• More than 2,500 organizations, including Cisco, Samsung, AWS, Airbus U.S. Space & Defense, Thales, and the London Stock Exchange Group, have credentials harvested during a supply-chain attack on LiteLLM
• LiteLLM was not directly hacked by the hacking group TeamPCP, which found their way in thanks to a compromised build of an open-source security scanner
• Some of the credentials still work, nearly five months after the original breach, indicating that there is still a persistent security risk until they are changed

Security firms CloudSEK and Hudson Rock have claimed more than 2,500 organizations have had credentials harvested in a supply-chain attack on LiteLLM.

LiteLLM, an open source gateway which translates API calls for over 100 large language models into a single OpenAI-compatible format, was not directly compromised in the attack, as hackers targeted a known vulnerability in Aqua Security’s Trivy.

I used the M1 MacBook Air as my primary laptop for nearly four years. During that time, I used it for everything from drafting news stories to editing photos for reviews, working from flights to weekend workcations. And if there was one thing that earned more compliments than the slim chassis and overall design, it was the speakers.

Whether I am watching an Apple keynote on YouTube, a stand-up comedy special in my room, a movie with a couple of friends on a workcation, or simply hearing the charging chime and notification sounds, the M1 MacBook Air always sounded remarkably clear and surprisingly loud. Be it the ghosts screaming in The Conjuring, the web-swinging sounds during an intense Spider-Man action sequence, or Chandler’s one-liners from Friends, it never really sounded like audio coming from a laptop.

That changed when my M1 MacBook Air suddenly refused to turn on in June 2026, forcing me to buy the 13-inch M5 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Everything about the M5 MacBook Air feels like an upgrade, as it should, considering it’s five generations newer, except the speakers.

The four-speaker “upgrade” that sounds worse than two

On paper, the M5 MacBook Air should sound better. It replaces the M1’s two-speaker setup with a four-speaker system. In practice, though, it doesn’t sound as loud or as rich as the M1 MacBook Air. 

What you actually get instead is a thin, almost hollow midrange, a shrill emphasis on high frequencies, and minimal low-end presence, the kind of sound signature that makes dialogue clear but leaves music and movies feeling flat and lifeless. There’s no fullness to it, no weight behind a bassline or an explosion, just treble doing all the heavy lifting.

I noticed it almost immediately. During setup, I heard a couple of audio cues and instinctively tried to turn up the volume, only to realize it was already maxed out. A few days later, a friend who had always complimented the M1 MacBook Air’s speakers asked a simple question: “What’s wrong with the speakers?” I told her what I thought might be happening.

What’s happening here?

The M1 MacBook Air had two upward-firing speakers, so the sound reached your ears directly. On the newer Air, Apple hides the speaker system inside the hinge, meaning the sound reflects off the display before reaching you. 

That likely contributes to the difference; bouncing sound off a fixed surface instead of firing it directly at you tends to scatter the low frequencies first, which would explain exactly why the bass disappears while the treble stays sharp, even shrill, in comparison.

Sitting across the table, she also felt the speakers didn’t project as well. To make sure it wasn’t just my ears playing tricks on me, I compared my M5 MacBook Air side by side with a friend’s M1 MacBook Air, and the difference was immediately obvious. The M5 sounded clear, but the M1 was noticeably louder and fuller, the kind that you’d want to use to play music in a room.

As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one hearing it. Digging through Reddit, I found several people who’d reached the same conclusion after comparing the two machines side by side. One user on r/macbook, who claims to own four MacBooks, writes that the “M1 actually sounds the loudest of them all.”

Others say the M5 MacBook Air’s speakers sound cleaner, while another user describes them as being “too much optimized for normal speech/dialogue clarity.” That lines up almost perfectly with my experience. Voices sound crisp, but there’s noticeably less low-end punch.

What’s missing is the loudness and richness that made the M1 MacBook Air’s speakers so impressive at full volume.

Can software actually fix this? 

Since the hardware itself isn’t changing, I spent some time seeing whether macOS could compensate for any of that missing warmth and fullness through software, and two built-in tools are worth knowing about, both tucked inside the Music app.

The Equalizer, found in the taskbar under Window > Equalizer, lets you manually boost or cut specific frequency bands, and it includes a Preamp slider at the top that governs overall output level before the individual bands even kick in. Nudging the Preamp up genuinely makes the M5’s speakers sound louder, and pairing that with a boost to the lower-frequency sliders helps mask some of that missing bass presence. 

However, if you push the Preamp too far, especially combined with an already maxed system volume, you’ll start hearing audible distortion and clipping, a crackly, strained quality that’s arguably worse than just accepting the speakers’ limitations. 

The second tool, Sound Enhancer, lives under Music > Settings > Playback, and it works completely differently from the Equalizer. Rather than adjusting specific frequencies, it widens the perceived soundstage by subtly altering how bass and treble are processed together. Basically, it tricks your ears into hearing a broader, more spacious soundstage than two closely spaced hinge-mounted speakers can naturally produce. 

Turning it on made a noticeable difference for me; music felt less pinched and centered. It won’t add bass weight the way boosting the Equalizer’s low end does, but it meaningfully improves how “big” the sound feels. Between the two, I’d start with Sound Enhancer for everyday listening, then layer in a modest Preamp and bass boost through the Equalizer. 

Just don’t expect either one to fully replace what the M1’s upward-firing speakers did for free.

Is it actually a dealbreaker?

No. Most people probably won’t notice the difference, especially if they’re coming from an older Windows laptop or an entry-level notebook. But if you’re upgrading from an M1 MacBook Air, the difference is surprisingly easy to notice. And once you hear it, it’s hard to ignore.

This is more of a PSA feature. The M5 MacBook Air offers a generational performance upgrade, but while the screen experience is only marginally better, the speakers are a noticeable downgrade. If you’re going with the 15-inch M5 MacBook Air, however, that offers a better six-speaker system. And if upward-firing speakers are a must-have, you’ll need to step up to one of Apple’s MacBook Pro models.

The new council will provide independent expert advice to the Government on developing the semiconductor sector.

Ireland is establishing a new advisory council to help align the country’s chip sector with its national strategy, as advancements in AI place unprecedented pressure on the semiconductor industry.

The new council is set up to provide independent expert advice to the Government on developing the sector, and help shape policies that strengthen the industry’s competitiveness on a global scale.

Among its various roles, the council will monitor the implementation of Silicon Island, Ireland’s national strategy aimed at attracting large investments for semiconductor development that is expected to create thousands of high-value jobs.

At the time of the strategy’s launch, the Government believed Ireland could support up to 34,500 new semiconductor roles by 2040.

The newly established council will also advise the Department of Enterprise on developments affecting the semiconductor sector, support collaboration and co-ordination across Government, enterprise agencies, industry and research organisations, and advise on Ireland’s engagement with European semiconductor policy, including the European Chips Act.

The Advisory Council on the Semiconductor Sector – set up to run for three years – is chaired by Intel’s former senior vice-president Dr Ann Kelleher and also includes Mike Morrissey, a senior director at Analog Devices; Qualcomm senior executive Colin Ryan; and Equal1 CEO Jason Lynch, among others.

The advisors are expected to utilise their industry expertise to identify emerging opportunities, challenges and risks affecting the sector, and provide strategic recommendations to support the continued growth and competitiveness of Ireland’s semiconductor ecosystem.

“The [semiconductor] sector is strategically important to Ireland’s economic future, and the council’s expertise will help guide the next phase of growth, innovation and international competitiveness,” said Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment Peter Burke, TD.

“By bringing together leaders from industry, research and investment, we are creating a strong platform to support collaboration, inform policy and ensure Ireland is well positioned to seize emerging opportunities in this rapidly evolving sector.”

Here’s who will sit on the new advisory council:

Ann Kelleher

Dr Kelleher is the former senior vice-president of technology development at Intel. During her 30-year career at the company, she has held senior engineering and leadership roles across its Irish and international operations, including taking charge of the company’s global technology development programmes and advanced semiconductor process technologies.

“Ireland has built world-class capabilities in semiconductors over many decades. I look forward to working with council members and stakeholders across industry, academia and Government to help deliver the ambitions of Silicon Island and further strengthen Ireland’s position within the global semiconductor ecosystem,” Kelleher said.

Mike Morrissey

Morrissey is the senior director of ADI Catalyst at Analog Devices, a collaboration hub for client companies looking to commercialise faster and optimise their revenue generation.

Ruth Cotter

Cotter is a senior vice-president and the chief administrative officer at US chips giant AMD, leading the company’s integrated, enterprise-wide corporate operations.

She has led major acquisitions for the company – including that of Xilinx, the largest semiconductor transaction of its time – and continues to play a key role in company-wide transformation initiatives, according to AMD.

Colin Ryan

Ryan is the executive vice-president and chief strategy and corporate development officer at Qualcomm. In this role, he explores strategies that drive business expansion, and manages mergers and acquisitions as well as the investments Qualcomm makes.

Conor Ryan

Ryan has spent more than 30 years at Applied Materials, across executive positions leading sites around the world. In his current role, he heads applied global services at the company as its group vice-president.

Seán Mitchell

Mitchell is the chairperson and chief commercial officer at Ubotica Technologies, the Irish space-tech building an AI-powered platform used in maritime security. Its technology has been deployed in more than 30 Earth observation models so far and run “hundreds of thousands” of AI inferences in orbit, according to the company.

The company recently raised $11m in a funding round led by Act Venture Capital and Greencode Ventures, with participation from existing investor Atlantic Bridge.

Jason Lynch

Lynch is the CEO of Dublin-based quantum start-up Equal1, the maker behind Bell-1 – the first-ever Irish-made quantum computer and, according to the company, the world’s first silicon-based quantum server designed for data centres and high-performance computing.

Prior to this, Lynch led strategy, venture creation and commercial execution for new growth opportunities at Analog Devices.

Elaine Coughlan

Coughlan is a founder and managing partner at Atlantic Bridge and has 30 years of experience in industry as a founder, executive and investor scaling technology companies. She was previously on the board of Enterprise Ireland and was appointed to British Patient Capital’s £800m Future Fund Breakthrough in 2022.

Leonard Hobbs

Hobbs is the government liaison at MIDAS, the Irish industry association for microelectronics and electronic systems design. He has 25 years of experience at Intel, and previously served as director for research and innovation at Trinity College Dublin.

Denis Doyle

Dr Doyle is the chairperson of Tyndall National Institute and a board member at IDA Ireland. He was formerly a vice-president and general manager at Analog Devices.

Earlier this year, Tyndall launched a new five-year strategy aimed at helping develop Ireland’s semiconductor capabilities.

Ronan Farrell

Farrell is currently the vice-president of academic and registrar functions and a professor in the department of electronic engineering at Maynooth University.

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PA-RISC emulation matters for data center modernization because it allows enterprises to decouple mission-critical HP-UX and MPE/iX applications from end-of-life physical hardware, enabling immediate migration to modern x86 servers or cloud infrastructure with zero code changes and minimal operational risk.

Quick Take

The PA-RISC Dilemma in the Modern Data Center

Developed in the 1980s and widely deployed through the 2000s, Hewlett-Packard’s Precision Architecture RISC architecture was a cornerstone of enterprise computing. Powered by the proprietary PA-RISC processor family—including 32-bit and 64-bit CPU designs such as the PA-7000 and PA-8000 series—these systems were engineered for high-availability database management, manufacturing execution, financial clearing, and enterprise resource planning. These environments ran either HP-UX or MPE/iX, operating systems custom-tailored to the underlying silicon.

However, HP officially phased out sales of PA-RISC systems in 2008 and ceased technical support around 2013 as the industry shifted toward Itanium and standard x86-64 server architectures. Today, organizations maintaining physical PA-RISC footprint in their data centers face several compound operational risks:

• Component Scarcity and System Failure: Physical board-level components—including power supplies, bus backplanes, memory modules, and specialized SCSI host bus adapters (such as LSI 53C8xx controllers)—are no longer manufactured. Maintenance teams are forced to rely on secondary, refurbished markets with uncertain reliability.
• Unplanned Downtime and Slow Recovery: Thermal degradation in aging silicon and mechanical drive failures increase the frequency of system outages. Without vendor patch support or hot-swappable replacement chassis, MTTR (Mean Time to Repair) stretches from hours into days.
• Data Center Resource Drain: Legacy multi-cabinet rack units occupy extensive floor space and draw disproportionate amounts of power. In an era where modern facilities prioritize data center power efficiency, maintaining kilowatt-heavy legacy cabinets strains utility budgets and air-handling units.
• Security and Compliance Gaps: Outdated hardware platforms cannot host modern encryption modules, automated compliance audit agents, or enterprise security monitoring tools required under PCI-DSS, HIPAA, or ISO 27001 standard frameworks.
• Loss of Institutional Knowledge: System administrators and hardware technicians skilled in vintage enterprise Unix systems and MPE console debugging are retiring, leaving organizations without in-house emergency support.

How PA-RISC Emulation Works Under the Hood

Hardware emulation bridges the gap between obsolete physical systems and modern infrastructure by changing the physical layer beneath the operating system rather than altering the software application. Implementing enterprise-grade PA-RISC emulation creates an instruction translation layer that presents a virtualized PA-RISC hardware platform directly to the guest operating system.

According to digital preservation research, virtualizing or emulating technical platforms allows organizations to preserve exact binary operational behavior while isolating applications from physical hardware decay. The emulation software layer handles instruction translation and hardware mapping through three primary subsystems:

1. Dynamic CPU Instruction Translation: The emulator intercepts guest PA-RISC machine instructions (PA-1.1 or PA-2.0 execution calls) and dynamically translates them into equivalent x86-64 instruction sequences executed by modern Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC processors.
2. Memory and Endianness Management: PA-RISC uses big-endian byte ordering, whereas modern x86 CPUs operate on little-endian architecture. The software emulation layer continuously translates memory references, registers, and memory management unit (MMU) address mappings transparently.
3. Virtual I/O and Peripheral Mapping: Physical disk arrays, tape drives, network interface cards, and serial controllers are mapped to virtual abstractions. For example, legacy SCSI storage controllers are mapped to virtual disk files residing on fast NVMe SAN arrays or enterprise cloud storage.

Because the emulation layer presents an identical virtual hardware abstraction to the operating system, the installed copy of HP-UX 11i or MPE/iX 7.5 booted within the emulator cannot distinguish the software environment from a physical server. The original kernel binaries, custom application code, databases, and configuration files remain completely untouched.

Core Benefits of PA-RISC Emulation for Modernization

When planning comprehensive data center modernization strategies, IT leadership must weigh speed, cost, and risk. Emulation provides a pragmatic middle path between maintaining fragile legacy hardware and executing high-risk application rewrites.

1. Rapid Infrastructure Consolidation

Emulation allows multiple multi-U physical server towers or heavy cabinet units (such as HP 9000 N4000 series or HP 3000 systems) to be virtualized onto standard 1U/2U rack servers or virtual instances. This physical consolidation frees up valuable data center floor space and enables integration into existing VMware, KVM, or bare-metal Linux host environments.

2. Slashed Energy and Cooling Overheads

Moving workloads from vintage multi-socket PA-RISC servers to dense x86 host hardware drastically lowers power consumption per computing cycle. Heat output decreases in tandem, reducing the load on data center HVAC systems and aligning IT operations with corporate sustainability mandates.

3. Zero Application Rewriting or Retraining

Full software refactoring or re-platforming projects routinely run over budget and take months or years to execute. Emulation executes existing binary code in place. end-users interact with identical application interfaces, workflow commands, and batch processes, eliminating the need for workforce retraining or operational process redesign.

4. Integration with Enterprise Disaster Recovery

Physical legacy servers often lack modern backup capabilities, relying on aging physical tape drives or manual image dumps. Once hosted in an emulated environment, guest operating systems gain immediate access to modern infrastructure tools: live VM snapshots, automated SAN replication, rapid recovery points, and cloud backup vaults.

5. Performance Upgrades via Modern Silicon

While dynamic instruction translation incurs software overhead, the sheer raw speed, higher cache capacity, and elevated clock rates of contemporary x86 CPUs mean emulated workloads often execute faster than they did on 20-year-old physical silicon.

6. Flexible Cloud Deployment Pathways

Modern emulation solutions are not limited to on-premises data centers. As documented in AWS Marketplace documentation for Charon-PAR, emulated PA-RISC platforms can run directly on cloud virtual instances (such as Amazon EC2 running enterprise Linux). This enables hybrid cloud integration without modifying core legacy software stacks.

Evaluating the Strategic Alternatives

Before committing to an implementation pathway, enterprise architects should contrast emulation against alternative legacy system migration strategies. A detailed comparison highlights the distinct trade-offs inherent in each approach:

Technical Trade-offs, Limitations, and Failure Modes

While emulation resolves immediate hardware exposure, engineering teams must evaluate specific technical edge cases during project planning. According to a detailed legacy hardware emulation analysis, understanding host dependencies is vital for a smooth transition.

• Proprietary Physical Interfacing: If the original PA-RISC server relies on specialized physical expansion cards—such as proprietary serial interface boards or custom non-standard PCI cards—those hardware devices cannot be physically plugged into modern x86 servers. The solution requires converting those hardware channels into network-attached serial gateways or IP-based emulated protocols.
• Host Sizing and CPU Core Oversubscription: Emulation relies on dedicated CPU resources for dynamic translation. Oversubscribing host CPU cores on hypervisors running heavy concurrent workloads can cause timing latency or degraded I/O throughput in the emulated guest OS. Dedicated CPU pinning or bare-metal host reservation is recommended.
• Storage Queue and Latency Tuning: Mapping virtual SCSI disks to modern storage requires proper host OS queue depth configuration. If disk image files reside on poorly configured network storage, asynchronous write spikes in HP-UX databases can trigger temporary disk wait timeouts inside the guest kernel.
• Vendor Licensing Constraints: While the application code remains unchanged, certain third-party software products running inside HP-UX bind their licenses to CPU serial numbers or specific hardware machine IDs. Engineers must audit application licensing mechanisms to ensure smooth re-licensing on virtualized hardware calls.

Understanding these virtualization and emulation techniques enables infrastructure teams to conduct pre-migration host sizing tests, mitigating latency issues before production cutover.

Key Takeaways

Frequently Asked Questions

Hisense has launched the first dehumidifier to support Matter, making it a perfect summer combo with Apple Home for easy control, Siri support, and automations.

We got the first look at the Hisense Matter dehumidifier at CES 2026, and a few months later, it’s shipping to users.

With a fair price tag and Apple Home support, it’s poised to be a great solution for those swampy summer months. I’ve been testing it out for the last several weeks, and it’s done wonders to make my home more comfortable.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: TopLift design

Essential home appliances like humidifiers and dehumidifiers seem like one of those categories that struggle to look good. No matter how good they are, I think they all look utilitarian.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Recessed pocket handles on either side to make lifting and moving a breeze

Hisense didn’t make an ugly dehumidifier by any means, but I wouldn’t say that it looks good either. It’s a compact rectangular box that is a bit more clean-looking than the bulk on the market.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Optional casters to move it around

There are a lot of nice functional touches built into that design. For example, hidden pocket handle grips are tucked into each of the device’s narrow ends, and optional casters on the underside allow it to move around easily.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Washable air filter

A large air intake is on one side, which draws the air through a filter. This filter can be removed and cleaned and doesn’t need to be replaced, which I appreciate to reduce long-term running costs.

Inarguably, the best part about the physical design is the top-lift water reservoir. It’s a 50L/18 pint container to hold the water it extracts from your environment.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Water reservoir

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You don’t see this often with dehumidifiers because it can be more expensive. Normally, the buckets are on the bottom and have to slide out, which undeniably results in spills.

I have two others in the home that are emptied this way, and every time I try to pull the containers out, the water jostles and splashes out. It’s basically unavoidable.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Retracting handle to remove water bucket

The Hisense model has a hidden handle on the top, and as you lift, the handle extends. You lift it, without bending over, and take it anywhere you’d like to empty it — a sink, outdoors, or your plants.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Hidden connector for water pump output hose

The reason you don’t usually have water reservoirs on top is that it requires a pump to push the water up, versus pulling it from the air and letting it drain naturally to the bottom. A bonus to requiring this water pump is that you can also connect the included hose and run it directly to a raised sink or bucket nearby.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Top-down view of the dehumidifier

Otherwise, it looks like a humidifier or dehumidifier. All white, simple controls on top, target humidity indicator, and plenty of air vents around the body.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Save spaces & live comfortably

Regardless of the design, the device has to work well, and in my testing, especially over the last few weeks, this does. It has pulled an incredible amount of water out of the exceptionally humid air.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Humidity target level display and water full indicator

In the early parts of summer in Ohio, the air is heavy. We have a lot of rain this time of year, and it makes you feel sticky.

Even with AC, the humidity still makes you feel overly hot. Not to mention, high humidity can promote mold growth and other issues in different parts of your home.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Hisense logo on the front of the dehumidifier

That’s why we’ve been running dehumidifiers in our home the last several years to make it more comfortable as the summers have gotten more brutal, and they have. This one has been the best we’ve used, between the more comfortable bucket design, performance, and connectivity.

When it is running at full speed, the water reservoir can manage to fill up the container in just about 3/4 of a day. That does mean you will be emptying this at least every day if you’re in a very humid area.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Emptying water into the garden

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Hisense says it is rated for rooms of up to 4,500 square feet, so medium to large rooms. We keep it in the combined living room-dining room-kitchen area, and it’s sufficient to get the job done.

I will say it’s also very simple to drain. When we go to water our plants with the water (I know there is debate if this is good or not, but we do it and our plants seem happy), it pours out of the spout on the side with good control and only dumps where we aim it.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Matter opens doors

For the Hisense TopLift functionality alone, I’d recommend this dehumidifier right now. There’s nothing to dislike about it.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Apple Home control via Matter

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What makes it even better, though, and I think will sell it for a lot of smart home users, is Matter support. It supports Matter-over-Wi-Fi and has a very quick setup process.

Like any Apple Home accessory, I scan the pairing code on the side of the unit, and it is added to the Apple Home app. It automatically adds the Wi-Fi credentials, gives it a name, and assigns it a room in your home.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Settings in Apple Home with suggested automations

Matter makes it compatible not just with Apple Home, but Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings, and more. You can even use multiple of these platforms at the same time.

That means you could control it through your Alexa speakers, while also using the Apple Home app and Siri. I had no issues with the multi-admin support in my testing using Samsung SmartThings side-by-side with Apple Home.

All that said, the full implementation is a bit bare-bones. It shows as a dehumidifier in the Home app, with control for the fan and its speed.

There are no indicators or alerts for the water level being full or real-time room humidity. Just on and off, as well as fan speed in 10% intervals that can be adjusted.

That’s not all bad, though. For example, if you already have a humidity sensor in your room or home, there’s no need for an extra one to be jammed in here.

Plus, if you have one already in the home, you can use it all year long and not just the times of year you are relying on a dehumidifier. You may have one built into your thermostat, a dedicated environmental sensor, or even Apple’s HomePod and HomePod mini.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Creating an automation in Apple Home

You could use these combined with your occupancy and time of day for various automations. For example, you could lower the fan speed as part of your “goodnight” scene so it’s quieter as you sleep, turn it off when you leave the house and resume when you come back home, or turn on and off based on a room’s humidity level.

I set up several of those automations and have had no issues. Once set up, it’s been online, responsive, and always reacts with my preset scenes or automations.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Great start for

The last dehumidifier I bought lacked any smart controls and cost around $300. This new Hisense model retails for $200, has a built-in water pump, and supports Matter.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Top-lift bucket is easy to move and empty

It is exactly what I’ve been looking for. I’d like to have a water level alert within Apple Home instead of just a light on top, and the water reservoir could be slightly larger, but it is otherwise exceptional.

Hisense did excellent work with this, and I hope to see more dehumidifiers launch with Matter. So far there was maybe one or two Apple Home certified models, but the market has otherwise been bare.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Clean, compact design

If you live anywhere with high humidity and want good smart home control, this is the model you should check out.

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Pros

• Compact design
• Easy placement with TopLift water collector, handles, & casters
• Multiple water output locations
• Reliable Matter-over-Wi-Fi support
• Can be automated using existing accessories
• Runs quiet at night
• Washable filter

Hisense TopLift dehumidifier review: Cons

• No water indicator exposed via Matter
• Water reservoir could be slightly larger

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Where to buy the Hisense TopLift dehumidifier

If you’re interested in the Matter-enabled Hisense dehumidifier, it is currently launching at Costco, where members can buy it for $199.

Hailed as being Sennheiser’s most “advanced true wireless earbuds yet”, what’s new with the Momentum True Wireless 5 compared to 2024’s True Wireless 4 pair?

Considering the Momentum True Wireless 4 has a five-star rating and spot on our coveted best noise-cancelling earbuds list, is it worth upgrading to the new pair? Or is last year’s option still perfectly sufficient for most users?

Ahead of our Momentum True Wireless 5 review, we’ve compared its specs to the Momentum True Wireless 4 and noted the key updates below.

Price and Availability

The Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 5 buds will launch officially on September 3rd, and come in a choice between five colours: Graphite, Cream, Copper, Denim and Lavender. The buds will have a MSRP of £249.99/$299.95.

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Naturally as it’s over two years old, the Moment True Wireless 4 has a slightly cheaper RRP of £229.99. Having said that, we have seen the buds drop in price over the past year. The buds also come in a choice between four colours including Black Graphite, White Silver, Black Copper and Gold.

Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 5’s ANC has been redesigned

We praised the Momentum True Wireless 4 buds’ ANC as excellent, with the amount of noise suppressed being genuinely impressive. So, how do the True Wireless 5 buds look set to compare?

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According to Sennheiser, the buds sport a revised adaptive hybrid active noise cancellation system and an automatic anti-wind mode too. The latter is especially noteworthy as, although the True Wireless 4 buds’ Anti-Wind mode does a good job of getting rid of blustery wind conditions, it comes at the expense of a stronger noise-cancelling performance. With this in mind, we hope the True Wireless 5 manages to bridge the gap between stopping wind coming through while maintaining solid noise-cancelling.

In addition, the 5s sport a dedicated four-microphone array to both maximise noise cancelling while delivering the series’ “most natural-sounding” transparency mode. We were seriously impressed with the 4s’ transparency mode, as it sounded so clear that it didn’t feel like we were sporting earphones. As our AV Editor Kob Monney stated that he doesn’t “think you can achieve much better than that”, we’re keen to see how the 5s really fare.

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Finally, the buds also promise to provide pristine voice capture, thanks to a combination of microphones and two bone-conduction voice accelerometers with an AI speech extraction algorithm that promises to isolate your voice. That should be a welcome and much needed improvement from its predecessor, as we found the 4s didn’t quite nail voice pick-up.

Momentum True Wireless 5 sport a new design

The 5 buds now feature a new “aerodynamic silhouette” which was modeled using data from thousands of unique ear models, resulting in a so-called “barely there fit”. This, Sennheiser claims, has been rated more comfortable as the 4s by a whopping 73% of testers. 

That’s not to say the True Wireless 4 buds are uncomfortable by any means, as we concluded they slip in with no fuss and without any discomfort either. 

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Even the charging case has had a revamp, with Sennheiser explaining it now has a more narrow aspect ratio and a low-friction finish. That should, in theory, make it easier to slip in and out of pockets.

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Otherwise, both buds are equipped with an IP54 rating which means they can withstand the odd splash of rain, water or sweat. 

Momentum True Wireless 5 focus on repairability

One of the key areas of the True Wireless 5 buds is with repairability and longevity. Much like the Momentum 5 headphones, the True Wireless 5 include a replaceable battery system in both the buds themselves and the charging case. If the thought of tinkering with your expensive electronics fills you with fear then worry not, as Sennheiser states this can be done using only a compact screwdriver.  

Momentum True Wireless 5 support Bluetooth 6

While the True Wireless 4 supports Bluetooth 5.4, and we never experienced any drop-outs or connection issues, the True Wireless 5 benefits from Bluetooth 6 instead. 

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Bluetooth 6 is the newer iteration of Bluetooth and includes more accurate distance tracking, lower latency and improved reliability among other improvements. In addition, the Momentum True Wireless 5 have native support for Google Fast Pair, Microsoft Swift Pair and multipoint switching.

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Momentum True Wireless 5 offer up to 40 hours of battery life

The True Wireless 4 promises up to 30 hours of battery and offers an hour’s worth of battery from a quick eight-minute charge. That’s pretty impressive, however Sennheiser have improved this with the True Wireless 5, with the buds promised to see up to 40 hours of life between charges.

We’ll have to wait until we review the buds to see whether they match Sennheiser’s claims.

Early Verdict

With a promise of improved ANC, longer battery life and a new and repairable design, the Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 5 buds look set to be a promising upgrade over the Momentum True Wireless 4. Having said that, we should mention again that we thoroughly enjoyed our time with the True Wireless 4 pair and concluded the buds to be the “finest earbuds Sennheiser has created”. 

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With that in mind, we’ll have to wait and see how the Momentum True Wireless 5 really compares.

Slack wants to drag AI coding out of the terminal and into the group chat.

The Salesforce-owned messaging platform today announced Slack Code, a new product that embeds AI coding agents — including Anthropic’s Claude Code, Cognition’s Devin, GitHub Copilot, and Vercel’s agent — directly into dedicated Slack channels where entire teams can watch, steer, review, and ship software together. Slack Code is available on any Slack plan at launch, though customers need their own access to the partner agents.

The pitch is deceptively simple: today, most work with AI coding agents happens between one person and one agent, invisible to everyone else. Slack Code makes that work “multiplayer.” When someone tags a coding agent from any conversation, the agent spins up a project-specific code channel, does the work in the open — complete with code diffs, live previews, and a running plan visible in dedicated tabs — and archives the channel when the job is done, leaving behind a searchable audit trail.

“One of the things I love about this is that code is no longer the bottleneck,” Rob Seaman, Slack’s interim CEO, said in a press briefing ahead of the launch. “Ideas, taste, judgment, craft — those are the things that are the bottleneck, and you’ve effectively extended the population that can contribute ideas, taste, judgment, and craft to anybody that exists in your Slack.”

It is a consequential launch for Slack, and a revealing one for the broader enterprise AI market. The AI coding boom has so far been a story of individual productivity — a developer alone with Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex in a terminal window. Slack is betting that the next chapter belongs to whoever owns the collaborative layer around those agents. And it is making that bet at a moment when its parent company badly needs the story to land.

How Slack Code channels put AI coding agents to work in the open

In the interview, which also included executives from Cognition, Slack leaders described a workflow that looks less like pair programming and more like a newsroom.

Jeff Wang, president of new enterprise at Cognition — maker of the Devin coding agent — walked through a live demonstration: someone reports a broken feature in an engineering channel, Devin acknowledges it with an emoji, replies in the thread, investigates, and opens a pull request. “It even knows the code owner, so you can see it tagged Theo into this as well,” Wang said. “Every time Devin is doing something like this, it does have its own computer. So here, it’s actually using Chrome and the DevTools to test if the feature is working correctly.”

From there, the work migrates into a dedicated code channel where anyone — an engineer, a product manager, a designer — can jump in. In Wang’s demo, a designer dropped a Figma file into the channel mid-task, and the agent incorporated it without breaking stride. The agent finished by posting the code changes alongside screenshots and a recorded demo proving the feature worked. That verification loop is central to the pitch: cloud-based agents, unlike agents running on a developer’s laptop, can generate an auditable record that the work is actually correct. “Scaling things, auditing things, giving it to everybody — that is much easier with these cloud agents form factor than it is with local agents,” Wang said.

The launch reaches beyond code channels, too. Slack is shipping a broader rework of how agents live in the product: agent DMs that behave like conversations with a colleague, a new Agents tab that gives every agent session a home base with live status and a stop button, and an “Add to Slack” flow that lets teams deploy agents from platforms including Lovable, n8n, OpenAI, LangChain, and Airtable in a few clicks, with OAuth and configuration automated.

Why Slack says writing code is no longer the bottleneck in software development

The strategic argument underneath Slack Code is that AI has inverted the economics of software development. Writing code used to be the scarce, expensive step. Now, Slack’s executives argue, it is the cheap one — and the constraint has moved upstream, to human judgment.

“One of the things I love about this is that code is no longer the bottleneck,” Seaman said in the press briefing. “Ideas, taste, judgment, craft — those are the things that are the bottleneck, and you’ve effectively extended the population that can contribute ideas, taste, judgment, and craft to anybody that exists in your Slack.”

Cognition offered internal numbers to back up the velocity claim. “We’ve seen our internal merged PR count go up 10x in the last few months, versus our headcount has only gone up like 40 percent,” Wang said, describing a workflow where engineers fire off a Devin task, move to something else, and launch another — “soon you have everybody working on like dozens of agents at a time.”

The pattern extends well beyond engineers, Wang said. “Believe it or not, a lot of our bugs are reported by our sales team. They report it in Slack, and then someone who’s technical applies them to fix the bug.” Seaman seized on that example as the whole thesis in miniature: “So much of that stuff never even made its way to a product manager into a backlog because the communication vehicles weren’t there, the motivation wasn’t there, the knowledge that it could actually be fixed so quick wasn’t there — and we’ve effectively knocked all of that down.”

Wang went further, sketching where he believes this ends up. Toil work — “fixing bugs, fixing CI/CD, or fixing vulnerabilities, all these things engineers probably don’t want to do — we think will be automated away,” he said. What remains is the work that “requires creativity, planning, business logic.” He added a prediction that will make some engineering leaders uneasy: while a human still gates every merge today, “I suspect maybe in the next year it’s just going to go through automatically.”

Can working in public solve the AI slop problem?

The obvious objection to democratizing software creation is quality. If anyone in a company can summon a coding agent, does an enterprise drown in what the industry has taken to calling “AI slop” — plausible-looking but poorly conceived output generated at scale by inexperienced users?

Slack’s executives argue, somewhat counterintuitively, that visibility is the antidote rather than the accelerant. “The multiplayer part is a guard against that, actually, because people can see your work, people can comment on your work,” said Katie Steigman, Slack’s VP of product. She contrasted it with the status quo: “If I’m doing God knows what in terminal with an agent, versus being able to do it in a place where people can see my intent and actually change and shape my work — or slap my hand and tell me that’s slop, because that’s real.”

Steigman, a product manager rather than an engineer, described her own practice as a template. “When I put PRs up as a product person, I almost always tag in an engineer from my team. I don’t just send a PR and ask for an approval,” she said. “Almost every time, an engineer will say something like, ‘Come on, you can make that a little bit tighter,’ or they’ll actually give it some specific technical guidance, and the agent will take one more rev and produce code that has been touched by an engineer to a certain extent.”

Seaman framed the argument in grander terms: “I think the moral arc of multiplayer AI bends towards higher quality and less duplication.” He pointed to Shopify, where he said CEO Tobi Lütke has written about restricting agentic coding to public channels precisely because it “immediately disseminates every single thing that’s happening in the company” and levels the playing field. Still, the skeptics’ case has data behind it. 

Gartner predicted last year that more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, citing escalating costs and unclear business value. And McKinsey’s most recent State of AI survey found that while 62 percent of organizations are at least experimenting with AI agents, only about a third have begun scaling AI at all, and just 39 percent report any bottom-line impact. The gap between agent enthusiasm and agent value remains the defining feature of the market Slack is selling into.

Inside Slack Code’s security model: no god mode, no new identities

For enterprise buyers, the most consequential design decision in Slack Code may be its permissions model. Asked directly whether agents in code channels could leak access across teams — a finance repo visible to legal, say — Seaman was emphatic that agents inherit the permissions of the human who invokes them, and nothing more.

“Everything is done on behalf of the user, using the user’s ACLs, both in Slack and in the systems that they’re connecting to,” he said. “There’s no god permissions or bot-level permissions… Within Slack, the agent has access to information that the user has access to, and access to the channels that it’s been added to.”

Steigman added that when an agent spins up a code channel, “the only thing that agent gets from the code channel is the context of the conversation” that triggered it. On the execution side, Wang said Devin runs in isolated sandboxes with “minimum viable access” — including an optional mode with no internet access at all. “You’ve heard all these stories about the agent escaping and causing havoc,” he acknowledged, “but we have different security configurations.”

This “agents as extensions of existing users” model is a genuine differentiator against standalone agent platforms, which typically force IT departments to provision new service identities and manage a patchwork of one-off permissions. It also answers the shadow-IT question that has dogged agentic tools: because agents produce standard pull requests into GitHub, existing release gates and review processes still apply. “It reduces that barrier upfront to get that initial PR up,” Steigman said. “Then the due diligence still happens in GitHub.”

What Slack Code means for Salesforce’s high-stakes AI turnaround

Slack Code arrives amid a turbulent stretch for its parent company. Salesforce shares fell roughly 18 percent over the year through January, badly lagging the Nasdaq, as Wall Street questioned whether AI would erode demand for traditional enterprise software. In December, OpenAI hired away Slack CEO Denise Dresser as its chief revenue officer, elevating Seaman — then Slack’s product chief — to interim CEO.

Salesforce has responded by racing to make Slack the AI front door for work. In January it shipped a rebuilt Slackbot powered by Anthropic’s Claude, which the companies said became the fastest-adopted feature in the company’s 27-year history. Slack Code extends that strategy from answering questions to producing artifacts: not just messages, but working code, prototypes, and documents generated inside Slack itself.

There is also a notable strategic reversal embedded in today’s news. In mid-2025, Reuters reported that Salesforce had moved to block rival AI firms from accessing Slack data — a defensive crouch.

Today’s announcement, by contrast, positions Slack as an open platform courting exactly those AI companies as partners, with plans to open the code channel APIs to any developer. Software engineering, the company says, is just the first use case; marketing campaigns and legal document reviews in dedicated agent channels are next. The calculus appears to have shifted from protecting Slack’s data to making Slack indispensable as the venue where agents — anyone’s agents — do their work.

Partners are, unsurprisingly, saying the right things. “A whole team can gather in one code channel, watch the agent work, steer it together, and ship a preview,” said Vercel CTO Malte Ubl. GitHub chief product officer Mario Rodriguez called Slack “a strategic part of a broader GitHub promise: humans set direction, agents close the loop.”

The future of AI coding: multiplayer channels and single-player terminals will coexist

None of Slack’s executives claim the terminal is dead. Asked whether tools like Claude Code and Codex become obsolete, Seaman predicted a division of labor. “The overwhelming majority of the work is actually going to happen in these multiplayer environments,” he said. “But there’s going to be deep, immersive, intensive, single-player thought work that’s going to happen in terminals.” An engineer rethinking a codebase’s architecture goes heads-down with an agent; a sales rep flagging a broken button gets a fix in a channel everyone can see.

The trust curve, Seaman suggested, will look familiar to anyone who watched teams adopt earlier waves of automation. “People are going to open these things at the beginning” — reading every diff, every thinking step — “and then build trust in the system and open it less and less over time.”

That is the wager, and it is bigger than a product launch. McKinsey’s research shows the organizations capturing real value from AI are the ones that redesign workflows around it rather than bolting it onto old processes — and Slack Code is, at bottom, a workflow redesign packaged as a feature, an attempt to make the team rather than the individual the unit of AI adoption. If it works, the company that once changed where colleagues talk will have changed where software gets made. If it doesn’t, all that transparency may just mean everyone gets to watch the slop pile up together.

Either way, the era of the lone developer whispering to an agent in a private tab is ending. As Wang put it: “The bottlenecks have shifted.” The question Slack Code will answer is whether the crowd makes them smaller — or just louder.