The national conversation about AI in the US is full of fear: fear about AI’s potential to end humanity, fear of data centers moving in, fear that government officials will do absolutely nothing even as the industry pleads for regulation, you name it.
Tech & AI
I Found The Best Amazon Prime Day Headphone Deals (2026)
Amazon Prime Day is here, and as WIRED’s resident headphone expert, I’ve hunted down the best Prime Day headphone deals for your consideration. Prime Day is a great time to find discounts on all sorts of tech, and while the best deals are often only for Prime Members, it can be hard to tell whether something is truly on sale or just a markdown off an inflated price.
I’ve been covering headphones for over four years, including guides to wireless earbuds, noise-canceling earbuds, open earbuds, and more. I know which headphones are worth your time and which deals aren’t all that good. Below, I’ve curated truly good products on sale that are worth a look.
Be sure to check out our other sale coverage of the Absolute Best Prime Day Deals, the Best Prime Day Tech Deals, the Best Prime Day Soundbar Deals, and more.
Best Prime Day Earbud Deals
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Photograph: Harry Rabinowitz
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Apple AirPods Pro 3 are the best wireless earbuds for iPhone users. This latest model has some of the best noise-canceling and transparency you can find in an earbud, with clear, detailed audio no matter what you are doing. They also come with many unique features like a built-in heart rate sensor and live translation. Plus, they get up to eight hours of battery on a single charge.
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After introducing the S2 a couple of months back, vivo is introducing the new S2 FE in the Indian market on October 6. This will come alongside another smartphone, the Vivo V80, and will serve as the Fan Edition of the recently released Vivo S2. The company teased the smartphone before its official release, sharing details about its sleek design, large battery, and immersive display. However, the company has not revealed the smartphone’s specs. Leaks suggest the device could have a 10,000mAh battery, along with other hardware details, and a price of around Rs 40,000.
The Vivo S2 FE is expected to feature a 6.7-inch display and the MediaTek Dimensity 7300E chipset. It may also feature a reportedly 3,800 square mm VC cooling mechanism. The smartphone’s battery is set to be one of its most important components. According to one leak, the battery capacity will be 10,000mAh, while another leak suggests it will exceed 7,000mAh. If the 10,000mAh battery turns out to be true, then the Vivo S2 FE will have the largest battery ever on a Vivo smartphone. This would also put the S2 FE close to the Realme P4, which packs a 10,001mAh battery.
For cameras, the Vivo S2 FE could feature a 50MP primary rear camera with a 2MP secondary sensor. The phone is also tipped to get a 32MP front camera for selfies and video calls. On the software side, it could run OriginOS 6 out of the box. The smartphone may also carry IP68 and IP69 ratings for dust and water protection. The company is also teasing the S2 FE with a sleek, youth-focused design, distinctive aesthetics, and an immersive display.
Vivo S2 FE Price and Availability in India
Vivo S2 FE smartphone is believed to have a cost range of Rs 30,000 – Rs 40,000 in India. Another leak claims a box price of Rs 39,999, while the selling price could be lower. It will also be cheaper than the Vivo S2, which starts at Rs 42,999. The FE model will be available on Flipkart, Vivo India’s online portal, and through their offline retail stores. However, the company has not yet officially confirmed any of these leaks. The company is expected to reveal the remaining details at the October 6 launch.
Happy IEEE Day 2026!
IEEE Day is an annual event that celebrates the first time in history when engineers worldwide gathered to share their technical ideas in 1884.
One of the IEEE Day’s objectives is to show the ways IEEE members, in local communities, join together to collaborate on ideas that leverage technology for a better tomorrow.
IEEE Day 2026 – October 6, 2026. Stay tuned as we continue this journey of innovation, connection, and global celebration.IEEE
Celebrate IEEE Day with colleagues from IEEE Sections, Student Branches, Affinity groups, and Society Chapters. Events happen both virtually and in person all around the world.
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But the AI conversation looks remarkably different across the Pacific.
In China, driven by public enthusiasm and a state-backed push for AI dominance, the country is in the midst of a large-scale AI integration into all facets of its society, driven by Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s support for the technology.
“He’s super AI-pilled,“ said Kyle Chan, an expert on China’s technology development and industrial policy at the Brookings Institution. “When you look at his speeches, when you look at Chinese policy documents, everything is about rolling AI out to as many domains as possible: manufacturing, services, education, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and of course the military. Everything is about trying to integrate AI.”
Beneath this push for a high-speed AI adoption across Chinese society lies a regulatory framework designed to safeguard political stability and keep boundaries on the kind of information AI models are able to share.
Chan joined Vox’s Today, Explained podcast to speak with co-host Sean Rameswaram about the different AI anxieties in the US and China, and whether joint regulations on AI safety are possible while the two countries are engaged in an AI arms race.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
One thing that really struck me about the way the Chinese government is approaching AI is that China has this explicit goal, right?
China has some concrete plans to boost AI adoption through the country, including its recent AI-plus initiative. And their goal is to try to boost the penetration of AI in so-called terminal devices, everything from computers to smartphones, to 90 percent or more by 2030.
It’s going really fast and it is, in part, a state mobilization effort. There are state-owned companies, there are government agencies that are trying to integrate AI, but also there’s just an enthusiasm from the general population.
If you look at surveys like the latest Gallup poll, people in China are much more enthusiastic and positive about how AI might help them and help the country. It’s quite a striking contrast with what you see in the US in terms of attitudes towards AI.
Because people here are worried about AI as an existential threat. People here are worried about AI taking their jobs, people here are worried about AI data centers in their backyards. Is that not the vibe in China?
Not so much. There is some concern about AI and jobs. But in general, China’s not worried about AI wiping out humanity. You really don’t hear that from the Chinese policymakers. There’s no talk about a P(doom), the probability that AI will wipe out humanity. So this is just a different approach to AI risk in general.
And why not the existential risk?
You know, one factor, I think, is sci-fi and the culture.
Huh. We’ve watched too many movies?
It seems like every major sci-fi book or film involves machines trying to kill us all, and I think that that idea has become very prevalent.
When you imagine a future with AI, that is one of the primary futures that people imagine, versus in China, I think a lot of the attitude towards technology in general, not just AI, is about using this edge to keep up and to become more competitive.
For a lot of people in China, technology was something that they saw transform their lives in real time. And Chinese leaders think it’s the key to China’s future modernization and transformation to a global superpower.
Let’s talk about what concerns there are.
One of the biggest concerns that Chinese political leaders have when it comes to AI is political and social instability. They don’t want AI-generated content to act the way that social media or the internet broadly could, which is to disseminate information, maybe deepfakes, maybe viral news that could threaten the [Chinese Communist Party’s] hold on power.
For AI-generated content, it was about making sure that the models didn’t say the wrong things about sensitive topics. A lot of this is about social and political risk rather than about existential technological risk per se.
From pretty early on, China has been developing a model registration system where basically AI services have to be vetted in advance and go through a battery of tests where they’re asked sensitive political questions and they’re supposed to either not answer them or say the “right thing” before they are officially registered. And once they’re registered, then they can be released to the public. So it’s a pretty tight regulatory framework for controlling things like political content.
We know that there’s a high unemployment rate in China, especially among young people, which is also a great concern of the government. Are people worried that this bullish approach to AI could affect employment numbers?
Yes and no. On the one hand, China is actually facing this demographic problem with a shrinking labor force. Fewer people want to go into, say, factory jobs, but China still wants to make everything the world wants to buy.
They see AI as a partial solution to that, a way to automate things like manufacturing. On the other hand, though, there are growing concerns in China about job loss. And you see also some recent court cases in China where they basically are telling employers, you cannot use AI as a reason to fire workers.
But I think overall, what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to find this balance between the diffusion of the technology and trying to prevent any kind of large-scale protest movement that might arise from sudden mass unemployment of, say, factory workers or food delivery drivers.
And President Xi was of course here in Washington last week. From the limited photos we have of the state dinner or of President Trump and President Xi on the tarmac, everything looks so chummy, even though we are so clearly in a cold war with China over AI. The president’s always talking about how he wants to win.
Was there tension in his visit to Washington last week? Did you notice any?
The weird thing is that just between these two men, there seems to be this kind of romance where Trump really fawns over Xi Jinping.
I think he has tremendous respect, even admiration, for Xi Jinping’s grip on power and control over the government apparatus in general.
What is happening under the surface, though, is continuing tensions and a deep competitive structural relationship. That involves especially competition in AI. AI has emerged as a new fault line of competition between the US and China, one that could come to define the relationship going forward.
I think that on the one hand, they’re talking about cooperation on things like AI safety and AI risk. On the other hand, there’s a whole bunch of issues where the US wants to lead. China wants to also get ahead. And when it comes to things like distillation or cyber capabilities, it’s as zero-sum as it’s ever been.
It depends on what you’re looking at and how you define winning. If you’re talking about the best models, for sure the US. And virtually everyone in China would agree, right? In fact, Anthropic’s Claude is very popular in China, even though technically Anthropic bans its use in China.
But aren’t their open-source models kind of popular here?
Yes, exactly. Chinese open-source models are getting more popular in the US, especially at a time when some of the capabilities are so incredible that most normal people don’t really need them, and they also don’t want to pay for the most advanced and most expensive models. Ultimately it’s this weird sort of cooperation and competition at the same time.
American models are popular in China. Chinese models are popular in America. We’re at each other’s throats, but quietly, politely.
Does the cold war make it all but certain that safety isn’t going to really be a chief priority for either country until something terrible happens?
The fierce level of competition and the very, very deep distrust between the two countries makes any kind of cooperation on AI safety very, very difficult. Even just talking to each other, having the US and China establish an official AI dialogue, which apparently they’ve agreed to, is seen as a huge first step, even though they’re just talking.
There’s a long, long road to go before we can even think about something like an arms control treaty or a broader international agreement about AI and AI safety. But I think that’s what some people, especially in Silicon Valley, are trying to jump to.
Researchers at the Singapore University of Technology and Design built a small robot that leaves a drone, spins on the way down, and keeps moving once it meets the water. They named it ALBATROSS, short for Airborne Lander with Buoyant AuToROtating Sailing Sensor. Lead author Shane Kyi Hla Win, working with professor Foong Shaohui, describes the machine in Science Robotics as a way to put sensors on a lake or a sheltered stretch of sea without sending a boat out to meet them.
A drone raises the one-kilogram prototype about 150 meters and then releases it. The inflexible wingsails attached to one side of the hull grab some air and begin spinning within a few seconds, much like a maple seed does on its journey to the earth. During tests on a reservoir, the craft settled into a very constant glide of around 7.4 meters per second, or roughly 26 kilometers per hour. According to Foong’s team, an identical hull without the spin would smack into the sea with nearly 18 and a half times the force, so the wings effectively negate the need for a parachute.
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The weight is responsible for landing the thing. A good heavy keel and ballast will turn the boat upright in approximately a second after it enters the water, and no power is required to flip it over. Once it floats, those same wings transform into sails. The main sail just turns freely with the help of a tail rudder, whilst a smaller front sail can alter angle to maintain the spin stable and catch any wind on the sea. To complete the task, only three actuators and three navigation sensors are required, which is quite small when compared to some air-and-water machines that require six to eight actuators.
Once it reaches that threshold, the wind takes over. Trials on Singapore’s Bedok and Pandan lakes revealed that a larger test version could reach a top speed of roughly a kilometer per hour and maintain that speed for nearly three hours while recording humidity, heat, and wind direction. Not bad given it only consumed almost half of its main battery. When the air lowers, a rudder shaped like a fish tail starts rotating and can provide the ship a moderate push forward at up to 0.4 meters per second, allowing it to make some headway when operating upwind.
Currently, the limit is relatively calm water. The design is primarily intended for still reservoirs and peaceful areas of coastline, and the team believes it would not last long in severe swell. Future versions are expected to be able to stay out for weeks, monitoring things like algal blooms, oil spills, trash, and the flow of heat between the sea and the air, and having a rapid release mechanism will come in useful if they need to conduct a search or inspect a remote beach. For now, though, it’s all about the sequence: one set of wings, one drop, one smooth landing, and a miniature boat that sails away on its own.
A software bug brought a Formula 1 grand prix to a standstill this weekend, stranding more than half the field on a sodden racetrack and forcing officials to abort the race start entirely while engineers scrambled to patch every car on the grid in real time.
The chaos unfolded at the Sepang International Circuit in Malaysia, which stepped in to host the “Bahrain Grand Prix” after the ongoing war with Iran made racing in the Gulf kingdom impossible. If the relocation itself was unusual, what happened next was unprecedented even by motorsport’s eccentric standards: a piece of shared racing software, developed jointly by the FIA, the ten teams, and their engine manufacturers, misread a slow, rain-soaked formation lap as an attempt to cheat — and shut the cars’ hybrid power systems down for 60 seconds apiece.
How a software bug turned a formation lap into chaos
Heavy rain had already delayed the start by half an hour. Race organizers opted for two formation laps behind the safety car, reasoning that a slower pace would let drivers assess the standing water while their intermediate tires helped clear it from the track. It was a sensible plan on paper, but it collided with a hard-coded anti-cheating rule buried in the cars’ control software.
That rule is designed to prevent teams from gaining an unfair advantage by manipulating hybrid power deployment at low speeds. But with power deliberately reduced in sections of the track for safety in the wet, and cars crawling even slower than usual behind the safety car, several vehicles’ systems concluded the rule was being broken. The result was an automatic 60-second shutdown of their electric motors — triggered not by any driver error, but by the software itself misinterpreting conditions nobody had planned for.
What followed looked less like a grand prix and more like a pileup in slow motion. Cars that had just rebooted crawled back up to speed only to find the car ahead stalling out next, producing a rolling wave of confusion up and down the field. Red Bull’s Max Verstappen described finding himself “five-wide on the straight because we couldn’t understand what was going on,” before coming across a cluster of cars still crawling a lap later. Race control had no real choice but to call the whole start off.
A rushed fix and a second attempt
FIA single-seater boss Nikolas Tombazis later explained that the software bug had simply never surfaced before because this year’s season had produced almost no wet-weather running to test it against. “It wasn’t maybe adequately checked,” he said, noting that the wet-weather power settings were common code used across every team’s car — meaning a flaw in one place could, and did, affect nearly the entire grid at once.
Once the problem was identified, the FIA says it took roughly 20 minutes to write and distribute an updated version of the software to every team, plus additional time for engineers to install it and confirm the fix had taken on each car. Verstappen couldn’t resist a dig at the process, joking that his team’s update landed faster thanks to Red Bull’s data partnership with Oracle.
By the time the field lined up for a second attempt roughly an hour after the first aborted start, conditions on track had shifted dramatically. The rain had eased, standing water had drained away, and the brief but costly delay caused by the software bug left drivers facing a tricky strategic gamble: stick with intermediate tires built for a wet track, or risk a slick tire on a surface that was drying faster than anyone had anticipated. Just nine drivers, including pole-sitter Verstappen and championship leader Kimi Antonelli, opted to stay on intermediates. Others, including Lewis Hamilton, chose slicks — a decision that the restarted formation lap quickly exposed as premature, since the track was still wetter than the dry tires could handle.
What the episode reveals about racing’s reliance on software
The incident is a pointed reminder of how deeply modern Formula 1 depends on software that most fans never think about — code that governs not just engine mapping and tire sensors but split-second judgments about legality and safety. A single untested edge case, triggered only by an unusual combination of extreme weather and unusually slow driving, was enough to disable half the field simultaneously and delay a world championship race by roughly an hour.
It’s also a case study in how quickly such problems can, in principle, be fixed once identified. Pushing a software update to ten different teams’ cars and verifying it across an entire grid in around 20 minutes is no small logistical feat, even if the underlying software bug should never have made it into a race weekend in the first place. Tombazis’s explanation — that this year’s unusually dry season left the wet-weather code effectively unvalidated — points to a broader challenge facing any complex, rarely-used system: the conditions that matter most are often the ones tested least.
For a sport that prides itself on split-second precision, the sight of cars idling behind a safety car because of a coding oversight was a rare and faintly absurd failure. But it also underscored a reality increasingly familiar across industries far beyond racing: as more critical decisions get delegated to automated systems, a single unanticipated scenario is sometimes all it takes to bring everything to a halt.
Sources:
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Felix at Billet Labs set out to park a real gaming PC in a living room and leave the fans off. A Ryzen 9 9800X3D and an RTX 5080 share a Gigabyte AORUS Pro B850 board, fed by a 600 watt Flex ATX supply, and the pair can pull well past 500 watts once a demanding game settles in. Air coolers handle that load by moving a lot of air. Moving a lot of air makes noise. An earlier attempt had hung the same idea on a cast iron radiator and ended near 100 kilograms, so this version started over on a hand-worked aluminum block that brings the finished machine down to about 15.7 kilograms once the loop holds roughly two liters of water.
The enormous black block on the floor is the case’s base, and 6 mm of thermal paste rests underneath the motherboard, while a big ol’ glob of paste is put under the power supply, allowing heat to be poured directly into the metal. Three radiators sit on top of the motherboard on brackets he built himself, with the paint stripped and the metal polished nicely: a large 200 x 400 mm unit at the bottom, followed by two smaller 140 and 120 class radiators laid flat so warm air can rise naturally through the fins. He closed the loop by soldering old copper piping from the home to brass fittings. A separate length of pipe capped at one end serves as a reservoir and feeds the pump. The pressure and temperature gauges are right up front. Motherboard fans are actually disabled in the bios, therefore they do not turn on. The thermal paste on the supply base is only there to keep the fan from spinning up (which it probably shouldn’t anyhow).
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The first few runs were relatively smooth, but then things became a little wacky. Even when idle, the water in the loop was exactly 28 degrees Celsius. A simple game barely put a dent in it. Cinebench, on the other hand, raised the temperature of the water to around 39.5 degrees Celsius, with processor cores reaching the low 90s. Halo remained playable, however. Cyberpunk 2077, on the other hand, raised the water temperature to 55.5 degrees, and by the end, the processor was approaching 95 degrees as the power draw dropped from 110 to 100 watts. A combined stress test eventually drove the water up to 56 to 60 degrees, just shy of the pump’s capacity.
As the water heated up further, he began to notice some cavitation. The small radiators were having problems allowing air to rise beyond the dense fins, so heat was simply creeping past them rather than through. The flow order was also contributing to the problem, because the warmest water was not being directed to the top radiator first. The pressure gage was loud enough to be heard across the room, and he had nearly punctured a radiator with a screw while assembling the entire thing. That is a very good technique to melt copper pipe, though; simply pass a long, hot torch over it, and the copper absorbs all of the heat.
One 120mm Noctua fan, a small black one that blends well with the metal background, sits neatly between the two smaller radiators and draws air through the fins to provide airflow that would ordinarily be insufficient to clear them. The gage is removed, and with it, the ticking sounds. The idle water temperature drops to 22 degrees. When you run cinebench, the coolant temperature maintains at 25 degrees, the cores are in the upper 70s with a brief peak of 82, and the processor is still only drawing 129 watts without needing to be cooled.
A full stress test that had been approaching 60 degrees finally settles at around 40, a full 20 degrees cooler, while the graphics card max out at 61. In ordinary games, the fan runs at a low speed and is almost inaudible, since it is quieter than the old gage even when it spins up slightly. The aluminum block already effectively cools the board and card, so all that was required was a single fan between the smaller radiators to complete the loop.
You can get by with a completely silent loop that can idle and handle some light gaming, but if you try to run a 9800X3D and a 5080 through a long gaming session, the water temperature will start to rise into the 50s and the processor will begin to fail. One quiet fan, directed at the radiators that were seriously impeding airflow, transformed the entire copper and aluminum configuration into a living room PC that looks good on a shelf and can even finish a session without crashing.
[Source]
Amazon Prime Big Deal Days 2026 is live now, with two days of discounts running October 6th and 7th on headphones, loudspeakers, smart speakers, TVs, streaming gear, and other consumer electronics. Often referred to as Amazon’s “October Prime Day,” the sale is limited to Prime members and includes some of the lowest prices we’ve seen this fall on products we actually recommend.
We’re tracking the best Amazon Prime Big Deal Days 2026 audio and tech deals as they appear, with a focus on products that offer genuine value rather than inflated “discounts” that look better on the screen than they do at checkout. Some of the strongest deals may disappear before the sale ends — and with Black Friday still weeks away, waiting could mean paying more or finding the product sold out.
Revel M146
The Revel M146 bookshelf speaker redefines spatial audio. Engineered with a 6.5-inch Deep Ceramic Composite woofer and 7th-Gen Acoustic Lens Waveguide, its pure sound warps time—suspending reality as tracks pull you effortlessly into the exact moment they were recorded. Pure acoustics, absolute immersion, right on your desktop or stand.
$2,999/pair at Crutchfield | Audio Advice | Music Direct | Sweetwater
ARCAM AVA15
Unleash true cinematic power with the ARCAM AVA15. Delivering pristine audiophile clarity, immersive Dolby Atmos, and effortless room calibration, it turns any living room into a high-end private theater. Elite Dirac-tuned engineering rarely comes at this price—grab the ultimate audio upgrade before stock runs out!
$4,499 at Crutchfield | Best Buy | Audio Advice
AWOL Aetherion Max
A flagship 4K RGB Triple Laser UST projector designed for bright living rooms, larger screens and shared entertainment. It delivers 3,300 ISO lumens, 6,000:1 native contrast and 110% Rec.2020, with PixelLock™ Technology for sharp 4K images up to 200″. It also features Anti-RBE Technology, Dolby Vision, IMAX Enhanced, VRR, ALLM and 1ms ultra-low latency for movies, sports and gaming.
$4,499 $3,599 at AWOL Vision | Amazon
Audioengine HD4
Give the music lover on your list something they’ll use every day. The Audioengine HD4 Home Music System in Hi-Gloss Piano White is 20% off for Prime Day. Big sound, easy setup, and a gift that makes every playlist, album, and favorite song sound better.
$429 $343 at Amazon
Technics EAH-AZ100
The Technics EAH-AZ100 True Wireless Earbuds deliver premium sound with Magnetic Fluid Drivers for rich bass and crystal-clear detail. Adaptive Noise Cancelling and Dolby Atmos® with head tracking create an immersive listening experience, making them an exceptional gift for music lovers. During Prime Big Deal Days, save $65.
$299 $234 at Amazon
Andover SpinBase 2
SpinBase 2 delivers powerful, full-range 270° sound in a sleek, space-saving design. Featuring Andover’s patented IsoGroove® Technology for noise-free performance and a built-in phono preamp, it sits seamlessly under your turntable. Get SpinBase 2 for as low as $289 this Prime Day! Click HERE for all Andover Prime Day deals – offers end 10/8/26.
$349 $289 at Amazon
ZVOX AccuVoice AV855
Can’t hear voices on TV? The AccuVoice AV855 Soundbar delivers unparalleled dialogue clarity with 20 levels of voice enhancement. The AV855 features dual built-in woofers for rich bass and HDMI-ARC compatibility for easy connection with your TV’s remote. Just $299 this Prime Day! Click HERE for all ZVOX Prime Day deals – offers end 10/8/26.
$349 $299 at Amazon
Sony WH-1000XM5
Although a generation behind, Sony’s award-winning WH-1000XM5 wireless headphones deliver the best bang-for-your-buck in noise-cancellation this Prime Day. Available in smoky pink, midnight blue, black, or silver.
$399 $199 at Amazon
TCL QM8L
The 75-inch 2026 TCL QM8L offers the best value for performance among the TVs we’ve tested this year. It’s now half-off for Prime Days in other sizes too!
$2,999 $1,497 at Amazon
Note: Some of these deals are only available to Amazon Prime Members during October 6-7, 2026. Check Amazon for the latest Prime Day Deals.
Need more gift giving ideas?
Disclosure: The products listed above are approved by our Editors, but may be requested by our sponsors. When links to buy are provided, we’ll direct you to the lowest price at time of publication. In doing so, eCoustics may earn a small commission from the associated retailer if purchased.
Over the weekend, Japanese publishing giant Nikkei disclosed that unknown attackers recently breached two employee email accounts and used one to send thousands of phishing emails.
In a Sunday statement, the company said an employee’s Google Workspace account was accessed in late July, exposing the personal information of employees and business partners.
Nikkei changed the account’s password after discovering the breach in early August, following a notification from Google.
While this incident may have exposed the names and email addresses of 1,646 individuals, Nikkei says the affected data doesn’t include information about readers or interviewees.
More recently, threat actors accessed another employee’s Microsoft 365 account in September and used it to send 9,000 phishing emails targeting Nikkei staff and interviewees.
“On September 30th , emails containing links to malicious websites were sent to internal staff and to interviewees with whom several employees had been in contact,” the media giant said. “Our company has changed its passwords, and no unauthorized logins have been confirmed since then. We have contacted the recipients individually and requested that they delete the emails.”
The company also warned affected individuals to watch for suspicious emails that may impersonate Nikkei or its subsidiaries in new phishing attacks.
Nikkei has yet to attribute the attacks to a specific threat actor or hacking group and hasn’t shared whether the two incidents are connected.
These are the latest in a string of security incidents Nikkei has disclosed in recent years. Last year, the company also revealed that its Slack messaging platform had been breached, affecting more than 17,000 employees and business partners.
In May 2022, Nikkei’s Singapore subsidiary was hit by a ransomware attack that affected a server “likely” containing customer data. Three years earlier, in late September 2019, Nikkei lost approximately $29 million in a business email compromise (BEC) attack that targeted a Nikkei America employee.
Nikkei owns the Financial Times and The Nikkei, the world’s largest financial newspaper, and is one of the world’s largest media corporations.
It controls more than 40 affiliated companies involved in publishing, broadcasting, events, database services, and the index business, has 37 foreign editorial bureaus and over 1,500 journalists worldwide, and has over 3.7 million digital paid subscriptions.
Join Mikko Hyppönen and security leaders from the NFL, CHANEL, and Atlassian for a two-hour digital summit on what AI-speed attacks change, what defenders should stop doing, and how to validate, decide, fix, and re-validate at machine speed.
Lucid Motors built 2,954 electric vehicles (EVs) in the third quarter of this year, a 54% drop from a year ago, as the company purposely limits production to better meet demand for its EVs.
This was the third straight quarter in which the number of EVs Lucid built has declined. It’s also the lowest quarterly output since the first quarter of 2025, which was just after Lucid Motors started production of its second EV, the Gravity SUV.
Lucid delivered 3,806 EVs in the third quarter, roughly flat with the second quarter and down about 200 vehicles from the third quarter of 2025. The company has struggled to find buyers for either of its first two luxury EVs. In five of the last six quarters, it built more vehicles than it delivered.
Lucid’s new CEO, Silvio Napoli, has spent the last few months leading an effort to “simplify the company.” That effort has included laying off around 1,500 employees, streamlining the company’s leadership, and eliminating a second shift at its factory in Arizona in a bid to reach cost savings of $1.4 billion. Lucid also delayed the release of its third EV, the Cosmos. That model is supposed to be much cheaper, starting at under $50,000.
The third-quarter figures, released Monday afternoon, come just a few days after rival EV upstart Rivian posted its best quarter in history on the back of the R2, its new, more affordable SUV. Although Rivian didn’t break out specific delivery figures for the R2, the company shipped nearly 20,000 vehicles in the third quarter, the first full quarter with the R2 in production, up from 12,194 in the second quarter.
Lucid’s failure to find a large market of buyers for its EVs is even more stark when compared with the promises the company made when it went public in 2021. That year, Lucid Motors merged with a special purpose acquisition company and estimated it would ship as many as 90,000 EVs in 2024 alone. The company raised $4 billion in the transaction.
On Lucid’s second-quarter earnings call in August, Napoli spoke about why he thinks the company has failed to make a dent in the EV market.
“While there is no question that Lucid brought leading innovations and outstanding products to the market, we have disappointed on several fronts, and for far too long,” he said. “We have not executed consistently. We missed commitments, launched products before they were ready, underinvested in service, responded too slowly to quality issues, and allowed complexity to slow decisions down.”
The Cosmos’ lower price could, in theory, let Lucid access a wider market, but Napoli cautioned shareholders that rushing the new EV out could create more trouble.
“We will not repeat the mistakes of the past by bringing a product to market before it is ready,” Napoli said on the call.
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The gap between Mac and PC is finally closing, but be careful before you pick a Mac as your primary gaming platform.
Macs have never exactly been gaming machines. For a long time, not only was the hardware lacking, but many developers never bothered to bring their titles to macOS. But the situation is different now with Apple silicon — the M-series chips are powerful, and there are new tools to easily port PC games to Mac.
But can a MacBook really handle demanding games? Technically, it can, but there are many other factors you should consider before choosing a Mac as your gaming machine. Yes, the gaming landscape on macOS is much better now than it was six years ago, but there’s still a huge gap between Macs and Windows PCs.
What a MacBook can and can’t handle
Thanks to Apple silicon, hardware is no longer a Mac’s weak point. If you have one of the latest Macs, such as an M5 MacBook Pro, it will likely run most games well — even some big names you might not have expected. Apple lists Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Dead Island 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 as some of the titles a Mac can run natively. The list of Mac-compatible games has been growing a lot, with more and more titles coming to macOS alongside their Windows versions.
And even if your favorite game doesn’t have a macOS port, there may still be an alternative. Apple has created something called the Gaming Porting Toolkit, which helps developers port Windows games to macOS using native translations. While this tool is intended for developers, anyone can use it to run PC games on a Mac with just a few lines of code. I’ve been using it to run GTA V on my M4 Pro MacBook Pro, and the results are pretty solid; I can get a steady 60 frames per second with high graphics settings. It’s not perfect and there are a few glitches here and there, but it works well overall for a game being translated in real-time.
If you’re not sure which games your Mac can run, it’s worth checking out MacGamingDB. This is a community-run website that provides compatibility details for thousands of titles, making it easy to quickly find out how your favorite game performs on a specific Mac model. It saves you a lot of time, since you don’t have to download gigabytes of data just to find out the game doesn’t work.
Which MacBook to buy, and when to look elsewhere
If you really want to game on a MacBook, the MacBook Pro is your best option. Even the base model with the M5 Pro chip and 24GB of RAM gives you enough power to run most modern games smoothly. If you need more, you can upgrade it with an M5 Max chip, which adds more RAM and a better GPU.
Of course, don’t expect a MacBook Neo to perform the same as the latest MacBook Pro line. Both the MacBook Neo and the MacBook Air have less powerful processors and no internal fan, which makes them less suitable for running demanding games. They can still run some titles, but performance won’t be ideal and you’ll have to lower the resolution and graphics settings a bit.
But if you’re serious about gaming, you should probably buy a PC instead. A Windows PC will likely cost you less for the same graphical power, and it will run all games natively without you having to worry about compatibility issues. You might also want to check out cloud gaming services like GeForce NOW or Xbox Cloud Gaming to stream games on your MacBook, so hardware won’t be an issue. You just need a good internet connection.
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