Tech
AI learns nature’s code: Allen Institute, UW and Fred Hutch launch $95M open science initiative
Three of Seattle’s top scientific institutions are launching a nearly $95 million research initiative that will generate data and train AI models to design proteins and genes that don’t exist in nature — sharing the results freely to help others develop new medicines and materials.
The initiative, called AI BioDesign, brings together the Allen Institute, the University of Washington and Fred Hutch Cancer Center, with funding from the Fund for Science and Technology (FFST), created by the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
AI BioDesign is led by David Baker, the UW biochemist who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for using computers to design new proteins, and Jay Shendure, a leading genome scientist at the UW and the Allen Institute.
The plan is to “hijack a lot of the machinery that evolution provided us” — the cellular assembly line that turns DNA into proteins — to design and measure millions of novel biological molecules, Shendure said in an interview in advance of the announcement.
That will help AI models learn the rules of biological design from a huge set of examples, instead of inferring them from the relatively limited number that nature has produced.
The field, Shendure said, is “putting too much emphasis on taking the cranks that we have and just running with them, as opposed to building the right cranks.”
The goal is to make designing biology more like ordering a part: a molecule that latches onto a cancer cell, for example, or a genetic switch that fires only inside brain cells and nowhere else.
Potential outcomes could include everything from new therapies for disease, to proteins that dissolve plastic in the environment, to cells that travel through the body in a programmed way, said Sanjay Srivatsan, a Fred Hutch assistant professor who leads the cancer center’s work on the initiative, in a video released with the announcement.
“For the first time, the speed of AI is beginning to match the experimental power of synthetic biology,” Baker said in a statement. “That changes the question from ‘what has nature already made?’ to ‘what else is possible, and how can we test it?’”
Where the money goes
The Fund for Science and Technology is providing $94.6 million for AI BioDesign over five years. The foundation launched publicly last year with a mandate to direct a large share of Allen’s fortune into bioscience, environmental and AI research.
The funding from FFST is allocated as $46.1 million to the Allen Institute, $43.8 million to the UW and $4.7 million to Fred Hutch, according to an Allen Institute spokesperson.
The initiative had 62 people as of mid-August, including some new hires and others redirected from existing projects at the three institutions. The UW accounts for 41 of them, the Allen Institute 13, and Fred Hutch eight. AI BioDesign is expected to continue growing over time.
“AI BioDesign is exactly the kind of ambitious, collaborative science FFST was created to support,” said Marc Malandro, the foundation’s chief programs officer and co-lead, in a statement. He joined FFST in May after nearly a decade at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, most recently as chief operating officer of CZI and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network.
Malandro and Chief Financial and Operations Officer Liz Carey have been leading FFST on an interim basis since founding CEO Lynda Stuart stepped down in May.
Inside the lab
On a recent tour of the AI BioDesign lab, research associate Jack Boylan pulled up results from a run he’d done on their new DNA sequencer that morning — on free kits donated by a neighboring biotech company, a year past their expiration date.
“We decided, let’s give it a roll,” he said. It worked fine.
The sequencer is what makes the whole approach possible. It reads all of the millions of DNA sequences in a single tube at once and reports which ones performed. One recent experiment ran 6 million distinct sequences through it at once.
“The scale comes not from robotics, but from parallelizing inside the test tube,” said Jesse Gray, executive director of strategy and platform for AI BioDesign and the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, and a former Harvard Medical School geneticist.
The lab, at Dexter Yard in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, a short walk from the Allen Institute’s headquarters, is organized into teams of five or six people, each working on a different design problem.
A separate four-person team of machine-learning specialists takes the incoming results and works with the bench teams to decide which experiments come next — the ones that will teach the models the most. Each round is judged on how much the models improved.
The Allen Institute calls projects like this “accelerators,” a term Rui Costa, the institute’s president and CEO, traced back to Paul Allen himself. The word came up in early planning sessions, Costa said. Allen wanted to “exponentially accelerate the field.”
Other accelerators at Dexter Yard include the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, the Allen Institute’s collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the UW, which Shendure also leads; and Cell Science, which works on engineering cells to assemble themselves into tissues.
The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), the separate Seattle research organization also founded by Paul Allen, is involved informally rather than as a funded partner, Costa said.
Its robotics team has been talking with AI BioDesign about scaling up the protein work, and the two expect to collaborate on models and on tools that generate research hypotheses.
Why give it away
The decision to focus on open science also came from Allen, Costa said in an interview this week. “He was so visionary in the early 2000s: radically open science to exponentially impact and change fields, not to compete.”
That raises a question the initiative will face as soon as it produces anything valuable: what happens if a company builds a lucrative drug on data given away free? In traditional science, Costa said, being beaten to a discovery counts as a loss. Here it’s the goal.
“We would be so lucky if many companies would be taking this data and changing the world for good,” he said.
At the same time, Costa left open the possibility of the three principal institutions spinning out their own startups, nonprofits, or other initiatives from the work done by AI BioDesign.
Betting against the field
AI BioDesign’s approach runs against much of the current thinking in the field. Costa said most efforts to apply AI to biology are chasing a single general model that could answer questions about how any cell works. AI BioDesign is betting on the opposite: narrow models built for specific design problems, trained on data generated for that purpose.
“This project is a clear bet on a different way of doing things,” Costa said.
The people running the initiative are careful not to oversell. Gray said it remains an open question as to whether their approach beats the alternatives. “The jury’s still out,” he said.
Shendure put it plainly: “It’s never as easy as you think it’s going to be,” he said.
Costa said AI BioDesign needs to show real progress within 18 to 24 months — ideally even sooner — and expand to researchers around the world within five years.
TikTok’s comments section is getting an upgrade. The social network announced on Thursday that it’s rolling out new features for its comment sections, including voice comments, comment polls, photo carousel comments, and Live Photo comments.
With the additions, the app is borrowing features from messaging apps as it looks to deepen engagement on its platform. By bundling voice, polls, and photo comments, the company aims to make comment sections places where people linger and interact with each other, rather than simply leave feedback underneath a video.
“Sound and music have shaped TikTok from the very beginning, turning songs into trends and audio clips into jokes shared across the app,” TikTok wrote in a blog post. “Now, we’re bringing that same energy to the comment section with Voice Comments, a new way to post and listen to audio messages directly under any video.”
To leave a voice comment, users need to tap the microphone icon in the comment box and record a message up to a minute long. Once the voice comment is posted, anyone can tap to listen.
A TikTok spokesperson told TechCrunch that voice comments are subject to the same Community Guidelines as other content on the platform. The company uses a combination of human and automated detection tools, including speech-to-text transcription, to identify and remove content that violates its policies.
Voice comments are rolling out globally over the next month to users 18 and older.
Additionally, creators can now add a poll when commenting on their own videos, a feature that had been previously available to some, but is now available globally.
TikTok says the polls can be used for things like voting on the next video idea, picking an outfit, deciding what to cook, and more. Creators can choose up to five options for viewers to vote on and then set a timeframe for the poll. As votes come in, creators can follow results directly in the comment section.
With photo carousel comments, people can now add up to nine photos in a single comment, after previously only being able to add one at a time. Plus, users can now upload Live Photo comments, which TikTok says will allow for “a brief burst of motion” that allows others to see a quick preview of the moment before viewing the full image.
Live Photo comments are now available globally, while photo carousel comments are rolling out globally over the next month.
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A factory-unlocked phone has no carrier restriction built in. It works with any compatible network the moment you turn it on. Buying one safely comes down to two checks. First, does it support your carrier’s network bands? Second, if it’s used, is it free of any blacklist or unpaid-balance flag?
People use different terms for this loosely: factory unlocked, SIM-free, carrier unlocked. They mean almost the same thing. Factory unlocked means the phone left the manufacturer with no carrier lock at all. Carrier unlocked usually means a phone that started locked to one carrier and was unlocked through a carrier request or code later.
Either way, the result is the same for you as a buyer: no carrier restriction, so the phone works with any network that physically supports it. That’s why people choose this route. You can switch carriers to save money whenever a better deal shows up, without buying a new phone each time.
Quick Take
Two checks matter most. Before you buy, confirm the phone supports your carrier’s network bands. If you’re buying used, check its IMEI for a blacklist or unpaid-balance flag before you pay anyone. Beyond that, unlocked phones typically get software updates faster than carrier-branded phones, since updates don’t have to pass through carrier testing first. One current gotcha worth knowing upfront: some recent iPhone models sold in the US have no physical SIM tray at all, so “unlocked” doesn’t always mean “takes any SIM card.”
What to Check Before You Buy
Do this before you hand over money, not after.
- Know your budget model. Factory-unlocked phones are usually paid in full or through the manufacturer’s own financing, not a carrier subsidy. Expect to pay the phone’s real price upfront instead of a discounted price tied to a contract.
- Know which carrier and network type you’ll use. Your carrier’s network bands need to match the phone’s. A phone bought for use overseas, or an older import, may not have the bands your carrier uses in your area. Compatibility checkers often ask for your location along with your IMEI, since band coverage varies by area, not just by phone model.
- Check the SIM type. Some current phones use a physical SIM card, others use eSIM only, and some support both. Confirm which one the specific model and region use before you buy. A eSIM and physical SIM comparison is worth reading if you’re not sure which your carrier needs.
- Confirm the exact model and region match your carrier. The same phone name can ship in different regional versions with different bands or features. Check the model number, not just the marketing name.
- Find the IMEI before you buy, or right after. Dial *#06# on the phone, or check the box or listing, to get the IMEI. You’ll need it for both the compatibility check and, if buying used, the blacklist check below. A full IMEI lookup walkthrough covers this if the listing doesn’t show one.
New or Used: Which Path Applies to You
Once you’ve checked the basics above, your path depends on how you’re buying.
- Path A: buying new or factory-sealed.
Lower risk. The phone has no history to check, just compatibility. Go straight to checking bands and buying from a trusted source. - Path B: buying used or secondhand, even if the listing says “unlocked.”
Real savings, but real risk too. You need to verify the phone’s history before you pay, not just take the seller’s word for it.
If you’re not sure which applies, treat the purchase as used. It costs nothing extra to check, and it protects you if the seller is wrong or dishonest about the phone’s status.
Path A: Buying New From the Manufacturer or an Authorized Retailer
- Check compatibility before you buy, not after: Most carriers offer a free compatibility checker that uses the phone’s IMEI or model number. T-Mobile’s Bring Your Own Device checker is a good example of how these tools work: enter the IMEI, get a compatible, partially compatible, or incompatible result. Run the same kind of check with your own carrier before buying, since results are carrier-specific.
- Buy directly from the manufacturer or an authorized retailer: Apple, Samsung, and Google all sell phones factory unlocked directly through their own stores. Apple’s own store, for example, sells iPhones unlocked when you pay in full or use the manufacturer’s own financing, separate from any carrier deal. Buying this way skips the gray-market risk entirely.
- Confirm the SIM type and region match before checkout: Double-check the listing states the exact model number for your region, and confirm whether it uses a physical SIM, eSIM, or both.
- Complete the purchase and save your records: Keep the receipt and note the IMEI. If anything goes wrong with activation later, you’ll need both.
Buying new costs more upfront if you pay in full, but manufacturer financing still results in an unlocked phone. It’s carrier-subsidized financing specifically that comes with a lock, not financing in general. There’s no seller history to verify and no blacklist risk, since the phone has never been activated on any account.
Path B: Buying Used or Secondhand Unlocked
This is where real savings happen, and where most problems happen too.
- Get the IMEI from the seller before you pay. A legitimate seller will give you this without hesitation. If they won’t, walk away.
- Check the IMEI against an official blacklist database. GSMA Device Check is the industry’s own registry for devices reported lost or stolen. A clean result there is a real signal, not a guarantee, since not every case gets reported.
- Ask directly whether the phone is fully paid off. A carrier lock and a financing lock are different problems. As Swappa’s guide to unlocked phones explains, a phone bought on an installment plan that still has a balance owed can get blacklisted later, even if it looks unlocked and works fine today. This is a separate check from the blacklist lookup above, and sellers don’t always know to mention it unless you ask.
- Buy through a marketplace with buyer protection, or inspect in person. A platform that holds payment until you confirm the item, or refunds a bad IMEI, removes most of the risk. Buying from an unknown individual with no protection removes your recourse if something’s wrong.
- Test with a SIM before you finalize, if buying in person. Insert a SIM and confirm it connects before handing over cash.
Watch for the signs of a counterfeit or improperly refurbished phone too: a price far below every other listing for the same model, missing or mismatched IMEI stickers, or a seller who won’t answer specific questions about the phone’s history. None of these prove a problem by themselves, but more than one together is a real warning sign.
Verify It Actually Works
InfoOnce you have the phone, confirm it works with your carrier before you consider the purchase done.
Insert your SIM card, or add your carrier’s eSIM if the phone doesn’t have a SIM tray. Power the phone on and check for a signal. Open Settings and look for your carrier’s name under network or cellular settings, not a “no service” or “SIM not supported” message.
Make a test call and send a text, then try mobile data somewhere you know you’d normally have coverage. If everything connects normally, the phone is genuinely working on your network, not just technically unlocked. If you bought the phone used, a full factory reset before you sign into your own accounts clears out the previous owner’s data completely.
Troubleshooting
No signal after activation
This usually means a band mismatch, not a bad unlock. The phone may be a regional model built for a different country’s networks. Check the band compatibility for your specific model against your carrier’s requirements. A partial band match can also show up as weak signal or dropped calls in specific areas, rather than no service everywhere.
eSIM won’t activate
This is especially common on current US iPhone models, which ship without a physical SIM tray at all. Double-check you’re using your carrier’s current eSIM setup process, not an old QR code or a physical SIM meant for a different phone. If the phone came from a different country, its eSIM profile slot may be tied to a different carrier’s activation system entirely.
The IMEI comes back blacklisted after you bought it
Contact the seller or marketplace immediately and request a refund. If you bought through a marketplace with buyer protection, this is exactly the situation that protection exists for. Don’t attempt to resell a blacklisted phone to someone else. It won’t work for them either, and you’d be passing the problem along.
Signs you bought a counterfeit or bad refurbishment
Inconsistent build quality, a missing or non-matching IMEI between the box and the phone’s settings, or software that looks slightly different from the manufacturer’s real interface are all warning signs. If you’re within a return window, use it.
Where This Approach Has Limits
Buying unlocked doesn’t remove every risk or fit every situation.
An imported phone built for a different region’s networks may simply lack the bands your carrier needs, no matter how “unlocked” it is. No amount of unlocking adds a radio band that isn’t physically in the phone.
Older phones without eSIM support won’t work at all on a carrier or plan that requires eSIM activation. Check this before assuming any old unlocked phone will work with a newer prepaid or MVNO plan.
Marketplace purchases without a return window carry the most risk. If there’s no way to test the phone and get a refund if something’s wrong, you’re relying entirely on the seller’s honesty.
An employer-owned or company-issued phone isn’t yours to resell or reassign as “unlocked,” even if it technically has no carrier lock.
Key Takeaways
- Factory unlocked means no carrier restriction from the start, but it doesn’t guarantee the phone has the network bands your carrier needs.
- Check compatibility with your carrier’s own IMEI-based checker before you buy, not after.
- Buying used means checking two separate things: blacklist status through GSMA Device Check, and whether the phone is actually paid off.
- A financing lock is a bigger risk than a carrier lock. It can blacklist a phone that looks fine today.
- Some current phones, including recent US iPhones, have no physical SIM tray. Confirm SIM type before buying if that matters to you.
FAQs
Does it matter to me as a buyer whether a phone is factory unlocked or carrier unlocked?
Not for how it works day to day. Both let you use any compatible network. It matters more for which checks apply. A carrier-unlocked phone was activated on someone else’s account first, so it’s worth treating it like a used phone and running the checks in the used-phone section above, even if the seller says it’s brand new.
Are unlocked phones always more expensive than getting one through a carrier?
Not always, but the sticker price is usually higher since there’s no subsidy built in. A carrier deal can look cheaper upfront but often spreads the phone’s real cost across your monthly bill through a higher plan price or a device payment. Compare the total cost over the time you’d actually keep the phone, not just the price on day one.
Will an unlocked phone work if I travel internationally?
Often yes, if it has the right bands for the country you’re visiting, which is worth checking before you go. Being unlocked means you can add a local SIM or eSIM instead of paying for international roaming. It doesn’t automatically mean the phone supports every country’s networks, so check band compatibility for your destination the same way you’d check it for a US carrier.
Does buying unlocked mean I lose the manufacturer’s warranty?
No. Warranty coverage comes from the manufacturer and generally follows the device itself, not how you bought it or which carrier it’s connected to. Buying unlocked directly from the manufacturer is often the clearest way to confirm full warranty coverage, since there’s no reseller in between.
Will an unlocked phone work with Verizon or other carriers that used to require CDMA?
Most current phones and carriers have moved away from CDMA-only networks, so this matters less than it used to for recent phones. It’s still worth confirming through your carrier’s own compatibility checker rather than assuming, especially for an older or imported device.
Forum regulars who had sold and played the GP32 and GP2X decided those machines left too much on the table, so Craig Rothwell, Fatih Kilic, Michael Mrozek (known as EvilDragon), and Michael Weston started sketching a successor, called Pandora, that mixed a proper Linux desktop with real game controls. Dave Cancilier shaped the clamshell case and keymat.
Pre-orders opened on September 30, 2008, while the first units reached buyers on May 21, 2010 after years of missed dates, frozen bank accounts, LCD shortages, and a Texas board house that delivered oxidized, high-failure PCBs. Production later moved to Germany, RAM jumped from 256 MB to 512 MB on later batches, and the UK company eventually folded while the German one kept assembling units. Roughly 7,500 machines left the line before a Wi-Fi chip shortage ended the run.
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A clamshell measuring approximately 140mm x 83mm x 28mm and weighing slightly more than 320 grams, which is a relatively compact size, opens to reveal a 4.3 inch 800 by 480 resistive touchscreen that handles the sun well and with little smearing. The dual concave sticks are located above a D-pad that rolls smoothly, four face buttons, and shoulder triggers. The lowest half of the unit features a 43-key QWERTY and number row, making it ideal for typing without the need to couple anything. Two SD card slots accept large capacity cards, a full-size USB connector powers peripherals, an OTG port charges the device, and composite and S-Video outputs allow you to connect to a TV. Wi-Fi 802.11b/g and Bluetooth 2.0 handle the rest. A 4200 Mah battery pack will provide you with 10 hours of mixed use, including gaming, video, and surfing, and even longer if you put it into suspend mode.
Texas Instruments OMAP3530 silicon, subsequently DM3730 on these 1GHz variants, integrates a 600 Mhz cortex A8, a 430 Mhz C64x+ DSP, and a PowerVR SGX530 GPU into a single package. Official specifications stated the clock speeds at 600 Mhz and 110 Mhz, although several users were able to increase them slightly. Internally, it has 512 MB of NAND to work with. Ångström Linux with XFCE desktop provides a netbook-like experience, including a file manager, terminal, browser, and LibreOffice-style utilities. The package system, known as PND, allows you to easily put software onto SD cards. Some people took risks and installed alternative Linux distributions or even Android Gingerbread. SuperZaxxon firmware was released in 2012 and quickly became the preferred everyday driver for many people.
Emulation is where Pandora’s users got the most out of the hardware, and the community stepped in to help. SNES, Mega Drive (including the CD and 32X), NES, Neo Geo, Amiga (several UAE variations), C64, DOSBox, ScummVM, and even PS1 titles usually work well; PCSX-ReARMed provides some good frame rates on many disks. The N64 is a bit more hit-or-miss, with some games being completely playable and others being a little laggy. You also have some native ports, such as Quake III Arena, which runs rather nicely on the twin sticks, as well as a slew of homebrew and even some older PC games that have been recompiled to work on Pandora. The same machine can function as a low-power Linux desktop on a desk or as a pocket computer during a long train travel. The subsequent 1GHz machines, which included 512 MB of RAM and a better GPU, simply made everything run more smoothly.
Community boards, a huge wiki, and two software repositories kept the community busy building new PNDs until the hardware was no longer manufactured. In 2014, the Pandora schematics and case data were made available for noncommercial use. Not long after, a spiritual successor, the DragonBox Pyra, was released and is still available in the world. Even today, Pandora owners can be found at estate auctions, and the device still works, although most of the time, these units are viewed as finished items rather than experimental prototypes. When you throw in a real keyboard, analog sticks, a bright 800 by 480 screen, ten hours on the battery, and a completely unmodified Linux desktop on a device smaller than most netbooks in 2010, you’d think no major company would bother, but that’s exactly what a few people got.
[Source]
While a fresh wave of AI-generated wealth is pouring fuel on San Francisco’s housing market, Seattle’s real estate scene is getting left out in the cold, stuck in a slump driven by ongoing local tech layoffs, soaring costs, and persistent worker anxiety.
A new report published Wednesday by Seattle-based Redfin illustrates just how dramatically the housing markets in the West Coast’s top two tech hubs have split.
In July, San Francisco’s median home-sale price jumped 6% year-over-year to $1.6 million as home sales rose 8.5%, fueled by an 18.4% drop in active listings—the largest inventory contraction in the country.
By contrast, Seattle’s median sale price dropped 3.6% to $809,479 as home sales fell 9.1% and active listings surged 16.7%, the nation’s steepest inventory increase, leaving local sellers outnumbering buyers by 65%. Redfin detailed the drop in pending sales in the city in an earlier report.
San Francisco’s resurgence is fueled by a concentrated wave of AI wealth. Driven by big salaries, six-figure signing bonuses, and anticipation of massive IPOs for Bay Area giants OpenAI and Anthropic, affluent buyers are aggressively bidding up homes, frequently paying hundreds of thousands over asking price.
The frenzy mirrors findings from The New York Times, which reported in May that cash-flush AI startup employees and secondary stock sales are fueling hyper-concentrated bidding wars across the Bay Area.
In Seattle, the dynamic is reversed. While local tech giants pour billions into AI infrastructure, corporate belt-tightening and lingering layoff fears at companies like Amazon and Microsoft have squelched buyer confidence, leaving prospective buyers cautious, job mobility low, and listings piling up.
Ground-level real estate agents in the Seattle area are feeling that buyer hesitation firsthand.
“Layoffs in the tech world are dampening homebuying demand in the entire area,” said Sheryl Wingate, a Redfin Premier agent, noting that return-to-office policies are further squeezing demand in outlying suburbs as tech workers avoid long commutes amidst job uncertainty.
Seattle-area real estate isn’t just feeling the squeeze from the heavyweights. Job cuts have hit nearly every tier of the regional tech ecosystem this year, sweeping through engineering hubs for Meta, Google, and Salesforce, consumer brands like Zillow, T-Mobile, and Starbucks, corporate divisions at Expedia and TikTok, and startups including Qualtrics and Amperity.
The chill is hitting the region’s high-end neighborhoods hardest. According to Bloomberg, pending luxury home sales in the Seattle area plummeted 15%, driven by a double hit of tech-sector layoffs and Washington state’s higher taxes on top earners. Once-frenzied markets in Eastside suburbs like Bellevue and Sammamish have stalled, with homes priced over $2 million sitting for an average of 44 days as affluent tech buyers pull back.
By comparison, high-end buyers in San Francisco are doubling their budgets as AI confidence surges. Redfin noted that luxury pending sales in the Bay Area jumped 46% year-over-year, with local agents reporting tech clients doubling their price points — in some cases expanding from $2 million budgets to nearly $4 million — and placing offers as much as $900,000 over asking price.
The shift is also severing a key migration pipeline that long fueled Seattle’s housing boom. While high-earning Bay Area transplants historically moved north to stretch their tech compensation, Redfin migration data shows the net inflow of home shoppers moving from San Francisco to Seattle plummeted to just 369 people in the first quarter — down from over 5,100 five years ago.
Looking ahead, Redfin economists expect these diverging trends to play out across other tech hubs as artificial intelligence reshapes the labor market.
“AI is reorganizing the tech labor market, with San Francisco and Seattle representing two sides of that transition,” said Chen Zhao, Redfin’s head of economics research, adding that while AI creates rapid wealth in some markets, it drives corporate restructuring and caution in others.
Roborock, one of the flashiest home robot makers, is taking the plunge. The Beijing-based brand, known for its super-smart robot vacuums, including models with robotic grabbing arms and stair-climbing capabilities, has launched its first-ever robotic pool cleaner.
We saw it first at IFA Berlin.
On a crowded showroom floor, we got a look at Roborock’s small and colorful new pool cleaner. Dubbed the RockAqua P1, this autonomous underwater vacuum is engineered to clean pool floors, walls, waterlines and shallow platforms.
Its adaptive cleaning path, a feature prominent in Roborock’s indoor vacuums, allows the robot to navigate pools of different shapes and depths. Vision-based obstacle avoidance identifies obstacles such as drain covers and steps, helping reduce interruptions during cleaning.
8 Best Robot Pool Cleaners, All Tested by CNET
While obstacle avoidance is useful, the ability to track down debris in a pool using AI cognition, as our top-rated Aiper Scuba V3 does, is even more impressive. So far, it doesn’t look like Roborock’s entry into the pool-cleaner category offers a comparable debris-detection feature.
What the RockAqua P1 lacks in proactive leaf, bug, and stone hunting, it makes up for with a lot of suction power. The robot delivers a suction rate of 6,800 gallons per hour, placing it in the same class as some of the most powerful pool-cleaning robots from well-established brands. Still, our lab testing shows that raw power doesn’t necessarily translate to better cleaning.
One particularly interesting feature is the robot’s ability to adjust its suction depending on the situation. According to Roborock, when it encounters larger debris, the robot reduces suction to prevent the water flow from disturbing the debris and pushing it out of the cleaning path. As it gets closer, it increases suction to capture the debris.
Roborock’s first pool cleaner runs for up to 3.5 hours on a full charge, which is average for high-end models. When a cleaning cycle is complete, the robot rests on the water’s surface. That’s a useful touch, since some pool cleaners remain at the bottom and have to be hauled out manually. The surface-resting design should make the RockAqua P1 easier to retrieve for emptying and recharging.
As of now, the RockAqua P1 is set for release in the European market only, with a rollout to the US still in question.
Editor’s note: David Watsky’s travel costs for the IFA conference were covered by IFA. The judgments and opinions of CNET are our own
In 2012, T-Mobile was losing hundreds of thousands of customers a quarter. AT&T’s attempted acquisition of the Bellevue, Wash.-based wireless company had just collapsed. T-Mobile was the fourth-place carrier in a four-carrier market, with a network that was a punchline and no obvious plan for fixing any of it.
Mike Katz was one of the leaders responsible for figuring it out.
The result of their work was the “Un-carrier,” a series of moves starting in 2013 that upended one industry tradition after another, launched under CEO John Legere and continued by his successor, Mike Sievert.
T-Mobile today is worth nearly $195 billion and claims the country’s best network. The company is now led by Srini Gopalan, who became CEO in November 2025.
Katz, whose wireless career began selling VoiceStream phones at a Circuit City in Fort Collins, Colo., is leaving after 28 years. The company announced July 7 that Katz, then chief business and product officer, would pursue “new professional interests,” staying on as an advisor through December.
During his tenure at T-Mobile, Katz worked in sales and corporate strategy, ran the company’s prepaid business, led consumer marketing through the first Un-carrier moves, built the company’s business division, and served as chief marketing officer, before becoming chief business and product officer in December 2025.
In an interview with GeekWire, Katz reflected on his experience inside one of the most improbable and irreverent comebacks in American business.
Continue reading for the lessons we took from his story.
Use speed to your advantage against bigger competitors.
When the AT&T deal died, Katz was put on a small team assigned to assess the company’s position and come up with a plan. Their advantage, he said, was that T-Mobile was too small to compete on everyone else’s terms.
“We were so subscale relative to AT&T and Verizon at the start, and what we developed because of being subscale was agility,” Katz said. “We would do things, and AT&T and Verizon would take forever to respond, and by the time they responded, all their customers were gone.”
It started with Un-carrier 1.0. Under the standard model then, a customer could get a phone for well below cost if they signed up for a two-year plan. But the carrier recovered it through the monthly service rate, which never came down once the phone was paid off. Customers paid a penalty for leaving early.
T-Mobile separated the device from the service plan in March 2013, pricing service on its own and putting the phone on monthly installments that ended when the device was paid for.
Verizon didn’t stop signing new customers to two-year contracts until August 2015. AT&T held out until January 2016.
Getting copied was the point. Katz said one measure of success for every Un-carrier move was whether AT&T and Verizon would eventually imitate it, because by the time they did, T-Mobile had already gotten all the credit and attention.
Legere reveled in calling AT&T and Verizon “Dumb and Dumber” (it was never clear which was which in his eyes). He crashed AT&T’s party at CES in 2014 and was escorted out by security, generating multiple rounds of positive publicity for T-Mobile. He asked the public to vote on how to taunt his rivals next, with skywriting over their headquarters among the options.
They were clearly having fun. Asked whether T-Mobile ever worried it had gone too far in baiting its rivals, Katz said, “Not really.” The mission then, he said, was to change wireless for everyone and not just for T-Mobile’s own customers.
The mockery extended to the events themselves. Katz recalled preparing for an early Un-carrier launch in New York when Legere, around 10 p.m. the night before, decided he wanted to open by parodying AT&T’s “It’s Not Complicated” campaign, in which a man interviewed small children at a tiny table. That meant finding dolls. Katz said the team spent the night working out how to get into the American Girl store in Manhattan.
“It was wild,” Katz said. “There were so many things in those early events.”
The next morning the lights came up on Legere at a small table, talking to the dolls.
“Maybe we were the only ones that got it,” Katz said. “But it was funny to us.”
Look for the unexpected and find out why it’s happening.
Back in 2010, then-CEO Robert Dotson put Katz in charge of the company’s prepaid business. It was not a marquee assignment.
Prepaid customers of that era “didn’t really pick prepaid. Prepaid picked them,” Katz said. “They had no other choices. They had tough credit, or they socioeconomically were in a really tough place.”
T-Mobile was also losing ground. A price war broke out in January 2009, when Sprint’s Boost Mobile introduced a $50 unlimited plan and MetroPCS answered at $40. The recession was pushing customers toward prepaid, and the flat-rate carriers were taking market share.
Katz ran prepaid as a business of its own, operations and marketing together, and looked for a way to compete without matching the price. Those cheaper plans limited customers to 3G, so T-Mobile charged a bit more, gave them 4G, and called it Monthly 4G. (A deliberately clear and functional name, as he pointed out.)
It worked. Through 2010, 2011 and 2012, while the postpaid business was shedding customers, prepaid was the only part of T-Mobile that was growing.
The surprise: a lot of the new growth was coming from previously postpaid customers, people who had other options and were choosing prepaid anyway. Katz’s team asked them why.
“There’s no contract. I sign up for a $50 plan, and it actually costs $50 a month. It’s just simple and predictable,” Katz said, quoting customers. It might seem obvious now, he said, “but at the time it’s like, wow, that’s a pretty interesting insight.”
Expand what’s working to other parts of the company.
They found inspiration in that when they turned to what T-Mobile should do next. The idea was to give postpaid customers the same simplicity that was drawing them to prepaid.
They called it pain-free wireless. They mapped out six moves in advance, including the end of upgrade restrictions and international roaming fees. These were the origins of the Un-carrier.
They pitched it to Legere, and to Sievert, the chief marketing officer at the time. Both signed on. The launch was originally set for the end of 2013. Legere moved it to the beginning of the year.
“There is something about desperation that really helps create crisp decision-making,” Katz said. “You can keep trying to make a gameplan that’s been failing for years work, or take some swings and take on some risk. … Because what’s the downside? It can’t get much worse than it was.”
Make sure people know the ad was yours.
Storytelling is the thing companies and brands get wrong most often, Katz said, and he called it the biggest thing he learned from Sievert, whom he worked with for more than a decade. It’s especially important in the wireless industry, where customers are effectively buying a promise.
“At the end of the day, we sell invisible air. You don’t really see the product we sell,” Katz said. “There’s phones, but we don’t make the phones. Apple makes the phones. There’s towers that you can see, but the tower companies, those are their towers. We sell the invisible air in between.”
Katz divides the profession into two camps: the “award show CMOs,” motivated by collecting trophies at Cannes, and the ones who measure themselves by business impact. He puts himself in the second group.
One example: T-Mobile’s February 2025 Super Bowl spot, which launched the public beta of its Starlink partnership, offering satellite-to-cell texting in the parts of the country terrestrial networks don’t reach.
It was tempting to fill it with celebrities and gimmicks, he said. Instead the spot was built around a voiceover and a direct call to action: try it out for free during the beta, open to AT&T and Verizon customers too.
“If we wanted to build a Super Bowl commercial to win the best Super Bowl spot in Ad Age, we would have done something very different,” Katz said. “We would have done the celebrity-palooza.”
“Within 30 minutes of that Super Bowl spot running, we achieved all the goals that we had for the rest of the month in signups,” Katz said.
He contrasted that with Verizon’s 2024 Super Bowl ad starring Beyonce, which he said people recalled without necessarily remembering the advertiser.
Bad results don’t mean bad people.
One of the lessons Katz learned from Legere, in addition to taking risks and failing fast, came from how the incoming T-Mobile CEO treated the people who were already there when he arrived. Legere took over a company that was losing badly and kept the team in place.
“It would have been really easy for him to come in and assume, hey, company’s not doing well, we must have a bunch of bad people here, and change everybody out, and he didn’t do that,” Katz said. “Don’t assume simply because the results of the company are bad that the people are bad.”
Katz said that was in his head during the Sprint merger, where the same thing applied: a business in rough shape, staffed by people who weren’t the reason. T-Mobile’s leadership today is a mix of the two companies.
Perception can sometimes lag reality.
Katz said T-Mobile passed Verizon on network quality years before customers believed it. Verizon “had so much built up brand equity around being the best network,” he said, that four or five years later, people still named Verizon when asked who had the best network.
T-Mobile declared victory at an event in Bellevue in June 2025, citing an Ookla study built on half a billion crowdsourced data points. Verizon disputed the methodology, saying crowdsourcing can’t control for variables, and pointed instead to RootMetrics drive tests that it said still showed Verizon the most reliable.
T-Mobile then began running ads with Billy Bob Thornton declaring it the best network in the country. Earlier claims had carried qualifiers, like fastest 5G or most available 5G. This one didn’t. Katz said the gap in how customers rate the two networks is now down to a couple of points.
Staying on top is harder than the turnaround.
For all the attention the comeback gets, Katz said the more remarkable part has been what came after it.
“If you look at companies that have done big turnarounds, you don’t really see a lot that have had the kind of sustained success and continued growth for a decade and a half like T-Mobile has,” he said.
He gives much of the credit to the network. The Sprint merger gave T-Mobile a spectrum position it didn’t have before, and the company bet that 5G would play out in mid-band spectrum, which was seen as risky at the time. Protecting that advantage through later spectrum deals was one of the things he worked on.
Building the network was not.
“There’s a couple jobs that they never let me do, probably for very good reason,” Katz joked. “You actually need to know what you’re doing.”
A mature company also needs different things from its leadership than a struggling one does. Gopalan spent years on T-Mobile’s board before joining as COO and then taking over as CEO. Katz describes him as an operator who brings discipline to the details of a business that by now has years of success behind it.
Asked for his biggest mistake, Katz said he moved too slowly at times.
“There are big decisions, risky decisions, that I could have made a lot faster,” he said. “I wish I’d pushed harder to make some of those decisions.” Some of what became the early Un-carrier moves were ideas that had been floated years earlier, in corporate strategy.
Katz says he still believes the company’s best days are ahead.
As for what’s next for him? Stay tuned, he says.
A year ago, people were hand-wringing over the iPhone Air’s failings, but 12 months later, it’s clear its detractors dropped the ball on an iconic iPhone.
The word “iconic” is thrown around all too easily these days. But it’s still one that fits the iPhone Air.
In a sea of all-too-familiar iPhones, the Air easily stands out from the crowd. It’s every bit as distinctive as the iPhone 4 or iPhone 6, devices that ushered in new design languages for Apple.
It’s also a damned good iPhone, regardless of what you might have heard or read in September 2025. I’ve carried an iPhone Air for the last year, and if September 2026 brought an iPhone Air 2, I’d jump on it.
But that’s not to be, and it’ll soon be time to move on. I’ll miss this iPhone Air, and it isn’t very often I say that about a smartphone.
The iPhone Air naysayers will claim I’m lying. That “Big Apple” got to me. That I’m being paid to say it.
But in reality, all I did was use it. And if more people actually had, I think they’d have fallen for the iPhone Air every bit as much as I did.
To focus on its flaws is to miss what makes it such a wonderful iPhone to use.
iPhone Air: Design and size
Normally, the design and size portion of an iPhone review is pretty standard fare. They’re all much the same, give or take a fraction of an inch here and a sliver of an ounce there. But the iPhone Air does things differently.
iPhone Air one-year review: iPhone Air is the coolest iPhone in years
At 6.15 inches tall and 2.94 inches wide, it sits firmly between the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max in terms of dimensions. But things get more interesting when we look at thickness.
The iPhone Air comes in at 0.22 inches thick, compared to the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max’s 0.34 inches. The difference is even more stark in the hand.
The theme continues when the scales come out. The iPhone 17 Pro sits at 7.20 ounces, and the iPhone 17 Pro Max measures 8.15 ounces. The iPhone Air weighs just 5.82 ounces. Again, you really need to hold this thing to understand what those figures are trying to convey. The iPhone Air is worthy of its name.
Whereas Apple’s Pro models are made from aluminum, Apple went a different route with the Air. Titanium is the order of the day here, with four colors on offer: Space Black, Cloud White (the one I’ve been using,) Light Gold, and Sky Blue.
In reality, there’s a black one and three shades of white. Still, I prefer the pure, driven snow-like Cloud White to the other two.
Up front, there’s another key spec where the iPhone Air sits between Pro and Pro Max. Its 6.5-inch Super Retina XDR display is larger than the iPhone 17 Pro’s 6.3-inch display and smaller than the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s 6.9-inch offering.
I came to the iPhone Air as a fan of the Pro Max models. I liked the bigger displays, but I’ll admit, the iPhone Air doesn’t feel cramped. I’m not sure I’d want to go back to anything smaller still, though.
The iPhone Air maintains all of the features we’ve come to expect from Apple’s top-of-the-line models. Face ID, an always-on display with an adaptive 120Hz refresh rate, HDR and True Tone, they’re all present and correct. It even boasts the same 3,000-nit peak brightness when needed, too.
It goes without saying that the display is a stunner. All iPhone displays are, at this point. But its OLED panels just keep on finding new ways to look even better. The Air is no exception.
Other notable design features include the presence of the Action Button and Camera Control. I almost never use either, and I suspect I’m far from alone in that regard.
One design oddity that does bear calling out is the speaker situation. That is, there’s no speaker at the bottom of the iPhone Air. In turn, that means there’s no stereo output, which is a shame. But as I said in my three-month review, that’s what AirPods are for.
iPhone Air review: Cameras
One of the main knocks that people have against the iPhone Air is its single rear camera. There’s no triple-camera array here.
iPhone Air one-year review: The Camera Control is on the lower-right edge
Instead, you have one 48-megapixel Fusion camera with a digital zoom of up to 10x. It supports Deep Fusion, Smart HDR 5, Night mode, and all the other features Apple’s iPhone cameras can muster. It’s just that there’s only one of them.
The lack of a telephoto or ultrawide camera has put a lot of people off the iPhone Air over the last year, and I get it. I was worried about losing two cameras from my iPhone 15 Pro Max.
I took an iPhone Air on vacation shortly after its release to see how well that single camera would hold up. As it turns out, I didn’t use the telephoto or ultrawide anywhere near as often as I thought I did. That’s still the case all these months later.
Ultimately, I’ve found the iPhone Air’s camera to be excellent, whether taking high-resolution photos or 4K, 60fps videos. I’d be lying if I said there hadn’t been an occasion or two where one of the other cameras would have been handy. But it was so rare that I was never tempted to ditch the Air for something more camera-laden.
Apple’s Camera Control is a touch-sensitive button that can launch and then fire the camera. You can also use it to adjust camera settings inside the Camera app, too.
In truth, the only time I used Camera Control after the first few weeks was when I accidentally pressed it. In testing, it works as described, and I can imagine it being a popular option for photographers. It’s just not for me.
iPhone Air review: Performance
Despite its svelte dimensions, the iPhone Air still has Apple’s range-topping A19 Pro beating at its heart. But there’s a caveat: this isn’t the same A19 Pro as the one found in the iPhone 17 Pro.
iPhone Air one-year review: The A19 Pro doesn’t break a sweat playing Red Dead Redemption
While the iPhone 17 Pro has a six-core GPU, the iPhone Air has to make do with one less. Each of its five GPU cores still has its own Neural accelerator, and the Air has the same six CPU cores as the iPhone 17 Pro.
In use, none of that matters one jot. Sure, if you run the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro through your benchmarking tool of choice, it’ll spit out some different numbers.
But for the rest of us, the iPhone Air’s A19 Pro is every bit as capable as any other. I’ve played so-called console-quality games on the Air without issue, including Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption.
The fact of the matter is that there’s no such thing as a slow iPhone anymore. Even iPhones from three and four years past are still incredibly performant when opening apps and doing general iPhone things.
Performance is about more than just an iPhone’s chip, and the Air uses Apple’s C1X modem for fast 5G and Wi-Fi 7 connectivity. Both have proven up to the task.
I’ve even come to enjoy the benefits of the eSIM, the iPhone Air’s only option. The lack of a physical SIM card tray continues to be an issue for some, but I’ve enjoyed the ease with which I can add and remove lines.
In terms of wired connectivity, the iPhone Air’s USB-C port is rated for USB 2 speeds. That’s just 480Mb/s compared to the iPhone 17 Pro’s USB 3 speeds of 10Gb/s. I only plug my iPhone in to charge, so it’s a non-issue for me. But it might be a problem for some.
iPhone Air review: Power and battery
Charging the iPhone Air means choosing between the USB-C port and MagSafe. Also rated for Qi2, the MagSafe induction charging is capable of 20W, more than fast enough for overnight charges.
iPhone Air one-year review: iPhone Air has been great, its battery needs to be considered
Unfortunately, the iPhone Air is also rated for 20W of wired charging. That’s slower than the around 30W you can pump into an iPhone 17 Pro or Pro Max.
However, it’s important to remember that the iPhone Air also has a smaller battery than either of those devices. It can be charged to 50% capacity in around 30 minutes if you need a quick boost before leaving home.
Given the iPhone Air’s relatively small 3,149mAh battery capacity, it’s obvious this isn’t a two-day phone. Most will need to charge it every night, as did I.
But not once did I ever run out of juice without some method of charging. I work from home, so the iPhone Air spends time plugged in as a matter of course. And in the car, it charges while connected to CarPlay.
Yes, iPhone 17 Pro Max owners need never think about their battery, because it’s huge. It can run for a couple of days without getting close to zero percent. But the iPhone Air is different.
I’ve never babied it, as such. But it’s important to remember what you’re dealing with. The iPhone Air is built to be thin and light, and that means being aware of your battery level before heading out. Or carrying a MagSafe Battery Pack.
iPhone Air review: Still the coolest iPhone, for now
I’ll admit that, in August 2025, I was ready for a change. Years of iterative iPhone releases were taking their toll, and I was ready to be wowed.
iPhone Air one-year review: The iPhone Air has a single rear-facing camera
September’s iPhone Air offered the wow-factor in spades. It looked every bit the futuristic smartphone, all thin and shiny. I had to try one out.
So I did, but I didn’t expect it to stick. I thought the Air would grow old, and that I’d eventually pick up an iPhone 17 Pro Max.
I’d been told that the battery was too small, and that a single camera in 2025 was enough to demand firings at Apple Park. The iPhone Air was all form over function, they said.
And they were right. The iPhone Air is flawed, but that’s far from unique. A two-seater sports car can’t carry a family of five, and a family SUV won’t win any awards for handling.
Life is about compromises. You can have all of the battery life and cameras in an iPhone 17 Pro Max, but it’ll pull your shorts down as soon as you stand up. That’s a compromise.
But for all its compromises, the iPhone Air has offered something no other iPhone could over the last 12 months. It’s been fun, and interesting, and cool. And I’ve enjoyed every minute with it.
Now, it’s 2026 and a new cool iPhone is on the horizon. And you know what? I’m sure that the iPhone Ultra will be flawed, too.
And I can’t wait to get my hands on one.
iPhone Air review: Pros
- A fresh new design
- Incredibly thin and light
- Storage starts at 256GB
- Excellent 48-megapixel Fusion camera
iPhone Air review: Cons
- Middling battery life
- No stereo speaker setup
- One camera isn’t enough for some
Rating: 4 out of 5
The iPhone Air has been a joy to use over the last 12 months. It’s fast, it has plenty of storage, and the one camera that it does have has proven to be excellent.
It isn’t a perfect phone, and its flaws are well documented. But the positives outweigh the negatives, and the iPhone Air goes down as one of my favorite iPhones yet.
Where to buy the iPhone Air at a discount
The iPhone Air starts from $999 with 256GB of storage, but there are many incentives available from carriers to bring the cost down.
Gigabyte has announced a new game bundle for gamers buying select AMD Radeon graphics cards and gaming desktops. As part of the limited-time promotion, eligible purchases will include a free copy of Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Capcom’s upcoming action title powered by AMD’s latest graphics technologies. The offer is available on select Radeon RX 9070 XT, RX 9070, and RX 9070 GRE products between August 25 and September 26, 2026.
Eligible Radeon RX 9070 GPUs Get a Free Onimusha Copy
The bundle applies to participating Gigabyte graphics cards and gaming desktops equipped with AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 series GPUs. Customers who purchase an eligible product during the promotional period will receive a game coupon through AMD, which can be redeemed for Onimusha: Way of the Sword. The game is scheduled to launch on September 4, 2026, while coupon redemption will remain open until October 24, 2026.
Gigabyte wants to showcase the capabilities of AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture, including improved ray tracing and support for AMD HYPR-RX, a suite of performance-enhancing technologies aimed at delivering smoother gameplay and lower latency.
Alongside AMD’s latest GPU architecture, Gigabyte is highlighting its own thermal design. The supported graphics cards, including the Nvidia ones, feature the company’s WINDFORCE cooling system, paired with its patented Hawk Fan design. According to the brand, the Hawk Fan increases air pressure by up to 53.6% and airflow volume by 12.5% compared to conventional fan designs. This should help maintain stable temperatures during demanding gaming workloads while keeping noise levels under control.
The NBA dropped the hammer on Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer on Wednesday, suspending the former Microsoft CEO from all league and team activities for one year and fining the franchise $30 million following a year-long investigation into illegal salary-cap circumvention involving star forward Kawhi Leonard.
The sweeping sanctions mark one of the most severe punitive actions taken against an owner in modern sports history. Beyond Ballmer’s ban and the team fine, the Clippers were stripped of five consecutive first-round draft picks (2029 through 2033), several team executives were suspended, and Leonard was ordered to pay $700,000 in restitution. Leonard’s uncle and advisor, Dennis Robertson, was also banned from league activity for five years.
The league’s findings center on allegations that first surfaced in late 2025: that Ballmer and team management illegally funneled off-court income to Leonard to bypass the NBA’s strict salary cap limits.
Central to what the NBA identified as a salary-cap evasion scheme was Aspiration, a green-banking tech startup that filed for bankruptcy after its co-founder pleaded guilty to a $248 million fraud. Shortly after signing Leonard to a $176 million contract extension in 2021, Ballmer personally poured $50 million into Aspiration, while the team landed a $300 million sponsorship deal and Leonard secured a multimillion-dollar endorsement contract with the firm.
The NBA’s findings directly refute Ballmer’s aggressive defense. When allegations first surfaced last year, Ballmer strongly rejected the claims, labeling the idea that he used tech investments to pay Leonard under the table as “absurd” and framing the transaction as a standard startup investment gone wrong. However, league investigators concluded that Ballmer knowingly facilitated off-court financial opportunities to secure Leonard’s commitment.
The disciplinary action echoes the aggressive corporate posture that defined Ballmer’s era at Microsoft, where the company repeatedly pushed legal and regulatory boundaries to maintain market dominance. As Microsoft’s president and later CEO during its contentious antitrust battles with the U.S. Department of Justice and European regulators in the late 1990s and 2000s, Ballmer oversaw a corporate culture famous for playing hardball to secure competitive advantages.
The suspension marks a rare personal and organizational blow for Ballmer. He bought the Clippers in 2014 for a then-record $2 billion shortly after stepping down from Microsoft, leveraging his immense tech fortune — currently valued around $150 billion — to transform the franchise, including the opening of its state-of-the-art, tech-laden Intuit Dome.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver called the circumvention “flagrant” in a statement, emphasizing that the salary cap system serves as “the bedrock of competitive balance in the NBA.”
Following the ruling, Leonard — whose trade to Toronto had been paused during the probe — said that he accepts “full responsibility for lapses in judgment by people within my inner circle,” adding he is focused on “closing this chapter and moving forward with a clean slate.”
It’s been a chastening couple of years for Sonos after the self-inflicted blow of an app update that was meant to improve discovery and send the app into the future – only for it to send the app into disarray, an issue that it a lot of time for Sonos to retrieve the situation.
So after the soft reboot that was the launch of the Play earlier in 2026, Sonos is back and determined to show that it’s still the multi-room king with the arrival of its latest operating system in Sonos27, which goes full send on AI which Sonos believes will set a path for its future.
Sonos27 arrives at the same time as Sonos’ latest in its growing line of Ultra products, with the launch of the Sonos Ace Ultra and the Sonos Beam Ultra, the former offers tighter integration with the rest of the Sonos’ speakers and soundbars with the introduction of the Headphone Engine 2; while the latter aims to bring even more performance from the slim, compact soundbar form.
There’s plenty riding on these products, which arrive at an inflexion where AI is making its presence felt, but no-one seems altogether sure as to how to properly harness it – might Sonos have found a way to utilise AI for good?
AI now and forever more?
Artificial Intelligence is not everyone’s favourite subject of late. Despite it making waves in media cycles, you can’t mention AI without looking at both the good and bad it brings. AI may be making things more efficient and helping connectivity, but it’s also making things a great deal more expensive.
Sonos is looking at the positives, framing the Sonos27 OS as a major platform milestone that’ll bring improvements to all its products.
As I was told in a conversation with Sonos’ engineers and designers ahead of the launch, the “Sonos 27 is the operating system for your home… it’s the culmination of all the work that we’ve done over the 20 years”, and that this new platform wants to reshape what people view Sonos as, not just as a speaker company but what Sonos views itself as, “an audio operating system for the home”, with Sonos 27 being “a system that lets you create the sound experience in your home”.
There have been mumblings among users that Sonos’ current voice control is limited (and it is), but Sonos 27 Voice looks to change that, with Sonos investment in AI creating a custom LLM-trained-assistant that’s focused on audio and home context.
Using Sonos’ MCP (Model Context Protocol) and AI agents that’ll be able to plug into the system (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude etc), users can prompt the system to deliver more natural and more specific answers. The example given was if you wanted to start “some music for my dinner party”, you’d ask through Voice Control and will serve up some tunes to go with your food. You voice, at least in this context, becomes the remote through which you can operate and find what you want.
The Sonos Custom Agents will allow users to create their own agents, each “with its own model, persona and voice”, creating a personalised assistant that’s by your side. It’s a cool idea, though I wonder if it’ll be able to learn from you over time but if there’s a thing that AI doesn’t seem to be great at, it’s specificity.
The ‘fabric’ that ties everything together
Sonos Fabric is what ties the system together, creating a whole that you can continually add, an organism that works in sync rather than coming up against brick walls in the system you can’t get past.
Ahead of the original Ace headphones launching, there was the belief that these headphones would link directly to your Sonos system, and you could fling music from a speaker to the headphone.
That wasn’t the case, if anything that was hype not from Sonos but from those excited about the headphones finally being a thing. The disappointment set it with the realisation that this direct linking could only be done with the soundbar through the TV Audio Swap feature, which admittedly was very good, but not what people were hoping.
Fabric can change that, and the new Headphone Engine 2 in the Ace Ultra makes that an actual reality. You can pull in sound from another speaker into the headphones if, for instance, you want some private listening, and you can push the sound back to a speaker in your home with the touch of a button. The headphone swap is no longer restricted to the Ace range and the soundbars.
You will now be able to use Sonos’ portable speakers within a home cinema set-up, though both speakers have to be of the same model to act as rear gunners. You cannot, for example, have a Move 2 and a Play speaker as your surrounds – it needs to be either two Move 2 speakers, or two Move Plays.
It’s that simple, and hopefully seamless, approach to unifying a system that AI’s potential seems to be able to unlock. Ahead of the launch, I wrote about Sonos needing to focus on its identity and be more Sonos. It looks like AI is helping them to do just that.
But it has to be good
The scope of what Sonos is doing and the improvements they’re bringing to the platform are all well and good but there was confidence about the previous major overhaul to the app – and look how that turned out. This can’t be another false dawn.
But the signs coming out of Sonos appear to be right. Before, you could argue that Sonos became arrogant and through the chaos of the previous app update, got hit with the hubris stick.
It’s led to big changes – a new CEO – and a new direction, ditching some products that weren’t fit for release (the mystery TV streamer) and a fresh focus in its embrace of AI.
The Ace Ultra needs to be better than the original Ace, which were solid but not up the standard of Bose or Sony. The Beam Gen 2 has arguably been the best compact soundbar since it launched, but the five-star JBL Bar 300Mk2 has knocked it off its perch in our best lists, and given the price difference between the new soundbar (£699 / $699!), it’s not a guarantee that the Beam Ultra will hop back atop the throne that Sonos has sat on for so many years.
We’ll see if Sonos is truly back once the new products are in the wild, and we’ll also have a gander of what the future holds in this increasingly AI-powered world.
I’m 19, And Just INHERITED $100,000!!! #daveramsey #money #finace
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