After several decades away from the loudspeaker category, Rotel is getting back into the game with the Amora 5, a passive two-way bass-reflex standmount speaker that marks a significant expansion of the company’s product lineup. Best known for its amplifiers, CD players, DACs, and other source components, Rotel is now extending that system approach all the way to the final link in the chain.

Priced at $999 per pair, the Amora 5 is designed to deliver a wide, open stereo image with low distortion, strong resolution, and a claimed frequency response of 48 Hz to 28 kHz. The compact standmount combines custom drive units, a precision-tuned crossover, and a rigid MDF enclosure, and while Rotel has clearly engineered it to pair naturally with its own electronics, the Amora 5 is intended to work just as comfortably in systems built around competing amplification.

The Tweeter

The 1-inch (25 mm) silk-dome tweeter is mounted within an aluminum surround ring for rigid, secure installation, while a geometrically shaped ABS faceplate minimizes diffraction and provides a smooth transition to the cabinet baffle.

Mid/Bass Driver

The 6.5-inch (165 mm) woven-fiber composite midrange/bass driver incorporates a rigid aluminum frame to maintain mechanical stability and proper driver alignment. This design helps reduce structural vibration while maintaining consistent performance. A 2.5 kHz crossover integrates the tweeter and midrange/bass driver to deliver a balanced frequency response, focused imaging, and an open soundstage.

The Cabinetry

The rigid MDF cabinet provides a stable acoustic foundation for the drive units, helping to minimize unwanted resonance. A rear-mounted bass-reflex port is tuned to extend low-frequency response down to 48 Hz while maintaining controlled bass performance.

Connection Terminals

For connectivity, the Amora includes dual sets of gold-plated speaker terminals that support standard single-wire or bi-wire connection options.

Grille 

The included speaker grille uses acoustically transparent fabric to maintain a clean appearance without compromising performance. It attaches magnetically and can be easily removed when desired.

“Rotel’s success has always been built on trusted engineering, long-term relationships, and a shared passion for music,” said Peter Kao, Managing Director of Rotel and third-generation member of the founding family. “With the Amora 5, we extend the Rotel experience through the final stage of the system, giving our global partners and customers a more complete path from source to speaker.”

Rotel Amora 5 Speaker Specifications

The Bottom Line 

Rotel is making an interesting move. After more than three decades away from the loudspeaker category, a company best known for amplifiers, CD players, DACs, and other electronics is getting back into the game with a single model rather than launching an entire speaker family.

That may be the most interesting thing about the Amora 5. There is nothing particularly exotic about its two-way architecture, 6.5-inch woven-fiber midrange/bass driver, silk-dome tweeter, or rear-ported MDF enclosure. Instead, Rotel appears to be taking a relatively conservative approach with a $999/pair standmount designed to complement the electronics it already sells.

The problem is that $1,000 is one of the most competitive price points in the loudspeaker market. The QUAD Elegan 1 sells for $995/pair, while the newly introduced Wharfedale Denton 1S is $999/pair and the Q Acoustics 5020 is also currently $999/pair.

There are also less expensive alternatives that could make the decision even more difficult. The KEF Q3 Meta is $899.99/pair, the larger Q Acoustics 3030c is $799/pair, and Triangle’s Borea BR04 is $625/pair.

Rotel’s biggest advantage might therefore be the name on the front rather than any revolutionary piece of loudspeaker technology. Existing Rotel owners now have the option of building a complete system from a familiar brand, and dealers could make the Amora 5 more compelling by pairing it with integrated amplifiers such as the DX-5 or A8.

Returning to loudspeakers after more than 30 years will certainly get Rotel some attention. Convincing buyers to choose the Amora 5 over some very established competition at the same price will be the harder part.

Price & Availability

The Rotel Amora 5 bookshelf (stand-mount) speakers will be available for $999/pair ( €999 / £999) in matte black or matte white through authorized Rotel dealers in August 2026. 

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On Tuesday, OpenAI announced a new batch of security policies focused on containing security incidents while models are being tested. The new safeguards include more detailed monitoring of models during the development process, as well as greater emphasis on alignment and security during the post-training process.

“As models become more capable, the risks associated with developing and testing them internally also grow,” the company said in a blog post. “Our standards for monitoring, alignment, and security must stay ahead of those risks.”

The new measures are one of the first public changes in OpenAI’s safety practices since the immediate aftermath of the Hugging Face incident, which was disclosed on July 21.

OpenAI representatives said that the measures are not a direct response to the Hugging Face incident but were also provoked in part by the cybersecurity capabilities of the forthcoming Astra model, as well as the overall pace of progress in AI development.

In the same post, OpenAI disclosed that it had paused reinforcement learning (RL) for two weeks following the Hugging Face incident but had since restarted many of the less-risky models.

“Our largest planned frontier RL run remains on hold while we conduct smaller-scale training and evaluations to assess model behavior, validate our safeguards, and establish more evidence of alignment before proceeding,” the post reads.

Speaking to reporters, OpenAI’s VP of research, Amelia Glaese, emphasized that the strictness of the controls would increase as models became more capable, with the largest models facing the greatest scrutiny.

“We have put in place requirements and expectations for safe development,” Glaese told reporters. “Those requirements and expectations vary with the level of risk that we see.”

OpenAI has been criticized for poor network security practices in the wake of the incident, which saw models escape their training environment by compromising a tool on its network that had access to the internet. The new safeguards include stronger network isolation practices, although the specifics remain vague. Under the new system, the post says, “a single compromise of a workload or supporting service does not, by itself, allow for unauthorized access to the Internet, or other internal networks.”

The strongest safeguard is the monitoring system, which will examine tool actions, available reasoning traces, and activity logs for a variety of unauthorized behavior. OpenAI says it aims to issue alerts within 30 minutes of the concerning activity.

OpenAI estimates that the compute burden of that monitoring will be roughly 20% of whatever process is being monitored. The company promised further details on the system in a forthcoming blog post. The company’s official postmortem analysis of the event is also still pending.

Hertility’s research conducted the ‘largest study ever undertaken’ in this area, across five years.

Hertility, an Irish-founded UK and Irish healthcare provider for women, has today (19 August) published the “largest study ever undertaken” in the region on female testosterone levels.

Published in the Journal of Endocrinological Investigation, Hertility assessed data from 30,453 women aged between 18 and 74 who accessed at-home hormone testing in England, Scotland and Wales between September 2020 and August 2025.

What was discovered is that hormone levels decline progressively throughout adult life, falling by approximately 1.4pc each year from a woman’s 20s onwards, with no abrupt perimenopausal cliff edge, which is the term often used to describe the sudden, ‘cliff-like’ drop in hormones. 

Testosterone plays a crucial role in many of the body’s functions, such as libido, mood, bone mineral density, muscle mass and metabolic function and also forms part of the assessment of conditions including PMO and androgen deficiency. However, the data has thus far not kept pace with developments. 

Currently, in both Ireland and the UK testosterone is typically measured using the immunoassay method. The ‘normal’ ranges that inform the tests are frequently based on just two small validation studies which took data from only 149 women across two broad age ranges 20 to 49 and the over 50s.  

Additionally, that cohort was screened only for BMI and hormonal contraceptive use and it failed to exclude hirsutism, which is excessive hair growth, PMOS, which is formerly PCOS and other markers of androgen excess. 

As a result, the research found that the dependence on arguably outdated data means “some women are still being falsely reassured and others investigated unnecessarily after their testosterone levels are tested.”

Failing averages

The report suggested that tests based on averages are failing women, particularly when it is shown that testosterone variation widens with age. 

Consider for a moment a woman of 25, within a bracket of 19 to 59 years olds, whose results may be regarded as normal, but who may have a counterpart whose results are flagged as abnormal and investigated because she is being compared against a system that was not designed to reflect her age. 

The report noted, “genuine hormonal disruption is masked as being ‘normal’ while normal physiology is escalated as abnormal and both outcomes contribute to the diagnostic delays that continue to characterise women’s health.

“Instead of using a single cut-off point, the researchers modelled where testosterone levels typically fall at every single year of age. This means a woman’s result can be shown as its precise position within the normal range for her age, providing one piece of evidence to be weighed alongside her symptoms, cycle history, medication use and a clinical examination.”

Hertility’s report is calling on clinical laboratories, assay manufacturers and guideline bodies to use age-specific, age-continuous hormone ranges rather than a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to women’s health. They should also aim to share the criteria that formed the basis of their study so clinicians can make an informed decision. 

Commenting on the report, Dr Helen O’Neill, the CEO of Hertility and associate professor in reproductive and molecular genetics at UCL, said, “When a woman has a hormone test, she is looking for an answer about her own body. 

“What she receives is a comparison against an average and too often an average drawn from a few dozen women, decades ago, grouped into age brackets so broad they are almost meaningless.

“Averages are not neutral, they flatten the range of normal human variation, masking real hormonal disruption in some women while manufacturing false alarm in others.

“Precision medicine requires reference data of sufficient scale and rigour that an individual can be interpreted as an individual. Better reference ranges will never replace clinical judgement, but they change what clinical judgement has to work with, and set a standard for what should be expected before any hormone result is described as normal or abnormal for a woman.”

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Watch England vs Pakistan live streams as the 1st Test from Headingley, Leeds, begins a three-match series full of intrigue. Joe Root returns as England captain as the backlash from the hosts previous series continues, while Babar Azam’s visitors seek a rare away series victory.

“Bazball” is finally over, with coach Brendon McCullum let go from the Test gig days after Ben Stokes announced a shock international retirement after England’s 2-1 defeat by New Zealand in June. Stephen Fleming, another Kiwi, doesn’t take the reins as the new Test coach until the winter so Marcus Trescothick is in interim coaching charge here.

As the resident NBN and home-internet expert for TechRadar Australia, I spend much of my time looking out for the best internet deals, and there are almost invariably a number of compelling options at every different speed tier — and these can be a great way to sense-check if you’re overpaying for your current NBN service.

When choosing deals, much of my decision-making revolves around two easily identifiable metrics: price and typical evening speed (TES). Typical evening speed is something all internet service providers (ISPs) have to disclose before you sign up for a plan. In essence, it tells you the download speed you can realistically expect to achieve during the busier evening hours of 7pm to 11pm. Being able to view the TES also means you can easily identify which ISPs ultimately offer better value — i.e. the ones advertising fast evening speeds at competitively low prices.

Spector was the creator behind Deus Ex.

Microsoft announced that it removed the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) tool from Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, as well as from Windows 11 beta builds released this week.

WMIC is a legacy built-in Windows command-line utility that helps interact with the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) system using text commands.

This move is part of a process announced in September, when the company said that WMIC will be removed after upgrading to Windows 11 25H2 and later.

Microsoft deprecated WMIC in Windows Server 2012 (in 2016) and Windows 10 21H1 (in 2021), and it converted it into a Feature on Demand (FoD) starting with Windows 11 22H2 (in 2022), and announced in January 2024 that it would be removed altogether after first disabling it by default.

“Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) has been removed in this release. This change is part of the ongoing deprecation and removal of WMIC from Windows,” Microsoft noted on Monday.

Three days earlier, on Friday, it also revealed that the tool is “already removed by default in new installations of Windows 11, versions 24H2 and 25H2, and is no longer available as a Feature on Demand (FoD).”

However, these changes apply only to the legacy WMIC component, as Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) itself remains unaffected. Further guidance for IT administrators who use WMIC is available in this support document, which recommends using PowerShell and other modern tools (e.g., WMI’s COM API, .NET libraries, or scripting languages) for tasks previously done with WMIC.

​WMIC’s removal aims to improve the operating system’s overall security by thwarting a wide range of malware and attack tactics that will no longer work.

The tool has long been considered a LOLBIN (living-off-the-land binary), a built-in Microsoft-signed executable that threat actors have abused for a wide range of malicious activities during attacks targeting Windows devices.

For instance, ransomware encryptors commonly use the WMIC command to delete Shadow Volume Copies to ensure that the victims can’t recover encrypted data. Other threat actors have also used WMIC to query for the list of installed security solutions and antivirus software and uninstall them.

Malware has also been observed using WMIC to add exclusions to Microsoft Defender, which helps evade detection on compromised systems.

Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.

The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.

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Systems

It seems like Nvidia’s not getting back into the Middle Kingdom anytime soon

Chinese web giant Baidu yesterday told investors it sees good days ahead for its Kunlunxin chip biz, because local buyers won’t have alternatives.

Baidu has previously said it plans to spin out and float Kunlunxin, which makes CUDA-compliant inferencing chips that it uses for its own cloud services and has sold to the likes of Huawei and ZTE, who use them in kit they sell to Chinese telcos.

Speaking on the company’s Q2 earnings call, Dou Shen, executive veep of Baidu’s AI Cloud Group, said Baidu is working to list Kunlunxin and will have concrete info to share soon.

“From a business perspective, we remain very confident in Kunlunxin’s long-term growth and commercial potential for a few reasons,” he said. One of those reasons is that demand for inferencing continues to rise, and Baidu thinks that trend will continue for the long term.

His second reason was that China’s domestic market has “significant growth potential” because supply of AI chips is “likely to remain constrained for some time.”

“Against this backdrop, customers are increasingly seeking high performance, reliable, and cost-efficient domestic AI chips.”

Those remarks are notable in the context of the US government’s policy to allow Nvidia to resume sales of its products into China, and Beijing’s response of giving itself a veto over any purchases by local companies.

After Washington banned Nvidia from selling its products in China, the company said that decision cost it $10.5 billion in six months. In its most recent results announcement the GPU giant said it had not won any revenue in China after the USA’s policy reversal, and is “uncertain whether any imports will be allowed into the country.”

And now Baidu is saying Chinese buyers are looking to local chips due to supply challenges.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has argued that the Trump administration should encourage chip sales to China, to cement the USA’s dominance of AI. Beijing has encouraged adoption of local tech, in part to reduce dependence on US products.

Baidu’s earnings included strong growth for its AI business, which saw revenue from cloud infrastructure rental rise 50 percent year over year to almost $1.1 billion, and revenue from the company’s GPU cloud surge 283 percent year-over-year, trumping the 184 percent growth in the last quarter.

Those numbers are modest compared to the likes of AWS, Google, and Microsoft – and also a fair way down the charts among Baidu’s Chinese competitors. The company believes owning its own stack of models, infrastructure, and chips will mean it can deliver AI services at keen prices and give it a market advantage. Alibaba makes similar claims and is arguably far ahead of Baidu in terms of model-making capabilities.

But Baidu has the robo-cab field to itself with the Apollo Go service, which execs said provided over one million fully autonomous rides around the world in Q2.

Back on the web, execs enthused about low hallucination rates for the company’s consumer-AI services, and an 83 percent year-over-year increase in the number of daily active users for Baidu’s ERNIE assistant – which saw the number of conversations users stage daily more than triple.

Overall revenue grew just four percent year-over-year to $3.9 billion, meaning Baidu’s AI cloud is the company’s growth engine. ®

I haven’t played Pokemon since I was a kid. I remember it being fun, playing on the floor at my local video game store. I remember all of the original 151 Pokemon — blade-armed mantis Scyther was my favorite. I played Pokemon Snap on my N64. That is about where my current knowledge ends.

I don’t know how many Pokemon exist now. But I do know Pikachu. More importantly, Polaroid knows I know Pikachu — and that you know Pikachu.

Capitalizing on that knowledge, the company on Tuesday announced a limited-edition Pokemon camera collection to celebrate the franchise’s 30th anniversary. 

The main attraction is a bright yellow Pikachu version of the compact Polaroid Go Generation 3 instant camera. It costs $100 and includes a hand strap shaped like Pikachu’s lightning-bolt tail.

A pink, white and blue Sylveon camera is also available for the same price. I couldn’t tell you what a Sylveon was, so I looked it up. It debuted in Pokemon X and Y in 2013, meaning this collection is apparently designed to exploit several generations of childhood memories at once.

The final camera is a larger $140 Polaroid Now Generation 3, designed to look like a Poke Ball. All three cameras have Poke Ball-shaped shutter buttons, just in case the bright colors and familiar characters weren’t already doing enough.

None of this is new camera technology. These are existing Polaroid cameras wearing Pokemon costumes. And honestly, that’s probably all it takes.

Plenty of adults are still into Pokemon because they play the games, collect the cards and genuinely enjoy the community around it. But companies know there’s another audience too: people like me, who moved on years ago but can still be pulled back by wrapping a product in a memory from when we were too young to have bills.

Nostalgia is bad for your wallet

A 2014 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research examined whether nostalgia makes people more willing to part with their money. Across six experiments, researchers found that people who felt nostalgic were willing to pay more for products and valued money less than people in a neutral emotional state.

The researchers concluded that nostalgia may often appear in marketing because it encourages consumers to spend.

In other words, thinking about your childhood can make you financially stupid.

That doesn’t mean Polaroid assembled a team of psychologists in a dark room and ordered them to weaponize Pikachu. Pokemon is celebrating a major anniversary, and branded merchandise is inevitable. But this collection does feel like a particularly clean demonstration of how nostalgia marketing works.

The target isn’t necessarily someone currently obsessed with Pokemon. It can also be someone like me, an adult who hasn’t played in years but still immediately recognizes that yellow face and remembers when Pokemon was a game instead of a multibillion-dollar machine designed to appear on every object I own.

Kids will probably want these cameras too. But kids generally don’t have $100. Adults do, and adults are increasingly spending that money on toys, collectibles and other products connected to the things they loved growing up.

An instant camera isn’t technically a toy, but it lives in that same world — it’s a familiar character, and there’s limited availability. It’s a collectible, and its price is just low enough to make an unnecessary purchase feel defensible. 

It checks all the boxes.

The camera is only the beginning

The Pikachu and Sylveon cameras are versions of the Polaroid Go Gen 3, a small analog camera that takes pocket-size instant photos. It has a selfie mirror, built-in flash, self-timer and double-exposure mode.

The Poké Ball model is on the larger Polaroid Now Gen 3, which shoots full-size Polaroid pictures and has a two-lens autofocus system.

Polaroid isn’t just selling the cameras, though.

There are also $25 double packs of Pikachu and Sylveon film, along with $23 i-Type film featuring Pokemon designs around the borders of each printed photo. Even the darkslide, which is the protective card ejected when you insert a fresh pack of film, comes printed with a Pokemon silhouette.

Beginning Sept. 29, Polaroid will let customers log in and track which darkslides they have collected. So even the piece of plastic you would normally throw away has now become a collectible.

Add in a $25 Poke Ball camera case, a $25 photo album and a $15 shoulder strap, and buying one of every item in the nine-piece collection would cost $477.91 before tax.

Apparently, you really can catch them all. You just need a credit card.

Preorders open Aug. 25 through the Polaroid website, while supplies last, followed by a general release on Oct. 5. The collection will also be available through the Pokemon Center website in the US, the UK and Canada. Polaroid says everything will be sold in limited quantities, adding a little artificial urgency to the childhood memories it’s already dangling in front of us.

I’m probably not going to buy one. I haven’t played Pokemon in years. But I did look through every picture of the Pikachu model. And there’s a Snorlax film pack? It’s kinda cute…

So yes, this nostalgia shit is as catchy as a well-thrown Poke Ball.

With more than a decade of experience, Nelson covers Apple and Google and writes about iPhone and Android features, privacy and security settings, and more.

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In iOS 27, Apple is bringing a welcomed set of changes to the stock Camera app. Here’s how it has evolved, what you can now do, and what we didn’t see.

There are hundreds of changes throughout iOS 27, and the Camera app has its fair share. It’s both easier to use and more powerful than before, so let’s walk through it.

Jumping into the app, it still looks very familiar. The general layout, color scheme, and functionality have all remained.

The shutter button is centered at the bottom, with the gallery button to the lower-left and one to flip the camera around on the right. Along the top you have all of your current settings, such as resolution, exposure, and more.

Updated controls

The first big change has to do with those controls. With iOS 27, Apple is making it easier to find and adjust them.

The stock Camera app looks very similar to before

Instead of hiding them at the top of the app in a little icon, there is a new grid icon for in-app controls just to the right of the shutter.

This opens a popover at the bottom with all the various controls you can change. These are relative to your current shooting mode, so you’ll see different options when you’re in video versus photo mode.

Controls have been moved into a redesigned popover

Because Apple is surfacing these controls more, it seems it is also trying to simplify things. Some of these controls, like resolution, have been removed from the Camera section within Settings.

So, if you’re looking for something, be sure to check first in the Camera app itself before digging into the Settings app.

Dedicated Siri mode

The second big change is a new shooting mode. Swipe left in the app to go to Video mode and swipe right to go to the new Siri mode.

A new Siri mode has been added to the Camera app

Siri mode is both new and old. It’s new in the sense that the Camera app didn’t have a dedicated mode in the past, but it’s old because the functionality just lived in a different place.

Prior to iOS 27, you could long-hold the Camera Control to launch Visual Intelligence. This is an AI mode to perform all sorts of different visual tasks, like translating text, looking up an outfit you like, and more.

Siri mode, or Visual Intelligence, can do many things, including looking up what type of tomatoes these are randomly growing in my garden. I did not plant them!

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Siri mode, is just Visual Intelligence baked into the Camera app. This will make it far easier for users to find and take advantage of the newfound AI abilities in iOS 27.

Some other tasks we’ve used it for recently including looking up the variety of tomatoes that was growing in our garden, calculating the number of calories in an entire container of raspberries, and scanning a wedding invite to add it to our calendar.

Visual Intelligence in the new Siri mode can tell you how many calories in this container of raspberries

To be clear, the Camera Control can still be used to launch Visual Intelligence. A long-hold of the Camera Control in iOS 27 just launches the Camera app straight into Siri mode.

More changes

In other changes, Apple is introducing RAW 9. This is its RAW processing pipeline that will apply to RAW images taken with both iPhone and other cameras.

The new version of RAW has much better definition and its easier to make out the colors

Apple is calling this its biggest update yet for RAW support and drastically improves the rendering of RAW files. It uses a new CoreML model and combines demosaic with denoise for the best image quality and runs entirely on device using the Apple Neural Engine cores.

The new version of RAW has much better definition

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In a developer session, Apple highlighted a few images to show the improvement in both color separation and noise reduction. Compared to RAW 8, which was excellent, RAW 9 is significantly better.

In the fifth developer beta of iOS 27, it was leaked that Apple is working on a new reference mode. It’s essentially a way to authenticate where images came from, which is increasingly important with the prevalence of generative AI.

A new Reference Image setting may be coming to iOS 27

Code shows that iOS 27 would use unique camera hardware information to verify an image is real. This would leverage Apple’s Private Cloud Compute architecture.

The feature will be user-enabled and an uncovered splash screen provides some details on how the feature works. Apple is clear that if you enable it, your photo and its metadata will be sent to Private Cloud Compute, though nothing sent there is ever saved.

What we didn’t see

Surprisingly, what we didn’t see was a more drastic change to the Camera app. Early rumors pointed to a new Camera app with a completely customizable layout.

Instead, we got the more modest design change that Apple previewed at WWDC. Even though the changes seem largely positive, it’s disappointing Apple didn’t do more.

As is often the case, camera upgrades sound like they may be a big focus of the new iPhone 18 announcement

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One possibility is that Apple will highlight the new Camera app alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. It could then theoretically bring the app to the older models as well, similar to how it has launched Apple Watch faces in the past.

It could lean into the camera hardware changes with a big app upgrade to match. This may just be wishful thinking, and fortunately there are a lot of great third-party camera apps like Moment Pro Camera or Halide.