While Aventon is known first and foremost as an ebike brand, the company started by making fixies in 2013. That gives it some bona fides when it comes to making enjoyable rides for experienced cyclists. (In addition to the Current ADV, there’s also a higher-end model, the Current EXP, with a more expensive carbon frame and better components.) Since its first venture into e-MTBs with the Ramblas in 2024, the company has continued to develop very nicely specced electric mountain bikes for the price.

The designers behind the newest iterations did a masterful job. The Current ADV looks 100 percent the part of contemporary mountain bike. With its 6061 aluminum frame, SRAM Eagle groupset, tubeless-ready Maxxis Minion tires wrapping a pair of double-walled 29-inch wheels, a 170-mm X Fusion Manic dropper post, a Rockshox Psylo Gold front suspension that boasts 150 mm of travel, and a Rockshox Deluxe Select+, it’d be easy to confuse the Current ADV for a traditional analog mountain bike.

Photograph: Michael Venutolo-Mantovani

It’s worth noting that while the motor is proprietary to Aventon, the components are not. It might be difficult to get your local bike shop to look at the battery and motor, but assuming those are fine, it won’t be hard to swap anything else out should you need to repair it.

Despite its design and ride feel, all of which can make you easily forget you’re riding electric, the Current ADV is a class 1 e-MTB (which can be toggled to a class 3 via the brand’s app), and one that gives hours and hours of riding on a single charge.

The 800-watt-hour battery is tucked neatly into the bike’s relatively small downtube, giving a claimed range of up to 105 miles. Of course, I didn’t get nearly that, as I was constantly switching through any of the Current ADV’s five power modes (Auto, Eco, Trail, Turbo, and a new, 30-second Boost Mode for extra torque on big hills). Still, the longest day I spent in the bike’s super-comfy Selle Royal SRX saddle was about three hours. In that time, the battery dropped only about 20 percent.

Eyes Up

The biggest flaw I found in the Current is small and seemingly simple, but it nonetheless had a major impact on my rides. That is the fact that, when clicking through power settings, the bike beeps, and all those beeps sound the same.

When I’m mountain biking (and probably when you’re mountain biking, too), the last thing I want to do is to take my eyes off the trail. Having those beeps be the exact same tone meant I instinctively kept looking down at the top-tube-mounted display to see which mode I was in.

Clarus isn’t chasing the budget crowd at AXPONA 2026, and with the debut of the Concerto MKII power conditioner, it’s making that crystal clear. Clean, stable power isn’t an audiophile myth; it directly impacts noise floor, dynamic range, and the overall coherence of a system. Your AC power isn’t perfectly clean. It can carry noise from other devices on the same circuit; dimmers, refrigerators, and switching power supplies, along with voltage fluctuations, spikes, and grounding issues that can impact how your system performs.

Clarus has built a serious reputation in high-performance audio, particularly with its well-regarded cable lineup, and the Concerto MKII leans into that credibility with a no-compromise approach to power delivery and conditioning. It’s not cheap—far from it. In fact, the price lands well beyond what most people have ever considered spending on an entire hi-fi system. But for those running upper five-figure or six-figure setups, where every upstream variable matters, this is exactly the kind of component that could make sense—and one worth hearing before dismissing outright.

Building on the original Concerto, the MKII increases current capacity, refines the filtering architecture, improves grounding, and optimizes power distribution. The goal is lower noise without restricting current delivery or altering the electrical behavior that high-performance audio systems rely on.

The Concerto MKII is built on the idea that reducing noise should not come at the expense of dynamics or tonal integrity. Rather than chasing maximum attenuation, its design focuses on the types of noise that actually propagate through real-world audio systems, aiming to lower interference while preserving musical coherence and ensuring unrestricted current delivery for analog, digital, and high-current components.

Clarus Repositions the Concerto MKII for a Different Class of System

The original Concerto launched in 2019 at $4,000, but rising material, manufacturing, and development costs would push that same design closer to $8,000 today. Rather than simply reissue it at a higher price, Clarus chose to develop the MKII as a redesigned successor with updated performance goals. The result is a significantly more expensive product at $12,000, positioned not as a direct replacement, but as a step up aimed at higher-end systems where incremental improvements in noise reduction and power delivery are more likely to be realized.

“Many power conditioners reduce noise by constraining current,” says Jay Victor, Concerto MKII power conditioner design engineer. “The MKII takes a different approach by targeting acoustically destructive noise while preserving the dynamics and harmonic structure that make music feel alive.”

Inside the Concerto MKII

At the core of the Concerto MKII is an application-specific filter architecture that tailors its approach to the electrical demands of connected components. Sensitive analog gear is fed through high-permeability common-mode “Clarus FluxCore” filtering, designed to reduce ground-referenced noise without restricting current or compressing dynamics.

Digital Optimized Power Outlets: Four outlets labeled “Digital” use a combination of differential-mode and common-mode “Clarus FluxCore” filtering to suppress high-frequency noise generated by digital sources.

High Current Power Outlets: Two outlets labeled “High Current” are equipped with “Clarus FluxCore-HC” filtering, engineered to reduce noise while supporting large transient current demands and limiting both conducted and radiated interference.

Analog Power Outlets: Two outlets labeled “Analog” utilize high-permeability “Clarus FluxCore” nanocrystalline inductor technology to deliver low-noise power tailored for sensitive analog components.

FluxCore Filtering: Designed to address common AC line imperfections such as noise and interference, Clarus’ FluxCore filtering aims to stabilize incoming power without restricting current delivery, helping reduce variables that can impact system performance.

Oil-Filled Capacitors: Newly added oil-filled capacitors are used to improve thermal stability and long-term reliability in the analog and high-current sections.

High Current Tolerance: The Concerto MKII features full 20-amp internal circuitry, allowing it to operate on both 15-amp and 20-amp residential lines without introducing current limitations. A star-ground architecture and isolated-ground outlets are employed to reduce ground noise and minimize circulating currents.

Internal Power Distribution: Power is distributed via heavy-gauge copper bus bars to reduce voltage drop and support high transient current demands.

System Protection: Protection is handled by a hydraulic-magnetic circuit breaker designed to tolerate high inrush currents without nuisance tripping. Constrained-layer damping is applied within the chassis to reduce mechanically induced vibration from internal components, helping maintain stable operation.

Low Noise Performance: Together, these design elements aim to provide a stable, low-noise electrical foundation that allows connected components to operate consistently under real-world conditions.

By addressing electrical noise based on its source and how it propagates, and by aligning filtering, grounding, and current delivery with the needs of each connected component, the Concerto MKII is designed to reduce interference without imposing a distinct sonic character. The intended result is lower background noise, improved low-level detail, greater dynamic contrast, and better clarity during complex passages—without restricting system performance.

Clarus Concerto MKII Specifications

The Bottom Line 

Power conditioning sits in that uncomfortable gray area between necessity and obsession, and the Concerto MKII doesn’t try to pretend otherwise. What Clarus is offering here is not a universal upgrade, but a highly targeted solution for systems where power quality is already a known variable and the rest of the chain is resolving enough to expose it.

What makes the Concerto MKII stand out is its application-specific filtering approach, separation of outlet types, and focus on maintaining current delivery rather than restricting it. That’s a meaningful distinction in a category where some designs can choke dynamics in the name of noise reduction. The inclusion of 20-amp internal architecture, star grounding, and heavy-duty power distribution shows that this is built for serious systems, not entry-level setups.

Who is this for? Not the average listener. Not even most enthusiasts. This is aimed squarely at owners of upper five-figure and six-figure systems, in environments where electrical noise, grounding issues, or inconsistent power are real concerns—not theoretical ones.

Is it worth $12,000? For most people, no. For a small group chasing the last few percent of performance and already invested deep enough that power delivery becomes part of system tuning, it might be. The key is knowing which side of that line you’re on before writing the check.

Price & Availability

The Clarus Concerto MKII Power Conditioner has a suggested retail price of $12,000 (not including power cable). It will become available during Q2 2026 through authorized Clarus retailers.

The Clarus Concerto MKII will be debuting at AXPONA 2026, April 10 – 12, in support of the Harman Luxury Group.

Related Reading:

Amazon’s satellite-based internet service, Leo, will enter service by mid-2026, so says company CEO Andy Jassy. Writing in his annual letter, Jassy claimed Leo would offer download speeds of up to 1Gbps, far more than what Starlink presently offers. Sadly, Amazon declined to offer any more details about what that mid-2026 service would look like. But given select partners have already been kicking Leo’s tyres for a while, we can only hope.

The mega-retailer is making some grand promises, including faster up and download speeds, cheaper cost and direct integration with Amazon’s other products. Of course, the company can also sell itself on the fact it’s a satellite internet provider not owned by Elon Musk. But it will have to buck its ideas up fast, given how far behind in its deployment of satellites it is.

— Daniel Cooper

The other big stories this morning

It’s a showcase for the Snapdragon X2 Elite.

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ASUS’ ZenBook A16 is a 16-inch ultraportable designed to go toe-to-toe with LG’s Gram Pro 16. It’s equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite and designed to address the flaws Devindra Hardawar found in last year’s ZenBook A14. Did it succeed? You’ll have to read his review to get the full story, but he’s certainly happy to have spent the last week using this thing.

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It will begin at the start of 2027.

Greece will ban under 15s from accessing social media, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has announced. Like many nations both in Europe and beyond, officials are concerned about the effect social media is having on children’s mental and physical health. The big platforms will be in charge of enforcing the ban, backed up by the hefty punishments enabled by the Digital Services Act.

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Know what doesn’t lose support after a few years? Books.

If you’re still using a Kindle or Fire tablet made in 2012 or before, then it’s going to get a little less useful on May 20. Amazon is discontinuing support for those earlier models on that date, removing the ability to purchase, borrow or download new titles. Thankfully, whatever is on the hardware already will remain, so don’t fret if you’re only a third of the way through Remembrance of Things Past.

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Fancy, but heavy.

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Billy Steele has been putting Fender Audio’s new speakers through their paces to find what can only be described as a mixed bag. Excellent audio quality and a wide variety of inputs get high praise, but the heavy weight, exposed wood and limited battery life all dent the paintwork.

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About time too.

WhatsApp’s CarPlay interface isn’t the most elegant or easy way to keep in touch with your friends while driving. Meta has, however, given the UI a little polish to help make it a little easier to get something useful done without pulling your attention from the road.

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The creator economy loves a neat little fairy tale: one magnetic person, one camera, one lucky break. It’s a great story. It’s also nonsense.

A lot of so-called organic growth has been industrialized for years. The Hollywood Reporter recently showed how major creators and media companies relied on armies of clippers to carve long videos into viral bait, turning audience growth into a volume game. And that operation never stopped with clippers. It sprawled into a wider layer of digital labor, from editors and thumbnail makers to virtual assistants handling scheduling, posting, inbox cleanup, and brand admin.

Many of those workers sit in the same countries that power global remote services, including the Philippines and India, where outsourcing still employs millions. The Philippines’ IT-BPM sector closed 2024 with 1.82 million jobs and $38 billion in revenue, while India’s tech sector workforce reached 5.43 million in FY24.

The creator economy didn’t invent this setup. It simply borrowed it, gave it ring lights, and called it hustle.

The creator economy built a labor pipeline it could underpay

What looked like spontaneity was often logistics with good lighting. Influencers didn’t just appear everywhere on TikTok, Reels, and Shorts by force of personality. They paid for a production chain that could cut clips, resize videos, write captions, schedule posts, and keep the content conveyor belt moving.

That arrangement worked because the labor was affordable and mostly invisible. Now the same businesses that benefited from it are turning to tools like OpusClip, which promise to turn long videos into short clips and publish them across platforms with a click. The factory floor was always there. AI just wants fewer people on it.

AI usually doesn’t kill the job first. It cheapens it

This is the part the booster crowd likes to skip. A job usually doesn’t disappear in one dramatic moment. It gets stripped for parts first.

The editor becomes the person checking AI cuts, fixing captions, swapping thumbnails, cleaning timestamps, repackaging clips, and posting them across five platforms because the software still does a few things badly enough to be embarrassing. Upwork’s 2026 skills report puts a number on the shift: demand for AI video generation and editing rose 329% year over year.

That doesn’t mean human labor is gone. It means human labor is being pushed into babysitting the machine that’s learning how to absorb more of the work.

The next shock lands in outsourcing hubs, not just creator mansions

The easy version of this story is a rich influencer replacing an editor in Los Angeles. The more honest version reaches much farther. In Latin America, regional platforms such as Workana grew by serving workers shut out by language and market barriers on global platforms, with the World Bank describing Workana as the largest freelance and remote work platform in the region.

So when AI starts squeezing this layer of work, the fallout won’t stop at a few creator agencies or freelance editors in big US cities. It’ll hit the remote workers in outsourcing economies who were told digital work was the safer future. The same system that turned customer support and back-office tasks into globally tradable labor did the same thing to creator work. It chopped the job into repeatable pieces, sent them abroad, and rewarded whoever could do them fastest and cheapest.

That’s why the clipping story matters beyond creator gossip. AI isn’t crashing into some pristine meritocracy. It’s tightening the screws on a system that was already built to make workers interchangeable.

The creator economy was perfectly happy with invisible human labor when it was cheap and easy to ignore. Now it’s discovering that the cleanest version of “organic reach” is one that no longer has to pay the army behind it.

Revolut, the British virtual bank platform, has just launched its new AI financial assistant named AIR (AI by Revolut) to its more than 13 million customers in the UK. 

The new AI assistant allows customers to manage their finances through in-app chat, their spending insights, investment tracking, subscription monitoring, and card management. It also provides travel assistance capabilities, such as trip budgeting and Revolut eSIMs purchases in-app. 

This new innovative service is designed to evolve the concept of chatbot, simplifying the digital bank experience from multi-step navigation and clicks.  Customers can chat with the copilot by swiping down from the middle of the screen on the Revolut app landing page, or go to Profile → Chats → AIR. 

The company emphasizes how AIR has a strict zero-data retention policy and can only access the data customers already see like transactions, investments and cards.

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However, this is not the first Fintech company launching an agentic AI assistant. Klarna has implemented it for customer service purposes, while Danish competitor Lunar says that around 75% of its customer calls are being managed by its AI voice assistant. 

More importantly, UK’s main competitor Starling bank launched what they called the “UK’s first Agentic AI financial assistant” last March, offering similar capabilities than Revolut’s AIR assistant.

Julia Ponomareva, director and general manager of CX and AI products at Revolut, highlighted how AIR is not just an AI assistant, “We believe the era of navigating through endless tabs and menus is over. With AIR, we’re delivering a new level of money intelligence that’s both powerful and effortless. It’s not just an assistant; it’s a co-pilot that elevates everyday life, making financial management as easy and natural as sending a text.”

Emphasizing how this new tool delivers a new level of money intelligence without risking customers privacy.

Other Smart Shades to Consider

We have tested a few other smart shades and retrofit devices. Here are a few that narrowly missed out on a place above.

Photograph: Simon Hill

Kincmo Motorized Blinds With Remote for $116: A reasonable alternative to our top pick, Kincmo’s choice of styles and finishes, motor functionality, and smart home connectivity was virtually identical, though you must opt for the Matter over Thread motor or hub if you want scheduling and voice-command support. I tried a long blackout shade for a doorway, and it worked very well. It is slow to open and close but also quiet, never breaking 40 decibels.

Weffort Motorized Roller Shade for $120: Another brand that offers smart shades very much like our top pick, Smartwings. The Weffort shade I tried for my office window worked in exactly the same way, with a simple remote and a Matter over Thread motor that enabled me to add it to Google Home and control and schedule through the app. The operating noise level is around 40 decibels.

Bringnox Motorized Blinds with Remote for $118: With a very similar range of options to SmartWings and some of the other brands above, I found Bringnox shades to be on par. You’ll need the Matter over Thread motor if you want smart home control and scheduling (or a separate hub), but you get a wee remote with every shade. I regret not opting for a better valance and bottom bar, because the shade I tested looks very blocky, and the top section covers part of the window. One interesting option Bringnox offers is no-drill shades with a kind of adjustable and lockable spring section at one end that could be very handy for installing a shade inside the frame of a window where drilling holes is a problem.

Courtesy of Ryse

Ryse SmartCurtain for $150: Another retrofit device for your window coverings, the Ryse SmartCurtain is super easy to fit. It works fine with rod rail curtains and is reasonably quiet at around 36 decibels, but you will need two if you have a pair of curtains, and it’s relatively expensive. Consider also that you need the Ryse SmartBridge ($50) hub to schedule, connect smart home devices for voice control, or even control multiple devices. Without the hub, you can only connect via Bluetooth to one curtain at a time. The two rechargeable 18,650 Li-Po batteries are supposed to last up to eight months. There’s no charger in the box, though you can apparently request one for free. While it’s a decent product, it’s also more expensive, less versatile, and generally inferior to the SwitchBot Curtain 3.

Aqara Curtain Driver E1 for $80: With separate models for rod or track curtains, this is very much like the SwitchBot Curtain 3 above, but not quite as good. It is bigger, which leaves more room for a larger battery, so you can expect up to a year of battery life. Unfortunately, it is also louder (over 50 decibels), more expensive, and requires an Aqara hub to unlock voice commands and smart home automation.

Don’t Bother

Courtesy of Ryse

Ryse SmartShade for $200: This is a retrofit gadget to convert any roller shade with a beaded chain into a smart shade. It’s easy to fit, but you will need a roller shade with an uninterrupted chain because a plastic spacer joining the two ends of a chain can cause problems (my chain came apart), and it’s noisy in operation. The removable battery pack is a smart idea, but if you want to remote control the shade from your phone, you must be in Bluetooth range. To get scheduling and voice controls, you need to buy the Ryse SmartBridge ($50), and I had issues with connectivity dropping in and out. After testing a couple of these retrofit designs for the beaded chain roller blinds (I also tested the Aqara E1) and having problems both times, I can’t recommend them. This one is also way too expensive.

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The OPPO F-series has always focused on the durability side of things, with some of the toughest phones I’ve ever tested. With the new F33 series, the Chinese smartphone maker is bringing a new type of durability-focused smartphone to India. Based on details shared ahead of launch, the company is positioning the lineup as a solution to everyday smartphone problems like cracked screens, water damage, and battery anxiety.

Built for Indian Conditions

Durability seems to be the core focus here. The OPPO F33 series is said to come with IP69K certification, which is a step above the usual IP67 or IP68 ratings seen in most mid-range phones. In practical terms, this means the device can handle high-pressure, high-temperature water jets and provide complete dust protection. It’s designed to survive not just accidental splashes, but harsher environments like heavy rain, kitchens, or dusty outdoor conditions.

Beyond certifications, OPPO says the F33 series has undergone military-grade durability testing. This includes extreme temperature tests ranging from freezing cold to high heat, salt exposure for coastal conditions, and even simulations of strong winds and heavy rainfall. The devices are also tested for drops, with thousands of simulated falls and immersion tests to ensure real-world reliability.

Structurally, the phones feature a 360-degree armor body, built using an aerospace-grade aluminium frame, reinforced internals, and thicker protective materials for both the display and back panel. There’s also an internal cushioning system designed to absorb shocks during impact.

Long-Term Battery Health

Battery life is another major highlight of the F33 series. OPPO is introducing a 7,000mAh battery that’s designed to retain up to 80% of its capacity even after five years of usage.

The company is using a self-repairing electrolyte technology, which is said to help maintain battery health over time. Combined with 80W fast charging, reverse charging, and bypass charging support, the F33 series aims to reduce both charging time and long-term battery degradation.

The nonprofit organisation will remain active on other social media platforms.

The prominent digital rights nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will no longer use social media platform X, primarily due to diminishing engagement from its posts there.

In a blogpost explaining its decision, the EFF said that “an X post today receives less than 3pc of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago”.

Earlier this week, the Harvard-based NiemanLab published an “analysis of thousands of tweets from 18 publishers” suggesting that linked posts on X are not driving significant traffic to their sites.

The social media network formerly known as Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk in October 2022 before setting about removing restrictions, oversight and moderation of content.

The EFF said that at the time of the takeover, its priorities for improvement of the platform were transparent content moderation, tangible security improvements and greater user control.

The EFF said it will remain active on other platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, despite its grievances and concerns around various aspects of their operations, to assist people who have no choice but to be present “in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms”.

“We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticising the very platform we’re posting on,” the nonprofit said in its blogpost, noting that its continued presence on these services “is not an endorsement”.

It added: “X is no longer where the fight is happening. The platform Musk took over was imperfect but impactful. What exists today is something else: diminished, and increasingly ‘de minimis’.”

The EFF, founded in 1990, describes itself as “the leading nonprofit organisation defending civil liberties in the digital world”, with a stated mission “to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice and innovation for all people of the world”.

The donor-funded US nonprofit claims to use “the unique expertise of leading technologists, activists and attorneys in our efforts to defend free speech online, fight illegal surveillance, advocate for users and innovators, and support freedom-enhancing technologies”.

In the media and publishing landscape, many organisations have left X since the Musk takeover, for a variety of reasons. They include the UK’s Guardian, France’s Le Monde, and NPR and PBS in the US.

Silicon Republic decided to stop using X in November 2024.

X was acquired by xAI, another Musk company, in March 2025; xAI was in turn acquired by Musk’s SpaceX in February 2026.

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The plans are early-stage and Anthropic may still decide to only buy chips rather than design them. The exploration comes days after the company signed a long-term deal with Google and Broadcom for 3.5 gigawatts of TPU compute starting in 2027. A company spokesperson declined to comment.

Anthropic is exploring the possibility of designing its own AI chips, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing three sources familiar with the matter. The effort is at an early stage: the company has not committed to a specific design and has not assembled a dedicated team for the project.

It may still decide to continue purchasing chips from third parties rather than building its own. A spokesperson for the San Francisco-based company declined to comment on the report.

The exploration comes as Anthropic’s revenue has accelerated sharply. The company disclosed earlier this week that its annualised revenue run rate has surpassed $30 billion, up from approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025.

That trajectory has created a scale of compute demand that makes the economics of custom silicon increasingly worth examining. Anthropic currently runs Claude across a mix of chips: tensor processing units designed by Alphabet’s Google, in partnership with Broadcom, alongside Amazon’s custom chips and Nvidia hardware.

The company said it matches workloads to whichever chips are best suited for them.

Just days before the Reuters report, Anthropic signed a long-term deal with Google and Broadcom that will give it access to approximately 3.5 gigawatts of TPU-based compute capacity from 2027, roughly three times the roughly one gigawatt it was consuming earlier in 2026, according to Broadcom’s SEC filing.

The filing flagged that the expanded deployment is contingent on Anthropic’s continued commercial success, an unusual hedge for a regulatory document. The deal builds on Anthropic’s November 2025 commitment to invest $50 billion in US computing infrastructure.

Broadcom is also already a chip design partner for OpenAI, and has a fifth undisclosed XPU customer, placing it at the centre of the custom AI silicon market that is emerging as an alternative to Nvidia’s general-purpose GPUs.

The possibility of Anthropic developing proprietary silicon mirrors moves already underway elsewhere in the industry. Meta has been building its own AI training chips, and OpenAI has been working on custom silicon as well.

Industry sources cited by Reuters put the development cost of an advanced AI chip at roughly $500 million, reflecting the need to hire specialised engineers and validate the manufacturing process.

That figure is not trivial for a company that remains, for now, unprofitable, but it is more manageable against a run-rate revenue base that has more than tripled in four months.