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7 Best Coffee Makers (2026): Ratio, Fellow, Moccamaster
Compare the Top 7 Drip Coffee Makers
Frequently Asked Questions
How We Tested and Chose the Best Drip Coffee Machines
I’ve been a drip coffee fan—some might say fanatic—for quite some time. Much of my machine selection comes from personal experience as a coffee writer and reporter for more than a decade. To broaden my selection, I listened to some of the best minds in coffee, including internet bean personalities like James Hoffmann and Lance Hedrick, trusted baristas and roasters, my friend Joel, and countless published lists by credible sources. If it looked good, I tried it. And sometimes, I just took a flyer on an interesting-looking machine.
Curious why you don’t see your favorite budget Hamilton Beach or Cuisinart 14-Cup on this list? It’s because I focused on a new generation of devices that are moving drip coffee forward in terms of flavor and technical sophistication—adding bloom cycles, dual heating elements, customization, or precise water-temperature control. That said, there are still a couple of budget devices that make actual good coffee. My favorite of these is the Zojirushi Zutto.
I test each coffee machine first by carefully reading and following the manufacturer’s instructions, and then brew both light- and medium-dark-roast coffee according to specifications. I then do the same while adhering to a 1:17 “golden ratio” of water-to-coffee while brewing multiple batch sizes. Then I generally tinker a bit with different roasts and machine settings while putting the machine through its paces, seeing how easy (or hard) it is to get a genuinely good cup of coffee according to different preferences.
But in addition to the evidence of my taste buds, I use probe and infrared thermometers when possible to track brew and final temperatures, plus time brew cycles for various-sized batches. I examine the soaking of the brew bed for signs of uneven extraction.
I also assess ease of use, the little fun features that make you fall in love with a machine, and the quirks or flaws that can make you hate it. Does the carafe hold temperature? Can you time the machine to have coffee ready when you wake up? How easy is it to clean or descale the water reservoir? How’s the lid fit? When you’ve really invested in a device, even the littlest things matter.
But taste is always king, and it’s what matters to me most. Amid testing, I also held side-by-side taste tests against other machines I liked, with the same ratios and coffee, to see how they compared. A good cup of coffee never quite seems good enough when it sits on the counter next to truly great coffee.
Do More Expensive Drip Coffee Makers Make Better Coffee?
The short answer is “often, very much yes.” You’ve probably noticed that drip coffee makers have gotten a lot more expensive lately, after decades spent racing to the bottom of the market.
The original Mr. Coffee machine was actually a time-saving luxury and a marvel of newfound convenience when it arrived in the 1970s, quickly taking over half the home coffee market share despite costing $250 or more in current dollars. But these days, a basic 12-cup drip coffee machine with a warmer is quite easily had at Walmart for less than $30. So why not just buy that?
You can. But it won’t be as good.
Why are cheap coffee makers cheap? Cheap drip coffee makers tend to work a similar way: Coffee is heated till it boils underneath the burner plate. The resulting steam pushes water up through plastic tubes with steam to pour out of a small showerhead over the brewing chamber, until all the water is gone. A couple things happen, alas. First, the water that initially pours into the brewing chamber is too cold. By the end of the pour, it’s too hot. Also, since the pour spout is generally a bit small, the grounds will not wet evenly, or extract evenly: Water will tunnel through the middle or the side of the brew basket. (You can see this quite clearly, usually: There’s basically a big crater in your coffee grounds after you brew.)
Bad extraction means bad coffee.
The result of this uneven extraction is uneven coffee. Different flavors come out of coffee at different times and different temperatures. Especially with lighter roasts and higher-quality coffee—coffee with unique, interesting, aromatic qualities—a cheap coffee maker will be a form of violence. What’s more, after you drop the coffee onto the thermal plate, it’ll just kinda keep burning. It will taste, perhaps nostalgically, like diner coffee. It’ll taste thin, and burnt, and possibly sour. If you’re used to this, and that’s what you like, these qualities should only cost you $30.
Good extraction makes good coffee.
Drip or immersion coffee does not have to taste like burnt rubber. Well-extracted drip coffee can taste round, chocolatey, and deep, without any burnt notes. It can offer aromatics as subtle and fruity as those you’d find in wine: plum, nectarine, and cherry. Since the early 2000s, baristas with twirly mustaches have gotten quite good at coaxing out these flavors with cafe pour-over—using good grinders, tight temperature control, and painstakingly evenly immersed coffee grounds. This usually involves a Chemex or a Kalita Wave conical filter and a tightly controlled gooseneck kettle.
Modern drip machines emulate cafe pour-over.
So why are the newer, more expensive drip coffee makers better? They exercise the same control as a good barista in a cafe. They keep the temperature in a tight range. They immerse the coffee evenly. They “bloom” coffee to further aid even extraction. They control time appropriately. They mimic what a skilled barista would do to predictably and beautifully coax the nice flavors out of the coffee, but they stop short before pulling out the nasty flavors.
But seriously. Is expensive always better?
Nah. Plenty of expensive coffee makers also make bad or OK coffee, despite their best efforts. That’s why I take my time testing each machine. WIRED’s top-pick devices make drip coffee better than any other machines I’ve encountered. Some, like the Technivorm Moccamaster, achieve these results with precise analog engineering. Some, like the Four from Portland coffee maker Ratio, construct ideal temperature curves and ideal extraction using electronic controllers and long-term testing, unlocking good coffee with a single button-press. And some, like the top-pick Fellow Aiden, allow you to customize your brewing parameters for each individual bag of coffee. Wild.
What Is SCA Certification?
A number of the brewers among the favorites are certified by the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) as “Golden Cup” brewers. What does this mean? Quite a bit, actually.
The Specialty Coffee Association is an international trade group for coffee. Its Golden Cup home-brewer certification is a rigorous testing process designed according to criteria laid out by coffee scientists in the 1950s. An increasingly small number of devices receive and maintain SCA Golden Cup laurels, and these include some of the best brewers in the game. Large brands like Bonavita and Breville may have more resources to devote to certification, but relative newcomers like Ratio and Fellow may also use SCA certification as a way of proving their bona fides.
An SCA brewer must be able to consistently deliver on the following criteria:
Coffee-to-water ratio: The golden ratio for coffee brewing generally is thought to fall between 1:16 and 1:18. This is one gram of coffee for every 16 to 18 grams or milliliters of water. That’s around 8 grams of coffee for every 5-ounce cup. This is the strength most prefer, after years of taste testing.
Brew temp: Water temperature must remain between 195 and 205 degrees Fahrenheit (90 to 96 degrees Celsius) throughout the brewing process. If it’s too hot, the coffee burns or bad flavors come out. Too cold, and the extraction is too weak and the coffee might end up tasting sour. The recommended temperature might be lower in higher-elevation areas, such as Denver.
Brew time: In general, a batch of drip coffee should brew in four to eight minutes in order to get full extraction without overdoing it and risking bitter or acrid flavors. Pour-over coffee tends to brew at the lower end of this scale, around three to five minutes.
Extraction: The SCA tests the extraction achieved by a coffee maker. The ideal strength—the percentage of the brewed liquid that’s made up of coffee particles—tends to be 1.15 to 1.35 percent. Extraction is a complicated calculation, but the SCA wants coffee to be 18 to 22 percent extracted. The maximum theoretical extraction is 30 percent, but you don’t want this. The bitter flavors come last, and you’d rather leave them in the bean.
The objectivity of these criteria has been questioned a bit recently, given changing tastes over time and different regional preferences. It is true that any coffee machine that can consistently meet these criteria tends to be a pretty well-made machine. But an SCA stamp does not guarantee excellent coffee. (In fact, I’ve tasted multiple “Golden Cup” brewers I would not recommend.) Likewise, the lack of an SCA stamp doesn’t mean bad coffee. Indeed, makers of some of our top picks have privately told me they’ve moved beyond the SCA’s one-size-fits-all criteria, in favor of in-house optimization.
What Is This “Bloom” You Speak Of?
The “bloom” is a technique from the pour-over brewing method that’s recently been adopted in a lot of the best automatic drip coffee makers.
The idea is this: If your coffee is fresh and freshly ground, it’s probably gassy. Specifically, there’s a bit of carbon dioxide still trapped in the bean that will actually hinder good coffee extraction. Once you add hot water, the carbon dioxide will be in a rush to escape and shoulder out those good coffee flavors from doing the same.
So a bloom is just a poetic name for degassing. Basically, you pour over a small portion of hot water to begin with, then wait 30 seconds or so. The visible bubbling of the carbon dioxide that results is the “bloom.”
Blooming fresh coffee tends to lead to a better and more full-flavored extraction. Weakly extracted coffee is thinner and more sour.
The best modern drip coffee machines now often also offer a bloom cycle, in part because consumers are now more likely to use better, freshly ground beans in their drip coffee. You don’t need to bloom stale ground coffee. But that said, it will always taste like stale coffee.
Another technique coffee makers have borrowed from pour-over is agitation, which is to say: stirring up the coffee with water. Many newer machines use a broad showerhead to drip out water unevenly in large droplets. This increases and optimizes coffee extraction by both wetting the coffee grounds evenly and creating more agitation.
This is a hairy, sticky, no-good question with only uncertainty at its bottom. There’s very little standardization in coffee makers, but the answer tends to be that most but not all American drip coffee makers use 5 ounces as a standard serving size. This means a 12-cup coffee maker tends to hold 60 ounces of water in its reservoir.
But some European makers, like Technivorm Moccamaster, roll with 125 milliliters, about 4 ounces. Other coffee makers might have 150-milliliter cups, or 6-ounce cups. To find out the size of each machine’s “cup,” you may have to use your own measuring cup or kitchen scale, read the manual very carefully, or have fun with Google.
More Coffee Makers We Like and Love
Photograph: Cavanaugh/Oxo
Oxo Brew 9-Cup Coffee Maker for $250: The 9-cup Oxo (9/10, WIRED Recommends) is a lovely, SCA Golden Cup coffee maker capable of making tasty drip coffee that would please any connoisseur. Five years ago when WIRED reviewed it, it was arguably our favorite batch coffee maker. Alas, the world of drip coffee relentlessly keeps moving forward. It still might be your favorite, given that it costs 40 percent less than my top-pick Aiden and offers a feature that’s indispensable for some: a timer that allows you to schedule your brew overnight, so it’s ready when you wake up.
Oxo 12-Cup Coffee Maker for $350: The Oxo 12-Cup Coffee Maker (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is another previous top pick for as a large-batch brewer, and it’s still a worthwhile choice. This Oxo is not overtly pretty, but, like the Luxe above, it’s SCA-certified, can be set on a delay timer, and can adjust heat and flow rate of its showerhead to account for batches from large to small. Which is to say it wakes up each morning and brews excellence. WIRED contributing reviewer Joe Ray prized, in particular, the machine’s water tank, which operates as a kettle, heating the water precisely before brewing rather than heating up during the brew—a quality quite rare among home brewers.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
12-Cup Breville Luxe Brewer for $350: Sometimes nothing less than 12 cups will do. WIRED has previously recommended this big-batch 12-Cup brewer as a top pick for those who want good-tasting coffee in large batches. Among the big boys, this Breville Luxe (7/10, WIRED Recommends), the update on the prior Breville Precision Brewer, has the best feature set and the best capabilities. It can reliably make balanced, aromatic 60-ounce batch of coffee thanks to a lot of technical sophistication under its hood: PID temperature control, water sensors, brew algorithms, customizable settings, the same thermocoils and pumps you’d use to make espresso. It also has an excellent cold brew function, which can make real, actual, cold brew overnight or over the course of the day, timed out with a drip stop. Even so, the device has a number of quirks and particularities in terms of water volume, water left in the reservoir, and an entirely different brew mode for small batches that’s not well explained in the product documentation. After noticing a lot of frustrated user feedback online, I’ve moved this down to my honorable mentions despite the machine’s many admirable qualities.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Ninja Hot and Iced XL for $160: Arguably Ninja’s top-line coffee maker of the moment, the 12-cup Ninja Hot and Iced XL has many features to like: timed brew for sluggish risers, the ability to choose your batch size from single mug to 12-cup carafe without having to measure water, because the device simply sucks the desired amount out of the tank; options on iced coffee and cold brew. It is what Ninja does: It has the features. The coffee is not as well-extracted as our top picks, whether on classic or rich settings. But at its price, and with its many little conveniences, it may still be the coffee machine you desire. It’s best for those who like medium roast or darker, though—it’s not a pick for delicate, aromatic light-roast drinkers.
Ninja 12-Cup Programmable Brewer for $90: At less than $100, this 12-cup Ninja is a perfectly serviceable brewer with a bloom function, a timer so you can wake up to hot coffee on a hot plate, and a half-batch setting to help optimize your brews. At the same price range, I far prefer a coffee pot from the five-cup Zojirushi Zutto. But if you want to caffeinate an office or community rec room on a budget, this larger budget brewer might still be your choice.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Ninja Dualbrew Hot & Iced Coffee System for $170: Lordy, this one really does it all. Hot coffee, cold coffee, iced coffee, pod coffee. This machine is designed for the family who can’t agree, or the person who wants everything, but only sometimes. It’s among WIRED’s top-pick pod machines for this wild versatility, and while the drip coffee doesn’t stack up to my top picks, it’s perfectly good for those more likely to make the occasional carafe from store bags.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Gevi 10-Cup Touchscreen Brewer for $160: Gevi is a relatively new brand out of China—part of a wave of new appliance makers who’ve moved from manufacturing expertise to product design. And lately, Gevi has been shaking up a lot of assumptions about what goes in a drip coffee maker and what doesn’t. This 10-cup batch brewer, usually on sale around $160, comes with a host of customizable brew settings, a timed-brew delay, and a conical-burr grinder to brew fresh coffee beans—a style of grinder you’d rarely find much below $100 all by itself. The resulting coffee is not at the level of my top picks: The grinder tends to grind too much coffee, and brew times are quite long, a combination that has led to some bitterness unless you adjust your grind to fairly coarse settings. But this Gevi does make brewing drip coffee from fresh coffee beans encouragingly easy and affordable for non-coffee-geeks. If you want a budget coffee maker for pre-ground coffee, though? You should probably get our budget pick five-cup Zojirushi or the 12-cup Ninja instead.
Aarke Coffee Maker With Thermal Carafe for $480: This shiny, SCA-certified Swedish-made system (6/10, WIRED Recommends) is beautiful, in the Swedish modernist sense: It looks like a Turkish tea service has been redesigned into a brand new gasworks. It makes quite lovely coffee. And in a novel twist, the coffee brewer can be paired with the matching flat-burr grinder so the grinder theoretically churns the exact right amount of ground coffee. Alas, this grinder pairing wasn’t quite perfectly calibrated, requiring much tweaking. And though I didn’t have this problem, users online have reported that the grinder jams up very easily—a troubling worry on such an expensive device. I remain nonetheless affectionate.
Other Brewers Tested
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Oxo Brew 8-Cup Coffee Maker With Glass Carafe for $180: I leapt at the chance to try an updated version of Oxo’s modern-classic 8-cup coffee maker, now available with a glass carafe and a warmer. When first reviewed in 2020, the Oxo Brew 8-Cup received a rare 9/10 score from WIRED reviewer Joe Ray for its elegant simplicity, its “rainmaker” showerhead meant to mimic the agitation of a pour-over, and a SCA Golden Cup certification attesting that the machine was able to stay within tight temperature and time parameters. Six years later, the coffee flavor and extraction is still amid the upper echelon of drip coffee brewers, at a sub-$200 price that’s a bargain in its class. It no longer being a top pick is simply a sign of how far other drip coffee makers have come—including the newer 9-cup and 12-cup machines from Oxo. In particular, I wish Oxo had since updated the 8-Cup’s showerhead design to be more in line with its newer machines. The six-hole showerhead erodes pits into the brew bed and causes channeling. This adds up to less even extraction than the newer Oxo machines. It’s not that I don’t like the 8-cup, it’s just that I think you should probably get the 9-cup or 12-cup instead.
Mr. Coffee Perfect Brew for $169: This SCA-certified Mr. Coffee brewer amounts to a giant leap forward for the drip-coffee pioneer. It does indeed make an aromatic and flavorful, if somewhat thin-bodied brew. That said, the controls interface is maddening, and the device tries to do too many things without succeeding at all of them: The cold-brew function, in particular, is just a recipe for lukewarm, watered-down coffee. The tea basket is a pleasant addition, however.
Melitta Vision Luxe 12-Cup for $227: This quite large and fetching machine was designed under the Melitta brand by Hong Kong design firm Wabilogic. It’s full of interesting touches like a water reservoir that lights up red when it heats, and a control panel that can swivel for convenience. Alas, I never found a way to get the even extraction I was looking for, and much coffee came out somehow thin but bitter. Worse, the immovable water reservoir stayed constantly humid after brewing—a recipe for either constant cleaning or something worse.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Gevi 10-Cup Grind-and-Brew for $150: This is a slightly lower-cost version of Gevi’s other, more digital 10-cup grind-and-brew device. Both include a built-in conical-burr grinder at a relatively low cost, and making fresh-ground coffee was easy and affordable for many drip coffee lovers. Both also brew similarly, a bit slow and strong, requiring coarser grinds. But at $20 or so more, I recommend Gevi’s touchscreen device instead for two reasons: a removable water tank, and a removable top granting access to the grinder to clear beans or jams or change out the burr. The touchscreen device has both. This one has neither.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Cuisinart Grind and Brew for $250: Cuisinart’s new entrant in single-serve, grind-and-brew coffee machines is a bit of a neither-here-nor-there machine that shows why it’s so hard to find integrated grinder-brewers. The grinder means it’s priced close to the top picks among stand-alone drip brewers that offer delicate and nuanced takes on even pre-ground coffee. But the Cuisinart’s integrated grinder has only one setting—which means the only way to adjust flavor is by adjusting brew strength. This makes it not great for the light or lighter-medium roasts favored by third-wave coffee lovers, the very people who tend to be sticklers about having their coffee ground fresh before brewing. The grinder adds a bit of versatility for those who favor medium-dark roasts, and the conical burr grinder is a step up from a blade grinder. But this machine remains a bit of an odd duck.
De’Longhi TrueBrew for $700: Like a lot of De’Longhi espresso machines, this TrueBrew (4/10, WIRED Recommends) is a superautomated machine with a bean reservoir up top. This one makes something akin to drip, grinding and brewing coffee ranging from a dense, 3-ounce-cup “espresso” to a classic mug. But the “espresso” was weak, and the drip coffee was sad, according to contributor Joe Ray. Plus, the machine was just kind of messy and expensive.
GE Café Specialty Drip Coffee Maker for $299: GE is a big name but a less common one in the world of high-quality coffee. This SCA-certified Café Specialty Drip Coffee Maker (4/10, WIRED Recommends) seemed initially promising, according to contributor Joe Ray, but turned out to extract coffee unevenly and led to flat, coppery flavors—a fatal flaw in a premium-priced machine.
Balmuda The Brew for $699: Balmuda is a brand known for lovable design, and this coffee maker (5/10, WIRED Recommends) is no exception: petite and handsome, with a habit of steam-blasting the coffee carafe in advance of brewing and ticking like a clock as the coffee dribbles down. But it brewed weird, wrote contributor Joe Ray, making concentrate at low temperatures then diluting it with extra water. Maybe it’s cute, but the coffee doesn’t taste good unless you do some serious gymnastics. It also costs a steep $700.
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Today’s Strands puzzle is a little tricky. Once you recognize the theme, you realize many words can fit as clues. Plus, some of the answers are long and could be difficult to unscramble. If you need hints and answers, read on.
Hint for today’s Strands puzzle
Today’s Strands theme is: Leave nothing out.
If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Don’t do anything halfway
Clue words to unlock in-game hints
Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints, but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:
- PELT, STEP, PETS, DILL, SALE, HOLE, COMP, TIRE, HERE
Answers for today’s Strands puzzle
These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight, but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:
- WHOLE, COMPLETE, ENTIRE, FULL, TOTAL, UNDIVIDED
Today’s Strands spangram
Today’s Strands spangram is ITSALLTHERE. To find it, start with the I that’s four letters down on the far-left vertical row, and wind over and back.
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Today’s NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle is a pretty tough one. That purple group lives up to its reputation as being almost impossible to solve. If you’re struggling with the puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.
Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups
Yellow group hint: NFL roles.
Green group hint: Get your racket.
Blue group hint: More than one point.
Purple group hint: Look at how they end.
Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups
Yellow group: Football positions.
Green group: Tennis shot descriptors.
Blue group: Worth two points/runs.
Purple group: Ends in a number.
What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?
The yellow words in today’s Connections
The theme is football positions.
The four answers are guard, linebacker, running back and tight end.
The green words in today’s Connections
The theme is tennis shot descriptors.
The four answers are backhand, drop, slice and smash.
The blue words in today’s Connections
The theme is worth two points/runs.
The four answers are 2-run HR, layup, safety and wrestling reversal.
The purple words in today’s Connections
The theme is ends in a number.
The four answers are Conine (nine), end zone (one), heavyweight (eight) and Witten (ten).
Rhino Entertainment has been busy digging down into its archives of the legendary Atlantic Records label, restoring many classic recordings to their audiophile best via its Rhino High Fidelity premium reissue series. Just out is a wonderful upgrade of Dusty Springfield’s iconic 1969 album, Dusty in Memphis.
Dusty in Memphis is widely regarded as one of the greatest recordings in pop music history. A stroke of production genius, the decision to bring the acclaimed British pop singer to Memphis for a recording session that blended her pop prowess with American Southern soul resulted in a timeless album that has since been inducted into both the GRAMMY Hall of Fame and the National Recording Registry.
Related Reviews:
Official materials from Rhino confirm that the new reissue was “cut from the original master tapes by Kevin Gray and pressed on 180-gram black vinyl at Optimal in Germany. These releases feature glossy gatefold packaging with ‘tip-on’ jackets and newly written liner notes. They are limited to 5,000 individually numbered copies and available today exclusively at Rhino.com and select Warner Music Group stores internationally.”
Dusty in Memphis is available from Rhino’s website for $39.98.
Surprisingly, Dusty in Memphis did not sell particularly well upon its initial release, stalling at No. 99 on the Billboard 200, despite containing Dusty’s spectacular version of “Son of a Preacher Man,” which was a Top 10 hit single in both the U.S. and U.K. at the time.
Those who did buy the Dusty in Memphis LP back in the day tended to love it, so it can be hard to find original editions in good condition. I know this because it has taken me ages to find one out in the “wilds” of collecting—garage sales, thrift shops, and flea markets!
For those who are not the crate-digging type, obtaining a nice copy on the collectors’ marketplace can be a challenge, at least for the wallet. For example, the five “Near Mint” copies listed on the online music marketplace Discogs at the time of this writing range in price from $45 to $175. So there is some real appeal to a high-quality reissue.
That said, after a reference listen to my 1969-era “Monarch” pressing—considered by many collectors and audiophiles to be among the best-made vinyl records of its day—I found the listening experience offered by the new Rhino High Fidelity edition to be far superior. It sounds more open and far less compressed, offering a wider soundstage, crisp highs, and fuller, more distinct lows.
Most importantly, it sounds the way Dusty in Memphis should sound, which is the bottom line for many fans. At times, it feels as though we are hearing more of that master recording for the first time.
Again, you can order Dusty in Memphis directly from Rhino for $39.98. It’s a limited run, so get one while you can.
Our Ratings
★★★★★★★★★★ Music
★★★★★★★★★★ Sound Quality
★★★★★★★★★★ Pressing Quality
Where to buy:
Mark Smotroff is a deep music enthusiast / collector who has also worked in entertainment oriented marketing communications for decades supporting the likes of DTS, Sega and many others. He reviews vinyl for Analog Planet and has written for Audiophile Review, Sound+Vision, Mix, EQ, etc. You can learn more about him a LinkedIn.
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With today’s emerging threats, traditional radar and electronic warfare (EW) systems that rely on static threat libraries face a critical vulnerability: mode-agile emitters operating in non-traditional modes that cannot be matched against predefined databases. A cognitive RF system addresses this challenge through artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, enabling autonomous perception, reasoning, and response to unknown threats in the RF spectrum. This white paper reviews the architecture of cognitive AI/ML radar and EW systems, including key functional blocks such as RF acquisition, AI-driven analysis and inferencing, waveform synthesis, and RF generation. It also examines the challenges of training these systems — from acquiring real-world and simulated signal datasets to performing hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and system-in-the-loop (SIL) testing — and describes how closed-loop testbeds can iteratively develop, validate, and improve the AI/ML algorithms needed to counter unknown threats.
Apple released new updates for macOS Sequoia and macOS Sonoma, extending security and maintenance support to Macs that haven’t moved to macOS Tahoe.
The updates are available through Software Update on supported Macs. Apple hasn’t identified any major new consumer features, which points to releases focused on security, stability, performance, and compatibility.
Users can install the updates by opening System Settings, selecting General, and choosing Software Update. A Mac will only offer the update that applies to its currently installed operating system.
The new releases give Mac owners another reason to stay current even when they aren’t ready or able to install macOS Tahoe. Some Macs can’t run Tahoe, while businesses and other users may remain on an older version because of software, hardware, or management requirements.
Apple has historically maintained the current version of macOS alongside two earlier releases. The company doesn’t promise a fixed support period, however, and older versions generally receive security and compatibility fixes rather than new features.
Updates for macOS Sequoia and macOS Sonoma keep older Macs secure and compatible while Apple puts most new features into macOS Tahoe and macOS 27 Golden Gate.
Apple introduced macOS 27 at WWDC on June 8 and released the first developer beta later that day. The company followed with the first public beta on July 13.
Security details may follow
Apple hasn’t posted complete security documents for the new Sequoia and Sonoma updates. The company often publishes or expands those documents after an operating system update becomes available.
The previous updates, macOS Sequoia 15.7.7 and macOS Sonoma 14.8.7, arrived on May 11 with security fixes for both operating systems. Apple also released Safari 26.5.2 on June 29 for Sequoia and Sonoma.
Safari 26.5.2 fixed WebKit and web extension vulnerabilities that could expose sensitive information, move data across website boundaries, escape web-content restrictions, or crash Safari and related processes.
The separate Safari update showed why older macOS versions still need active maintenance. A Mac doesn’t have to run Apple’s newest operating system to face the same browser and WebKit threats.
Most users running macOS Sequoia or macOS Sonoma should install the applicable update. People who depend on specialized software, drivers, security tools, or managed enterprise systems may want to confirm compatibility before updating.
YouTube Premium will include Peacock Premium at no extra charge beginning in early 2027. “The deal brings a slew of premium content to the [$15.99 per month] YouTube Premium subscription, including live sports like the NFL, NBA and MLB and entertainment like Law & Order, Saturday Night Live and Love Island,” reports The Hollywood Reporter. “It also has the potential to dramatically scale Peacock, which remains smaller than many of its streaming competitors.” From the report: Peacock has 48 million subscribers, while YouTube Premium and YouTube Music have a combined 125 million subscribers, though they don’t break out how many each of those offerings have. The agreement, which expands on the deal the company inked with YouTube parent company Google last year, will also extend the entertainment company’s programming deal with YouTube TV, while bringing some of YouTube’s offerings to Comcast Xfinity and Xumo platforms.
There’s also a notable sports and production element to the deal, with NBC Sports agreeing to stream some live sporting events on its YouTube channels, and with NBC agreeing to serve as the production partner for select live events on YouTube. YouTube will also bundle some of the company’s International streaming offerings like Universal+ and Hayu in select markets.
Hackers are actively exploiting a vulnerability in the FastJson open-source Java library, allowing remote code execution without user interaction or elevated privileges.
The security issue affects FastJson versions 1.2.68 through 1.2.83 and is leveraged in attacks targeting various organizations in the U.S.
The malicious activity was observed last week by the agentic security company ThreatBook, and researchers at the business protection company Imperva confirmed that it was “targeting a wide range of organizations, across Financial Services, Healthcare, Computing, Retail, Business, and other industries.”
“Attacks are currently almost entirely targeting US-based organizations, with a few attacks in Singapore and Canada, although this will likely continue to expand globally,” Imperva says.
Source: Imperva
FastJson is an open-source Java library developed by Alibaba, used for serializing Java objects to JSON, and vice versa.
The project has 25,600 stars and 6,400 forks on GitHub, and is especially prevalent in Chinese enterprise software and projects built on Alibaba’s platform.
CVE-2026-16723 was discovered by FearsOff, an offensive security company, which published a technical write-up earlier this month.
The researchers explain that the flaw stems from the library’s type-resolution logic, which performs attacker-controlled resource lookups before enforcing AutoType restrictions. This creates a path for executing code remotely in Spring Boot fat-JAR deployments.
By abusing @type processing, the researchers were able to load and execute malicious classes without AutoType enabled or requiring third-party gadget chains.
No fix available
In its security bulletin, Alibaba confirmed the critical severity of the vulnerability and warned that it is exploitable on “the most common Spring Boot deployment model.”
“The only deployment prerequisite is that the target runs as a Spring Boot executable fat-jar (i.e., launched via java -jar xxx.jar),” reads Alibaba’s security advisory.
The vendor notes that specifying a target class during deserialization does not mitigate CVE-2026-16723, as attackers can embed malicious payloads within ‘Object’ or ‘Map’ fields.
The vulnerable type-resolution logic is not present in fastjson2, which uses an allowlist-first model for polymorphic deserialization and doesn’t rely on the @JSONType annotation as a trust signal.
Also, FastJson versions 1.2.60 and earlier, and any non-fat-JAR deployments, aren’t affected either.
Developers using a version within the affected spectrum are urged to immediately enable SafeMode or switch to a non-impacted build.
Currently, there’s no fix issued for CVE-2026-16723. Imperva has also noted that FastJson 1.x is no longer actively maintained, so it’s unlikely it will receive a security update.
Firefighters in France are confronting a phenomenon never seen in the region before: fire clouds. It’s a sign of the intensity of the blazes burning—and how climate change is upping the odds that they appear.
A wave of fires has swept over France and Spain, sending hundreds of thousands fleeing. Firefighters on the frontlines are facing what a spokesperson for the French firefighter association told AFP called an “operational impossibility”—in other words, a “natural force beyond our control.”
As evidence of how out of control the wildfires in France are, look no further than the skies where the blazes have, in some cases, created their own weather. To form a fire cloud—what meteorologists call a pyrocumulonimbus or the even more metal-sounding cumulonimbus flammagenitus—you first need heat, which fires have in spades.
But just as important are dry conditions near the ground and cool, relatively moist conditions aloft in the atmosphere. As superheated smoke rises miles above the flames and into the cool atmosphere, water vapor condenses around the particles of ash to form water droplets. (Yes water vapor and water droplets are two different things.) As the air keeps rising, those water droplets eventually become ice crystals.
At this point, the smoke and water droplets have created a cloud, but unfortunately one that’s unlikely to provide much relief in the form of rain. Instead, these towering fire clouds can unleash lightning strikes that can start more fires and generate powerful downdrafts that reach the ground to fan flames further. At their worst, pyrocumulonimbus clouds can even spawn tornadoes.
Pyrocumulonimbus clouds have been documented in the US, Canada, and Australia, among a handful of other locations. But until now, there were no documented fire clouds in France. While the country is no stranger to wildfires, the size and ferocity of this summer’s blazes is well outside the normal.
Last week was France’s single most destructive week for wildfires over the past 20 years, according to data from the European Forest Fire Information System. It more than doubled the previous record during that period, which coincides with accurate satellite data. This isn’t an isolated bad week either. More than 220,000 acres have burned across the country so far, six times the annual average. That’s 61,000 acres higher than the previous yearly record.
If that sounds like a familiar trend, well, it unfortunately is. Burning fossil fuels has heated the planet up, making explosive wildfires more common and destructive around the world. A 2024 study found the incidence of extreme fires globally more than doubled from 2003 to 2023. Six of the seven most extreme years have happened since 2016.
After a slight weekend reprieve as temperatures dipped, they’re expected to rocket back up above 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) in France and 108 degrees Fahrenheit in Spain later this week. That means firefighters will have to contend with more extreme fire weather—including the possibility of clouds created by the blazes themselves.
After getting his hands on a rope driver module from the Apollo project era that had a big ‘Scrapped Module’ stamped on it, [Mike Stewart] was naturally left curious as to what exactly had failed in this module. Originally destined for the Apollo Guidance Computer, these Raytheon-manufactured modules were the pinnacle of space-grade high-tech of the 1960s, with requisite acceptance testing so as to not endanger a very expensive space mission.
The cool part here is that the acceptance documents for the module in question (B16-B17) have been scanned in and can be found on the Internet Archive. With the part itself being potted and very much inaccessible, this document helpfully lays out the expected measurements on the module’s pins, as well as schematics and mechanical drawings. Unfortunately the reasons for the rejection were not recorded, so replicating the failing test results is required to understand the reason.
A slight complication here is that the testing procedure doesn’t just involve hooking up a multimeter for some voltage and capacitance measurements. There are also temperature and voltage extremes, and vibration tolerance involved, which would be somewhat complex to test, but most of all risk damaging a historical artefact. Thus a somewhat conservative testing procedure was chosen, even if this may not reveal the actual fault.
As noted in the video, sometimes modules were also rejected because someone simply dropped it on the floor along the way. However, generally if a module was found to be faulty they would open it to diagnose said fault, with a closer look at this module indeed revealing suspicious marks in the potting compound where it was apparently opened and conceivably repaired. This also might explain why they also put the ‘For engineering use only’ on it.
With multiple of such locations visible in the potting compound, these locations were mapped to the schematics for the module, to get some idea of what may have been accessed. After this, basic testing was performed on the module, as per the acceptance testing document.
Along the way an error was detected in said document, in the form of the wrong pin number. In table 4-2 the input pin 269 was mistakenly listed as having output pin number 169 when it should have been pin 168. Pin 169 is chassis ground, so this was presumably fixed in a later version of the document.
After all the testing with just stationary, room-temperature conditions, everything appeared to check out. This means that likely this was indeed a repaired module that got subsequently used for engineering purposes rather than installed in flight-ready hardware. The only issue found was that channels were out of calibration, but whether this was an original flaw or due to the module being half a century old is hard to tell in the absence of repair logs.
Overall it’s an exciting opportunity to document another part of history, since so many of the details pertaining to these original modules and related technologies got lost or muddled over the decades.
There’s a hybrid vehicle recently named as the one with the highest annual mileage, according to iSeeCars data. The study reflects that conventional hybrids, which don’t need to be plugged in to recharge, are driven 10.3% more miles than pure gas vehicles. Analysts at iSeeCars found that the average conventional hybrid travels a total of 14,696 miles per year, the highest average annual mileage recorded in any category. In contrast, the other primary hybrid category, plug-in electric vehicles (PHEVs), is driven 12.5% fewer average miles than full battery electric vehicles (BEVs).
The conventional hybrid that travels the highest annual mileage within the category is the Toyota Sienna hybrid minivan. This iSeeCars study stated that the average Toyota Sienna traveled 17,368 miles each year. JD Power named the Sienna the most reliable minivan you can buy in 2025. The other conventional hybrids that finished in the top three places included Toyota’s Highlander hybrid (16,795 miles) in second and Toyota’s Camry hybrid (16,605 miles) in third.
For the methodology of this study, iSeeCars analyzed odometer readings of more than 2.1 million three-year-old cars sold in 2025. These vehicles were broken down by the type of drivetrain and number of miles driven annually, with low-sales models eliminated.
What you should know about the Toyota Sienna hybrid minivan
The Toyota Sienna hybrid minivan is powered by a 2.5-liter four-cylinder engine boosted by two electric motors for a combined 245 horsepower, channeled through an electronically controlled continuously variable transmission eCVT. It should be noted that the Sienna has been hybrid-only since it received its last redesign in 2021. Front-wheel drive is standard, but all-wheel drive is optional, courtesy of a third electric motor on the rear axle that does not add anything to the 245-horsepower rating. We also discovered that the Sienna is one of the many Toyotas that are great for seniors in more ways than one.
A 2026 Sienna with all-wheel drive can go from 0-60 mph in 7.5 seconds, based on testing by Car and Driver. It has adequate cargo-hauling capability, with 34 cu. ft. of storage behind the third row and 75 cu. ft. with the third row folded. Unfortunately, the latest generation Sienna’s (2021-2026) second row cannot be removed, unlike other rivals such as the Chrysler Pacifica and Honda Odyssey. For those who need to haul lots of stuff, this could be a deal-breaker. Even so, evaluating five of the Sienna’s coolest features might sway you toward a purchase.
The Sienna’s best EPA-estimated fuel economy goes to the front-wheel drive version, which gets 36 combined mpg. The all-wheel drive version gives up one mpg in the city, but maintains 36 mpg on the highway. Sienna pricing starts at $42,415 (base LE trim), including delivery. Standard equipment includes remote keyless entry, three-zone climate control, wireless charging, eight-speaker audio, LED headlights, and dual power sliding side doors.
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