Expect more than an hour of trailers and reveals.
Sony is kicking off the not-E3/Summer Game Fest season with a State of Play event on June 2 at 5PM ET. You can tune in live via the company’s official YouTube and Twitch channels. A version with Japanese subtitles will be available on YouTube.
We are parking the YouTube stream below. You can keep the page open and press play when the stream starts.
The company has promised more than an hour of footage, with “updates, announcements and gameplay reveals from top studios around the world.” We don’t know exactly what will be revealed, but we do know that the event will highlight Insomniac’s highly-anticipated Marvel’s Wolverine game. This makes sense, as the PS5 exclusive will be available to play in just over two months on September 15.
We don’t know much beyond everyone’s favorite long-clawed mutant, so let’s head into speculation territory. Rumors have suggested that the stream may give us some new details on Naughty Dog’s upcoming title, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. There’s also been rumors of some kind of God of War spinoff coming down the pike. The upcoming PS5 games Phantom Blade Zero and Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls are both coming out soon, so will likely get final trailers.
That leaves plenty of room for first-party surprises, which is something Sony very much needs right now. PS5 sales are down nearly 50 percent year-over-year, which should come as no surprise. Console prices keep going up and people’s personal finances keep going down. Sony’s latest console is six years old and is now more expensive than it was at launch. In the past, gamers could expect steep discounts by the six-year mark, which usually led to an uptick in sales.
Given current geopolitical concerns and AI’s never-ending hunger for memory, it’s unlikely Sony will lower prices anytime soon. That leaves one tried-and-true option to lure in new customers: make games people want to play.
It’s no secret ICE officers are using their phones and their tech toys to do way more than they’ll openly admit to doing. Tech tools that can be abused will be abused. And ICE has plenty of those, including an app that’s supposed to be used for “verification” of migrant status, but is just facial recognition tied to whatever other information ICE has access to.
The cameras come out and the harassment begins, as detailed here in this NPR report. Shortly after Portland, Maine resident Xenia Pantos stopped her car to observe some ICE activity in her neighborhood, their spouse, Carly Williams got a call from a blocked number. The caller identified himself as calling from the Department of Homeland Security.
Williams said the caller asked if anyone else drives her vehicle. When Williams mentioned her spouse sometimes did, the caller asked Williams if she knew her spouse had stopped at an incident that morning.
“What he basically said was, ‘You should let her know to not do that anymore because people who are doing that type of thing are getting added to a domestic terrorist watch list,’” Williams recalled in an interview with NPR.
ICE continues to deny it targets anti-ICE protesters with its surveillance tools. According to the report, it has “repeatedly denied” utilizing its tools and databases to find out more about those who protest or observe its anti-migrant efforts.
Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., cited a well-circulated clip of an ICE agent in Portland, Maine, telling a person videotaping that she would be added to a “nice little database.”
“I can’t speak for that individual,” said Todd Lyons, who serves as acting director of ICE. “But I can assure you that there is no database that’s tracking United States citizens.”
Lyons doubled down on his denials about the database’s existence during a Senate hearing Thursday. When asked if ICE is giving protester information to any other agency, Lyons said: “We do not.”
That’s what Todd Lyons said in February. And it’s definitely not true. ICE has a database that is definitely capable of “tracking American citizens,” because it has access to plenty of law enforcement databases filled with information about American citizens. One needs to look no further than the heat it has drawn by asking local law enforcement to perform searches of things like Flock’s ALPR databases on its behalf.
And it’s definitely not true because the same Todd Lyons said as much in a written response [PDF] to congressional queries that has only recently been made public.
Lyons in February: “There is no database that’s tracking United States citizens.”
Lyons in April: “Well… except for this one.”
Your letter asks what specific personal information DHS officers collect. ICE collects information to identify the person(s) with whom the officer or agent is engaging. During these interactions, a variety of data may be collected by ICE law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration and criminal law. ICE collects essential biographic and biometric information and situational details required to support criminal investigations, safety, and immigration concerns.
If individuals who interact with ICE officers are not arrested or detained, any information collected during those encounters is maintained consistent with applicable law and DHS and ICE policies and is treated as an official government record.
That sounds like a database is being created and maintained — one that deals solely with people who are not targets of immigration enforcement effort. And most of those people would be (1) US citizens and (2) protesters and observers engaging with ICE officers.
Further down in the letter, Lyons offers up another phrase that sounds like a denial, but really isn’t:
DHS is not creating or maintaining a separate, standalone database for individuals encountered that haven’t been arrested or detained.
That would mean something if no information was collected on these people. But Lyons has already stated that officers collect this information. If DHS is not “creating or maintaining a separate database,” that only means exactly what that says. However, it does not mean DHS is not collecting and storing information about people ICE officers “encounter” who are not “arrested or detained.”
Even if all applicable laws and retention standards are being followed (and DHS has given us little reason to believe it follows laws and standards), this information is still being collected, stored, and — because it’s there — accessed by federal officers.
And even if we choose to believe Lyons’ dissembling, we’re still left with the fact that people identifying themselves as federal employees are calling up citizens who’ve done nothing more than exercise their First Amendment rights and threatening them with being added to government databases. So, even if Lyons ain’t lying, the people who worked for him (until he stepped down) aren’t doing what Lyons thinks they’re doing. They’re doing the other thing: collecting information on protesters and observers for the sole reason of keeping an eye on them, if not actually tracking them down to harass them.
Filed Under: free speech, ice, protests, surveillance, todd lyons
Google Cloud Summit came to London last week, and we took the opportunity to sit down with database execs Sailesh Krishnamurthy (VP engineering) and Yasmeen Ahmad (product executive Agentic Data Cloud).
The event was wall-to-wall agentic AI, and true to the theme, Ahmad told us that “we’re putting agents at the center … with the goal that humans are not going to be using data platforms in the next three to five years. It’s going to be humans orchestrating agents, and agents actually doing the work.”
One of the key AI-driven changes, Krishnamurthy said, is that when retrieving data “it’s not so much about getting the exact results, but getting the best results.”
For developers skilled in crafting SQL queries that get precise results in the most efficient way, the notion of inexact queries that go through some sort of non-deterministic and compute-expensive parsing may seem like a step backwards.
“If you have exact questions, you need to be able to provide exact answers,” Krishnamurthy told us. “But I think inexact questions are what people are also going to expect. When you think about agentic workloads and operational databases, you want to be able to ask more flexible questions.” An example might be a natural language query that takes into account context, such as previous interactions.
Krishnamurthy described “AI native infrastructure,” including vector indexing, text indexing, and graph technology where “you combine structured and unstructured data, you have to be operating in terms of inexact results and data quality.”
The company is also investing in the “knowledge catalog,” formerly called Dataplex, which is enterprise search now also treated as context for LLMs (large language models). Knowledge catalog aggregates organization data across multiple sources including structured and unstructured sources.
Krishnamurthy said that exact SQL queries are not going away, and that sometimes a “fuzzy question in natural language” might generate an SQL query with exact results.
How do you verify that AI-generated SQL is producing the results you want? “The answer is the same, not just about SQL, but about many AI-related things,” said Krishnamurthy. “The answer is a set of evals you have to maintain … you might start with something where some results work well and some don’t. And then you have to keep iterating on your blueprints and other pieces of context until your eval set is 100 percent working well.”
By eval set, Krishnamurthy means “a set of questions that are representative tests that users may have, and what is the right query that is generated associated with it, and then a determination of is this query, is this answer correct or not?”
Google SQL as used in its distributed Spanner database, PostgreSQL-compatible AlloyDB, and in the BigQuery data warehouse engine now has AI functions such as AI.IF, which evaluates a condition described in natural language and returns true or false. The prompt value is evaluated using a Gemini LLM; and could return an error or null if the model fails such as when unavailable or out of quota.
The inefficiency of functions like AI.IF is a problem, but there are possible solutions. One is the idea of proxy models, which Krishnamurthy described as “a tiny model in the database.” A proxy model is trained on the fly, based on a small sample of the data. The query engine evaluates the results from the proxy model, and if good enough, uses it for inference in place of a call to the LLM. According to a paper on the subject proxy models “consume about 400x less tokens, and the latency goes down by 30x-100x.”
We asked Ahmad why she believes humans will soon not interact directly with Google’s data platform. The answer, she said, is based on the idea of intent-driven engineering. “Three years ago everyone was doing prompt training classes. Really, these models were co-pilots or assistants. Now these models are doing multi-step execution, parallel execution, handling complexity. So you can define an intent, a goal, an outcome, and the model will figure out the steps to get there.”
According to Ahmad, humans will act as orchestrators, thinking about business outcomes, and models will do “the hard graft of figuring out the low-level data wrangling.”
She said that today’s staff need to be skilled not so much in prompt engineering, but rather using AI for spec-driven development. “The focus for the human is getting to the right plan and iterating with the model on what is the right way to think about the problem.”
In business intelligence, she said, companies will move away from dashboards because they only “serve the first layer of predictable questions.” In their place will be “conversational analytics for business users.”
She believes that unwelcome aspects of generative AI, such as hallucinations and prompt injections, are mitigated by improved context, such as from Knowledge Catalog. “I have customers who have got 90 percent plus accuracy with conversational analytics, but that was not the case 18 months ago when the models would get one out of every two questions wrong because they would not have that context.”
A problem here is that even over 90 percent accuracy is not good enough if you are, for example, a customer of a company with heavy AI adoption confronted with a blocked transaction or other rejection because of an inaccurate response.
Another issue is that injecting AI into every interaction means paying for tokens on top of the base compute and storage resources traditionally consumed by cloud database platforms. Higher productivity and reduced staff costs may more than compensate, but this cannot be taken for granted, particularly as reducing the skill barrier with features like conversational analytics also tends to increase usage.
Giant cloud providers like Google though have plenty to gain. AI, Krishamurthy told us, is driving growth in data storage as well as token usage. He described “a huge overall growth in the business because everyone needs data … Anthropic, for example, rely on BigTable to store all their prompt information. They have other workloads too which are not public.”
Two metrics he is permitted to talk to us about, he said, are that Spanner “now runs 7 ½ billion queries per second at the peak … a year back Spanner might have been 5 billion queries per second.”
Spanner, he said, “has about 23 exabytes of data. It’s the same with BigTable, roughly 7 billion queries per second and double-digit exabytes.”
Models make more queries, he said. “Instead of taking the user request and just sending one query, one pattern I’ve seen is a model will send five different queries … it’s hard to say exactly what is happening because the models are trying different things.”®
On this week’s episode of the Smart Home Insider podcast, Jon Harros from the Matter governing body joins to talk through the latest release of the home automation standard.
Jon Harros is head of testing and certification for the Connectivity Standards Alliance, and he drops in on the podcast from Unify. Unify is the CSA’s first public-facing conference on the smart home and there were many announcements from the week.
We start the episode going through the news. The big release was the Schlage Sense Pro UWB.
This lock will be available to preorder by the end of June and supports Apple Home Key via UWB with Aliro later in 2026. With Aliro, it will also support Google and Samsung wallets.
There was a lot of new television news as of late. During the episode, we talk about HDMI 2.2, Roku, and Philips.
It appears the very first HDMI 2.2 devices will hit the market by the end of 2027. The new standard, with up to twice the bandwidth, will likely start with high-end TVs.
Apple TV is launching on the new 2026 Philips television sets. They are no longer running Google TV and can stream from the Apple TV app with Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and 4K.
Finally, Roku has agreed to be purchased by Fox. Fox will take over the hardware business which compliments its media infrastructure.
The bulk of the episode was dedicated to the new announcements from the CSA. Jon Harros explains the details in Matter 1.6.
Matter 1.6 has many changes, but the most notable is new NFC commissioning that doesn’t require Bluetooth or dedicated power, more context for thermostats, and a Joint Fabric layer for multiple ecosystems to use the same devices.
There was also the Product Security 1.1 release. This time it’s more about extending the security beyond the hardware to apps and software as well.
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Meta is betting on India for WhatsApp’s next chapter, naming entrepreneur Kunal Shah to lead the messaging app and succeed Will Cathcart, who is stepping down after nearly seven years at the helm to take on a new product-building role at the company.
The move comes alongside a Meta-led $900 million financing for Indian fintech giant CRED, structured through a combination of primary and secondary share purchases. The deal will make Meta a minority investor in the CRED, which said Shah will step down as chief executive while retaining his personal shareholding.
India is WhatsApp’s largest market, with more than 500 million users accounting for a significant share of the app’s global base of over three billion people. The country has also emerged as a key battleground for Meta’s ambitions in business messaging and digital payments, areas seen as critical to WhatsApp’s next phase of growth.
Cathcart, who has led WhatsApp since 2019, oversaw a period of rapid expansion that helped the service become one of the world’s most popular messaging apps, including with more than 100 million users in the United States. Under his leadership, WhatsApp expanded beyond private messaging with the launch of products such as Communities, Channels, and AI integrations, while deepening its focus on business messaging.
But efforts by WhatsApp to push into digital payments have delivered mixed results. While WhatsApp Pay gained traction in India, the service struggled to replicate the scale and engagement achieved by local rivals such as PhonePe and Google Pay, leaving significant room for growth in one of the world’s largest payments markets.
Meta is betting that Shah’s experience building a consumer internet company in India can help unlock WhatsApp’s next phase of growth.
In a statement, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Shah had built CRED into “one of India’s most important technology companies” and brought the “builder mentality and global perspective” needed to run the world’s largest messaging app.
The appointment comes as Meta seeks to expand WhatsApp’s business beyond messaging, particularly in areas such as payments, commerce and business communications. India, as WhatsApp’s largest market, has been central to those efforts.
In 2018, Shah founded CRED, a fintech platform with 17 million monthly active users, after earlier building FreeCharge, one of India’s early digital payments startups. Beyond his operating roles, he has become one of India’s most prominent startup investors, backing more than 250 companies and serving in advisory and industry leadership positions across the country’s technology and financial services sectors.
Meta’s investment values CRED at about $4.5 billion on a post-money basis. The startup was last valued at about $3.6 billion in a funding round in May 2025, below its peak valuation of $6.4 billion in 2022. Before its Series F round, the company had raised more than $1 billion from investors.
As part of the transition, Miten Sampat, who has overseen strategy and finance at CRED since 2020, will take over as interim chief executive with immediate effect. Shah will retain his shareholding in the company after stepping away from day-to-day operations.
CRED said its board and leadership team were working on a longer-term management structure as the company prepares for an eventual initial public offering, with the fresh capital expected to support growth across its payments, lending, insurance, and wealth businesses.
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Sila raised its first round of funding in September 2011 — the same month solar power manufacturer Solyndra went bankrupt, sullying the sustainability sector.
But the California-based startup developing high-performance battery materials kept plugging away, and eventually batteries started booming as EV sales and concerns about the lack of domestic battery production accelerated in the U.S.
Last fall, Sila began manufacturing material in Moses Lake, Wash., at the first automotive-scale, silicon-anode plant for both the company and the nation.
“With something like this, you just keep plugging away at it,” said Gene Berdichevsky, Sila’s CEO and co-founder. “And you ride the waves.”
Keep reading to learn more about Berdichevsky’s sustainability journey. His quotes have been edited for clarity and length.
What was the moment you realized you had to work in energy?
In my freshman year, I discovered the Stanford Solar Car team. We were student-run group, and the group was building a solar-powered electric car for a race that would go 2,300 miles from Chicago to L.A., and I started participating. It was very little adult supervision, lots of students. And I fell in love with energy, like everything energy. It’s really at the foundation of civilization. And what was super interesting to me is it felt like there was still so much opportunity to make an even better energy system.
What gives you the most hope for the planet?
The creativity of people and the opportunities for science and technology to solve impossible problems. It wasn’t that long ago that the world faced a choice between depopulation or starvation, as the world was thought to not have enough resources for the food needed for a few billion people. But crop science solved it. The same can be said as we face energy challenges today — and I believe material science can solve it.
What’s your biggest concern when it comes to addressing climate change?
You cannot cut your way to solving climate change, yet that is often the temptation and the rhetoric. The only way we will solve climate change is by harnessing scientific breakthroughs, technology, and the power of markets to make the clean option simply the better, more economical option.
What’s the biggest misconception about building an energy company?
In the end, there is no such thing as a billion-dollar energy company. When you start an energy company from zero, you have to understand what it takes to succeed at a $10 billion or $100 billion scale and stay rooted in the long term because that’s the minimum threshold to have an impact on the world of energy — and nothing smaller will survive.
What’s one habit you’ve changed personally because of sustainability concerns?
None. I drive an EV because they are more fun to drive — but they happen to be clean. When I travel internationally, I try to fly on 787’s because they’re designed for more passenger comfort — and they happen to be more efficient. When I travel in major cities, I take the metro because it’s faster to get around. Let’s make the cleaner option simply the better one.
Coffee with any energy leader, past or present — who do you pick?
Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse. The scientist and the entrepreneur responsible for transforming our world and making electricity flow as freely as water in our lives. While Thomas Edison was the stronger businessman, Tesla was so ahead of his time, and his partnership with Westinghouse created the competition with Edison that revolutionized our world.
What impact do you hope your work has in 20 years?
A better energy foundation for the world. Oil, coal, and gas have created immense prosperity and transformed our society for the better in the 20th century. But an even better, more resilient, lower-cost, and cleaner energy foundation is possible with batteries, geothermal, and renewables. That is the path to yet more prosperity for the world in the 21st century — and it requires innovation, commercialization, and incredible scaling. My hope is for Sila to play an important part in that energy foundation.
OpenAI’s books show zero debt and just $46mn of quarterly capital spending. The catch, reported by The Information: around $665bn of commitments sitting just off the balance sheet, now heading for regulators’ desks.
On paper, OpenAI looks like a lean software business. The reality is far heavier.
As at 31 March, the ChatGPT maker had zero debt and less than $750mn of lease liabilities, according to The Information, which reviewed its financial statements. Its capital spending for the quarter came to just $46mn. That is less than Salesforce, a company that merely sells software.
For one of the most hardware-hungry businesses in tech, those are remarkable numbers.
The spending has not vanished. It has moved off the balance sheet.
OpenAI carries around $665bn of purchase commitments that do not show up as debt. Most of it is compute: long-term deals to rent the data centres and chips its models run on.
The company leans on Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon and joint ventures such as Stargate and Fluidstack for that capacity. The obligations are real and enormous. They simply do not appear where investors usually look.
The structure raises a second question. Who sits on the other side of these deals?
About 72 per cent of OpenAI’s cost of revenue flows to related parties such as Microsoft. Microsoft is both a major backer of the company and one of its key suppliers.
That kind of concentration invites scrutiny over conflicts of interest. It is exactly the sort of arrangement that public-market regulators tend to probe.
This is landing as OpenAI prepares to go public. It filed confidentially with the SEC on 8 June, a week after rival Anthropic, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the deal.
The filing valued OpenAI at about $852bn. Analysts think a debut could push it past $1tn, perhaps this autumn. It follows SpaceX, which listed in June in the largest IPO on record.
The filing also hands financial regulators their first proper look at OpenAI’s accounting and its tangle of business relationships.
None of this would matter if the growth were already there. It is not.
OpenAI projects advertising revenue rising from $2.4bn this year to $102bn by 2030, when ads would be more than a third of its sales. Ad group WPP expects the entire AI search and chatbot ad market to be worth about $101bn in 2030. That figure already includes Google.
In short, OpenAI is forecasting that it can capture, on its own, a whole market the rest of the industry will be fighting over.
The cash, meanwhile, keeps pouring out. OpenAI spent about $34bn last year and burned through $3.7bn in the first three months of 2026 alone.
A clean balance sheet usually reassures investors. This one may do the opposite. Zero debt means little when $665bn of commitments sit just out of frame. Sceptics already warn that an OpenAI stumble could ripple across the whole AI supply chain.
Ireland takes over the EU Council presidency on 1 July with a tech-heavy legislative agenda, but its economy depends on the very companies those rules target. Two firms, understood to be Apple and Microsoft, paid 40 per cent of all Irish corporate tax in 2024.
TL;DR
Ireland takes over the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU on 1 July, inheriting a legislative agenda that includes proposals to curb Europe’s reliance on American tech, simplify the bloc’s digital rulebook, decide whether to ban children from social media, and overhaul telecom regulations. The country holding the presidency is supposed to act as an honest broker, finding common ground among 27 member states rather than advancing its own interests.
That role is complicated when the broker’s economy runs on the companies being regulated. Sixteen of the world’s 20 largest tech firms reportedly operate hubs in Ireland, and more than 100,000 people work in the sector.
Ireland’s fiscal watchdog, the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, warned earlier this year that just two companies, understood to be Apple and Microsoft, paid almost 40 per cent of all corporate tax in Ireland in 2024. That amounted to roughly €11 billion, with a third firm, understood to be Eli Lilly, bringing the share to 46 per cent.
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“It’s widely acknowledged, including by the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, that Ireland is too reliant on Big Tech firms,” said Michael McNamara, the liberal MEP who co-led the European Parliament’s package to roll back elements of the AI Act. He said Ireland needs to be “clear-eyed about the pressures that will come during the Presidency” from companies headquartered in Dublin.
Ireland’s presidency agenda runs through the same regulatory territory where it has faced sustained criticism. The Irish Data Protection Commission, the body responsible for policing GDPR compliance by tech firms that base their European operations in Dublin, has been accused of being too lenient on enforcement and of allowing a revolving door between the regulator and the private sector.
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties has called for Ireland to recuse itself from all digital files during the presidency. Lynn Boylan, a left-wing MEP from the opposition party Sinn Féin, said Ireland’s economic model is “deeply tied to keeping a small number of overwhelmingly American tech corporations comfortable,” creating an “obvious conflict.”
Tech firms made their priorities clear in a public consultation Ireland held ahead of the presidency. CCIA Europe, the Big Tech lobby group, called for Ireland to “double down” on simplifying tech rules and “firmly reject” sovereignty provisions that could exclude foreign firms.
Meta urged Ireland to “adopt a leadership position in shaping Europe’s digital agenda,” calling for a “complete overhaul” of the bloc’s digital rules and a “pause on implementation” of new regulations. It also said Ireland should bring its “unique relationship with the U.S.” to the fore during the presidency.
Bram Vranken, a researcher at the transparency group Corporate Europe Observatory, said that while companies lobby every country holding the presidency, “in the case of Ireland they know they have more leverage.” Irish officials pointed to the fact that they published all lobby submissions received during the consultation as evidence of transparency.
Ireland’s defenders point to its track record. During its last presidency in 2013, Ireland pushed GDPR negotiations so hard that diplomats from other member states slept in tents to maximise negotiating time, earning praise from then-Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding.
Two EU diplomats, granted anonymity to speak candidly, told Politico that Ireland had been “very fair” and “very professional” on previous digital files. Niamh Smyth, Ireland’s minister of state for artificial intelligence, rejected the idea that Big Tech’s presence would compromise the presidency.
“We have had many presidencies before, and we have always done our job well and done it objectively,” Smyth told Politico. Billy Kelleher, a liberal MEP from the governing Fianna Fáil party, added that Ireland should “not be embarrassed about being a success story.”
Whether simplification tips into deregulation will define how the presidency is judged. The question for the next six months is whether Dublin can separate what is good for its economy from what is right for the bloc.
This post is brought to you in paid partnership with YARBO.
If you’ve been pricing out a robot mower for a genuinely large property, Prime Day just made the math easier. The YARBO Robot Lawn Mower Pro is down to $4,999 on Amazon (from a $5,999 list price), a $1,000 Prime Day saving on a machine built for yards most robot mowers can’t touch. At that price and that capability, this is the kind of purchase that changes how an entire weekend gets spent, and the RTK and AI vision navigation underneath means there’s no perimeter wire to bury, which is the install headache that defines most of the category.
A robot mower for a large property earns its keep differently than a small-yard model does. Where a basic unit taps out at a fraction of an acre and needs a boundary wire trenched around the lawn, the YARBO Pro is rated for up to 6 acres and skips the wire entirely, using RTK positioning and AI vision to map and navigate. For a property that size, that distinction is the difference between a gadget and an actual labor replacement.
The modular design is what makes this worth caring about beyond mowing season. The Pro is built as a year-round yard-care platform rather than a single-season mower, so the same base robot is designed to take on other tasks as the seasons change rather than going into storage in October. Dual motors deliver up to 2500W peak power, the 20-inch cutting width covers ground quickly, and a 120-minute runtime lets it work through large sections on a charge.
The practical control side holds up too. The cutting height adjusts from 0.8 to 4.0 inches for everything from a tight finish to longer grass, and the smartphone app handles scheduling, remote operation, and RTK positioning with privacy protection built in. It’s positioned for both residential and commercial use, which tracks given the acreage it’s rated for.
A $1,000 Prime Day saving on any single item is significant, and on a large-acreage robot mower it brings a genuinely capable machine to $4,999. Comparable wire-free robot mowers built for multi-acre properties sit at or above this price, often before any sale, and the YARBO Pro’s RTK navigation and modular platform keep it competitive with anything aimed at yards this size. For a property where the alternative is a riding mower plus the hours to run it, the value calculation shifts quickly.
The YARBO Robot Lawn Mower Pro at $4,999 is the big-ticket Prime Day buy that’s hard to talk yourself out of if you’ve got the acreage to justify it. The wire-free RTK navigation, 6-acre coverage, modular all-season design, and app control add up to a machine that earns its price in reclaimed weekends, and the $1,000 day-one Prime Day saving makes this the moment to commit if a robot mower has been on the list.
Every year in the hi-fi and home cinema world there are trends – some you see from the start of the year, others start to develop over the course of a few months.
This type of convergence can almost be an act of serendipity – all these products launching around the same time – what could have kick-started this or any trend?
Let’s take a look at active, also known as powered speakers. They are starting to pop up with unerring regularity.
We’ve had Ruark Audio’s five-star powered speakers. We’ve also had the launch of Cambridge Audio’s L/R S (with more to come), KEF has launched a few active/powered speakers in the last few years, there are new models from Tangent, Triangle, Elipson, Kanto, Klipsch, Edifier – and this is just the beginning.
Hi-Fi has struggled to attract the attention of a younger generation glued to smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. Hi-Fi can seem hoary and stuffy compared to the worlds that mobile devices can offer.
Some hi-fi brands have taken the route of headphones to entice people not au fait with hi-fi. Speaker brands such as Bowers & Wilkins, Dali, Focal and others have invested big-time in headphones (or head-fi) as a gateway to hi-fi, but is it actually a gateway? Do people jump from headphones to hi-fi? Let’s say I’m not too sure.
But we’ve seen a renaissance of vinyl. There’s been a resurgence in CD, and even cassette tapes have enjoyed a few days in the sun, while wired headphones continue to drum up positive publicity.
But proper – or trad hi-fi – still struggles for some traction and momentum. The appeal it has is men of a certain age who like to decamp to their den to listen to music in peace.
But active and powered speakers could change that outlook.
For one, hi-fi takes up space. Who has space these days? Everyone wants to move to a bigger house for more space, and everyone wants to move to a smaller house because it’s less expensive. What’s something that’s the best of both worlds – saving space, still offering a good experience but ultimately provides convenience?
Well that could be active/powered speakers.
The amplification, in some cases the streaming and processing, can be done with just two boxes rather than many. But more than that, they’re multi-purpose in use.
I’m currently testing a pair of KEF and Edifier speakers, both of which come with HDMI eARC to connect to a TV, making them potential soundbar replacements. Other models have a built-in phono stage to connect directly to a turntable. USB means you can plug your music in that way.
And then there’s the wireless support. Some cheaper options will make do with just Bluetooth, but active speakers with Wi-Fi open the world to the likes of Spotify Connect, Tidal, Qobuz etc – high quality music streaming services that you just need to tap a few buttons to get started.
Hi-Fi sound, but without the faff. You can see the appeal, and why brands seem to have set their stall up in this area of the market.
The great thing about active and powered speakers is that they can fit within your current set-up rather than having to buy certain products to create a system.
While traditional hi-fi offers outright performance, especially if you know what you’re doing, knowledge can also be a bit of a bugbear. Not everyone knows what they’re doing or can be bothered to find out either.
This is why the convenience of powered speakers is useful. The plug-and-play mentality, of reducing the number of steps and therefore complexity, is one I’d reckon has wide appeal.
Everyone likes to listen to good music – if you don’t, I fear you might be a miserable so–and–so–and a pair of speakers that can do that without sacrificing much in the way of performance has got to be worth pursuing.
But convenience is only great if you can afford it. At the low end you might consider £400 rather expensive – especially if you’re the type of person for whom a £70 Bluetooth speaker is you pushing the boat out. £400 (sorry, £399) has become the first boundary marker. You’ll find a decent experience for less, but you won’t find better for less.
It’s when we start to go up through the price bands that I can see things start to stall. Yes, Wi-Fi is a ‘good thing’ to have, but eyebrows start to raise when you see those models pushing £1000 if not more. And then we have your ‘posh’ active speakers, models that stretch the asking price to £2000+, despite not offering a feature set that’s markedly different from a pair of actives half the price. And in some cases, a performance that doesn’t quite live up to the premium billing.
So while this emergence of active and powered speakers is very much ‘good’, it’s also susceptible to money. It is also something of a lifestyle choice. People like listening to music, but how they do so is different. Not everyone wants to be tied to a desktop or their living room. They like to take their music with them.
So while this emergence/growth of the active/powered is a good thing and may lower the barrier and make hi-fi more accessible, the biggest obstacle active speakers face is not in terms of perception. The biggest obstacle that active speakers, and hi-fi in general faces, is that it has, in a way, been superseded by something in plain view.
Like a riddle; what can you use at home and outside of it? What comes in different forms that allows you to listen to audio however you like? What’s the device tied to you in a very personal way?
What hi-fi has to overcome is the unassailable might of headphones, which has pretty much replaced traditional hi-fi. And I for one can’t see that happening anytime soon. Is the active/powered speaker doomed? Of course not, but maybe this sudden gold rush won’t necessarily result in the riches hi-fi brands hope it will.
Airbus has unveiled a version of its popular H145 helicopter that flies completely without a pilot. The new U145 removes the cockpit to create space for cargo and mission equipment while adding full autonomy through sensors and artificial intelligence.
Designers at Airbus Helicopters began with the H145, a helicopter that has already been used in EMS, law enforcement, and offshore work across the world. They built on the core H145 structure, with the same twin engines and performance as the original. You can’t disagree with over 1,800 of these things flying about, as that’s 8 million plus hours of real-world testing, indicating the U145 has a solid base on which to build reliability.
Sale
Airbus made the most significant change in the front, removing the cockpit and installing large clamshell doors, a fold-down loading table, and a reinforced cargo deck while leaving the regular rear doors and side doors intact. This converts the nose of the vehicle into the main loading area, making it easy to transport large, heavy items in rugged or remote regions.
The power is still provided by two Safran Arriel 2E engines, although they are now fully digitally controlled. The maximum takeoff weight remains at 3,800 kg, and like with all H145s, it is known for being extremely quiet and environmentally friendly. The U145 relies only on sensors and artificial intelligence. Sensors send data into AI algorithms, allowing the aircraft to fly autonomously and complete any mission required. Airbus designed this thing without considering a human crew because the entire concept revolved around it flying on its own.
Cargo delivery is the primary use for both civilian and military users, but the modular design allows it to be utilized for disaster relief, firefighting, surveillance, and even armed scouting. Airbus is also considering employing the U145 as a “mothership” for launching air-launched effects with MBDA, and there is considerable work being done on crewed and uncrewed teaming.
This is the second time Airbus has converted a crewed helicopter into an unmanned system; the VSR700, based on the Cabri G2, has been operational with the French navy for some time. Lessons from that experiment helped them improve the U145 significantly. The first test flights will take place later in 2026, with a safety pilot on board, and it should be ready for operation in the early 2030s. Airbus will collaborate with some specialist partners to improve autonomous capabilities and expand the entire ecosystem for uncrewed aerial aircraft across Europe.
[Source]
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