Miasma worm shapeshifts, but cloud secret-scouting remains the goal
Microsoft’s GitHub has disabled over 70 repositories after they were reportedly compromised by a worm in the latest open source supply chain attack.
The code shack took down 73 repos within the space of 105 seconds after its alarms were tripped on Friday, June 5, after detecting signs of the Miasma worm infecting its projects, according to StepSecurity’s co-founder and CTO, Ashish Kurmi.
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Users reported issues quickly on Friday, after visits to those repos all resulted in the same message displayed, indicating that they had been disabled due to terms of service violations.
According to StepSecurity’s analysis, the attack kicked off after a compromised contributor account pushed a malicious commit to Azure/durabletask. The commit dropped configuration files that triggered remote code execution on machines when a developer opened the repo in an IDE or AI coding tool, such as Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and Cursor.
Several developers soon reported broken CI/CD pipelines, a support thread showed, although a moderator said at the time this was due to “an internal management issue.”
“The repo that most immediately caused issues was Azure/functions-action,” Kurmi wrote, used to deploy code to Azure. With it being taken down, every workflow that referenced Azure/functions-action@v1 stopped resolving.
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GitHub stepped in a few hours after the repos were infected by the malicious commit. Its automated detections kicked in and disabled the repos in under two minutes, in two separate waves.
However, it was the borking of the durabletask family that hinted at the bigger picture, that the attack was indeed a re-opening of the previous Miasma worm attack that hit Microsoft last month.
Microsoft’s durabletask PyPi package was a previous target of the Miasma worm on May 19. Within a 35-minute window, three versions of the package were uploaded to PyPi, which planted infostealers on developers’ machines, specifically sniffing out cloud secrets and developer tool configurations on Linux systems.
Crucially, the re-targeting of durabletask suggests the tokens associated with the compromised developer account used to execute the PyPi attack were not fully rotated, allowing an attacker to gain access and push commits to GitHub, Kurmi said.
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It was either that, or the contributor was re-compromised through the worm’s own propagation loop, or a different contributor’s token was used but the attacker altered the metadata to make it look like a repeated attack.
Cybercrime group TeamPCP claimed responsibility for developing Mini Shai Hulud, which itself is named after an earlier worm of the same name, sans “mini.”
However, because TeamPCP open-sourced Mini Shai Hulud, it’s difficult to tell whether it was also behind Miasma or if someone else took the reins on the follow-up project.
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StepSecurity also reported that two days before the Microsoft attack, the same worm was making a nuisance of itself at npm, compromising more than 50 packages, including a Vapi.ai SDK with more than 408,000 monthly downloads.
The Register asked Microsoft for comment, but it did not immediately respond. ®
PwC’s Raymond Martin explores his day to day at the intersection of technology and healthcare.
“I lead technology-driven transformation for PwC’s health sector clients in Ireland, helping them improve patient care, expand access to services and run more efficient operations,” said Raymond Martin, a health technology director for the organisation.
He explained that, more and more, healthcare teams are being asked to do more with the same resources, so targeted transformation using technology is often the single biggest lever for change.
Here he discusses his day to day at PwC.
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If there is such a thing, what is a typical day in your job like?
There really isn’t one and that’s a positive. The pace of change across technology, health and business over the last five years has been astonishing and AI has put it into overdrive in the last two.
My time tends to split three ways. First, overseeing live client delivery, technology roll-outs in acute hospitals, community teams and national programmes, often involving significant redesign of care pathways to enhance collection and use of data and promote data and process standardisation. Second, working with our clinical and operational experts to shape new services based on what clients are asking for and the trends we’re seeing globally. Third, helping our PwC team evolve and working out what the market shift means for our people, their skills and their careers.
In the more than 20 years you have worked in the health-tech space, how has the landscape evolved?
It’s night and day. 20 years ago, health-tech was dominated by back-office systems, heavy custom development, complex configuration projects and clinical systems that were largely paper-based or niche high tech. Delivery of any change took years.
When I started on Medicaid systems in the US in 2008, the average time from design to first release was four years and some releases might be a year apart. Five years later, working on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in California, that had dropped to two years. The explosion of cloud infrastructure and SaaS platforms brought it down to under a year and Covid compressed it again to months.
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During Covid, for the New Mexico Department of Health, I led a team through mobilisation of a contact centre, CRM deployment and the onboarding of hundreds of staff, beginning operations within 30 days and adding most functionality within three months of that. The challenge for us is making sure governance and methodology keep pace so speed doesn’t introduce new risk. The other big shift is the democratisation of technology. 20 years ago, technology was a niche skill. Today our clients come prepared, fluent in the tools and often using AI to enhance their own awareness and position in conversations.
How is technology transforming the future health space?
It’s hard to find a corner of healthcare that technology won’t touch. The clinician-patient relationship will remain the human core, but everything around it is changing fast. Data is the first frontier. Healthcare generates extraordinary volumes of rich data, but it has historically been trapped in silos, useful inside one system or location, invisible everywhere else.
Joining that data across boundaries unlocks huge value, like better national and local service planning for a start. With better access to clinical data and the ability to augment it with lifestyle data from wearable devices and eating habits, patients can actively manage their own health as well as their care journeys. The most obvious advantage is it gives clinicians a fuller picture of the person in front of them.
Beyond the clinical interaction, cloud platforms and AI are reshaping access to care. Virtual consultations, remote monitoring and hospital-at-home are becoming normal. AI assistants will help people build healthier habits and manage conditions preventatively. Genetic screening will drive tailored therapies into the mainstream and AI-accelerated trials will shorten the path from discovery to approval. And that’s just the start.
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What are some of the challenges and how are they managed?
The pace of technology change is now stress-testing the governance and procurement models organisations rely on. They simply weren’t built for this rate of arrival.
Healthcare and public sector clients feel it most because they operate in highly regulated environments and rightly so. Patient safety, public confidence, data privacy and responsible use of public money are the currencies they trade in.
‘Move fast and break things’ is not a viable strategy in a hospital. Processes must be proven safe and compliant before they can be adopted. Our role is to help our clients adopt new technology at pace without compromising on those fundamentals, putting the right methodologies, assurance frameworks and clinical governance in place so innovation and safety move forward together.
Another challenge our clients are grappling with is finding the right path to adopt AI and get real return on the investment. That came through clearly in PwC’s recent Global Performance Survey. The answer is moving beyond isolated proof-of-value pilots into AI-enabled process handling at scale, and examining growth opportunities rather than just cost savings. In healthcare, that translates to taking administrative burden off frontline and back-office staff, applying AI to the problems it’s genuinely better at. That’s where real value can be unlocked.
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Are you noticing new and emerging trends so far in 2026?
AI is the story of 2026. It has moved out of novelty and experimentation into mainstream adoption. A significant share of the population now uses it daily, including clinicians and patients. People have seen what AI does for the customer service they get from their insurance company, their utility provider, or their streaming service and they expect the same standard from their healthcare provider. Chat tools mean patients arrive at appointments better informed about their own conditions, which is changing the dynamic of consultations. We’re also seeing native AI companies turn their focus to health, which will accelerate the pipeline of AI-driven products coming to market.
Have you any advice for professionals interested in a career similar to yours?
Stay positive. There’s a lot of pessimism in the headlines about disruption and changing business models, but disruption is often the biggest accelerator of opportunity. If you look beyond the displacement headlines, there’s a bigger story about the opportunities being created by AI.
This is the fifth major technology disruption cycle of my career, starting with the dot-com crash in 2001. I was an intern expecting a graduate job that didn’t materialise because of the crash. That led to a different job and a career that took me from Ireland to the US, Canada, India, the UK and a few places in between.
Every cycle since, from the financial crash of 2008 to the cloud and SAAS revolution of 2011, even Covid, has been initially destructive but has ultimately created more opportunities for people in this industry. This is the reality we’re seeing as right now we are growing and hiring for our advisory health team.
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My second piece of advice, don’t wait for doors to be opened for you. Ask. Tell people what you’re interested in, ask for new roles, ask for introductions, find out what’s possible. You manage your own career. That’s as true now as it has ever been.
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Jeff Bezos is backing Flourish, a new “neuro AI” startup with $500 million in funding and a reported $2.5 billion valuation, that aims to reinvent AI by studying the brain’s architecture and building systems that learn continuously while using far less power than today’s large language models. The company’s long-term bet is that neuroscientists and AI researchers working together can uncover the brain’s “core algorithm” and eventually create brain-inspired AI that runs on a tiny fraction of current compute. Wired reports: Rob Williams knows how to pitch Jeff Bezos: You write a press release as if your product has already been built. Bezos reads it and gives a thumbs up or down. Williams went through this process a lot as an executive on Amazon’s “S-team,” in charge of software products such as Alexa, until his departure last fall. But the pitch he made a few weeks later — in December 2025 — was different. Now he was collaborating with Thomas Reardon, a neuroscientist and repeat startup founder, and approaching Bezos as a funder, not a boss. Here’s what Bezos, sitting on his yacht somewhere, read while Williams anxiously watched on Zoom: “Flourish is a neuro AI company that is solving the two most difficult problems facing AI today: power efficiency and continuous learning. We are building Cortex AI, the first synthetic intelligence system designed to match the computational capacity, learning efficiency, and power budget of the human brain.”
A month later, I’m lunching with Reardon and Williams in the Flatiron neighborhood in New York City. Reardon gets right to the point. AI has dug itself into a hole, he says. Though increasingly powerful, large language models are greedy consumers of computer power and data. Though the inspiration for LLMs was rooted in biology, current frontier models have little in common with the human brain. A person uses about 20 watts of energy to process information; a single chip in an AI training cluster uses more than 30 times that amount. The hyperscalers require thousands of chips and gigawatts of energy, enough to power small cities. And those models need to suck up virtually all of what humans have written. Each new model requires more, more, more. For all of that, the models don’t learn. Once you train them, they’re stuck. The goal, Reardon tells me, is to build “a synthetic artificial intelligence brain that runs on 50 watts or less.” It should adapt to its conditions, be as nimble as a human mind, and burn a tiny fraction of an LLM’s compute power and energy. The proof of concept is thriving inside our skulls. “There’s something fundamentally wrong with saying, “I need to basically read every book ever written 20 times over in order to learn English,’” Reardon says. “A human baby does it with a couple hundred thousand utterances.”
Reardon and Williams haven’t figured out yet how to build systems that match the magic of a human brain. What they have is a belief that an expert, well-resourced team — of AI researchers and neuroscientists working essentially side by side — can find the answer. The neuroscientists will conduct original wet lab experiments with some of the most advanced lab equipment available, to hunt for usable intel on the brain’s architecture. They plan to release the models they’re currently developing as near-term products on the path to a full reinvention of AI. The fuzziness of the proposal didn’t bother Jeff Bezos. After reading Williams’ two-pager, he chipped in $50 million. Other funding came from Lux Capital, Google Ventures, and Catalio, among others. Bezos then almost doubled his initial stake and told Reardon he’d have given more if they’d asked. Now with a war chest of $500 million and a reported valuation of $2.5 billion, Flourish just needs to invent a new way to do AI.
By most accounts, HIGH END Vienna 2026 was a success, and that is no small thing for an industry that could use some good news as we begin the slow crawl into summer. The move from Munich to Vienna was always going to be scrutinized, second-guessed, and overanalyzed by people who spend too much time arguing about cable elevators, but the first edition in Austria appears to have landed well. The rooms were busy, the product pipeline was stronger than expected, and manufacturers showed up with enough new hardware to suggest that high-end audio may finally be catching some tailwinds again.
Good. The industry needs them.
There are already five more shows on the calendar between now and September: T.H.E. Show SoCal, CanJam London, Audio Advice Live 2026, CanJam SoCal, and CEDIA. Audio Advice Live has become a more important stop this year, and I will be joining Chris Boylan in Raleigh in early August rather than covering SWAF in Dallas in late-July.
At some point, even editors need to recharge the batteries, spend time with their kids, clean up the house, paint a few walls, and fix whatever winter broke before summer arrives to break something else. The Jersey Shore is already preparing for its annual stress test: Netflix Studios construction, World Cup traffic threatening to paralyze half the Garden State, and the return of the Bennies, who descend every year like a seasonal weather event with beach chairs, parking issues, and questionable lane discipline.
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So yes, I’m thinking very carefully about how to manage the rest of 2026 starting in late-July.
That is especially true when eCoustics is on pace for roughly 1,200 articles, videos, and podcasts in 2026. That puts us behind only What Hi-Fi? in terms of output, and well ahead of most of the specialist audio press. That kind of schedule is not powered by Austrian pastries and blind optimism. It takes planning, travel, editing, late nights, and a team willing to do the unglamorous work that most readers never really notice.
HIGH END Vienna 2026 Proved There Is Life After Munich, Even With More Schnitzel and Viennese Caffeine
Editor-at-Large, Chris Boylan will have more to say in his Best of Show report, along with more video reports from HIGH END Vienna dropping this week. My focus here is slightly different. These are the 11 new products from the show that most caught my attention, the ones I most want to review when they become available, and the products that say something meaningful about where the market may be headed next.
Because there is a bigger point here.
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The audio industry may be finding some momentum again, but it still needs to learn how to market itself without tripping over the same gold-plated rake. Not every new product is a “new reference.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, “The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else.” For the hi-fi industry, that might be the most useful Austrian export of the week. HIGH END Vienna 2026 proved there is still life in the category, but the brands that matter going forward will be the ones willing to stop sounding, looking, pricing, and marketing themselves exactly like everyone else.
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The Dirty Eleven: 11 Vienna 2026 Products to Review
Acoustic Energy AE Active
The Acoustic Energy AE Active is a fully analog active stand-mounted loudspeaker with Class A/B amplification, RCA and XLR inputs, room-trim controls, and an updated driver package that looks like a focused evolution of the AE1 Active.
That may sound almost quaint in 2026, which is precisely why I want to hear it. Most active speakers now arrive with apps, firmware updates, streaming platforms, Bluetooth logos, and enough software baggage to make you wonder whether you bought loudspeakers or adopted a small IT department. Acoustic Energy has gone in the other direction: wired inputs, analog signal path, onboard amplification, and a very clear focus on the box, the drivers, and the amplifier doing their jobs properly. Radical stuff, apparently.
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I want to hear whether Acoustic Energy has improved on the AE1 Active without sanding down the speed, impact, and immediacy that made the original such a compelling compact loudspeaker. The real test will be placement, bass control, tonal balance at sane listening levels, and whether the room-trim controls are actually useful in smaller spaces, and not just switches added to make the rear panel look busy.
The other part of the review is the use case. The AE Active has a very limited number of inputs, so I want to hear how it interacts with the preamp sections in a range of network players and DAC/preamps. If the source/preamp pairing matters, and with active loudspeakers, it usually does — that needs to be part of the review, not an afterthought buried somewhere between “nice imaging” and “good for desktop use.”
The Klipsch Rebellion is a premium Heritage-inspired standmount loudspeaker based on Paul W. Klipsch’s rare 1958 H8 design, using a K-702 tweeter mounted to a K-703 Tractrix horn with Mumps technology, a new K-81-EP woofer, and a rear Tractrix flare port.
Klipsch has been leaning hard into its 80th anniversary, and the Rebellion is far more interesting to me than another nostalgia badge glued to a walnut box. It is not cheap at $2,599 per pair, but the idea of a compact Heritage-flavored Klipsch loudspeaker that does not require La Scala real estate or a second mortgage has real appeal. The category needs speakers with high sensitivity, dynamics, personality, and some actual fun baked into the cabinet, because not everyone wants another polite rectangular box that sounds like it was voiced during a faculty meeting.
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What I want to test is how flexible the Rebellion really is with amplification. On paper, this could be a very interesting match for everything from affordable Class D amplifiers like WiiM’s current crop, to older Class A/B integrated amps from NAD, Cambridge, and Rega, to tube integrated amplifiers from a wide range of manufacturers. The review has to find out whether the Rebellion keeps the Klipsch energy and immediacy without getting shouty, whether it can work in real rooms without punishing placement, and whether it has enough tonal refinement to win over listeners who like the Heritage attitude but do not want to live inside a live PA system.
The Cambridge Audio Evo 300 is a 300Wpc streaming amplifier built around Hypex NCOREx power, StreamMagic Gen 4, HDMI eARC, MM phono, and the same basic “just add speakers and stop building equipment towers” argument that has made the Evo series so compelling.
The extra power is the headline, but it is not the only thing I care about. The Evo 75, Evo 150, and Evo 150 SE never really ran out of gas with the speakers I tried them with, including models from Q Acoustics, Acoustic Energy, PSB, Focal, and others. More power is rarely a bad thing, unless we are talking about politicians or subwoofers in apartments, but the Evo platform was already more capable than some people gave it credit for.
What I want to test is whether Cambridge has actually moved the amplifier section forward, not just added a bigger number to the brochure. Does the Hypex NCOREx implementation sound cleaner, faster, and more composed than the earlier Evo models? Is StreamMagic Gen 4 easier to use day to day? Does HDMI eARC behave properly with real TVs? Does the MM phono input feel like a serious part of the product or a convenience feature? The Evo 300 needs to prove that it is not just the Evo with more horsepower, but a more complete streaming amplifier for people who want fewer boxes without lowering their standards.
The Canvas L is a premium TV-mounted active speaker system that now supports larger screen sizes, offers more finish and grille options, and uses BACCH 3D+ processing to make the case that a very serious “soundbar” can replace a conventional front-channel system.
The price has gone up. A lot. That does not automatically make it a problem, but it does move the Canvas L into a very different conversation, especially when buyers can also look at strong active loudspeakers, compact 3.0 or 3.1 systems, and increasingly ambitious lifestyle audio products from brands with serious hi-fi credibility. The ability to pair it with larger TVs makes sense because that is where the market has gone, and I like the grille options because not everyone wants their living room to look like a demo room at an audio show staffed by people named Lars.
Can the Canvas L can actually replace a proper 3.0 or 3.1 system through output, tonal scale, dialogue clarity, center image stability, and BACCH 3D+ spatial processing — especially because there is no separate subwoofer in the system. I was a guinea pig for the original BACCH work at the lab in Princeton and at the designer’s home, and I have wanted this technology to work properly in a real consumer product for probably eight or nine years. The review has to answer the uncomfortable question: is this finally the elegant living-room solution that can satisfy movie and music listeners, or is it still asking too much from one very expensive box attached to a television?
The DALI VEGA is a $4,500 single-box wireless hi-fi system with ten in-house-developed drivers, 400 watts of Class D amplification, BluOS streaming, HDMI ARC, AirPlay 2, TIDAL Connect, Spotify Connect, and adaptive processing that lets it work horizontally or vertically.
This type of system is becoming a real category, and I am perfectly fine with that. Products like the VEGA, Focal’s Mu-so Hekla, Canvas L, LIVEBOX, and Ruark’s larger all-in-one console systems are forcing people to pay attention because they are not just Bluetooth speakers with better tailoring. They are aimed at people who want serious sound without separates, speaker cables, and a rack that looks like it belongs in a regional airport control room.
The Naim influence is obvious; sorry, Salisbury, everyone found the big dial — but the category has moved beyond imitation. The Naim/Focal room at AXPONA 2026 was standing-room-only primarily because of the Mu-so Hekla demo, and people were not pretending to be impressed. They were impressed.
What I want to test is whether the VEGA can work as well in real rooms as it does on paper. The Adaptive Orientation Adjustment is not a gimmick if it can make the system sound convincing both horizontally on furniture and vertically on a wall, but that has to be tested with real placement compromises, not a brochure-perfect room with one chair and no family members. The dog can stay.
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I want to hear whether DALI’s Adaptive Stereo Enhancement creates real width and scale without turning everything into processed vapor, whether the bass has enough weight without getting thick, and whether BluOS, HDMI ARC, presets, EQ, wall-distance adjustment, and that rather lovely control dial make the VEGA feel like a proper living-room hi-fi system rather than another expensive lifestyle object asking for Scandinavian forgiveness.
The Eversolo DMP-A8 Gen 2 is a digital hub that combines streaming, DAC, preamp, local music-server functionality, internal SSD support, HDMI ARC, subwoofer control, balanced analog outputs, AKM DAC architecture, Wi-Fi 6, and SFP fiber networking in one very polished box.
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Eversolo has become a serious player in network audio because its products usually offer strong hardware, useful software, and a feature set that makes some more expensive streamers look a little thin. The original DMP-A8 already made a strong case as a flexible digital front end, so the Gen 2 is interesting because it appears to refine the platform rather than reinvent it. The move to AKM, the addition of SFP fiber networking, broader system-control features, and continued emphasis on local storage all suggest Eversolo understands that many listeners want one digital component that can handle streaming, files, TV audio, and preamp duties.
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What I want to test is whether the DMP-A8 Gen 2 improves the parts that matter in daily use. Does the AKM-based DAC architecture change the tonal balance or presentation in a meaningful way? Is the preamp section good enough to drive active speakers or a serious power amplifier without making a dedicated preamp feel mandatory? Does SFP fiber networking offer a practical benefit in a real home network, or is it mostly there for the people who already own three Ethernet switches and strong opinions about optical isolation?
The Meze Audio ARTA is a $6,000 open-back flagship headphone built around a new 225-ohm Rinaro Isodynamic Hybrid Array driver, with the kind of industrial design, materials, and Romanian craftsmanship that have become central to Meze’s identity.
Having owned the Empyrean II for a few years, I can attest to how good Meze can be when it gets the balance right. The Empyrean II is brilliant from both a design and performance perspective: comfortable, beautifully made, musically generous, and far more than a piece of headphone jewelry for people who alphabetize their cables. That is why the ARTA interests me, but also why the price gives me pause. At $6,000, it is walking straight into the same rarefied air occupied by statement headphones from Audeze, HiFiMAN, ZMF, and others. The question is not whether Meze can build something spectacular. It can. The question is whether the ARTA can be thousands of dollars better in ways that matter.
What I want to test is whether we are getting too close to the sun in the head-fi space. If the ARTA is spectacular, I will be thrilled, because I have invested a lot of money and professional capital in this Romanian brand and still believe Meze brings something different to the category. But spectacular is now the entry fee at this price. I want to hear whether the ARTA delivers more resolution, scale, speed, tonal sophistication, and emotional pull than the Empyrean II without losing the comfort and humanity that make Meze special.
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Compared with $1 million loudspeakers, perhaps a $6,000 headphone is a bargain even after you add the amplifier, DAC, source, cables, stand, and the quiet room you apparently now need to justify listening to music by yourself.
The Questyle QMS system pairs the iXStreamer with the E5 and E4 wireless active bookshelf speakers, using SEAS drivers, Wi-Fi 6, LDAC, aptX, HDMI ARC/eARC, and Questyle’s own DAC/amplification thinking to build a more serious lossless wireless ecosystem.
This will not be cheap, and nobody should pretend otherwise. Questyle makes superb products, even if not every one of them has landed on my “Best of” list, because the company usually tries to do something different rather than just chase the same safe feature set as everyone else.
What I want to test is whether Questyle can make the system feel like real hi-fi and not just another premium wireless speaker platform. The E5, especially the Oceanic Blue co-branded SEAS version, is the one I want in for review because the concept only works if the loudspeakers deliver proper imaging, scale, tonal balance, and low-latency stability with TV, streaming, and hi-res playback.
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I also want to know whether the iXStreamer actually makes the ecosystem easier to use, whether HDMI ARC/eARC behaves properly, and whether Questyle’s current-mode DNA translates into active loudspeakers without turning the whole thing into an expensive proof-of-concept for people who already own three DACs and still claim they are “simplifying.”
The Ruark R710 is a new CD hi-fi console in Ruark’s 100 Series, designed to sit above the R610 and work as a more ambitious all-in-one music system for listeners who still want CD playback, streaming, proper amplification, strong industrial design, and a system that does not require a rack of boring boxes.
I already heard the Talisman-R loudspeakers at a show, and they made a strong case for Ruark being far more than the company North American audiophiles seem determined to file under “nice radios.” But the R710 was the piece hiding in the wings, and that is the one that may tell us even more about where Ruark is headed. I have reviewed most of the brand’s recent kit, and the frustrating part is that it is consistently better than a lot of people on this side of the Atlantic seem willing to admit.
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What I want to test is whether the R710 can finally make more North American listeners take Ruark seriously as a proper hi-fi brand, not just a lifestyle-audio company with good manners and better woodwork. The review needs to answer whether the R710 has enough amplifier control, scale, streaming stability, CD playback quality, and system flexibility to justify its position above the R610, especially with the Talisman-R as the obvious partner. Ruark has the design language, the usability, and the musical instincts. Now I want to know whether the R710 has the authority to make the “real audiophile gear” crowd stop smirking long enough to actually listen.
The Ruark Talisman-R is a compact two-way floorstanding loudspeaker; roughly 33.5 inches tall, rated at 87 dB sensitivity, with a 6-ohm nominal impedance that dips to 3.8 ohms, and Ruark recommends amplifiers between 50 and 250 watts.
Ruark is clearly positioning the Talisman-R as the natural partner for the new R710 CD hi-fi console, and that makes sense. But this speaker should not be treated as some locked-in accessory for one Ruark system. Those amplifier requirements open the door to a wide range of gear: modern Class D integrated amplifiers, older Class A/B amps, British integrateds with some grip and warmth, and better streaming amplifiers that need a compact floorstander with actual personality.
What I want to test is whether the Talisman-R is the Ruark product that finally makes more North American listeners stop treating the brand like a polite British radio company and start seeing it as serious hi-fi. If I had to pick a pair of speakers I am likely to buy by the end of 2026 for my new office, these, the Dynaudio Legend, and the DeVore Fidelity o/baby are the three strongest contenders. That is not a small compliment. I want to find out whether the Talisman-R has the tonal density, imaging, bass control, and amplifier flexibility to earn that spot — or whether I’m just being seduced again by British woodwork and my own terrible weakness for compact floorstanders.
The iFi iDSD GR2 is a $529 portable DAC/headphone amplifier with a Burr-Brown PCM1795 DAC, USB-C and S/PDIF inputs, 3.5mm and 4.4mm headphone outputs, Bluetooth with LDAC and aptX Lossless, iFi’s Nexis app control, and up to 1,513mW RMS into 32 ohms.
iFi has been very good at making portable DAC/amps that feel overbuilt in the right ways, but the category has become crowded, aggressive, and surprisingly good at lower prices. That makes the GR2 interesting because it has to justify itself against dongles, desktop DAC/amps, and wireless headphones that keep getting better. The price is reasonable by iFi standards, and it is lower than the outgoing xDSD Gryphon, but $529 is still real money for a device that many people will carry around, drop in a bag, and eventually panic-search for under a car seat.
What I want to test is whether the GR2 still makes sense in 2026 as a serious portable hub. Does the Burr-Brown PCM1795 implementation deliver the tonal density and smoothness iFi fans expect without getting too soft? Is the output powerful enough for more demanding headphones without turning sensitive IEMs into a hiss festival? Does Bluetooth sound good enough to be useful rather than merely convenient? And does the Nexis app, touchscreen interface, battery life, and hybrid power system make the GR2 easier to live with day to day, or is this another portable box that sounds excellent but demands the patience of someone assembling IKEA furniture in the dark?
London Tech Week opened the way these events increasingly do: with a leaderboard of investment pledges. By the end of the first morning, the UK had collected several billion pounds in AI commitments, most of it aimed at the unglamorous machinery of compute.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer kicked off the keynotes with a new national AI compute strategy, including £400mn to buy specialist AI chips and expand the country’s computing capacity, part of a push he framed around keeping British firms able to “start here, scale here and stay here”.
The bigger numbers came from industry.
AMD committed up to £2bn over five years, backing high-performance computing with the University of Cambridge and Imperial College and taking direct stakes in UK startups, with chief executive Lisa Su on stage to announce it.
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Cloud provider Nebius pledged around £1.7bn to build out UK AI capacity, funding three new deployments of Nvidia infrastructure that will reach 65 megawatts by 2027 and expanding its London R&D hub.
London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, added a smaller but pointedly different commitment: £12mn to help the city’s small businesses actually adopt AI, through readiness checks and mentoring, rather than build it. The Prince of Wales is due to appear later in the week, tying technology to his Homewards anti-homelessness initiative.
The backdrop is a UK tech sector that, by Tech Nation’s count, is now worth £1.2tn, with British AI startups raising more than £8.2bn in venture capital in the first half of 2026 alone, close to half of all European tech investment by the prime minister’s reckoning. Europe’s IT spending is forecast to grow 8.2 per cent this year to $1.3tn, its fastest in half a decade.
For a country anxious about being squeezed between the US and China, the figures are a useful retort.
There is a familiar tension under the optimism. Much of the money is for compute infrastructure, and most of that infrastructure runs on American technology: AMD’s chips, and Nvidia’s hardware inside Nebius’s data centres.
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The UK’s sovereign-AI ambitions, real as they are, still lean heavily on US suppliers, a dependence the same week’s launch of Cosine’s home-grown “Lumen Sovereign” model was explicitly designed to chip away at. Building capacity in Britain is not the same as owning the stack.
Still, for one morning at Olympia, the direction of travel was clear, and loud.
Between government money, a US chipmaker’s billions, and a cloud firm’s data centres, the UK is betting it can be the place where Europe’s AI gets built. The harder question, as ever, is whether that turns into companies, jobs, and breakthroughs that stay, or simply more rented compute.
London Tech Week runs until 10 June, with the pitches, and the pledges, set to keep coming.
Photo credit: Sonny Dickson New photos of a production-style dummy device for Apple’s first foldable iPhone have surfaced online. They come from leaker Sonny Dickson and offer the clearest view of the design yet. Sonny Dickson, the leaker, provided images from several perspectives. The unit appears in both closed and fully open variants, with a screen installed for a more realistic appearance than the previous crude iteration.
When you turn the device off, it shows a compact exterior display that is about 5.5 inches across. The front-facing camera is located in the center, with a circular cutout at the top. If you are familiar with the traditional iPhone, you will see that this one is somewhat shorter and wider, similar to a passport held upright. However, when you fold it open, the experience changes dramatically. The internal display stretches to about 7.8 inches and has a broader, shorter aspect ratio, akin to an iPad mini. That leaves plenty of room for apps, videos, and split-screen work, assuming the software can adjust to the new configuration.
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The gearless, high-strength hinge makes it durable enough to handle about 10 years of folding[3]; plus, Pixel 10 Pro Fold is built with Corning…
In the close-up images, you can notice a little round camera hole in the upper-left corner of the huge inner screen. Apple used a similar technique to previous Android foldables here, marking the first time this format has been used on an iPhone display. The vertical wrinkle down the middle of the interior screen is one of the most noticeable features. It appears faint on the dummy, but speculations suggest that Apple was able to reduce the depth and angle of the fold by changing the hinge. With some fancy glass and adhesives, the crease should be even harder to see on the finished units.
When the device is closed, a horizontal camera bar occupies a portion of the rear. Two lenses are side by side on a raised plateau that resembles the camera section of the iPhone Air, but no telephoto lens is seen at this time, and there is a small cluster of holes for the rear microphone. Other notable elements in the photographs include a titanium frame, volume controls relocated to the top edge, and a side button with Touch ID for unlocking and making payments, as this design does not appear to have Face ID.
Rumors suggest that there will just be one color option available at launch. White is the only color indicated in recent leaks, though we may see different colors later, as Apple has done with previous iPhone releases. It all comes together to create a device that fits in your pocket for everyday use and transforms into something resembling a small tablet when opened. The outer screen is ideal for fast peeks and calls without having to unfold the entire device, while the inner screen is far more comfortable for long-term tasks. [Source]
Apple is holding a lot of secrets this year, and it’s about to share some of them with us. But what will today’s surprises bring?
The keynote address at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference starts at 10 a.m. PT today at Apple Park in Cupertino, California. We’ll get a glimpse of Apple’s upcoming features and software updates, like previews of iOS and WatchOS, but likely won’t see any new hardware, like Apple’s rumored foldable iPhone, yet.
For now, WWDC 2026 is all about Apple’s software features and AI developments. And everything is still a big mystery. But that makes it fun to speculate about what might be coming.
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To lean into the excitement, the CNET Group is hosting a Big Guessing Game contest across its websites — CNET, Lifehacker, Mashable, PCMag and ZDNET. Three rounds of guessing let you predict what Apple will unveil this year. Each answer you get right earns you one chance in a drawing to win the latest Apple Watch announced in September.
The Big Guessing Game Round 1 was all about Apple’s new software (like iOS, iPadOS, VisionOS, WatchOS and MacOS). Your guesses ahead of June’s WWDC event are in and are outstanding.
Most readers think Apple’s new CEO will speak at WWDC
June’s WWDC keynote is expected to be the last one for Apple CEO Tim Cook before he resigns in September. Whether Apple’s incoming CEO, John Ternus, will speak at the event is still unknown. The vast majority of CNET readers (96%) believe Ternus will speak during Monday’s keynote, while 4% think he won’t.
Here’s some food for thought. Cook was Apple’s chief operating officer before being named CEO. He was less involved with product development and announcements and instead created and refined Apple’s robust supply chain ecosystem, which helped Apple become a trillion-dollar company.
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Ternus is currently Apple’s vice president of hardware engineering, and has been a part of Apple event keynotes before. We’ll have to see if Ternus lands onstage at any point as a presenter, but it’s almost certain that Cook will kick off the event with his usual, low-key “good morning.”
MacOS 27 may not have a nickname this year
CNET readers didn’t come to a consensus on what MacOS 27 will be named, but there are a few guesses that stand out. Since 2013, MacOS has always had a nicknamed based on a California landmark, like Mavericks or Catalina. Prior to that, Apple’s Mac software had big cat names like Cheetah, Jaguar and Puma.
The names readers guessed for the new OS varied, but slightly over 9% believe it could simply be named MacOS 27 without a California nickname this year, which would be a first. Some readers think it could be Redwood (6%), Shasta (4%) and Mammoth (3%). Other names that stand out include Big Bear and Emerald Bay.
Here’s a look at earlier versions. Keep in mind that Apple changed its numbering conventions in 2025 to reflect the year following its release.
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MacOS 26 (2025): Tahoe
MacOS 15 (2024): Sequoia
MacOS 14 (2023): Sonoma
MacOS 13 (2022): Ventura
MacOS 12 (2021): Monterey
MacOS 11 (2020): Big Sur
The frequency of ‘Apple Intelligence’ mentions is a toss-up
Based on guesses from CNET Group readers, the term “Apple Intelligence” could be mentioned anywhere from zero to a billion times during the WWDC keynote on Monday. Even among the reasonable guesses, there was a wide variation.
The median guess, or the middle number of all the guesses, was 26, but the average guess was much higher at 68. (There were some very high guesses.)
We first heard the term Apple Intelligence at WWDC in June 2024, and it began rolling out to iPhones, iPads and Macs in October 2024. Since then, Apple Intelligence has become a buzzword for Apple amid the recent evolution of AI.
Apple Intelligence launched with a few features, including text rewriting, photo cleanup to remove unwanted objects, and notification prioritization. However, AI has advanced significantly since 2024, and Apple is increasingly investing in its evolution.
Recently Apple Intelligence updates to accessibility features were unveiled for hardware: VoiceOver and Magnifier, to describe what’s on your screen. Apple Intelligence now supports natural language, letting you speak like a regular person to control your iPad or iPhone.
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As Apple evolves to embrace AI, we’re likely to hear a lot about Apple Intelligence as it weaves into more OS features, like the overdue Siri update expected to run on Google’s foundational models for Gemini AI. We’ll need to wait to see exactly how much AI dominates Monday’s WWDC keynote.
Watch this: What to Expect From Apple at WWDC 2026 | Tech Today
Readers are certain WatchOS will get an AI health coach
Speaking of AI, most CNET Group readers (89%) believe the next WatchOS upgrade could include an AI health coach, while 11% don’t believe so. WatchOS 26 came with a few fitness upgrades, notably Workout Buddy, which is an AI-powered personal trainer that acts in real time.
Vanessa Hand Orellana, CNET’s lead smartwatch writer, said in her commentary that Workout Buddy could be Apple laying the groundwork for fitness and AI. It’s also a chance for Apple to see what it can do with AI on the smartwatch. Orellana added that an AI-powered coach helps you understand your health data and motivates you to build better habits. So a health coach that focuses on your overall well-being isn’t far-fetched based on what we’ve seen from Apple.
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Could the iOS 27 public beta drop as early as June?
I like that Apple gives us a chance to test out the new software before it’s officially released through its Apple Beta Software Program. But we never know for certain when the official public beta versions will be publicly available until they are.
A surprising number of CNET readers — 53% — think Apple will release the public beta version of iOS 27 this month, while only 17% predict it will come in July. Others think it could come in August (9%) or September (21%).
Even though it was the third-most-popular guess, there is a strong argument for July — the public beta of iOS 26 came out on July 23, 2025, and the public beta of iOS 18 came out on July 15, 2024. We’ll have to see whether Apple follows the same pattern and whether we’ll get any hints on Monday.
Mark your calendars for July 7 for the second round of CNET’s Big Guessing Game, where we’ll focus on Apple devices, like Apple’s beloved iPad and iPhone. Remember, every correct answer gets you closer to a chance at winning the latest Apple Watch in September.
Britain’s banks, telecoms, and weapons-makers have a new shared anxiety: that the AI they increasingly run on is built, owned, and controlled in the United States. A startup barely three years old is betting they will pay to fix it.
Cosine, a UK frontier-AI lab, has assembled a coalition of blue-chip British institutions to co-design Lumen Sovereign, what it bills as Britain’s first sovereign frontier AI model.
The signatories read like a roll-call of the national economy: BT, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest, BAE Systems, Babcock, LSEG, PwC, Thales UK, Leonardo UK, and Telefónica Tech, each signing a memorandum of understanding to help shape the model’s use cases, security requirements, and governance.
The reveal was timed for the opening of London Tech Week, where Prime Minister Keir Starmer set out a more interventionist AI strategy and announced roughly £400mn of new spending on specialist AI chips to expand the country’s computing capacity. Britain’s next AI champions, he said, should “start here, scale here and stay here.”
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The selling point is control. Lumen Sovereign will be trained entirely on Isambard-AI, the Nvidia-powered Bristol supercomputer that ranks among Europe’s most powerful, using compute awarded under the government’s £500mn Sovereign AI programme, which named Cosine in its first cohort in April.
Cosine says the model will carry no dependence on foreign infrastructure at any stage, and can be deployed inside a customer’s own systems, including air-gapped environments with no connection to outside networks.
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That is the crux of the pitch.
For most companies, choosing an AI model is a procurement decision; for a defence contractor, a bank running anti-money-laundering checks, or an operator of critical infrastructure, it is a legal and security one first. Sending classified systems, AML alerts, or clinical data to a server in a US data centre is often simply not allowed.
“Enterprises are increasingly waking up to the risk of being wholly dependent on foreign providers,” said Cosine co-founder and chief executive Alistair Pullen, who argues that vendor lock-in brings “security risk, dependency risk, and cost escalation risks.”
Cosine is an unusual candidate for the job, and a credible one.
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Founded in 2022 by Pullen, Yang Li, and Sam Stenner, the Y Combinator-backed lab has raised just $8mn from investors including Lakestar, yet its coding models have topped independent benchmarks against OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, and DeepSeek for two years running. It supports more than 38 programming languages, among them the COBOL, Fortran, and Ada that still run Britain’s defence systems and financial plumbing, and that most AI tools handle badly.
Lumen Sovereign, it says, will be built from scratch on proprietary datasets spanning more than 30 regulated workflows, rather than fine-tuned from an open-source model, with deployment targeted for the end of 2026.
The coalition partners are blunt about why they are in. “Cosine has offered us a path to a completely UK native and highly customisable AI stack,” said Peter Passaro, director of AI and data at Babcock, pointing to “the very complex defence environments we operate in.”
Priority uses span cybersecurity, KYC and AML investigations, legal document review, and healthcare administration, areas where UK AI adoption has stalled on exactly these security concerns.
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Cosine’s effort is the sharp end of a wider British scramble for AI independence, one that keeps colliding with an awkward fact. The government has poured money into homegrown compute and chip supply, and struck sovereign-infrastructure deals with Nscale and Nvidia, even as flagship US projects such as OpenAI’s Stargate UK have stumbled.
Yet “sovereign” AI in Britain still tends to run on American chips, Isambard-AI among them.
For now, these are memoranda, not contracts, and Lumen Sovereign is still to be built. Training a frontier model from scratch to the assurance standards demanded by defence and finance, and doing it by the end of the year, is a formidable task, and Britain has announced sovereign-AI ambitions before.
What is different this time is the coalition: a row of institutions treating sovereign AI not as a slogan but as a procurement requirement.
We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.
Lepow 16″ Quad Monitor for Laptop: 30-second review
The Lepow 16″ Quad Monitor for Laptop is an innovative multi monitor design that essentially enables you to take the office with you. The four monitor set, stand and backpack is available as a complete system.
The build quality matches that of the TriScreen Pro side panels that I recently reviewed..
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The set also comes with a stand which considering it’s robust construction is surprisingly lightweight, and offers decent stability for the monitors through the test.
The monitors themselves are linked with the Transformer connectors, the same as those used on the TriScreen Pro, and as I found with that monitor setup the same is true here, careful alignment, then a firm press and a wiggle and click to ensure that everything is locked into place.
Once connected, the panels form a solid visual array with a decent of articulation once you discover that theres’s additional flex in the connectors once you pull the two ends apart, once you get that shift in angle you can position them around or above your laptop screen.
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For most of the test, I used the screens with my MacBook Pro M1 Max, and, as with the TriScreen, you need the USBDisplay app to get everything working; without it on the Mac at least, you’ll just see four blank monitors.
The installation process for USBDisplay does require a series of special permissions to be granted under Privacy and Security. Once done, the app lets you change the orientation of the screens via a menu accessible by clicking the icon at the top of your screen.
If you want to rotate a panel from horizontal (landscape) to vertical (portrait), you do it physically by unclipping the monitor and then clipping it back in your intended orientation, and then you can access the app to correct the orientation.
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The screen arrangement is, as ever, configured through the main display settings for the OS, whether Windows or macOS.
In use, having four 16-inch panels arranged around my MacBook Pro was genuinely useful and offered a great way to organise my workspace, allocating an application to each screen. I found that I essentially had five displays: the main MacBook display, then the four mounted above.
While all the displays are identical in size, I used one as the main display, and the others for all other windows and content. The main Laptop screen I left empty for use with any color-critical apps I needed.
The display quality as covered by the benchmarking was good, although the results and specifications highlight the limited resolution, color accuracy and refresh rate; however, in a work environment and for pure productivity, the system, with the solid stand, absolutely makes sense and works exceptionally well.
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Lepow 16″ Quad Monitor for Laptop: Price and availability
The Lepow TriScreen Pro is available now direct from Lepow’s website here, where you can select between triple and quad display systems. At time of review, it’s priced at $769 (down from $819).
You can order the system with a US, UK, AU, JP, EU, and KR plug, depending on where in the world you’re based.
The system includes four 16-inch panels with proprietary connectors, an HDMI cable, a USB-C cable, a power supply, and a carry case.
Each of the four 16-inch panels in the Lepow 16″ Quad Monitor for Laptop are identical, with a thin, lightweight construction that enables them to pack into the supplied backpack and makes everything ultra portable.
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When it comes to the size and weight of each, the monitors weigh 1050g per unit and measure 420 × 360 × 30mm. When the kit arrives, everything is nicely boxed, but it’s worth assembling before use just to check on the construction. I noted that the central monitor really needs to be screwed into the stand using the VESA mounting holes. Otherwise, once the other monitors are attached, it can feel unstable; attaching the monitor fixes this.
That said if you need to transport it in the back pack the monitor really needs to be detached from the stand to avoid it getting damaged, so I found securing it with two of the four screws saved time when disasembling, this is definately something in the design that needs reworking.
Each display is otherwise identical, with a matte IPS panel, a slim profile, and a finish that gives them a premium look, which is reflected in the price. Unlike the large 27-inch display from Lepow that I looked at recently, these are lightweight with a polymer composite build rather than metal, which makes each panel relatively light, which is handy due to their intended portability. The actual construction feels robust, the panels are rigid, and there is no flex when handling them, which is relevant when attaching the Transformer connectors.
The Transformer connectors are a real innovation and allow each monitor to connect seamlessly, and then there are just two cables that are needed to connect to the laptop and power. Each monitor has two USB-C ports: one for the display and the other for power, and it’s up to you which you use to connect to the system.
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The Transformer connectors then carry the data to each of the other monitors without the need for additional cables.
Each monitor in the review kit is identical, and these can be mounted on the lightweight CNC’d aluminium stand. This is incredibly lightweight, a perfect design for a portable system like this, and provides a good, solid base to support the weight of the monitors.
(Image credit: Alastair Jennings)
Once the first monitor is placed in the stand, the others can be clipped on, and, as previously mentioned, screwing the central monitor into the stand ensures absolute stability, this is a bit of a design flaw and not ideal.
It does take a few minutes to assemble and connect, but once done, the setup is solid and essentially lets you set up a larger workspace with plenty of screen real estate in a relatively space-limited location.
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Then at the end of your work session, the breakdown of all the components is relatively quick, and everything, including your laptop, can be neatly packed into the backpack along with the cables and charger. It’s a tight fit, but there is room.
Lepow 16″ Quad Monitor for Laptop: Features
(Image credit: Alastair Jennings)
The Lepow 16″ Quad Monitor is a modular display system that’s been designed to work alongside your laptop to expand on the screen space you have available.
Each monitor features three connection points: one on each side and one on top, so you can configure the system as you want. For instance, you could have four panels in a horizontal row, a vertical stack, a mixed landscape-and-portrait that wraps around your laptop screen, a 2×2 grid, or in a triangle for meets where all participants can see a screen.
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In practice, the configuration I found most useful for day-to-day work had two panels in landscape mode above the laptop screen and one on each side also in landscape mode. I tried portrait, but I think that’s going to take a mind shift on my behalf. This configuration kept a relatively low profile while still providing plenty of screen space.
This meant I could keep my main applications centre focus, with email and music on the side panels, and an additional browser window open at the top. Everything was always visible, and there was never a need to switch between applications as you do when using a single panel.
While PC users are used to this multi-screen display, Mac users often face constraints, and this system requires some initial setup with the USBDisplay App. Once installed however, you’re good to go.
One interesting feature of the monitors is that, as they’re designed for productivity and office work, the aspect ratio is 16:10 rather than the more common 16:9. This just means you have additional screen height for email, document editing, spreadsheets, and web browsing in landscape orientation, and more horizontal width in portrait. This format really does make sense for the intended use.
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Switching between display modes, like turning a screen from horizontal (landscape) to vertical (portrait), has two steps: physically move the panel, then choose the correct option in the USBDisplay menu bar app.
The monitors switch relatively quickly, and the other part is to change the monitor arrangement in the operating system’s display settings. This takes only a few seconds and is easy after a couple of goes. The USBDisplay app is extremely simple and one of those single-screen support programs that runs in the background until you need it, when it can be accessed from the menu bar.
While the system is designed for multiple monitors, the modular approach means you can use one, two, three or all four even on a Mac.
If you need however, each panel can operate as an independent USB display with its own power and data connections, so if you want to travel with just one additional monitor for your laptop, then you can.
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Lepow 16″ Quad Monitor for Laptop: Performance
(Image credit: Alastair Jennings)
Benchmark scores
Spyder X2 Calibration Results
Gamut: 5.0/5 Tone Response: 4.5/5 White Point: 2.5/5 | Measured 7200–7500K Contrast: 5.0/5 | Peak 1700:1 at 25% brightness Luminance Uniformity: 2.5/5 Color Uniformity: 4.5/5 Color Accuracy: 3.5/5 Overall Rating: 4.0/5 Peak brightness (measured): 333.2 nits at 100%
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Through this test, I was surprised by just how portable these monitors were, and while the supplied backpack was quite plain and uninspiring, it was perfectly sized to hold all four panels, with seperate sections for each, as well as a large cavity for the stand, and still room to squeeze in my 16-inch MacBook Pro.
The backpack was a little weighty, but no more than my usual work camera backpack, and perfectly acceptable for daily use on a commute from home to the studio/office or another location.
Over the test period, I varied the setup I took with me, and early on, screwed one of the panels onto the stand to make a secure base for any other monitor combination I would take.
The stand, while simple, is perfectly designed, with the three sections folding down securely so it essentially packs down nearly flat. Each section can be angled up to the position you need, and large push-button releases and locks the angle.
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Through the test, I found that my most common configuration was to have two landscape panels above the laptop, one landscape panel on each side, which gave five visible screens, and I assigned a specific application to each.
As an example, email on one, 3D printer monitoring on another, music and media controls on a third, server monitoring on the fourth, and the main laptop screen reserved for primary work.
The fact that the four monitors are identical makes them extremely easy to work with, and they essentially match the one on the MacBook Pro, at least in size.
Initially, it took a while to figure out the best configuration, but once settled on the monitor positioning it was then time to install the USBDisplay software. Locating the software wasn’t straightforward, and finding the correct page, which didn’t seem to be linked from any page on the manual or website, took time. You can use this link on the official site, and scroll down to the firmware section.
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Once this software is installed, everything else is straightforward: the monitors will flicker to life, ready to be oriented using the USBDisplay app and arranged in the system display settings.
Out of the box, the calibration is OK and perfectly adequate for productivity. If you do want to match them to the MacBook Pro monitor, then a calibration device is needed. Just as a matter of course for the test, I used the Spyder X2 Ultra to calibrate and analyse the displays.
During calibration, it showed that despite the relative limitations of the panels, they still scored 5/5 for Gamut and Contrast, with a Tone Response of 4.5/5, which is impressive.
White Point, however, was quite low at 2.5/5, out of the box, with a measured reading of 7200–7500K, but it improved after calibration as the monitors are set to a yellowish warm by default. More notable was the Luminance Uniformity, which also scored 2.5/5, with brightness differences across the panels. I tested each, and each was slightly different, though in all cases you’d be hard-pressed to notice it visually. Really, this would only be an issue for photographers and videographers.
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As the initial benchmarks showed, the panels arrive with a slight warm tint before calibration, which is easily corrected via the OSD. Running the Spyder X2 calibration across all four panels individually takes around an hour, but it brings them closer in representation to each other and to the MacBook Pro screen. For productivity applications, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, this really isn’t an issue, however this is something to note for color-sensitive work.
As these monitors are designed to be portable and will more than likely be used away from ideal office conditions, brightness is an important feature. Here, the benchmarking measured 333.2 nits at 100% against a claimed 300 nits.
In a studio or office environment at 50–75% brightness, the panels are a decent brightness, and in normal ambient light, there is no visibility issue. The 1920×1200 resolution is a bit of a limitation, and comparing these panels directly to the MacBook Pro display makes the difference apparent, but in use with Word and Excel rather than being used for creative displays, it is absolutely fine.
On Windows, the setup is considerably more straightforward than on Mac. Install the driver once you find it, again link above, connect the panels, and Windows handles the rest without prompting for permissions. Switching between Mac and PC required only swapping the USB-C and power cables with no reconfiguration of the panels.
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Lepow 16″ Quad Monitor for Laptop: Final verdict
(Image credit: Alastair Jennings)
The Lepow Lepow 16″ Quad Monitor for Laptop is a great choice if you’re looking for a lightweight multi-screen solution that is ultra-portable. The way they all connect is innovative, and once you figure out how you like to position them, they really do become a very slick display option.
These are, however, designed for productivity rather than creative use and gaming, and with the limitation of 1920×1200 resolution at 60Hz and limited color depth, those specifications lack for the creative or game sector, however, they are ideal for productivity. However, as an addition to a MacBook Pro or ASUS ProArt monitor, there’s no arguing just how useful the multi-display system is, we all have to write emails, and do you really need an Adobe RGB class monitor for your music library?
What I also liked was that, because of the modular design, you can take one, two, three, or all four, and that choice is fully up to you. That flexibility makes them extremely useful.
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Over a month of testing, I initially started taking the system with me as part of the test, but relatively quickly, the use alongside the MacBook and Netgear M7 made a powerful onsite solution giving plenty of space for documents and other media, and then the fact that it all packs into a handy backpack just made it ultra convenient.
It is a shame that the resolution is limited, and while the panels are 100% sRGB, which is fine for productivity for photographers and videographers, the fact that the minimum DCI-P3 requirement is not met and is way off the ideal of Adobe RGB accuracy means that most creative users will find them slightly limited on the creative front.
These modular monitors however seem perfectly suited for developers, business users, remote workers, or content creators who need multiple screens for productivity, monitoring, and organisation, rather than for color grading. The Lepow 16″ Quad Monitor is excellent and offers something that few other products at this price can match.
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Should I buy the Lepow 16″ Quad Monitor for Laptop?
(Image credit: Alastair Jennings)
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Value
Four 16-inch modular panels, a metal CNC stand, and a carry backpack for $893. Decent value for a portable quad-screen system.
4
Design
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The composite polymer build is a step below the TriScreen Pro’s CNC aluminium, but it feels robust and perfectly suited for portable use.
4
Features
Fully modular quad-screen configuration with 16:10 panels, 360° orientation options, and a versatile meeting mode
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4
Performance
The results say it all with a Rating of 4.0/5. 333.2 nits measured vs 400 nit claim. White-point mismatch before calibration, meaning they’re essentially excellent for productivity but not suitable for color-critical work.
3.5
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Overall
A genuinely portable modular quad-screen system that offers flexible configurations for wherever you work.
The stream will last for about 50 minutes, followed by a deep dive into gameplay.
Kamil Switalski/Unsplash
It’s been a busy, busy week in the world of video games. PlayStation and Xbox both held showcases amid the maelstrom of Summer Game Fest. Nintendo isn’t going to stand by and be left out of the party this time, though. Via its Nintendo Today app, the company announced a Nintendo Direct stream for June 9. It’ll start at 10AM ET and you can watch it on YouTube or below.
The Direct will run for about 50 minutes and feature games for both Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. Afterwards, we’ll slide into a Nintendo Treehouse stream, which will last for about 95 minutes and feature gameplay from several games shown during the Direct.
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Nintendo currently has Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave and an exclusive FromSoftware game, The Duskbloods, on its slate for the remainder of 2026. Perhaps we’ll get release dates for those.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Zelda series, so maybe we’ll get some news on the franchise during this Direct too (such as another look at the upcoming movie). For what it’s worth, rumors have suggested a remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is in the works.
Retro gaming finds often arrive with layers of dust and stories. This Spider-Man plug-and-play TV game from Jakks Pacific, released in 2004, fits that pattern perfectly. James Channel recently pulled one from an online marketplace and gave it the full treatment: cleaning, testing every mode, and opening it up to see what made it tick. The result shows a licensed product that leaned hard into its character theme while delivering the kind of simple, self-contained entertainment common in that era.
When you take the unit out of the box, you can tell it has a distinct personality because Spider-Man’s masked visage stares at you from the front. The lower half of the device is an interesting blue with white eyes, while a long red joystick rises from the machine’s core, surrounded by a black web pattern. AV connections protrude from the back, connecting to any standard television, and a little white button sits at the top of the stick.
POSABLE SUPER HERO – Scale up the action with the highly articulated LEGO Marvel Spider-Man Hero Figure (76346) building toy for boys and girls ages…
COLLECTIBLE LEGO FIGURE – Capture the appearance of the web slinging hero as portrayed in the Spider-Man: Brand New Day movie
PLAY AND DISPLAY – Whether used for pretend play action or arranged on display, kids can position and pose the dynamic Super Hero and his…
Used accessories like this may eventually show signs of wear and tear, as battery leaks have been known to create corrosion, and unless you want to go through the cleaning procedure, you’ll have to fix it before the machine will start correctly. Even when it has been cleaned up, it reverts to a plain interface with only five built-in games and a high score list. There are no cartridges or memory cards needed; simply enter the device, turn on the power, and you’ll be ready to play.
The first game drops you into the streets and rooftops of a city as Spider-Man, and it’s a dead simple platformer in which you simply run, leap, and grab items while avoiding the traps that lay around every corner. The other modes are a touch more varied, with an on-rails shooter in a training facility, a time-sensitive battle against Venom, a sewer maze through which you must navigate all of the hazards, and an aerial shooter against the Vulture’s minions.
Controls are basically made up of the stick and the button at its end. Movement appears to be pretty direct for standard left, right, up, and down movements, but when you try to get crazy with diagonal inputs, the stick can become a little challenging. The rubber touch pads beneath have become hard over time, and the top button controls web shots or attacks depending on the game. There are also some more buttons on the base that let you to jump and perform other things, but some units can become loose with time, and the buttons can pop out in mid-game. Additionally, the spring inside the stick can wear down, making accurate swings or dodges more of a chance than a talent.
Inside the case, the build speaks for itself: you’re staring at a big integrated circuit attempting to manage everything, graphics, sound, processor, and memory, and it’s not up to the task. The game data is contained on a little flash ROM chip, and the PCB contains a few other supporting components and jumpers that allow you to toggle between PAL and NTSC countries. The problem is that the soldering and component quality all hint to a gadget designed to be inexpensive, since it works well for a time but isn’t made to last. Swapping the crystal might help get the video working, but that’s about all.
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