Sonos is launching a new pair of headphones soon, if online reports are accurate. When I heard these reports, I imagined they might be a true wireless considering rumours for that form factor have back years, but it looks like Sonos will announce a new pair of over-ears.

So what should we expect from them?

I think ‘expectations’ is an aspect that might dominate the conversation surrounding the Ace Ultra. I think hype and expectations ultimately led to the original Ace not having the impact Sonos imagined.

Even though I see the headphones on people’s heads every so often (in fact, I saw someone wearing a black version on the way to work); I suspect Sonos imagined that everyone who had a Sonos system in their home would sign up for a pair of Ace headphones as an extension of their system in the same the outdoor speakers such as the Move, Roam and Play have tried to do. But it didn’t quite work, and expectations played a part in that.

So how should we view these upcoming headphones? Has Sonos learnt from its previous mistakes and what areas should they have looked at in terms of improvements?

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A new model or a replacement?

What we don’t know is what they’re called. The Ace Ultra designation appears to be just a rumour for now, and it appears we’ll find out in some official capacity in September.

A question I’d ask is whether the headphones are an expansion of Sonos’ headphones range, or a replacement for the Sonos Ace? You may ask whether there’s any difference, and I would say there is.

An expansion would position Sonos as looking to build its headphone line-up, introducing tiers in a similar way that Sony, Bose and JBL have headphones that appeal to different people at different prices. A replacement implies a do-over, that essentially we’re back to square and these headphones would be the answer to criticisms people had of the first one.

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I’m inclined to think it’s the latter.

I think Sonos wants one pair of headphones in a bid for simplicity, a one-suits-all proposition at a premium price in a similar manner as Apple has done with its AirPods Max headphones. Has it ordered a massive redesign of the headphones? I suspect not, because there’s plenty that worked about the Ace (comfort especially) but there were areas where Sonos fell short of the competition. I’m thinking these headphones will be an ‘enhanced’ version, a 2.0 that shores up the issues people had.

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But we’ll find out for sure in September.

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Improvements needed for audio and noise-cancelling

The audio and noise-cancelling aspects of the Ace were fine – but in both regards the Ace were solid rather than exceptional. You can’t be in the same conversation as the likes of Sony and Bose by just being solid.

And in the two years since the launch of the Ace, rivals have only gotten stronger. Sony’s WH-1000XM6 are arguably the leader in the market. Bose has improved, and so has Sennheiser with the Momentum 5 Wireless, which sound fantastic. No one is resting on their laurels.

Considering Sonos’ inexperience in the headphones market, it will have had to accrue knowledge at a much faster rate than others, but it released its first pair of headphones, it got feedback from it, and like any feedback loop, that funnels resources into making the next pair better.

Here’s hoping that the noise-cancelling, which was already strong, has improved further; but more than that the sound this time around needs to have more character to it. Sonos aimed for a neutral presentation, which I found enjoyable but it had its limits. It was as detailed as other pairs, nor was it as dynamic as other pairs. When you don’t sound as good, or cancel noise as well as other pairs who are less expensive, that’s never a good sign. People will only pay a premium for quality. Sonos can’t be ‘as good’, in some ways it needs to be better.

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They need to lean into Sonos’ strengths better

For years, Wi-Fi has been seen as some sort of holy grail for headphones; though despite the potential that offers, Bluetooth still dominates.

We’ve seen AKG deliver a pair of very good headphones that have a Wi-Fi dongle. This site has published reviews of Wi-Fi headphones in the HED Unity (average) and the Wi-Fi models from Hifiman (better). When the original Ace launched, we all thought it would have some Wi-Fi connectivity, which it did through the excellent TV Audio Swap, but it also didn’t feel like it realised the potential of Wi-Fi because it was only available in this form.

By the sounds of it, the new pair could connect directly to a Wi-Fi network, like any other Sonos product, and open up the possibility of lossless audio. Of course, there’s a limitation in that you wouldn’t be able to benefit from this in outside environments – partly why Wi-Fi headphones don’t seem to have taken off – and connecting directly to the Wi-Fi would lock the headphones into the home network anyway.

But if Sonos can sort out the presentation of audio (and throw in USB-C audio while they’re at it too), and open up the bit-rate, then that’s at least something that’s different from most of the competition. That differentiation is arguably what Sonos needs the most.

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I’ve reviewed a lot of gaming chairs, sat my butt on plenty of seats promising the best of the best comfort, or ergonomic longevity (I’m convinced noblechairs wants my posture to last me until I’m 126 years old), and I’ve got to say, aside from possibly the AndaSeat Novis, this might be the most comfortable chair I’ve ever sat in.

At least, part of it is. The seat base. The fabric, the material, lovely; the base width, great. The backrest? Right up my street. But the Soma is a bit of an odd one when it comes to everything else it’s trying to do. And an even bigger issue is its launch day price tag.

Most people experience constipation at some point in their lives. For astronauts, it’s a common occurrence. The problem is that no one knew exactly why. Now, science seems to have figured out the No. 1 reason why astronauts have problems going No. 2 in space.

Research dating back nearly three decades has explored the effects of low- or zero-gravity environments on human digestion. A new study published in Nature by researchers at the University of Copenhagen working in tandem with NASA suggests that because astronauts spend so much time in microgravity, this state of near weightlessness causes food to move more slowly through the gut.

To carry out the study, researchers took samples from 52 astronauts who had spent months aboard the International Space Station. They found that time in space significantly affected their gut microbiomes, likely leading to constipation and other gastrointestinal problems. 

Here’s how it works. The gut microbiome generally breaks down carbohydrates and fiber first as its main energy source. Without gravity, however, food moves much more slowly through an astronaut’s digestive tract. This delay causes gut microbes to finish all available carbohydrates early and switch to fermenting protein for energy instead. This protein fermentation releases specific compounds into the bloodstream — that’s what allowed researchers to prove that a lack of gut-accessible carbs leads to slower bowel movements.

“We see changes in astronauts’ blood samples that indicate that the gut bacteria begin to ferment protein to a greater extent than usual within weeks after the astronauts arrive in space, and this change continues until they are back on Earth,” Giorgia La Barbera, one of the authors of the study and an associate professor in the Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports at the University of Copenhagen, said in a statement.

A solution to the digestion traffic jam

While astronauts may be reaching for the stars, their digestive systems are firmly grounded in the laws of gravity.

Researchers say that a potential solution for off-planet travel is a diet richer in “slow-fermented carbohydrates.” These carbs take longer for the body to process, giving astronauts’ gut biomes something to chew on, figuratively and literally, as the material moves through the intestines. 

”Eating whole foods, rich in dietary fiber, such as vegetables, lentils and nuts, would be important to keep the gut motility up to speed and to provide additional substrates for the bacteria during space missions,” Henrik Roager, study co-author and associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, said in an email. “This way, the gut microbes would be kept busy fermenting dietary fiber instead of protein.”

Roager also says that “supplementation with prebiotics” and other treatments may also help decrease gut transit time, thereby helping astronauts avoid constipation. 

If the prescription sounds familiar, that’s because it’s also the recommended course of action for avoiding constipation here on Earth. Doctors regularly tell patients to drink more water and eat more fiber. Diets low in fiber cause stool to move more slowly in one’s digestive tract, even with gravity assistance. 

Since these results are linked to both terrestrial and space life, the study’s findings may be helpful in other areas as well, such as with bedridden patients suffering from chronic disease who also experience constipation, Lars Ove Dragsted, another author of the study, said in a statement.

Houston, we have a bowel movement

Issues like constipation may seem mild in the grand scheme of things, but they’re among the many that NASA and other space agencies need to solve before sending astronauts on much longer voyages — like when humans eventually go to Mars. 

The problem is twofold. It’s no secret that constipation is a major pain in the butt. Irregularity leads to bloating, pain, cramping, and in some cases, hemorrhoids and other short-term symptoms, which astronauts already deal with on the ISS during their months-long stays.

But there are long-term consequences to worry about as well. Potential long-term issues include heart disease, chronic kidney disease and other health effects like an increased risk of colorectal cancer and possibly also inflammatory bowel disease. A mission to Mars without a solution to constipation would put astronauts at risk of developing these additional complications.

“Whether constipation is also linked to mental health is not clear, but some of the molecules that we found to be increased among astronauts during space missions have been linked to increased anxiety and stress in animal models, so that is another potential concern,” Roager said.

NASA seems amenable to making dietary changes. “We are always looking at diet and health, working to use nutrition as a means to mitigate negative effects of spaceflight on crew health and performance,” said Scott M. Smith, manager for nutritional biochemistry at NASA. “The findings in this recent paper are intriguing, and we will continue to look at this and make recommendations where appropriate.”

It’s all a reminder that gravity keeps our bodies moving in the right direction.

One connects to your phone, and the other one doesn’t.

Android Auto needs your phone

dennizn/Shutterstock

Android Automotive lives in the car

Torkgaur/Shutterstock

A mysterious new AI model called Ox Alpha has driven certain corners of the internet into a frenzy of speculation about who actually built it.

The free model was released on OpenRouter on Thursday, where it was described as “a reasoning model designed for coding, sustained agentic work, and production workload.” On X, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison (whose company is acquiring OpenRouter) described Ox Alpha as “very impressive.”

So who’s actually behind Ox Alpha? The OpenRouter listing described it as a “stealth model” and said it was “developed and operated by a third-party provider who has chosen to remain anonymous during this preview.”

Unsurprisingly, much of the speculation has revolved around China. AI analyst Andrew Curran posted on Friday that the initial speculation focused on the GLM models developed by Chinese company Z.ai, but “this morning people seem less sure of anything.”

Similarly, an article on Wccftech first suggested that the evidence pointed to GLM, but an update suggested that Ox Alpha could be an unreleased version of Microsoft’s MAI. And on Reddit, there’s at least one post declaring that Ox Alpha “can’t be the Chinese,” while another expressed “high confidence” that it is, in fact, Chinese.

Anyone waiting for a new iMac may only have a few more months to go. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is preparing an updated model that should be available to buy before the end of 2026.

The refresh is expected to bring Apple’s upcoming M6 chip alongside some new color options. Beyond that, though, buyers shouldn’t expect Apple to reinvent its all-in-one desktop this year. Gurman says the upcoming model won’t change much else, suggesting Apple will stick with the familiar 24-inch design rather than introducing a larger screen, OLED panel, or substantial chassis redesign.

The iMac could be a natural fit for Apple’s unusual M6

The processor upgrade is easily the most interesting part of the upcoming refresh. Apple is reportedly taking a very unusual approach with the M6 generation. Previous reports suggest the company will only release a baseline version of the chip, skipping M6 Pro, Max, and Ultra variants entirely before moving to a broader M7 lineup in 2027.

Apple’s 24-inch all-in-one has never needed Pro or Max-class silicon, making it a natural fit for the baseline M6. The new chip is expected to bring higher memory bandwidth, a more powerful Neural Engine, and a GPU with up to 12 cores. In other words, the new iMac could still receive a meaningful performance upgrade even if almost everything around the chip stays familiar.

The upgrades people really want are still years away

Anyone waiting for a bigger display or OLED panel probably shouldn’t expect either feature this year. Apple is still reportedly experimenting with larger and more powerful iMac models, while separate reports suggest Samsung Display and LG Display are developing 24-inch OLED panels for a future version. Current timelines point toward an OLED iMac arriving around 2029.

The new iMac may not arrive alongside Apple’s upcoming iPhone 18 Pro lineup either. The M4 iMac followed a separate launch schedule in 2024, with Apple announcing it on October 28 and releasing it on November 8, more than a month after the iPhone 16 event. If Apple follows a similar pattern this year, the M6 iMac could instead make its debut sometime in October or November.

Waiting may make even more sense given what happened to the current model in June. Apple raised the starting price of the M4 iMac from $1,299 to $1,499, making it considerably more expensive than it was at the start of the year. Unless Apple starts offering substantial discounts on that machine, anyone who doesn’t need a new desktop immediately may be better off waiting to see what the M6 model brings.

One of my neighbours has a Ring doorbell. I know this, not because they’ve told me, or because I’ve walked past and seen it installed, but because they have Quick Replies turned on. 

Quick Replies are an automated feature that lets the doorbell play a short message if the doorbell is not answered within a set amount of time. 

The default message is spoken in a whiny American voice: “We can’t answer the door right now, but if you’d like to leave a message, you can do it now.”

It’s a phrase that’s permanently etched into my brain, as my neighbour’s doorbell spurts that out multiple times a day, at maximum volume.

from the who-needs-standards? dept

I’ve spent the better part of a lifetime studying and writing about the way corrupted lawmakers and U.S. telecom giants work hand in hand to erode U.S. broadband standards and mapping so they can obscure the way corruption and monopoly result in limited broadband competition — resulting in shitty, expensive, spotty, and slow U.S. internet access (check out my Techdirt/Copia paper about it).

The Trump administration has certainly been no exception. After some modest improvements in broadband mapping and standards made possible by the 2021 infrastructure bill, the Trump administration has been working overtime to revert things right back to the status quo (read: shitty and broken).

Case in point: this week the administration abandoned the FCC’s goal to nudge broadband connectivity toward 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) downstream and 500 megabit per second (Mbps) upstream, a dramatic improvement to the FCC’s current base definition of 100 Mbps downstream, 20 Mbps upstream.

FCC boss Brendan Carr falsely claimed in a statement that this downgrade was necessary because the faster standard was not “technologically neutral,” and having higher standards would be an overreach for the agency:

“As part of our return to following the plain language of Section 706, we adopt our proposal from the Notice [of Inquiry] to abolish without replacement the long-term goal of 1,000/500 Mbps established in the 2024 Report,” the order said. “A long-term goal is not mentioned in Section 706 and could appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner. At present, it is impossible to predict long-term technological developments and the evolution of consumer preferences.”

I hope you’ll notice that Brendan Carr has absolutely no problem violating or ignoring the law when it comes time to censor free speech or destroy U.S. media consolidation limits, but when it comes time to push giant U.S. telecom monopolies to try harder, or to enforce any meaningful consumer protections (like net neutrality), Carr is always suddenly concerned with taking things too far.

The downgrade was part of the FCC’s annual Section 706 Report (required by Congress), in which the captured agency unsurprisingly declares that U.S. broadband deployment is great and there’s really nothing that needs fixing.

Why is Carr suddenly concerned about having high standards? Well, a 1 Gbps goal would cause problems for Elon Musk, whose increasingly-congested Starlink low-Earth orbit satellite broadband system will struggle to reach that goal. While Starlink is great for remote users with no other options, it’s generally too congested to scale and is too expensive for people most in need. It’s also run by a white supremacist.

That hasn’t stopped Republicans from hijacking huge swaths of the $42.5 billion set aside for broadband access and redirecting it to Elon (see my feature at The Verge from last June). A lot of that money is being redirected away from better, faster, community-owned fiber networks or cooperatives, and toward a billionaire in exchange for much slower and more expensive LEO satellite service he planned to deploy anyway. Musk is poised to see a multi-billion dollar windfall for doing nothing differently.

The FCC’s abandoned gigabit speed goals is also of benefit to giant cable monopolies like Comcast, whose lack of network investment has long resulted in dated upstream speeds.

I’ve long covered how even pushing the FCC to adopt the faster 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up speed standard took more than a decade due to lobbying pressure. Big ISPs have also endlessly undermined efforts to more accurately map U.S. broadband access, well aware that better data would only serve to highly monopoly domination and private telecom market failure.

Filed Under: brendan carr, broadband, elon musk, fcc, fiber, gigabit, infrastructure, internet access, maps, slow

DEVOPS

S3 keeps the source of truth while local NVMe repositories do the latency-sensitive work

Developers recently burned by GitHub’s system outages should take note that there are other ways to manage Git at scale. One approach, recently put into action by Cursor, is to build the distributed version control system on object storage.

A recent post from Cursor principal systems engineer Vicent Martí explains how the SpaceX subsidiary worked through its scaling issues with the notoriously fickle Git distributed version control system.

The post explains how Cursor arrived at an architecture for its own Git-based repository service called Origin, which is powered by an internal engine called Continuity. A beta of the service is available with paid Cursor plans. 

“Agents have fundamentally changed the way we work with software, and in many ways they’ve made this situation worse. More code, more PRs, more CI runs. Version control is at the core of all of this, and it is possibly the hardest thing to change overnight,” Martí wrote. 

Martí speaks from experience, having worked at GitHub through much of the last decade when the company arrived at its own current architecture for managing Git. 

Synchronization is a bitch

Git creator Linus Torvalds designed his software to work as a content-addressable data store, where all the objects are stored and indexed by the SHA-1 hash of their contents. 

Git sees a repository as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), with each commit being a node in a graph of nodes all connected by pointers. A Git server can look up an object directly by its SHA, but if it doesn’t have the SHA, then it “must actually walk the DAG step by step,” Martí noted.

A client may just want to fetch or clone a consolidated packfile of the repository, or even get a list of recent changes, but to fulfill these requests, the server must traverse the entire graph only to assemble the necessary objects. 

Now, imagine providing such a service for over 400 million repositories, and you’ll get an idea of the scale at which GitHub operates (or struggles to do). 

After some fiddling about, GitHub engineers landed on what they called Spokes, which basically involves keeping at least three tightly synchronized copies of every repository on speedy NVMe disks.

The approach became an industry standard, though over time its limits became apparent; the chief one is that the more replicas you make, the longer the synchronization takes. And Git does not play well with “eventual consistency,” Martí explained.

Plus, these days agents bring their own mayhem. 

“When agents work with Git repositories at scale, they often operate outside of a monorepo by creating vast numbers of small repositories, many of them throwaway, and most of them barely touched,” Martí wrote.

Object stores to the rescue

When Cursor set out to build its own Git repository, it turned to object storage. Unlike file or block storage, object storage gives each chunk of bits its own unique identifier and files it with all the others in a single namespace (no directories). 

The most popular object storage today is Amazon Web Services’ Simple Storage Service (S3), which is increasingly used as a foundational layer for enterprise software such as databases, container registries and message brokers, thanks to its low cost, built-in redundancy and – for all practical purposes – endless scalability. 

With Origin, pushes are uploaded into S3 in a write-ahead log (WAL), capturing all changes as immutable objects. Wherever possible, changes are bundled together for faster throughput. 

Simultaneously, the pushes are written to the local “reference” copy of the repository (usually an NVMe disk). Once both actions complete, other replicas of the repository can download the changes as needed. 

“With the only requirement of having to synchronize the reference transaction with a single local repository instead of a quorum of replicas, we have a system that can ingest pushes as fast as our disk allows,” Martí wrote. 

Git will still have to do DAG traversal for many operations, but it is better to do it locally on a speedy solid-state drive than over a network.   

“Where does every repository live? The answer is ‘anywhere’. It doesn’t matter! We treat repositories like a warm cache on disk, but the source of truth is always the write-ahead log,” Martí noted.

We will see how well this approach plays out as Origin moves into being a production service. But if we don’t see stories about Origin outages, then Git managers will know to give object storage a serious look. ®

OpenAI has added a shortcut that surfaces your four most recent photos when you long press the plus button in ChatGPT on iPhone. It lands while Apple’s own camera and visual assistant features stay unavailable on iPhone in the EU.

OpenAI has taken two taps out of the most common thing people do with ChatGPT on a phone. Long pressing the plus button beside the prompt box now surfaces your four most recent photos, ready to attach.

The old path was not hard, just longer. Open the plus menu, choose Photos, then find the image in a library that may hold tens of thousands.

OpenAI’s consumer product lead Adam Fry called it “a fun, power user feature,” shipping it in the company’s 21 August weekly drop alongside better handling of the current time and faster loading for long conversations on the web.

Taken alone this is a gadget-blog item. What makes it worth a look is the gap it is quietly filling.

Apple demonstrated this exact job at WWDC26. A Siri mode in the Camera app and an expanded Visual Intelligence were meant to let you point a phone at something and ask about it, without attaching anything.

European iPhone owners are not getting those. Apple said in June that there is no timeline for Siri AI on iPhone or iPad in the EU, while keeping the features on Mac and Vision Pro.

The company was blunt about it. “We’re deeply disappointed that our EU users won’t have Siri AI on iPhone or iPad when we share our new software releases later this year,” said software chief Craig Federighi.

The dispute is over the Digital Markets Act. Apple argues the Commission’s reading of the interoperability rules would force it to give rival assistants the same deep system access Siri has, and regulators rejected both its Trusted System Agent proposal and an 18-month phased rollout.

The practical result is a continent of iPhones without a native visual assistant. TNW has put the population affected at around 450 million people across the EU.

OpenAI is building for exactly that opening. It is pushing further into the same market on the commercial side too, taking ads into 31 European countries.

So a long press is a trivial feature almost everywhere. In Europe it is the closest thing an iPhone owner has to a camera that answers questions.