• The Xiaomi Watch 5 is now available for sale outside China
• The smartwatch originally launched in China in late 2025
• It’s switched operating systems from HyperOS to Google’s Wear OS 6

Back in December, Xiaomi launched its Watch 5 wearable with Wear OS 6 compatibility. The bad news is that it was only released in China, but the company has now made the device available worldwide, bringing its new features to a much wider audience.

The Watch 5 comes with a 1.54-inch AMOLED display featuring sapphire glass on both the front and back and reaching up to 1,500 nits of brightness. The body is made from a stainless steel frame and is available in Juniper Green or Black, while the 3D-printed strap weighs 43g, which Xiaomi says is about 50% lighter than a stainless steel equivalent.

Unlike on Earth there aren’t dozens of satellites whizzing around Mars to provide satellite navigation functionality. Recently NASA’s JPL engineers tried something with the Perseverance Mars rover that can give such Marsbound vehicles the equivalent of launching GPS satellites into Mars orbit, by introducing Mars Global Localization.

Although its remote operators back on Earth have the means to tell the rover where it is, it’d be incredibly helpful if it could determine this autonomously so that the rover doesn’t have to constantly stop and ask its human operators for directions. To this end the processor which was originally used to communicate with its Ingenuity helicopter companion was repurposed, reprogrammed to run an algorithm that compares panoramic images from the rover’s navigation cameras with its onboard orbital terrain maps.

Much like terrain-based navigation as used in cruise missiles back on Earth, this can provide excellent results depending on how accurate your terrain maps are. This terrain mapping process used to be done back on Earth, but for the past years engineers have worked to give the rover its own means to perform this task.

Because the off-the-shelf processor in the rover’s Helicopter Base Station (HBS) is much faster than the custom, radiation-hardened processors that control the rover, the decision was made to try the algorithm on the HBS, especially since Ingenuity was left behind after it fatally damaged its propeller during a rough landing. This left the HBS unused and free to be repurposed.

Repurposing such OTS hardware also provided a good way to check for radiation damage to such standard hardware that was never certified for high radiation environments. To validate reliability the algorithm was run multiple times on the HBS, with the results compared by the main computer. This found some discrepancies, attributed to damage to about 25 bits out of 1 GB of RAM.

By isolating these damaged bits, the algorithm could run reliably, while giving another nod to the genius of the Ingenuity program that enabled such new features with what was at the time an unproven and relatively low-budget side-project tacked onto the Perseverance rover.

Thanks to [Nevyn] for the tip.

At sundown on Monday, Purim begins; a holiday rooted in survival, marking the Jewish people’s narrow escape from annihilation in ancient Persia. The story, told in the Book of Esther, is not subtle. A Persian court insider, named Haman convinces the king that the Jews must be wiped out. A young queen named Esther risks everything, steps forward, and turns the tide. Hamantaschen for everyone and don’t even think about handing me one that isn’t filled with poppy seed.

Two and a half millennia later, history has a way of sounding uncomfortably familiar.

With hostilities resuming between Israel, the United States, and the Islamic regime in Tehran, the rhetoric stopped being theoretical and the missiles started flying. As Iran’s retaliation unfolded on Sunday, a ballistic missile struck Beit Shemesh, just west of Jerusalem, and in that instant, the war was no longer a headline scrolling past. It was immediate. It was personal. I put the pen down. I stopped writing. I called family. Nine neighbours were murdered in that strike. Politics disappears when your phone starts ringing and you’re counting names.

Believe what you believe about governments and geopolitics. But no people should live under the shadow of missiles or under a regime that exports death. May the Iranian people one day live in freedom and without fear. They deserve better than this nightmare.

And yet here we are, covering Paramount swallowing Warner Bros, Qobuz drawing a line in the sand over AI, Empire Ears going dark, AMC and indie theaters fighting for oxygen. The media and hi-fi worlds keep spinning. Deals get signed. Products launch. CEOs posture. But this week is a reminder that none of it exists in a vacuum. Not the mergers. Not the music. Not the movies. Not us.

Paramount Wins Warner Bros While Netflix Walks

For the past few months, the future of Warner Bros. Discovery was negotiated behind closed doors; over private dinners in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, with lawyers murmuring, investors hovering, and regulators quietly keeping score. That maneuvering is over. Paramount has secured the company, with the board approving the deal late on February 26, 2026. David Ellison stayed in the fight. Netflix’s CEO chose not to counter within the allotted window rather than ignite a bidding war.

All of it unfolded under the watchful gaze of the Trump administration, where antitrust scrutiny and political leverage made clear that no media empire moves without federal gravity. Paramount won. Netflix stepped aside. Now the real battle for your wallet begins.

Control of Warner Bros. Discovery means control of one of the deepest libraries in modern entertainment — films, franchises, cable networks, news divisions, and streaming platforms that have defined multiple generations. The dollars matter. The regulators matter. The politics matter. But beneath all of that is a larger shift: power in Hollywood is consolidating fast, and the streaming hierarchy is being rewritten in real time.

Now comes the part nobody puts in the press release. HBO Max, TNT, CNN, Warner Bros. Television, DC, and a sprawl of international assets have to be folded into a single operating strategy. Tens of thousands of jobs sit under that umbrella. Overlap will be cut. Billions in costs will be slashed. Paramount has made it clear this must turn profitable quickly and before its own board starts asking hard questions. With more than $110 billion in enterprise value and obligations tied up in this ecosystem, there is no room for sentimental restructuring.

Hollywood is not easing into a new era. It’s being forced into one.

Consolidation at this scale doesn’t lead to kumbaya town halls and better consumer bundles. It leads to layoffs. Platform convergence. Redundancies circled in red ink. Expect overlap to be cut aggressively and quickly. If HBO Max survives as a standalone brand under Paramount’s roof, it will be a minor miracle. The far more likely outcome is a folding into Paramount+, some Frankenstein hybrid pitched as “value.” As for the rest of the television portfolio under the umbrella; TNT, TBS, legacy cable properties, their long-term fate is anything but secure.

And then there’s CNN. That’s the real live wire. Owning CBS News and CNN hands one studio extraordinary influence over the tone, framing, and velocity of national news coverage. That level of concentration will not go unnoticed. CNN’s ratings are soft even on a good week. Its on-air talent is expensive. Very expensive. Does Paramount maintain two separate news divisions? Do they merge them into something unified with a very prominent “C” at the beginning? No one at CNN is sleeping particularly well right now.

It’s difficult to imagine that decision unfolding quietly or without casualties; Bari Weiss has every reason to be smiling right now, knowing that after selling The Free Press to Paramount and stepping into control at CBS News, she now holds the professional fate of many who once lined up to attack her.

The ripple effects extend to theaters. Both Netflix and Paramount made promises during the bidding process about theatrical commitments, windowing strategies, and respect for exhibition. We’ll see. The length of theatrical runs before titles shift to streaming is now a corporate lever, not a creative one. If windows shrink below three weeks, exhibitors, especially chains like AMC are going to feel it fast. Theaters are already operating on thin margins. Compress the window and you accelerate the decline.

Then there’s physical media — the part enthusiasts still care about. As buyers of discs, many of us felt marginally safer with Paramount controlling Warner’s catalog. But let’s not kid ourselves. What was once a multi-billion-dollar category is now a thin, diminished version of itself. Outside of specialty labels like The Criterion Collection, Arrow Video, and Kino Lorber, mainstream studio releases in 2026 are lucky to hit low six figures in unit sales. Low. Six. Figures. For companies the size of Paramount and Warner, that’s a rounding error tolerated, not prioritized.

Talent is the final pressure point. Do we really believe someone like James Gunn who has been openly critical of President Trump — remains comfortably in place at DC when Ellison did not win this fight without political gravity on his side? Maybe. But Hollywood loyalty lasts exactly as long as leverage does. Don’t be shocked if Gunn finds his way back to Marvel or under the Disney umbrella where the corporate alignment is cleaner.

This is what monumental change actually looks like. Jobs will disappear. Platforms will merge. Newsrooms will consolidate. Theatrical windows will compress. Physical media will shrink further into boutique territory. And consumers? They won’t be the primary beneficiaries. Power has concentrated. Now we find out what that concentration costs and don’t expect the bill to be lower than what you’re paying now.

Qobuz Cracks Down on AI Content to Protect Artists

AI music is no longer some nerdy weird science experiment in a lab. It is a content factory running three shifts before its workers head out to Waffle House for eggs, grits, and fisticuffs.

Streaming platforms are getting buried under machine generated tracks. Endless ambient playlists by artists who have never seen a sunrise. Jazz trios that have never boozed it up and fought backstage over a set list. Singer songwriters with flawless pitch and the emotional range of a toaster. Upload by the truckload. Tweak the metadata. Scoop up fractions of a penny at industrial scale.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It is basically the subplot of Office Space. Skim a microscopic amount from each transaction and hope nobody notices until the money adds up. Except this time it is not Initech. And there are no conjugal visits. It is the global music ecosystem. And the people getting screwed over are real musicians trying to pay the rent and afford health insurance. Spotify has been playing whack a mole with this stuff for a while now and they’re not winning. When the system rewards sheer output, you get a flood. Not art. A flood. Quality gets shoved to the curb and the consumer gets stuck listening to garbage they really didn’t want to pay for.

That is the mess Qobuz is stepping into.

Earlier this month Qobuz rolled out its AI Charter, which was easy to applaud and just as easy to ignore. Instead of leaving it as a mission statement, they built a proprietary detection system to scan the catalog and flag music that is one hundred percent AI generated. Not “possibly.” Not “we think so.” Tagged. Labeled. Out in the open. Those identifiers will begin showing up across the apps in the coming months so you actually know what you are listening to.

Qobuz is also tightening the screws on fraud. Impersonation attempts. Streaming patterns that look like they were engineered in a basement server farm in Tehran. The company is expanding its detection tools so if something smells off, it does not get the benefit of the doubt. It gets flagged, refused, or removed. And those fake streams do not count toward royalty reports. Good luck getting Spotify to offer up something like that.

On the editorial side, Qobuz is keeping actual humans in the driver’s seat. Real editors picking Albums of the Week. Real teams building playlists and Qobuzissimes. No content mill dumping twenty thousand tracks into the hopper and hoping the algorithm gets bored enough to promote one. The Discover page will lean on curated data from in-house teams and trusted music labels.

And here is the line that will make certain tech executives roll their eyes. Qobuz says it will not generate audio for its catalog. It will not replace human curation with AI systems and not use customer data to train external AI models. That almost feels like open rebellion against the Emperor.

Why should you care?

Because the money is not theoretical. A 2024 CISAC study projected that by 2028 music creators could lose around ten billion euros over five years due to AI competition and unlicensed use of their work. At the same time, generative AI companies could be pulling in billions annually from that same ecosystem. None of that sounds like a win for the artists who create real music and don’t be surprised when that becomes an even uglier fight for screenwriters, actors, and cinematographers.

The WGA and SAG have already gone on strike to fight against these practices and if you think studios undergoing acquisition and consolidation will continue to spend hundreds of millions on individual films when they can produce 10 for the same price using AI — you’re about to find out that profits matter more than quality.

For artists, this is survival. If machine output floods playlists and crowds out real musicians, visibility collapses and compensation shrinks even further. For listeners, it is about knowing whether the song you love was written by someone with rent due or generated by a prompt and a power bill.

Qobuz Deputy CEO, Georges Fornay explained that “the hyperinflation of AI content is creating distrust across the industry.” He is not wrong. When everything looks and sounds polished, authenticity becomes the differentiator.

Qobuz is betting some of you still care who made the music. In a business chasing endless content like it is oxygen, backing humans is slower and messier. You didn’t sign up for synthetic background noise pretending to be art so it will be interesting to see if the rest of the market follows or bends the knee.

Empire Ears Shuts Down After 10 Years in the High End IEM Market

Empire Ears, a name that meant something in the boutique, high-end IEM world — is gone. After a decade of carving out a reputation for sonic excellence and obsessive craftsmanship, the brand quietly shut its doors on February 27, citing health challenges, rising costs, and an increasingly inhospitable market. For enthusiasts who watched Empire’s cables and custom monitors become fixtures on enthusiast wish lists, this is not a footnote. It’s a sign.

And let’s be honest: not all is well in the high-end wired IEM market.

Brands like FiiO, Campfire Audio, and other smaller Asian boutiques are still shipping products and carving out niches, but Empire’s departure forces a hard question: have we hit saturation with ultra-premium wired IEMs in a world that has moved on to wireless? Four-figure cables and hand-crafted shells feel increasingly like boutique curiosities next to the convenience and everyday usability of wireless. The market that once justified artisanal attention has shrunk, shifted, and in some corners evaporated.

That tension will be on full display this weekend at CanJam NYC 2026, and yes, we will be there covering it. If wired IEMs still have gas in the tank, this is where the next spark of innovation should show up: new driver tech, refreshed tuning philosophies, perhaps unexpected form factors that justify carrying wires in the age of Bluetooth dominance. We already know that one of our favorite European headphone and IEM manufacturers plans to unveil a new $1,000 wired IEM this weekend, and it will be very interesting to see how the market reacts.

But the departure of Empire cannot be ignored. It underscores a larger industry truth that many in audio enthusiast circles are quietly wrestling with: excellence does not guarantee survival. Passion does not pay rent. And even the most covetable products can find themselves adrift when consumer priorities shift faster than product cycles.

Smells Like Victory

Robert Duvall died on February 15 at 95, and with him goes the kind of actor Hollywood does not turn out anymore.

Duvall did not arrive in Hollywood fully formed. He earned it the old way. He started on stage in 1952, grinding through summer stock at the Gateway Playhouse in Bellport on Long Island, taking a year off to serve in the United States Army before returning to the boards. Those early contacts opened the door to television in the 1960s, with appearances on serious dramas like The Defenders, Playhouse 90, and Armstrong Circle Theatre, where actors were expected to act, not pose.

He made his Broadway debut in Wait Until Dark in 1966. More than a decade later, already a film star, he went back to the stage for David Mamet’s American Buffalo in 1977 and earned a Drama Desk nomination. That tells you something. He did not see theater as a stepping stone. It was part of the craft.

His film debut came quietly but memorably as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird in 1962. No grand speech. Barely any lines. Just presence. Then the run started. Bullitt. True Grit. M*A*S*H. THX 1138. He slipped into supporting roles and made them stick. You might not have walked into the theater for Robert Duvall in those early years, but you walked out remembering him.

Everything changed with The Godfather. Tom Hagen. Quiet consigliere. The man in the room who did not need to raise his voice because he already understood the temperature. It was a supporting role that felt like a lead. Duvall did that a lot. He made space feel heavier. He made silence do the talking.

Apocalypse Now is the obvious landmark. Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, sunburned and unhinged, delivering lines about napalm with a grin that told you everything about war and madness in a single breath. But go deeper and you see the range that defined him. The Apostle, which he wrote and directed, was raw and fearless. Tender Mercies earned him an Academy Award and showed how much power he could summon by barely moving at all. Lonesome Dove on television turned him into Augustus McCrae, all warmth and steel, reminding Hollywood that the small screen could still carry epic performances if you put the right actor in the saddle.

He was also a better dancer than anyone remembers. Watch him in Tender Mercies or The Apostle. Loose hips. Total commitment. No vanity. He moved like a man who did not care who was watching. He understood rhythm. Not just musical rhythm. Emotional rhythm. Scene rhythm. He could charm you in one beat and terrify you in the next.

Duvall belonged to the old guard. The Clint Eastwood school. The Al Pacino and Gene Hackman generation. Actors who showed up prepared, knew their lines, respected the craft, and did not spend their days refreshing social feeds to see how the discourse was trending. He was not shy about his political views. He did not tailor them for applause. He also did not make them the centerpiece of his career. The work came first.

That is the difference. Today too many performers treat acting like branding. The right cause. The right quote. The right viral moment. Duvall did not need any of that. He was about the scene. About the truth inside it. He could be gentle and disarming. He could be solemn and wounded. And when the role demanded it, he could be cold, manipulative, and downright evil without blinking.

Even late in his career he could walk into a scene and own it. In Thank You for Smoking, he played tobacco tycoon Captain, half mischievous uncle, half corporate warlord, dancing around the moral hypocrisy of Washington with a grin and a glass in hand. 

Every film or television project he joined improved simply because he was in it. He raised the standard in the room. Directors trusted him. Co-stars leaned on him. Audiences believed him.

He was not flashy. He was not desperate to be liked. He was a professional in the purest sense of the word. And in an industry that increasingly rewards noise over depth, Robert Duvall felt like something rarer each year. A craftsman. A grown up. A cut above what too often passes for acting today.

We will not see many more like him.

Related Reading:

• Audiophile Excess Runs Wild In Denmark, Qobuz Fixes CarPlay, Wes Montgomery’s Timeless Groove, And The Marantz M1: Editor’s Round-Up
• Culture Wars At The Super Bowl, Meze STRADA’s Curious Tuning, Record Store Day 2026, Hi-Fi Show Overload?: Editor’s Round-Up
• Jazz Dispensary At 10, Integrators In The Keys, Wireless Headphones On The Road, Catherine O’Hara, And Sinners Leading The Pack: Editor’s Round-Up
• Steve Cropper, FiiO Air Link, Wharfedale Diamond 12.3 & Other War Stories — An Editor’s Round-Up From A Hospital Bed

In terms of fit and feel, Apple’s earbuds have always been a source of contention. Some swear by the sealed tips on the Pro models for keeping everything out, while others prefer the normal versions to prevent the uncomfortable plugged-up feeling. Then Apple debuted the AirPods 4 with active noise cancellation, and for $119 (was $179), they manage to make a huge difference in terms of quietness without requiring you to insert a seal into your ear canal.

Apple’s designers spent some time adjusting the contour of these earphones to ensure they fit more firmly in your ear than their predecessors. Simply screw them in gently and they will stick firmly, even during a bumpy subway journey or a fast stroll. They’re also far more comfortable, because to the curved shape, which prevents pressure points from forming over time. To top it off, they’re dust and water resistant to a considerable degree.

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The case design has also been improved, as it is now somewhat smaller and allows wireless charging and USB-C for rapid top-ups, while the sound on these earbuds is excellent. The bass comes through clearly and does not overpower the mids, allowing you to easily identify different instruments in a song. The treble is also sparkling and detailed, so it doesn’t get too jumbled like it used to.

Adaptive EQ works by fine-tuning the sound to your ear shape on the fly, resulting in a pleasant, consistent sound over a wide range of music. It also works the same for calls, as Voice Isolation removes background noise, allowing you to be heard clearly on the other end. Active noise cancellation in an open ear setup may seem improbable at first, but it is really quite effective in real-world conditions. So you won’t be able to hear low rumbles from airplanes, buses, or office air conditioning systems, which helps to quiet things down. When you have music playing at an appropriate volume, it makes everything more enjoyable. You can enable Transparency mode if you need to have a quick chat or whatever.

The battery life is also fairly decent, with 4 hours of listening with noise cancellation and 20 hours with the case. Without ANC, it is 5 and 30 hours, respectively. Fast charging allows you to just place them in the case for a short period of time and have enough juice to last for an extended period. Oh, and the case has a little built-in speaker that you can use with Find My if you misplace it.

X is rolling out a built-in “Paid Partnership” label that creators can apply to sponsored posts, replacing the hashtag workarounds they’ve had to rely on until now. The feature, by the platform’s head of product Nikita Bier, adds a toggle that places a disclosure label directly below a post’s content. It can also be applied retroactively.

The label is meant to help creators comply with years-old requiring clear disclosure of sponsored content. The agency reminding influencers about this requirement in 2017, and a disclosure feature that same year. Without a native tool, X creators had been left to use hashtags like #ad and #paidpartnership.

X has been trying to court creators for some time with tools like and creator , but the platform still struggles with major image issues following a string of scandals like . The Elon Musk-owned platform is under investigation both and for the AI agent’s behavior.

Donut Lab, a Finnish company, recently released some impressive test data demonstrating how their solid-state battery handles extreme temperatures that conventional lithium-ion cells would struggle to deal with. The test results come from a series of measurements conducted by the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, a respected, government-backed research organization. They needed to figure out precisely how high the heat could reach before this Donut Lab cell, rated at 3.6 volts and 26 amp-hours, blew up in smoke (or some other way), so they decided to put it through its paces.

The engineers first established a baseline at a comfortable 20°C, at which point the cell delivered 24.9 amp-hours of capacity during a standard 1C discharge (or, to put it another way, the cell was chucking out a whopping 24 amps in one hour), but then they ramped up the temperature to 80°C, or ‘high heat’ to you and me, and discharged the cell again at the same rate. To their surprise, the cell managed to muster 27.5 amp-hours, which is around 110.5% of what it could manage at ambient temperature, and then outperformed that at 100°C (though at a lower 0.5C rate of 12 amps to keep things stable). There, the cell produced 27.6 amp-hours, or 107.1% of the beginning amount.

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The clear upshot of all of this is that when the temperature increased, the internal resistance in the solid electrolyte decreased, allowing the ions to move about more freely, which increased the battery’s useful energy output significantly. After both high discharges, they returned the cell to ambient temperature and recharged it normally; fortunately, no permanent damage was discovered from the electrical angle. Not so good news: at 100°C, the pouch cell lost its vacuum seal, most likely owing to gas buildup or material weakening, although it still functioned properly.

Conventional lithium-ion batteries use liquid electrolytes that become wobbly when temperatures rise above 60-70°C, causing a variety of problems such as vaporisation, swelling, rapid degradation, and, in the worst-case scenario, the dreaded thermal runaway, in which the cell becomes so hot that it is essentially a fire waiting to happen. Solid-state designs replace the liquid with a non-flammable solid, which, for obvious reasons, eliminates the source of all the problems. Donut Lab’s version appears to be capitalising on this advantage, transforming what would be a major issue for other batteries into a little but significant benefit.

This test adds to the evidence Donut Lab is using to support the claim that their battery technology is suitable for use in the real world. Donut Lab unveiled their Donut Battery as the first all-solid-state battery pack ready for cars at CES 2026, and it wasn’t just a pipe dream, as they claimed some pretty impressive numbers, including 400 watt-hours per kilogram energy density, full charges in 5 minutes, and a mind-boggling 100,000 cycles with almost no fade. The cells are really powering various Verge Motorcycles models that will hit the road this quarter, with the boast that they can hold more than 99% of capacity from -30°C to 100°C.

For the last couple of years, the mid-range smartphone pitch has been simple: offer a rounded package without making the obvious compromises. A good screen, solid battery life, and decent performance go a long way. That’s why the iPhone 17e vs Pixel 10a matchup is a bit spicy.

Google’s Pixel 10a still seems like a sensible pick; familiar, practical, and easy to recommend. But Apple’s iPhone 17e is doing something disruptive, which is making the “budget iPhone” feel like the real deal.

And that’s what makes the Pixel 10a look worse.

The 128GB era isn’t dead, but Apple just made it embarrassing

Apple has effectively killed the 128GB baseline. The iPhone 17e starts at $599 for 256GB, with no 128GB version at all. Google’s Pixel 10a, on the other hand, starts at $499 for 128GB and costs $599 for 256GB. If you come down to a direct, same-price comparison, storage isn’t the dunk it looks like at first. But Apple’s move still matters because it upgrades the default. On the 17e, 256GB is the baseline reality. On the Pixel 10a, it’s the version you have to consciously choose.

It also makes the iPhone 17e feel like a more meaningful upgrade over last year’s iPhone 16e, which launched at the same $599, but with 128GB. That’s a real bump in everyday value.

PixelSnap snubbed the 10a, while Apple brought in the whole ecosystem

The Pixel 10a feels oddly incomplete because Google seemingly decided to skip the Qi2 magnetic charging support on the budget phone. PixelSnap was a big update to the Pixel experience, and this makes the 10a feel like the one phone in the Pixel 10 lineup that can’t really tap into that new accessory push.

Apple did the opposite. The iPhone 17e gains MagSafe support (and Qi2) that was originally missing on its predecessor. This brings Apple’s magnetic charging-and-accessory ecosystem to the “e” tier. This is one of those features that doesn’t look like a headline spec until you live with it. Magnetic chargers, stands, wallets, and car mounts — it’s convenience you stop thinking about because it just works.

Apple making MagSafe standard here gives the 17e something the Pixel 10a doesn’t have: a budget phone that still feels like it belongs to a larger ecosystem.

The real $100 trade-off isn’t specs, it’s how complete the phone feels

Yes, the Pixel 10a is $100 cheaper at the entry point. But Apple is betting that $100 buys you more than storage. It buys you fewer compromises:

• The base configuration that doesn’t feel like a trap
• MagSafe as a real daily-life bonus
• A more polished “it just fits” story. It’s not just accessories, but how the 17e slots into Apple’s broader ecosystem (Macs, iPads, Watch) in ways that feel less optional and more baked in

This is where the iPhone 17e starts pulling ahead. It’s not just good for the money; it feels like Apple has decided that the ‘e’ model shouldn’t come with an asterisk.

The Pixel 10a does have two big wins, though

To be fair, the Pixel 10a isn’t showing up completely empty-handed.

First, the display. All of the performance gains of the iPhone 17e’s A19 feel a bit wasted on a phone still locked to a 60Hz display. It’s like a lion caged in a tiny box. Google’s aging Tensor G4 might not win benchmark wars, but the 120Hz screen will make the phone feel instantly snappier in scrolling, animations, and everyday use.

Second, software. Where the Pixel 10a really separates itself is software, especially with Google’s AI-driven features that actually feel practical. Real-time scam detection is working quietly in the background. Call Assist can screen unknown numbers and filter spam without you having to deal with the annoyance first.

Features like Call Notes can transcribe and summarize calls, while on-call translation is arguably the most nifty feature of them all. And yet, these are just the tip of the iceberg. The Pixel-only software perks are the kind of thing that becomes sticky once you’re used to them.

The “more compelling upgrade” bottom line

The Pixel 10a’s problem isn’t that it’s bad. It’s that it’s safe.

A safe Pixel a-series release is still a good phone. But the iPhone 17e feels like a more meaningful statement: Apple kept the same $599 starting price while upgrading the things budget iPhones typically cheap out on. That makes the 17e feel like a better upgrade this year, even before you get into the typical talking points of cameras, processors, or benchmarks.

If you’re purely maximizing dollars, the Pixel 10a at $499 will still tempt a lot of people.

But the better choice is the one that feels like fewer compromises. Apple didn’t just tweak the ‘e’ series; it made it more complete. And in the mid-range market, where good enough is everywhere, complete is a pretty nice flex.