracking for 3D audio formats like Dolby Atmos. The bass isn’t as potent as on previous Beats headphones, including the Studio Pro, but it’s musical and well controlled. The treble is brighter than on models like Sony’s XM6, and the 360 doesn’t offer the same level of definition, but it remains relatively detailed across the frequency range, with good clarity and instrumental separation. For a closer look at performance, watch our full video review on YouTube.

The Bottom Line

The latest Beats headphones have a lot to offer, from their adaptable, splash-resistant design to powerful noise canceling and accessible sound. They’re an enticing option for folks who want a stylish, sporty pair of headphones, as well as those who don’t want to spend up for the latest flagship models from Bose, Sony, and others.

I do wish they had a few more features, including auto-pause. It would also be nice to get a hard case, though I don’t expect one from Beats at this point. The biggest issue is the odd battery drain when powered off, which makes the 360 tough to recommend based on my current testing. I’m hoping Beats can fix the problem, and it’s always possible the issue is limited to a small number of units like mine.

Otherwise, the 360’s solid performance and unique design would make them worth considering for anyone looking for versatile headphones that stand out from the crowd.

Pros:

• Distinctive customizable design
• Clear and relatively detailed sound
• Excellent noise-canceling for the money
• Fantastic call quality
• IPX4 water resistance

Cons:

• Potential battery drain issue when powered off
• Bass isn’t as big as Beats fans might require
• No manual EQ or line-in playback options
• No auto-pause

Our Ratings:

Editor’s Note: These ratings reflect the battery drain issue we experienced and will be updated if it’s fixed.

★★★★★★★★★★ Performance

★★★★★★★★★★ Build Quality

★★★★★★★★★★ Comfort

★★★★★★★★★★ Features

★★★★★★★★★★ ANC

★★★★★★★★★★ Value

Where to Buy:

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The most powerful AI chip in China today, delivering three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890.

That is how Eddie Wu described the processor Alibaba unveiled on Tuesday. The chief executive was speaking at Apsara, the company’s annual cloud conference, in Hangzhou.

The chip is the Zhenwu V900. Alibaba said in a post on X that it comes from T-Head, its chip design unit. The company says it handles both high precision model training and ultra low precision inference.

Two other announcements came with it. Alibaba plans models of up to 10 trillion parameters, and 20GW of data centre capacity by 2032.

What is inside the V900

T-Head has published a basic spec sheet for the chip. Simon Sharwood reported the numbers for The Register. The sheet lists 216GB of memory and 1,200 GB/s of inter-chip interconnect bandwidth.

The processor supports FP32 down to FP4 natively. T-Head reworked the Tensor Core arithmetic unit for better instruction precision in FP8 and FP4. The chip also carries more scaling factor formats and block size configurations under MXFP8 and MXFP4.

Wu said a single cluster can hold up to 500,000 of the chips. The resulting machine will power frontier model training and inference, he said. Alibaba launched the M890 in May.

Mass production and commercial release are set for the first quarter of 2027. Liam Mo and Eduardo Baptista reported for Reuters that Wu expects significant growth in annual AI chip shipments.

Alibaba will refresh the lineup every year, Bloomberg reported. It put deliveries of the Zhenwu family at 560,000 units to more than 400 external customers. Alibaba’s own post puts the figure higher, at more than 650 customers. They span industries from cars to language models and embodied intelligence.

The company also set out a roadmap for its next generation Yitian server processors. They are built for agentic AI work and due in 2027.

Qwen 5 is planned at 10 trillion parameters

Alibaba is already training Qwen 4. Wu named the two models after it, Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5. Both should scale to between five and 10 trillion parameters.

Qwen 3.8 Max, the current flagship, has 2.4 trillion. Alibaba called it its most capable model in August.

Wu framed the jump as a route to artificial superintelligence. The larger models target longer and more complex tasks.

He also said the Qwen team is working on recursive self improvement. A model identifies its own weaknesses, runs experiments and generates training data with little human involvement. He described the progress as meaningful.

Twenty gigawatts by 2032

The third announcement was infrastructure. Wu set a target for Alibaba Cloud to pass 20GW of global data centre capacity by 2032.

Citigroup estimates that much capacity could drive more than $160bn of external revenue for the cloud division, according to Bloomberg.

The commercial property firm Cushman and Wakefield counts 37.7GW of data centres under construction in the United States alone. SpaceX had roughly 1.4GW of AI computing capacity in the middle of this year. It wants to pass 10GW in 2027, the Associated Press reported.

Supply is the constraint Wu named. He said global shortages across the AI data centre supply chain are limiting how fast Alibaba can scale its compute, and that mid to long term industry demand far outpaces what the company can supply.

Alibaba Cloud will start bringing its AI supernodes online at commercial scale this quarter. Wu did not say where the new data centres will be built.

What the push costs

Alibaba has committed more than $53bn over three years to its AI expansion, and raised about $10.2bn in a follow-on share sale in August.

The spending shows in the accounts. Quarterly profit fell by 75% after a spree of almost $10bn.

Executives expect annualised revenue from AI products to reach $10bn this quarter, and say the company can recoup its investment within three years. The target for cloud and AI revenue is $100bn in five years.

Investors took the announcement well. Alibaba’s Hong Kong listed shares rose 5.1% on Tuesday, to their highest in a month, and Tencent gained more than 7%.

Why Alibaba designs its own chips

United States export controls keep Nvidia’s most advanced accelerators out of China. The same controls largely block Chinese firms from using TSMC. Bloomberg reported that it is unclear whether Alibaba works with SMIC, a capacity constrained rival.

Huawei made its own move last week, unveiling new chip technology at its Connect conference.

Neil Shah, vice president at Counterpoint Research, told the AP that using extra computing power to make up for chip limits helps China stay strong locally. His colleague Parv Sharma pointed at manufacturing. How far the gap narrows also depends on China’s ability to advance its own foundries, he said, not just on chip design.

A day before the summit

Xi Jinping arrives in Washington on Wednesday for a state visit and a meeting with Donald Trump. AI, trade and tariffs should all feature. Jensen Huang and Satya Nadella are due at the state dinner.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Vice Premier He Lifeng met this week. They agreed to set up a dialogue on AI, aimed at a common understanding of goals and threats.

Washington has accused Alibaba and DeepSeek of illicitly accessing American models, a charge Beijing rejects as groundless. Anthropic accused Alibaba of distillation in June.

Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, called this month for a slower pace of model development. Wu addressed the argument directly.

Last year, we asserted that the more capable AI becomes, the more powerful humanity will be. Today, I remain steadfast in that conviction.

He calls it machine thinking

Wu avoided the term artificial intelligence through most of his keynote. He used machine intelligence, or machine thinking, instead.

He compared the moment to the industrial revolution. Steam and combustion engines, he said, were built to do what horses and labourers already did, and machine power now drives 99.9% of the world’s physical work.

He expects the same pattern in cognition. Machines currently produce less than 3% of all thinking, by his measure. He predicted they will eventually produce more than 1,000 times the thinking of all humanity combined.

Wu also said the groundbreaking products of the era have not arrived yet. He likened AI coding to the light bulb, an early application of electricity rather than the thing that mattered most.

Scarlett O’Hara has survived the Civil War, Reconstruction, Rhett Butler walking out the door, VHS, LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray and the indignity of streaming compression.

4K UHD Blu-ray was apparently the next hill to climb.

Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment will release Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray for the first time on November 3, 2026, more than 86 years after the film’s Atlanta premiere. The new edition has been remastered in 4K with HDR and will be available as a standard release, limited SteelBook and Walmart-exclusive Collector’s Edition, with a new 4K digital version arriving the same day.

More importantly, this is not simply the old Blu-ray master wearing a new hat.

Gone With the Wind was photographed in 35mm three-strip Technicolor, making it exactly the kind of catalog title that can benefit from a careful modern restoration. Warner has confirmed a newly remastered 4K presentation, while subsequent disc information indicates Dolby Vision, a remastered DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack, and the original theatrical mono mix in DTS-HD Master Audio.

Frankly, my dear, that took long enough.

Why the 4K Restoration Matters

Three-strip Technicolor is one of the reasons Gone With the Wind still looks so distinctive.

The process recorded separate color information onto three black-and-white film elements, which were later combined to create the final image. Restoring that material requires careful alignment, color work and preservation of detail across multiple source elements.

Warner’s 2009 Blu-ray restoration was already considered excellent, so the UHD has a high bar to clear. The real opportunity here is not merely more resolution, but better color reproduction, expanded dynamic range and improved preservation of the movie’s elaborate production design, costumes, painted backgrounds and shadow detail.

Warner has not published a full technical restoration report detailing the scanning resolution or exact source elements used for the 2026 edition, so claims about a specific 8K workflow should be treated cautiously until the studio confirms them.

The feature is also being spread across two 4K UHD discs, rather than squeezing nearly four hours onto one. That should allow for a healthier video bitrate and fewer compromises.

Gone With the Wind 4K UHD Specifications

• Format: 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
• Resolution: 3840 x 2160
• Video codec: HEVC/H.265
• HDR: Dolby Vision
• Original photography: 35mm three-strip Technicolor
• Aspect ratio: 1.37:1
• Feature presentation: Two UHD discs
• English audio: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
• Original audio: Theatrical mono in DTS-HD Master Audio
• Commentary: Film historian Rudy Behlmer
• Subtitles: English SDH, French and Spanish
• U.S. release date: November 3, 2026
• Physical editions: Standard 4K UHD, SteelBook and Walmart-exclusive Collector’s Edition

The Original Mono Track Matters

Keeping the theatrical mono soundtrack may sound like an odd selling point in the Dolby Atmos era, but it is important for film preservation.

Gone With the Wind was not mixed for height channels, rear surrounds or six subwoofers buried beneath the sofa. The remastered 5.1 track offers a more expansive presentation, but including the mono mix gives viewers access to something much closer to the original theatrical experience.

That is exactly how catalog releases should be handled: improve the experience without erasing the original one.

New Bonus Features

Warner has prepared three new supplements:

• Gone with the Wind: The Influence that Endures examines the film’s impact on cinema and popular culture.
• Gone with the Wind: Restoring and Preserving an Epic focuses on the restoration process.
• Scarlett O’Hara: A Woman Ahead of Her Time looks at Vivien Leigh’s performance and the character’s enduring place in film history.

Some international editions include additional legacy material, but Warner has not confirmed that every supplement will appear on every U.S. configuration.

A Box Office Monster That Still Has No Real Equal

The commercial history is almost as extraordinary as the film itself.

Box Office Mojo records roughly $402 million in worldwide nominal theatrical grosses across tracked releases, but that figure tells only part of the story because Gone With the Wind has been reissued repeatedly since 1939.

Adjusted for inflation, the numbers become absurd.

Guinness World Records estimates that the film sold approximately 202 million tickets in the United States during its first three theatrical runs and generated the modern equivalent of roughly $4.5 billion worldwide.

For context, Avatar, the current worldwide box-office leader in unadjusted dollars, has earned about $2.9 billion.

In other words, Gone With the Wind was not merely popular. It operated on a scale that modern theatrical releases are unlikely to reproduce.

The film also won eight competitive Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress, while Hattie McDaniel became the first Black performer to win an Oscar.

The Complicated Part

Any modern release also has to acknowledge the film’s depiction of slavery and the Antebellum South.

Gone With the Wind romanticizes plantation life and minimizes the brutality of slavery, issues that were criticized even when the film was originally released. Warner has chosen to preserve the movie rather than alter it, while acknowledging the offensive and problematic elements of its portrayal.

That is the correct approach. Film preservation should not require pretending history was cleaner than it actually was.

The Bottom Line

Gone With the Wind does not need another release simply because somebody found a new anniversary to print on the box.

It does need a definitive 4K presentation.

The combination of three-strip Technicolor photography, Dolby Vision, two-disc UHD presentation and preservation of the original mono soundtrack gives Warner an opportunity to create one of the more important catalog releases of 2026.

The film remains both a major achievement of Golden Age Hollywood and a deeply flawed depiction of the American South. Preserving it properly allows audiences to confront both.

For a movie that has already earned the modern equivalent of several billion dollars, two UHD discs seems like the least Warner can do.

After all, tomorrow is another day.

Where to pre-order:

(Available November 3, 2026)

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Private and public sectors need to join efforts to make robotaxi deployment a smoother affair, says Geotab’s Edward Kulperger.

Over the past decade, self-driving cars have become a somewhat common sight across several major cities in the US, China and elsewhere. Cautious regulators now want robotaxis on European roads.

Across the region, a number of countries, including Germany, Spain and the UK are allowing companies to pilot the technology in urban areas.

The needle is moving here in Ireland as well, with the Irish Government having approved partially autonomous vehicles (AVs) – also called level 2 AVs – on the country’s roads earlier this year, and kick-starting a strategy towards level 4 autonomous technology, or fully autonomous vehicles.

Though it may be years before we see fleets of driverless taxis in the country.

The safety argument

The argument for robotaxis primarily hinges on safety, according to Edward Kulperger, the senior vice-president for the EMEA region at the Canadian fleet management company Geotab, who tells SiliconRepublic.com that AVs are safe today and would “for sure” be safer than human driving in the future.

Geotab has about 6.5m connected assets, including robotaxis and other logistics vehicles on its platform, Kulperger explains. These assets, that have collectively completed more than 300m miles of complete AV driving, produce approximately 100bn individual data points.

This includes GPS data, vehicle and energy performance, accident data and vital information on other maintenance issues, which are used to monitor vehicles in real time, as well as train future fleets. “That’s a massive baseline to draw from,” says Kulperger.

Waymo, which has more than 200m in AV miles, said that its data indicated that its robotaxis were better than humans at avoiding crashes that result in injuries.

Just days ago, the Estonian ride hailing company Bolt announced a plan to launch its European robotaxi services on 25,000 Lucid-made cars. The company said it would use its extensive existing European data to train up the driverless fleet with hopes of growing the number to 100,000 by 2035.

Kulperger argues that AVs mean no distracted, reckless or drunk driving. While still in its infancy, the fast-advancing technology – now boosted with new advances in AI – will “surpass [humans] from a safety perspective”, he says. It’s also more efficient, he adds. “I think it’s really paramount that we, as a society, dive into fixing this [issue of road deaths].”

Then there’s other problems too, such as road congestion and concentration of pollution in urban streets that Kulperger believes AVs could also help resolve.

Road deaths globally dropped 21pc between 2011 and 2025 according to the World Health Organization (WHO), despite the addition of more than 1bn vehicles within the period. Still, more than 1m lives were taken on roads across the world just last year.

Meanwhile, road fatalities dropped by 3pc on average in the EU last year, amounting to nearly 19,500 deaths. Romania continues to have one of the highest fatality rates in the bloc alongside Bulgaria and Croatia (Croatia’s capital Zagreb was tapped by Uber to launch its first robotaxi service in the continent just last month).

The massive drop in road deaths, though, is attributed to “safe road systems”, says the WHO. This recognises human error as unavoidable, and promotes safer roads, infrastructure, vehicles, speed limits and regulations to hopefully ensure that crash impacts remain within survivable levels. Smarter vehicles, of course, aid in driver safety.

Still, some experts point to a lack of sufficient independent data backing up the narrative that AVs are less crash-prone than humans. They argue that driverless vehicles face problems of an entirely different kind to what humans might experience on the road.

Earlier this year, Waymo recalled pulled 3,900 robotaxis from US streets over a software issue that let AVs enter and drive in closed freeway construction zones. Just a month earlier, the company recalled nearly 3,800 robotaxis from the US over a software issue that could allow vehicles to drive onto flooded roadways.

Meanwhile, last December, the Alphabet-owned company briefly suspended services in San Francisco after a massive outage stalled Waymos on roads, disrupting traffic and adding on to the gridlock.

Waymo’s Chinese competitor Baidu also faced a similar issue in Wuhan after more than 100 of its Apollo Go robotaxis abruptly stopped on the city’s roads in late March.

Bloomberg reported that Chinese authorities, as a result, suspended issuing new licences for level 4 AVs, preventing companies from adding new robotaxis to their fleet or expanding to new cities.

Both countries have seen grievous AV-related injuries in recent years as well.

But according to experts like Kulperger, the hope is that over time, and with enough data captured from different urban layouts globally, issues like these will eventually be fixed. “The rapid adoption and acceleration now is kind of unprecedented – it’s really doable,” he says.

“Our societies have invested a lot in trains and buses – I think we complement that,” Kulperger says when asked what role robotaxis would play in alleviating congestion-related issues. He envisions a mixed fleet of public transport alongside AVs to help people reach destinations safely.

“You take a train, and then maybe you move to an AV to get to your destination…I think the economic and societal benefits [of AVs], will be realised, you know, exponentially as it grows.”

Data is the answer

The robotaxi market is expected to grow to $168bn by 2035, with a global fleet size of 3.6m robotaxis, according to data from Counterpoint Research.

Waymo, Tesla and China’s Baidu Apollo Go, WeRide and Pony.ai are all expected to lead the market, supported by their technology, funding and aggressive roll-out strategies. Meanwhile, ride-hailing leaders, including the likes of Uber, Lyft, Bolt and Grab are continuing to partner with robotaxi builders, connecting companies with their wide customer-base.

In Europe, these businesses are targeting to deploy more than 100 AVs per city by 2030, Kulperger says. “That gives you a little bit of insight into the kind of timeline.

“The thought process is to focus on logistical corridors… so arteries, freightways and to integrate that with various fleets.”

Europe’s old roads and unruly weather – a particular cause for trouble in areas like Ireland – have made expanding into the region somewhat challenging for businesses. Though that hardly seems like a hurdle anymore.

“We work with the largest AV organisations today,” Kulperger says, including one with driverless fleets in the US and recently in Europe. “We’re just at the tipping point of it really starting to scale.

“I think [by] 2030, we’ll see increasingly in, you know, cities like Dublin, a mixed fleet on the road where you have personal vehicles that are completely autonomously driven alongside partially assisted vehicles.”

Regulations need to evolve with the technology, says Kulperger. The bloc has been known to be slow with regulations, but it is attempting to change that across the board in recent years. Earlier this June, 18 EU member states, including Ireland, signed a declaration to support large-scale cross-border testbeds for AVs.

“I think it’s incumbent upon [the] private and public sector to start to really work together at the state and city level to deploy this because the safety and efficiency is kind of demanding it,” Kulperger says.

“The cities that’ll be best positioned to lead this might not be the ones that are most advanced today on autonomous vehicle…[but would be] ones that can combine the technology with the right regulatory infrastructure and commercial environment.”

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