iFi Audio is updating its entry-level wireless DAC lineup with the ZEN Air Blue 2, a $129 Bluetooth receiver designed to replace the original ZEN Air Blue while adding meaningful upgrades where it counts. The new model introduces Bluetooth 5.4 with aptX Lossless alongside LDAC, LHDC/HWA, AAC, and SBC support, giving it broader high-resolution codec compatibility than most options at this price.

Rated for a 10-meter (approximately 30 feet) range, the ZEN Air Blue 2 also benefits from an improved antenna design for more stable connections at the edge of that distance, making it a practical way to add modern wireless streaming to amplifiers, AV receivers, or powered speakers via RCA outputs without changing the rest of the system.

The ZEN Air Blue 2 uses a dedicated three stage internal design built around a Qualcomm QCC3095 Bluetooth chipset, an ESS Sabre DAC reportedly the ES9023 for digital to analog conversion, and iFi AMR custom “OV” Operationsverstärker op amps to maintain signal integrity through the output stage.

It also supports a wide 5 to 12V DC input range, making it suitable for home systems as well as automotive, marine, or other battery powered setups. An automatic power on function is included for vehicle use, allowing the unit to start with the engine.

Comparison

The Bottom Line 

The iFi Audio ZEN Air Blue 2 succeeds by keeping things simple and focused. At $129, it delivers a rare combination at this price point: Bluetooth 5.4 with aptX Lossless, broad codec support, and a stable wireless connection that makes it easy to bring modern streaming into older systems without replacing core components. That’s the angle—it’s not trying to be everything, just a clean bridge between your phone and your existing hi-fi.

What it doesn’t offer is just as clear. There’s no headphone output, no balanced connections, and no advanced control over DAC settings or outputs. If you want a more flexible desktop DAC or preamp, options like the Topping E50 II or Fosi Audio S3 give you more to work with for not a lot more money.

The ZEN Air Blue 2 is for listeners who already have an amplifier, receiver, or powered speakers they like and just need a reliable, high quality Bluetooth front end. It also makes sense in secondary systems or even in a car or boat where its wide voltage support and auto power on are actually useful. If your goal is straightforward wireless playback with minimal fuss, it fits. If you want control and expandability, look elsewhere.

Pricing & Availability

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Motorola is practically a veteran when it comes to foldables, which makes the Razr Fold all the more surprising. When I got my hands on it at a Hollywood villa overlooking the Los Angeles skyline, it felt less like an iteration and more like a fresh take.

The phone-maker’s first book-style foldable incorporates all the know-how it gained from making clamshell foldables dating back to the first modern Razr in 2019 — a launch I also attended at a similar event in Los Angeles. As advanced as it felt back then to hold a smartphone that folded in half, the foldable niche has come a long way since. The Motorola Razr Fold shows the company has moved beyond the rookie missteps typical of first-generation book-style foldables. The Google Pixel Fold, for example, notoriously didn’t unfold completely flat — an issue the Razr Fold avoids and a clear advantage in this space.

My first impression of the Motorola Razr Fold, as I held it in my hand, was that it had the polish and heft of a book-style foldable refined over many iterations, such as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7. It’s not quite the thinnest folding phone around — measuring just over 5mm thick when unfolded and about 10mm when folded — but it’s reasonably trim and didn’t feel clunky at 8.6 ounces (243 grams).

The Razr Fold is also unmistakably a Motorola phone, thanks to the design of its back, which is covered in a textured material that curves up to meet the camera bump, similar to the Moto G (2026). For the record, I find the textures classy, with a matte feel for the lily white color and cross-hatched nylon weave for the blackened blue hue.

Speaking of feel, the hinge and opening and closing of the Razr Fold feel satisfyingly sturdy — an odd but perhaps necessary reassurance that Motorola successfully translated its clamshell expertise to book-style foldables. Moreover, the Razr Fold is both well-specced and priced competitively against rival foldables: At $1,900, it lands right between the $2,000 Galaxy Z Fold 7 and the $1,800 Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold. The Motorola Razr Fold is available for preorder on Motorola.com and retailers on May 14 and will go on sale May 21.

Watch this: Motorola’s Razr 2026 Phones Are Still Powerful in Your Pocket, Just Pricier

02:35

The specs under the hood

The Razr Fold is powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chip, which is less powerful than the highest-end Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, according to NanoReview’s benchmarks. With 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, the foldable is powerful on paper; we’re looking forward to seeing how its performance compares to Samsung’s and Google’s devices.

The Razr Fold’s 6.6-inch pOLED cover display is sharp and vivid, as is its 8.1-inch LTPO OLED inner display, both roughly the same size as screens on other foldables. What sets them apart is how bright they can get, with peak brightness rated at 6,200 nits for the main (unfolded) display and 6,000 nits for the external (folded) display — easily double that of many other phones, something I’m eager to test in harsh lighting conditions. That brightness could make the Razr Fold one of the best foldables for the beach or a park picnic, though it may also drain the battery faster.

If that’s the case, it’s a good thing the Razr Fold packs a 6,000-mAh battery, offering more capacity than its rivals — and even the Galaxy Z TriFold. Better still, you can recharge the foldable with 80-watt wired charging and 50-watt wireless charging, far faster than the Galaxy Z Fold 7 (25-watt wired) and Pixel 10 Pro Fold (30-watt wired). Based on our extensive battery testing, I’d expect those speeds to recharge most of the Razr Fold in about half an hour (though we’ll have to confirm that in our review). The foldable also supports 5-watt reverse wireless charging to share power with other devices.

The Razr Fold has some of the best cameras on any Motorola phone, featuring a triple 50-megapixel rear camera array (main, ultrawide and telephoto). The telephoto uses a periscope lens with 3x optical zoom and up to 100x digital zoom. The front display has a sharp 32-megapixel selfie camera, which makes sense, as book-style foldable owners use the cover screen more often. When they pop the Razr Fold open, they’ll find a 20-megapixel camera for video calls and similar tasks.

No book-style foldable would feel complete without a stylus — or so we thought until Samsung dropped S Pen support from the Galaxy Z Fold 7. I had a chance to handle Motorola’s Moto Pen, though I didn’t have time to pair it with the Razr Fold. Tucked neatly into its holster (which looks a bit like a vape), the Moto Pen pops out easily, and the brief writing I tested on the Fold’s screen felt smooth enough. I’m not surprised that the phone-maker behind the Moto G Stylus pulled off a sleek standalone digital pen, though I’m curious about how its physical buttons function.

I have a laundry list of questions left to answer when we get our hands on the Motorola Razr Fold, from performance to camera capability to recharging rates. It’s tough to get a full picture of a phone from just an hour meet-and-greet in a fancy Los Angeles event space. But I’m confident that Motorola’s first book-style foldable will be a great alternative for folks who haven’t yet been convinced to pick up one from Samsung or Google. We’ll just have to see if Motorola has enough time to make a splash with the Razr Fold when it goes on sale May 21 before Apple potentially steals the spotlight with its long-rumored foldable iPhone expected to make its debuted in September.

Every week we like to showcase the biggest stories on the TechRadar website over the previous seven days in our ‘In Case You Missed It’ (ICYMI) round-up — both to help you catch up with the news, and also because we’re proud of our work.

Once again, it’s been a really busy week in technology: we’ve got stories here covering new phones from Motorola, electric helicopters, Taylor Swift taking on AI, robots playing table tennis, the new Steam Controller, and more besides.

Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory gathered around a special 26-foot vacuum chamber in February of last year to witness a prototype engine fire five times in a row. The temperature within that device skyrocketed, exceeding 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, with a center tungsten electrode burning a brilliant white and an outer nozzle spewing out an astounding crimson stream of lithium plasma into the void of space.

Those short bursts of fire boosted the engine to a clean 120 kilowatts, a level not even the most powerful US-built electric propulsion system had ever achieved. High voltage electric currents rip through lithium vapor inside the engine, interact with a magnetic field, and suddenly the plasma blasts out of the nozzle at a breakneck pace. It everything works together to provide you with a consistent thrust without any flames or explosions, just a smooth and continuous push that accumulates over months or even years in space. The lithium works so well for the job because it ionizes cleanly, can run on lower voltages than other choices, and allows the system to pack a big punch into a small space once everything is scaled up.

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Senior Research Scientist James Polk from JPL is the driving force behind the operation, with assistance from his colleagues at Princeton University and NASA’s Glenn Research Center. They spent a long two and a half years planning and building the monster with funds from the space nuke propulsion program. Polk described the test as a “big stride forward” because they not only demonstrated that the engine works but also achieved their target power exactly as expected. The data acquired throughout those five test cycles is now being used to plan the next releases.

NASA has already tried electric propulsion on missions with a lot lower power outputs, such as the Psyche spacecraft. This one revolutionary design can deliver 25+ times more power than those units while utilizing only a fraction of the prop required for a chemical rocket. In general, these techniques will reduce fuel requirements by up to 90%, allowing spacecraft to launch much lighter and carry far more cargo or crew supplies.

Eventually, nuclear reactors will provide enough electricity to keep the thrusters going over extended distances. A mission to Mars, for example, will most certainly require 2-4 megawatts to get the entire crew there. Once this configuration is in place, the transits will be much shorter because the spaceship will be able to keep chugging along steadily for the entire journey rather than coasting for the majority of it.

Of course, before any of this can happen, the team must first conquer a number of hurdles. The components must be able to sustain heat for thousands of hours without failing, and the engines must be capable of producing at least 500 kilowatts, if not more. The testbed they’ve set up in the vacuum chamber at JPL provides a strong foundation for them to address those difficulties one by one.

Apple has quietly raised the desktop’s starting price to $799 after demand from developers building local AI tools cleared its shelves. Tim Cook says it could take months to catch up.

For five years, the Mac mini has been the cheapest way into Apple’s desktop ecosystem. Since the M4 refresh in late 2024, that price has been $599, an unusually aggressive figure for Cupertino, and one that turned the small aluminium box into a sleeper hit.

It became the recommended starter Mac, the home-server-of-choice for tinkerers, and, increasingly, the go-to local machine for developers running AI models on their own hardware.

As of Friday, the $599 Mac mini no longer exists.

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Apple has discontinued the 256GB configuration of the M4 Mac mini and made the 512GB model, which sells for $799, the new starting point. Bloomberg reported the change first, citing Apple’s own product pages, with confirmations following from MacRumors, 9to5Mac, Macworld, and AppleInsider. The pricing on each specification has not changed; the entry rung has simply been removed.

In effect, the Mac mini is $200 more expensive to buy in its base form than it was a day earlier.

Apple’s reasoning was made unusually explicit on this week’s Q2 earnings call. Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, attributed shortages of both the Mac mini and the more powerful Mac Studio to demand that had outpaced internal forecasts, and tied that demand directly to AI workloads.

Both machines, he said, are “amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools, and the customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted.”

That recognition has a specific shape. The Mac mini and Mac Studio share a feature that has, in 2026, become unexpectedly valuable: large amounts of unified memory directly accessible to the GPU and Neural Engine on Apple’s M-series chips.

For developers running local large language models, agentic tools that orchestrate multi-step tasks on a single machine, or compact research setups that would otherwise require cloud GPUs, that memory architecture is a meaningful advantage. A 64GB Mac Studio costs less than the cheapest Nvidia H100, runs quietly on a desk, and does not bill by the hour.

The result has been the kind of run on inventory that hardware companies usually associate with launches, not nine-month-old products. Many higher-RAM configurations on Apple’s online store are listed as currently unavailable. The 16GB, 512GB Mac mini, the new entry-level model, is, by some retail accounts, backordered into June.

Behind the consumer-facing story is a less visible one about supply. The same advanced memory chips that ship in Mac minis and Mac Studios are also a critical input for the AI server farms being built by hyperscalers, and the imbalance between data-centre demand and global memory production has been intensifying for more than a year.

DRAM prices have risen sharply, and analysts have begun warning that consumer electronics manufacturers will increasingly find themselves second in line behind cloud providers willing to pay above market.

Cook acknowledged the constraint on the call, telling investors that supply-demand balance for both machines is “several months” away. He stopped short of predicting further price changes, but Notebookcheck and others have noted that the pattern, AI demand absorbs memory, memory becomes scarcer, consumer prices rise, is unlikely to be unique to Apple.

There is also a US manufacturing dimension to the story. The M4 Mac mini is one of the products Apple has begun assembling in part within the United States, and analysts at Technetbook and elsewhere have argued that some of the cost pressure on the entry tier reflects that shift rather than chip availability alone. Apple has not commented publicly on the relative weights of the two factors.

For most consumers, the change is a soft price rise dressed up as a product simplification. The 512GB Mac mini that used to be a $200 upgrade is now the floor. Anyone who would have bought the 256GB version, students, second-machine buyers, light office users, now pays more for storage they may not need.

For the segment Apple appears to be courting, the developer running Claude- or Llama-class models locally, the new entry tier is closer to a sensible minimum. 256GB of storage was always cramped for that workflow, and 512GB combined with 16GB of unified memory is a more honest starting point.

Either way, the broader signal is harder to miss. Apple, a company that historically holds prices steady through chip cycles, has just lifted a starting price by a third in response to AI-driven demand. The Mac mini is no longer a sleeper. It is, briefly and inconveniently, an AI workstation.

Coatue, one of the biggest names in venture capital and hedge funds, has a new plan to generate bigger returns on AI beyond its sizable stakes in Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and data center companies like Singapore’s DayOne and CoreWeave.

It has launched a venture called Next Frontier to buy up land near large power sources with the goal of turning those parcels into data centers, the Wall Street Journal reports. Sources tell the WSJ that Next Frontier has already signed a joint venture with Fluidstack, a cloud infrastructure startup that penned a $50 billion deal to build data centers for Anthropic. (Coatue did not respond to a request for comment.)

Although the U.S. already has 3,000 data centers, more than 1,500 new ones are in various stages of being built, according to Pew Research, most of them in rural areas. The frenzy is enticing land speculation and data center financing projects from lots of players, ranging from Blackstone to Kevin O’Leary from “Shark Tank.”

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Meta has acquired humanoid robotics startup Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI) for an undisclosed sum, the social media giant said.

“We acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a company at the frontier of robotic intelligence designed to enable robots to understand, predict, and adapt to human behaviors in complex and dynamic environments,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch in an emailed statement.

ARI’s team, including its co-founders, will join Meta’s AI unit, the Superintelligence Labs research division. ARI had raised an undisclosed seed round from AI seed firm AIX Ventures.

The startup was building foundation models for humanoid robots to perform all types of physical labor such as household chores. Co-founder Xiaolong Wang was previously a researcher at Nvidia, and an associate professor at UC San Diego, with a list of prestigious awards to his name. Co-founder Lerrel Pinto, who previously taught at NYU and co-founded the kid-size humanoid startup Fauna Robotics before Amazon snapped it up last month, has also won a string of prestigious awards.

ARI will help Meta with its humanoid ambitions. “This team, led by Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang, will bring a deep expertise in how we can design our models and frontier capabilities for robot control and self-learning to whole-body humanoid control.”

Meta researchers have been working on humanoid robotics tech for years. A leaked memo from a year ago discussed Meta’s ambitions to build such a robot, including AI models and hardware, aimed at consumers.

Even if Meta never releases a consumer humanoid product, many AI experts these days believe that the path to artificial general intelligence (AGI) — the theoretical point at which AI reaches or surpasses human-level intelligence across all domains — will require training AI models in the physical world, where robots learn through direct interaction rather than data alone.

The ARI and Fauna deals reflect a broader industry sprint — one where forecasts vary wildly, from Goldman Sachs’ projection of $38 billion by 2035 to Morgan Stanley’s estimate of $5 trillion by 2050 — a spread that reflects both the enormous potential and the uncertainty around tech that’s still finding its footing.