Do you know what a spudger is? I didn’t until I was already fingertips deep into performing open-heart surgery on the Google Pixel Watch 4 and realized that the implement — a plastic stick with one pointy end and one flat end — was already in my hand.

I was following iFixit’s instructions to try to do a full screen replacement on the watch from the comfort of my own home, and spudging, it turned out, was a key part of the process. The spudger is used for pressing, prying, pulling and coaxing the watch’s components in and out of place without damaging the metal elements.

But no sooner had I got to grips with it, when I suddenly had to swap it for a pair of tweezers with pincers sharper than scorpion tails. I wielded them clumsily while trying to peel off a sticker holding the screen connector together. The instructions warned me that in extracting this well-secured scrap of tape, I must be careful not to damage it.

I began to sweat as I tussled with both the sticker and my frustration. If you’ve ever tried to remove chewing gum from your hair, you’ll understand what I mean (though you can’t just fill a smartwatch with peanut butter and hope it still works).

It’s not exactly like I have experience in the field. Call me an ambitious amateur.

Once, for example, around the age of 10, I helped my dad repair our boxy television set with a soldering iron. On a couple of occasions in recent years, under close supervision from the iFixit team at tech shows, I’ve tinkered with laptops and phones. I never electrocuted myself in physics class while playing with circuits. I’m also pretty good at jigsaw puzzles. That’s basically it.

But I wanted to make a go of it because I fundamentally believe product repairability is important. Extending the lifecycle of products means less waste, less need to constantly mine the Earth for rare minerals and less impact on vulnerable communities around the world, including the use of child labor in dangerous conditions. It also means we can get our money’s worth out of our ever-more-expensive devices.

Increasingly, we have the right to repair our own electronics thanks to regulations that compel companies to design their products for easy repair and to make parts and instructions accessible. But it’s one thing to repair a laptop or even a phone. Wearables — from the laudably compact to the fiendishly tiny — are a whole other degree of difficulty, for both manufacturers and consumers.

By early 2025, every US state had introduced some form of right-to-repair legislation, with 10 laws currently in effect (you can check your own state here). Meanwhile, in Europe, the EU Right to Repair Directive is set to come into force at the end of July. Theoretically, we should be starting to see repairability and parts availability trickle down into the tech we buy. In reality, progress is painstakingly slow.

“We are kind of at the point where right to repair has passed legally,” says Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, an advocacy group that offers repair guides for high-tech consumer gear and sells tools and replacement parts. 

But compliance? It’s “uneven,” Wiens says.

Tiny tech, big problems

As I set out on my repair adventure, I felt pretty intimidated. Not because the stakes are particularly high, but because I’d like to be able to prove that even for me, an idiot with a screwdriver, this is possible. Because if I can do it, so can you.

The Pixel Watch 4, which came out last year, was an obvious candidate for me to tear down (and then rebuild), because Google has been proactive in making this wearable repairable in a way that no other smartwatch maker has yet attempted. 

“They kind of swung for the fences early, and they’re out ahead,” says Wiens.

The company reengineered its watch from the ground up, without adhesives, so someone like me could disassemble and reassemble it without breaking it. Possible, that is, but not always straightforward. 

Throughout history, watchmakers have been considered artisans as much as they are technicians. Working on watches of all stripes requires dexterity, patience, precision and a steady hand — none of which are qualities I innately possess, nor have I done much to cultivate.

I could’ve made this process easier for myself by choosing something larger and less fiddly to repair, but at this point in time, there’s a well-established repair ecosystem for phones, laptops and bigger electronics, whether that be local repair shops or cafes, company-led efforts such as Apple’s Genius Bar or support for self-service repair. 

Examine the spectrum of iFixit scores, and it’s clear that many phones still pose a challenge — especially the newer foldable variety — but as a category, repairability has improved significantly over the past decade.

The same repair ecosystem and focus on repair from tech companies are not currently in place for wearables.

That’s an issue, because the number of wearables has been skyrocketing as we adorn ourselves with tech to track our sleep and our workouts, to provide the soundtrack to our lives and to observe and record the world around us. I’m talking not only about earbuds and smartwatches, but also newer gadgets, including smart rings, smart glasses and a whole slew of niche (for now, at least) AI peripherals. These items don’t come cheap and ideally will last at least us as long as, if not longer than, our phones. If we can’t repair them, they’ll quickly end up in the trash, adding to the growing mounds of e-waste piling up around the world.

A study published in Nature last December by researchers from Cornell University and the University of Chicago found that demand for health-focused wearables could approach 2 billion units by 2050. Cumulatively, they have the potential to generate 100 million tons of e-waste, increasing pollution risks to communities worldwide.

By far, the biggest contributor to these devices’ carbon footprint is the production of their printed circuit boards. The researchers concluded that if devices are designed to be modular and repairable, their circuit boards can be reused time and again, extending their lifecycles and reducing the need to constantly mine for new materials.

Here we have both a problem and a solution — so why aren’t tech companies doing more to implement it? For a long time, there’s been a perception that wearable tech is simply impossible to repair, which has led many companies to avoid trying. Instead, they tend to rely solely on recycling and trade-in programs to offset the environmental damage.

When it comes to repairability, wearables pose, without a doubt, “the most challenging frontier of consumer tech,” says Matt White, head of sustainable design at deep tech powerhouse Cambridge Consultants. But it’s a challenge that he has first-hand experience overcoming.

I first met White at CES 2026 in a dimly lit Las Vegas hotel suite with his colleagues. The show is famous for its endless stream of shiny consumer tech launches, but the team brought something very different — a proof-of-concept repairable smartwatch called Ouroboros.

The idea behind the project was to identify the roadblocks to repairability, whether engineering, cultural or legislative. What the team discovered, says White, is that building a truly repairable product requires not only a determination from its inception, but also a commitment to it as a north-star priority throughout the design process.

“It’s a business transformation, it’s not just a product design transformation,” he says. “That takes a lot of guts, it takes a bit of a leap of faith and a bit of a bet on innovation for companies to do that. I think that the reward is there, but it requires the right kind of mindset.”

How Google reinvented the Pixel Watch

Google is already seeing that reward, even though it released the Pixel Watch 4 only last summer. 

“The reception after launch has been better than we could have hoped for,” says Francis Hoe, group product manager for Google Pixel Watch.

First up, there was the acknowledgment from iFixit, which awarded the device a 9/10 repairability score, that Google had created the most repairable smartwatch on the market (most watches, like the popular Apple Watch, score 3 or 4 out of 10 at most).

This was validating, Hoe says, but he also appreciates the way the community of Pixel Watch owners has responded. He says he loves to go on Reddit and see people promoting its serviceability, as well as discussing how easy they found the watch to repair. 

“It’s a little surprising,” he says. “But it’s good to see that feedback.”

One such Reddit user who completed a successful repair said the iFixit guide was easy to follow, and it took them less than an hour (much better than my 90 minutes). 

“I’m familiar with doing maker projects, soldering, etc, but I think anyone could do this pretty easily,” they said. “I do have small hands, so not sure if that helped.”

There were some nerves around how people would actually find the process of repairing the device, according to Hoe. And having taken it apart and put it back together again, I can understand why. On the iFixit website, it ranks replacing the screen on the Pixel Watch 4 as “moderate” on the difficulty scale, and says it should take between 30 minutes and one hour.

By the time I tightened the final screws in the Watch, I was about to hit the 90-minute mark. But ultimately, despite the fiddliness of the operation, I completed it. 

The remarkable thing about the Pixel Watch 4 is that from the outside, it looks almost identical to the Pixel Watch 3, but the two products share almost no DNA. Even the screws that hold the watch together, one hidden under each watch band, are a new addition. Previously, there was just glue.

The assumption was that once the device was sealed, that would be it, says Hoe. Now that things have to go in and out, both the components and the order in which they’re assembled have been completely rearchitected. Many parts have been shrunk, the haptic engine was swapped for an alternative, and the connectors needed to be extra robust to survive being attached and detached. The battery was a particular challenge.

“If the battery gets smaller, battery life gets worse, and that’s obviously a huge selling point of wearable devices,” says Hoe. “It meant fundamentally changing our battery strategy.”

The last thing Google wanted to do was make any part of the Pixel Watch experience worse for the sake of repairability, whether that be reducing battery life, increasing the device’s size or making it less waterproof.

Tech companies often use the difficulty of waterproofing as an excuse for not prioritizing modularity and repairability, says Ben Hatton, connected devices analyst at CCS Insight. But the direction of travel is beginning to change.

“Seeing things like the Google Watch and smartphones becoming more repairable, but not sacrificing IP68 and 69 ratings for it, proves that actually that’s not really a compromise that has to be made,” he says. “That major argument against preventing water ingress is starting to be maybe debunked a little bit.”

Those IP ratings indicate resistance to dust and water infiltration. The 6 in the first position indicates the highest level of dust protection, while the 8 or 9 in the second position are high marks for water resistance.

With the Pixel Watch 4 being a sports and fitness device, making it waterproof was a nonnegotiable, says Hoe. Again, this was previously accomplished with adhesives, which aren’t compatible with self-repair, so they had to experiment with alternatives.

The Pixel Watch 4 does come with an IP68 rating, and I got to see first-hand how Google has used O-rings — donut-shaped rubber bands — to create a tight, leak-free seal on both the external screws and around the screen. Getting the tiny O-rings back on the 2mm screws was another tricky part of the reassembly process for me, like playing an ant-size game of Hoopla, but it will be essential if I’m ever to wear the watch in the shower.

Given the potentially dicey trade-offs, many companies would’ve thrown in the towel on repairability. White, who has worked on many different products over the years, says he’s seen multiple times when companies set out to make something repairable but abandon that design principle when it might hold up a project.

“Keeping it sacred is very, very hard when you know engineering teams are getting pressure that you know this has to be released next month in order to hit this milestone and that milestone,” he says. “Then, it’s the first thing in the firing line.”

For Google, repairability eventually won out in internal debates.

“Every time that there’s an inflection point of trade-offs that have to be made, I think we always try to come back to the user and what are we hoping to deliver with this product,” Hoe says. “The trend is usually people are using the devices longer and longer, so it wasn’t something that we wanted to walk away from.”

Fairbuds mount a challenge to the industry

When it comes to challenging the status quo, no one in consumer tech is doing it quite like Fairphone. The Dutch social enterprise is best known for its sustainable, repairable smartphones — the mere existence of which throws down the gauntlet to the entire industry, including giants such as Apple and Samsung.

Around 2021, the company decided to branch out into audio products and has since released a series of products, most notably the Fairbuds, which are earbuds, and the Fairbuds XL, which are over-ear headphones. 

Perhaps because they’re so small, often relatively inexpensive and viewed as a peripheral rather than a device in their own right, people tend to treat headphones as disposable. You’ve probably had at least one pair of headphones break, but did you think to try to repair them?

If your answer is no, don’t feel ashamed. There’s been a long-held belief that headphones are impossible to repair. That’s just started changing.

It’s only in the past few years that iFixit has been handing out repairability scorecards to wireless earbuds, and only in May that it started marking headphones. In both categories, only one company has managed a perfect 10/10 score.

This Fairbuds XL, in particular, is the company’s “most fun” to repair, says Chandler Hatton, Fairphone’s CTO. “It’s a little bit chunkier, and you can feel a little bit more comfortable taking it apart.”

Earbuds, meanwhile, posed a trickier challenge. Our ears aren’t typically load-bearing body parts, so there’s a trade-off between weight and battery size. The small batteries inevitably burn out sooner than we’d like, so we end up chucking them and buying new ones.

“The way that we combat it is to make it super simple to upgrade it to the point that it would be quite silly to throw it away, because you realize: Hey, this thing that I have is valuable, and I can very easily purchase something for very little money and spend 5 minutes putting it into this device,” says Hatton.

Giving a device a second or even third life can prevent a piece of tech from ending up gathering dust in a drawer, he adds, noting the sense of confusion many people feel when they don’t want to admit they might never use something again.

Ultimately, to build repairable tech, you do need to start with repairability as a design principle, says Hatton. If every component needs to be soldered to a printed circuit board, you’re asking people to do too much to repair it. Instead, you need to take a modular approach and ensure the most commonly replaced components are actually accessible.

Another major benefit of making a device modular and repairable is that it can be backward compatible. When Fairphone launched the latest version of the Fairbuds XL, it made the new driver available so people with the earlier model could upgrade their headphones without buying a whole new pair.

It’s important to the company to make tech that’s also appealing and affordable, says Hatton. She doesn’t want to ask people to compromise on their design and comfort standards. Repairability can’t come at the cost of an avant-garde product that might alienate people and make them less willing to take a chance on a smaller brand.

“We want to build on the things that are already there and be part of the conversation, part of the ecosystem and part of the trends that are going on,” says Hatton. 

When repairability becomes an obligation

For now, companies, including Fairphone and Google, are leading by example, but at some point that example might form the basis of a legal precedent.

Europe’s battery regulation, which will come into force in 2027, requires most portable consumer electronics to have easily user-replaceable batteries. Just as the EU regulation mandating USB-C charging made it the global charging standard, it’s expected that the new rules will affect the design and repairability of products worldwide.

There are exemptions for devices where battery access would compromise water resistance, or for ultra-compact designs where physical constraints make safe battery access impossible. But these exceptions exist for only as long as there’s nothing in the state of the art — or in the market — that proves it’s possible to make a battery accessible or waterproof after all, says White, the consultant.

Now that Google has shown it’s possible to make a smartwatch with an IP68 rating and a user-replaceable battery, that could shift what’s considered state-of-the-art.

“Whether it be for a ring or whether it be for smart glasses or whether it be for headphones, it’s a real opportunity for companies to go… this is now the state of the art, and everyone else has to follow,” says White. “You can use it as a tool to enact change across the entire sector, and also gain all of the benefit of being the first one to do it.”

With both regulation looming and product precedents being set, there is enormous potential for tech companies to force competitors to raise their own game by developing replaceable battery solutions first. If you hold a licensable patent for such a solution, it could even prove profitable.

European regulators might be slow, but their power shouldn’t be underestimated. Even Apple switched its proprietary Lightning port to USB-C on all the iPhones it sells globally.

Apple has made significant strides in repairability, says iFixit’s Wiens, who has publicly and successfully exerted pressure on the company over the years. 

“They really, genuinely, I think, do believe in repair and making it last longer,” he says. “Broadly, the iPhone does last a long time, and it’s great resale value.”

He’s less impressed when it comes to the Apple Watch and AirPods. (Versions of the latter consistently receive a 0/10 iFixit score, and Wiens describes the lack of repairability as “egregious.”)

The Apple Watch, meanwhile, poses a “fixable design problem,” says Wiens. One of the main issues — prevalent across the industry, especially with games consoles — is the availability of parts and manuals, which Wiens sees as lacking when it comes to the watch.

He directs me to a letter sent by Apple to the Minnesota attorney general in February and posted on Reddit, in which the company points to its online Self Service Repair store as proof of its compliance with the state’s right-to-repair law regarding the Apple Watch. This resource contains documentation and opportunities to buy parts for many Apple products, but not the Apple Watch. 

A spokesperson for Apple said the company meets the requirements of Minnesota’s right-to-repair law, and that it’s the first smartphone maker to support a push for federal right-to-repair regulation.

The miniature design of the Apple Watch presents challenges, but the company is rolling out same-unit battery repair service for a growing number of models over an expanding range of regions. Display repairs for certain models are also under development, as are further enhancements to overall Apple Watch repairability.

“We’ve seen big improvements from Apple and almost market-leading improvements in some respects,” says Ben Wood, chief analyst at market research firm CCS Insight, who cites an easily delaminated glue the company invented to simplify iPhone disassembly. It’s the kind of thing that could be rolled down to the Apple Watch and other small products to increase ease of repair.

Wood adds that he wouldn’t be surprised, especially given Apple’s progress in cutting emissions associated with the manufacture of recent Apple Watch models, to see a more easily repairable Apple Watch in the near future.

Emerging wearables: No repairability in sight

While the established players in established wearable product categories are taking active strides toward sustainability, the same can’t be said for the up-and-comers.

Quinten Klein, a 30-year-old business development and operations contractor, dangles a pair of first-generation Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses in front of his camera from his home in Los Angeles. 

“If you can see in here, I’ve taken off one of the arms,” he says, as the inside edge of one of the glasses stems flaps open.

This is the fourth pair of Meta Ray-Bans Klein has tinkered with, he tells me. The speakers on his first pair of Ray-Bans broke out of warranty, prompting him to take matters into his own hands. Reddit is filled with complaints from people just like him, who have been left with a non-functioning pair of smart glasses relatively soon after buying them.

“They’re definitely fragile,” Klein says. “They’re not easy to repair — not because the job isn’t easy, [but] because things just don’t work once you repair it. Things don’t go back together right, and it’s packed tightly. It’s one of those things where they’ve obviously designed it never to be opened up again.”

On the Gen 1s he shows me over the video call, he’d replaced the battery with one from the Ray-Bans Gen 2. This time, he’s been extra careful not to cause any serious damage so that he can keep on using them rather than have them be another sacrifice to repairability science.

“You’re still going to end up damaging some little parts, like the bottoms here — the plastic is just so soft,” he says. “The glue, once you’ve broken it off, it’s really hard to get off of the little plastic edges. It’s definitely not something that I would recommend to any casual user.”

Once he was in, the battery on the Gen 1 glasses was actually pretty easy, says Klein. The front half of the glasses’ arm nearest to the lenses is very simply organized and connected (the back half, where the speakers reside, is more of a mystery).

“It’s the putting it back together part and the reliability once it’s together part that is not really there,” he says. 

This is something I relate to from my tinkering with my Pixel Watch 4. The reassembly was by far the most fraught part of the process. “I’m not sure what kind of glue they used, but I’ve been trying to work with different industrial glues to copy it,” says Klein.

Smart glasses (especially those without screens) are currently experiencing explosive popularity, with research published by IDC this week showing 167% year-on-year growth in the first three months of 2026. Let’s hope those 2.25 million units stand the test of time. 

“It could turn into an e-waste nightmare if there’s not due consideration designed into these things,” says White.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Meta is the market leader in smart glasses, with over 69% market share, according to IDC. No other company currently boasts more than 3.5%, but several promising challengers are poised to enter the fray with competitive products. 

Glasses from Google, Samsung, Gentle Monster, Warby Parker and Xreal are all on the verge of hitting the shelves. Meanwhile, the Alibaba Qwen smart glasses I tried at MWC in Barcelona in March had swappable batteries on the ends of the arms — the first hint of any repairability we’ve seen in this emerging product category.

Thanks to his intrepid approach to DIY repair, Klein has shown that if you can get inside the Meta Ray-Bans and close them up again, battery repair is not only possible but straightforward. But access to the device’s innards is so prohibitive that in an iFixit teardown, the team deemed the glasses “unrepairable.”

The generous way to think about this is to acknowledge that it is new technology and that Meta is still figuring it out. 

“You’re packing a considerable amount of tech into a crazy, already predetermined form factor that you can’t deviate much from,” says Carsten Frauenheim, iFixit’s global head of design for repairability. “Their engineering challenge is high, and I think their priority is just tackling that right now.”

Wiens has a more take-no-prisoners attitude. “Glasses are hard — we’re at the bleeding edge of this,” he says. “But come on, you’ve got to find a way to make the battery swappable on these smart glasses, otherwise it’s a disposable product. … I’m going to continue to hold their feet to the fire until they get the battery repairable.”

A spokesperson for Meta said the company was always looking for ways to improve the overall lifecycle of its products, focusing on durability and longevity as key considerations during hardware development. The company follows circular economy principles, including “reusing hardware components, increasing the use of recycled materials and responsible supply chain practices,” they said.

“We have several programs in place to keep devices in use and out of landfill,” they added. “We also offer refurbished products where available, extending the lifecycle of existing hardware.” Lenses are fully replaceable and customers, having trouble with warrantees should reach out to Ray-Ban or Oakley customer support directly.

Compared with upcoming interlopers into the glasses game, such as Google, Samsung and potentially Apple, Meta has relatively little hardware manufacturing experience, which could put it at a disadvantage. It’s likely that they’ll include some of the learnings from making other products in their portfolios repairable, Hatton says. “Maybe that could steer Meta into a more sustainable outlook.”

Other makers of wearables, including smart rings and AI peripherals such as pendants and clips, don’t appear to be doing much better — though there are signs of hope.

Earlier this year, smart ring maker Oura filed for a patent in the US with a replaceable battery design. The company hasn’t commented further on this, and there was no such component in the Oura Ring 5, which debuted in May, but it still feels promising at a time when very few companies designing emerging wearable products seem to have repair on their agendas at all.

For those, such as Wiens, who are campaigning for the right to repair, the lack of care and attention being given to repairability by companies experimenting with new product categories is ultimately dispiriting. 

“I get we’re excited with the shiny new, but you can’t go and mine a hole in the Earth every day of raw materials, get stuff made by children … then drag the supply chain all around the world to make something that we’re going to sell to you for $400, and then it stops working in 18 months,” he says. “This is not OK. It should not be ethically tolerated.”

In the face of unrepairable products, companies only have trade-in and recycling schemes to fall back on. Both Meta and Oura offer these, but in the long run, they won’t meet the requirements of right-to-repair legislation, and it’s hard to measure how thorough any recycling truly is. 

Our role in repair

All of this brings me back to my own attempts to repair the Pixel Watch.

It’s all well and good for companies to invest in making their products easily repairable and recyclable, but the onus is also on us, as consumers of those products, to follow through by repairing or recycling. If we leave them in a drawer for years gathering dust — something I’ve been guilty of doing — or dispose of them irresponsibly, we’re not playing our part in keeping the circular economy a true circle.

In a survey last year by the University of Bradford in northern England, researchers found that 73% of people were willing to repair their electronics. The majority were motivated by cost savings and the fun of a DIY project.

Those who were reluctant to repair their tech cited lack of skills, tools, knowledge and time as major barriers. Lack of time is a personal issue and often a matter of priorities and perception. As for the other three, iFixit and other self-service repair stores, including Apple’s, have people covered.

Still, for many of us, a psychological shift might be required to add a repair chapter to the story of our ownership of any given item. If we can make this shift, we might be able to find the time after all. We’re out of practice right now — most of us don’t spend our evenings sitting in front of the TV darning our own socks.

Tech companies could also do more to hold our hands through this process, says White. “There’s an opportunity there in not just the raw engineering design, but in the messaging, in the [user experience] of the product, in little touch points within the product that kind of nudge or guide the consumer to understand either how to repair their products or what to do with it at the end of life.”

Our consumer culture is one of abundance, so the skills and inclination to fix and mend have been replaced by the ease of disposing of and replacing. But if we can get out of that habit, there may be untapped and unacknowledged benefits in repairing our broken things.

Consider the Ikea Effect, a term coined in 2011 by three academics from Harvard, Yale and Duke who published the results of three studies in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Together, their findings showed that people tend to cherish items they’ve built themselves, placing much higher value on them than on items they’ve simply purchased.

Most of us are familiar with the feeling of satisfaction of completing a Lego set, for example, as well as the way we tend to value the finished product — often not wanting to tear it down, but instead displaying it somewhere we can admire it. Our effort creates attachment, and the same might well be true of items we successfully repair.

Tech companies can help make repairs more fun for us, too. At every step of the journey, the Pixel Watch team had to think about what people would experience if they went fishing around under the hood. That meant not just making it easy to take apart, but making it aesthetically pleasing. 

“We’re not thinking about just the outside, but how do we drive the inner beauty of the device, so that when you’re taking it apart, it feels like something we considered,” says Hoe. He points to the printed Google branding on the battery’s metal, the way the components line up to create a smooth surface, and the lack of sharp edges. “It wasn’t an afterthought, essentially,” he says.

We could well start to see our technology not simply as utilitarian items destined sooner rather than later for the rubbish heap, but instead as something partially crafted by our own hand, into which we have poured time, labor and care. We might subsequently make more effort to keep our tech safe and give it a responsible send-off when it finally does take its last gasp.

Likewise, handholding us through our confusion over what to do with our broken products is a way for tech companies to establish goodwill among customers. 

“It’s a really great opportunity for the brand to build loyalty and stickiness,” says White. “In my mind, it feels like a win-win.”

The legacy of the Pixel Watch, says Hoe, is that it’s already proven people do actually care about repairability.

I found my experience of replacing the Pixel Watch’s screen both deeply fun and satisfying. It also massively boosted confidence in my own capabilities. Having completed one repair, I now feel less intimidated at the thought of getting out my screwdriver, my tweezers and, yes, my spudger to crack open more of my damaged tech. 

There’s one particularly pricey pair of headphones sitting in a drawer that is calling to me. I’ve been putting off dealing with them, but they’re already broken. It’s at this point that I have to ask myself, what’s the worst that could happen?

Art Director | Jeffrey Hazelwood

Creative Director | Viva Tung

Video Host | Katie Collins

Video Producer | Andrew Lanxon

Video Editor | JD Christison

Project Manager | Danielle Ramirez

Editor | Corinne Reichert

Director of Content | Jonathan Skillings

With the 1.6 release, the Matter smart home standard is becoming more capable with streamlined setup, improved multi-ecosystem support, and expanded user preferences.

Starting the week of June 15th, the Connectivity Standard Alliance has been hosting its first ever Unify conference in Austin, Texas. It’s there the CSA made the announcement around Matter 1.6.

As a precursor, Matter is a fairly new smart home standard that is intended to unify the various platform ecosystems. Matter devices can largely work seamlessly between Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, Apple Home, and more.

Matter 1.6

With this update, NFC-based commissioning is improving compared to the initial 1.4.1 implementation. Previously, after tapping a NFC tag, the commissioning was then carried out over Bluetooth.

Now, Matter 1.6 can complete the entire commissioning process via bi-directional NFC communication. That removes the need for BLE at all and it even works before the accessory is fully powered on.

In use, we expect to see devices like light bulbs or in-wall switches that can set up before ever being plugged into a socket or wired into a wall.

For multi-ecosystem homes, the CSA is releasing Joint Fabric. Instead of each ecosystem having its own network of devices, 1.6 creates a standardized Matter network that different ecosystems can tap into.

Devices can be added to a Joint Fabric once, and automatically appear in each of the ecosystems. This removes the need for fresh setup in each ecosystem.

The final major update with this release is for thermostats. Instead of sending a contextually blind command directly to a thermostat, Thermostat Suggestions standardizes the communication of commands by adding context.

For example, if a user manually adjusted the thermostat but moments later, a new command arrives from a previously-set schedule. The thermostat is able to ignore that command, recognizing it’s likely not what the user intended to happen just after making a manual adjustment.

If a Thermostat Suggestion is ignored, the thermostat can send back a response with a reason for the action.

Other changes include event history for security sensors, unmounted states for smoke and CO alarms, and standardized capability communication.

Product Security 1.1 update

Also developed by the CSA, we got version 1.1 of the Product Security certification program.

Version 1.1 has a more wholistic view of the smart home, offering security certifications for the whole ecosystem, from the app to the accessories.

“With this announcement, the Product Security Certification Program advances our goal to make compliance with external product security standards and regulations practical for the global IoT industry,” said Steve Hanna of Infineon, the Chair of the Product Security Working Group Steering Committee. “Version 1.1 expands the scope of the program and introduces higher-confidence pathways for certification, reflecting emerging trends in global regulations.”

The new version of Matter is available to developers and accessory makers now. We now have to wait for Apple Home and other ecosystems to adopt it.

As global investors race to fund the infrastructure underpinning the artificial-intelligence boom, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board’s CPP Investments has committed up to ₹70 billion (about $741 million) to Indian data center operator CtrlS, betting on India’s growing role in the global buildout of cloud and AI infrastructure.

Under the partnership announced on Wednesday, CPP Investments will invest ₹40 billion (around $423 million) to acquire an 8.2% stake in CtrlS and commit up to ₹30 billion (about $317 million) to a joint venture to develop hyperscale data center campuses across India.

CPP Investments will own 48% of the joint venture, while CtrlS will hold the remaining 52%, the companies said in a joint statement.

Founded in 2007, CtrlS operates more than 15 data centers across India. The Hyderabad-based company has been expanding its footprint to meet rising demand from cloud providers, enterprises, and AI workloads.

India has become a major destination for data center and AI investments as global technology companies and investors ramp up spending to meet surging computing demand. Companies including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Uber have announced investments in the country in recent months, while operators are rapidly expanding capacity amid a broader global race to build AI infrastructure.

“As one of the world’s fastest-growing digital markets, India represents an important pillar of our global data center strategy,” said CPP Investments’ global head of real assets Max Biagosch in a statement.

CPP Investments, Canada’s largest pension investor, has been investing in India since 2009 and had net assets of about $20 billion in the country as of March 31, making it one of the largest foreign institutional investors in the market.

The investment builds on CPP Investments’ broader push into digital infrastructure. The pension fund said it has invested in the data center sector since 2017 and has built a portfolio of assets and joint ventures across major markets worldwide.

The partnership will help CtrlS expand capacity and build infrastructure tailored for AI workloads, said CtrlS founder and chief executive Sridhar Pinnapureddy.

The CPP-CtrlS deal is the latest in a string of investments targeting India’s data center sector. Earlier this month, Blackstone-backed AirTrunk said it would invest $30 billion to build five gigawatts of data center capacity in India by 2030. Meta, meanwhile, partnered with Reliance Industries last week on a 168-megawatt AI-enabled data center in the western state of Gujarat.

New Delhi has sought to position India as a global hub for digital infrastructure through a range of policy measures, including tax exemptions for foreign cloud providers on services sold overseas through 2047, provided those workloads are run from data centers located in the country.

Indian conglomerates have also accelerated expansion plans to capitalize on the opportunity. Adani Group and Tata Consultancy Services are among the companies that have unveiled major data center projects aimed at supporting AI and cloud workloads. In 2023, CtrlS announced plans to invest $2 billion over six years to expand its data center footprint across India.

India’s growing role in AI infrastructure has not yet been matched by similar progress in developing frontier AI models. While the country has a handful of startups building indigenous AI models, including Sarvam, much of the underlying AI technology used by Indian companies continues to be supplied by U.S. firms.

The rapid buildout of data centers is also expected to increase pressure on electricity and water resources, highlighting some of the challenges that could accompany India’s ambitions to become a major AI infrastructure hub.

Few energy sources can top geothermal’s potential, with at least 42 terawatts of capacity available worldwide, according to the IEA, more than twice the world’s energy use last year.

The technology is shaping up to be the energy world’s dark horse, even though investment in the tech pales in comparison to startups in advanced nuclear fission and fusion power.

That makes the $19 million in seed funding raised by a startup called Critical Energy especially notable. Critical Energy hopes to fill a major gap for geothermal power plants by building modular turbines tailored to them. The funds are earmarked to build its first 2.5 megawatt project, the startup exclusively told TechCrunch.

Meanwhile the darlings of the investment world, those working on nuclear fission and fusion, are targeting the early 2030s for their first commercial deployments. By that time, geothermal startups could be building gigawatt-scale power plants.

“Geothermal is going to beat them to it. By a lot,” Spencer Jackson, co-founder and CEO of Critical Energy, told TechCrunch. “In four or five years, I hope that we’re doing many gigawatts a year.”

Even modest expansion of geothermal could pay off to serve the world’s — and especially the tech industry’s — growing energy needs. A recent report said that advanced geothermal could power nearly two-thirds of new data centers by 2030.

But Jackson said there’s a looming shortage of compatible turbines. Many projects today are specifying large turbines, which can take months to years to assemble on site, he said. “It’s still way faster and cheaper to make it the other direction, to built it in a factory.”

Critical Energy hopes to fill the gap with modular turbines. To design them, Jackson leaned on his experience at SpaceX, where he worked on Falcon Heavy, Starship, and the Raptor rocket engine. To build them quickly, Critical Energy is working with machine shops to make the turbomachinery and other turbine components, which resemble rocket engines. It’s buying other parts off the shelf for now. In the future, the startup may decide to bring other pieces in house, similar to how Tesla and SpaceX have done, Jackson said.

The first power plant to use Critical Energy’s turbines is scheduled to be completed by 2027 and will be installed at an existing geothermal site similar to those found in Iceland or at The Geysers in Northern California. Critical Energy is also designing a larger, 5 megawatt module targeted at enhanced geothermal companies like Fervo Energy, which drill deeper into the Earth to withdraw more heat.

By the early 2030s, Jackson hopes Critical Energy will be making gigawatts worth of turbines. “We are looking for the fastest path to gigawatts of scalable power on the grid,” he said. “Long term goal is 300 gigawatts a year in 2045.”

Though geothermal development has been quietly proceeding, Jackson expects that once the technology is more mature, oil and gas companies will dive in, speeding things up considerably. 

“Geothermal is great because the oil and gas industry has the replicability to do hundreds and then thousand of wells. They’re very, very good at drilling wells,” he said. “But they need turbines and there’s going to be a massive shortage of those.”

The seed rounds were led by Susa Ventures and Upfront Ventures with participation from MaC Venture Capital, Susquehanna Sustainable Investments, Humba Ventures, Scribble Ventures, and Underground Ventures. The startup also nabbed $3 million in venture debt from Silicon Valley Bank bringing its total early capital to $22 million.

Nathaniel Nifong grew tired of the same scene repeating every day. Toys lay scattered near the couch. Socks and shirts dotted the floor after his kids finished playing. The mess demanded constant attention, yet it always returned. Most robot arms stay fixed to one workbench or table. Rolling robots must weave around furniture and adapt to a floor that changes constantly. Nifong wanted something that could reach anywhere in the room without those headaches.

He secured four motorized units to the four corners of a rectangular space. All of this was held together by a thick braided fishing line that ran from each anchor to a central platform. By carefully shortening or lengthening the cables in near-perfect timing, the platform may travel to any location in three dimensions below the ceiling. There is also a fifth cable that drops straight down from that platform, carrying the gripper itself. When the task is completed, the gripper retracts upward, and the entire assembly parks high and out of the way.

LEGO City Heavy-Duty Recovery Tow Truck with Crane Building Toy – Dump & Tow Truck Toys for Boys & Girls…

• CLEAR THE ROAD! – Builders 8 years old and up can pretend to operate professional tow truck equipment with the LEGO City Heavy-Duty Recovery Tow…
• WHAT’S IN THE BOX? – Includes a powerful tow truck with a working crane, a dump truck with boulder cargo, a restraining chain, and 3 tow truck…
• WORK LIKE THE PROS– Kids can deploy stabilizing outriggers, rotate the crane, and use the rear lifting system and winch to load vehicles for…

Each corner anchor houses a small computer, a camera, and a motor that rotates a spool. But the motors work together to share the load, so none of them require a lot of power on their own, and one of the support lines also delivers current down to the gripper, so it never needs a battery. The entire system is always powered up and ready to go, with no need for anyone to swap cells or dock at a charging station.

The gripper features two fingers joined by a four-bar linkage, which allows it to pick up a wide range of things, from a soccer ball to a crumpled up shirt. When the motor opens them wide, the fingers extend in a broad arc. As they close, the motion changes so that they travel parallel to one other, which is ideal for picking up smaller or flatter items such as socks or even a coin. A pressure sensor in one of the fingers alerts the system when it hits anything and then switches control to a basic loop that maintains a constant force rather than simply crushing whatever it is hanging onto. There is also grip tape on the contact surfaces, which provides dependable friction without leaving any sticky residue or causing any harm.

The four anchors contain cameras that provide a 360-degree view of the area while also locating the gripper and any target objects on the floor. Along with this, there are little printed markers that you place in crucial locations, such as the rim of a washing basket, to provide the system with accurate reference points for dropping items. The gripper also includes a camera, a laser distance sensor, and a motion sensor to determine its final approach and assure a secure hold before lifting.

The system was trained using hundreds of real-life household examples, and the model learnt whether forms and textures correspond to toys, clothes, or trash, as well as how to approach each one. All of the processing takes place on a home computer, with no data being sent to outside servers unless the owner chooses to pass some data over for future enhancements. The same arrangement allows you to manually manipulate the item with a gamepad or run fully automatic cycles that last around an hour before returning everything to its resting position.

In the real world, the crane glides across the open space above the furniture with ease, only lowering to catch something. It then rises and carries the load to the appropriate bin. Demonstrations show how it collects scattered laundry or stray toys and neatly places them without bumping against walls or knocking down lamps. Because of their form, flat books occasionally slip through, but most common detritus is easily picked up.
[Source]

Focal did not show the Diva Alta Utopia at High End Vienna 2026. There was no private-room tease, no covered prototype, and not even the usual carefully vague French whisper over espresso that something ruinously expensive was hiding behind the curtain. Same story at AXPONA 2026, although perhaps we should have paid more attention when Focal and Naim suggested that something was coming that would push wireless hi-fi into far more serious territory.

Now we know what that something is: the Focal Diva Alta Utopia, a new flagship wireless loudspeaker system for 2026 and the third model in the company’s rapidly expanding Diva Utopia family. Following the original Diva Utopia in 2024 and the larger Diva Mezza Utopia in 2025, the Diva Alta Utopia takes the same basic promise; a high-end Focal loudspeaker with Naim electronics, streaming, amplification, and system control built in, and pushes it into the kind of price category where most people start checking property taxes.

At $210,000 per pair, the Diva Alta Utopia is not a lifestyle speaker unless your lifestyle involves gated driveways, dedicated listening rooms, and debating whether to turn grandma’s guest room into a pickleball court. But the price also needs some context. A passive Focal/Naim system built around Utopia loudspeakers, high-end Naim amplification, cabling, racks, source components, and proper installation can easily live in the same financial neighborhood.

Looked at that way, the Diva Alta Utopia may be outrageous, but it might also be the cleaner, smarter, and possibly less expensive route in the long run for someone who wants a no-compromise Focal/Naim system without a stack of boxes.

You will still need a turntable. Civilization has limits. Bugger.

Related News:

Directly inspired by Focal’s flagship Grande Utopia EM Evo passive loudspeaker, the Diva Alta Utopia adapts several of its core acoustic ideas for an active wireless platform rather than simply duplicating the passive design. Its architecture includes a four-way driver layout, Focal’s Focus Time technology, fine-tuned filtering, and a new M-profile “W” midrange driver developed for this model. Focal says the Diva Alta Utopia is optimized for rooms ranging from 538 to 1,292 square feet.

Pro Tip: For comparison, the original Diva Utopia is optimized for rooms up to 861 square feet, while the Diva Mezza Utopia is rated for spaces up to 1,076 square feet.

What’s New Inside The Diva Alta Utopia

Although the Diva Alta Utopia draws heavily from its predecessors, it also incorporates new technologies that represent Focal’s most advanced loudspeaker engineering to date.

New PRISM Tweeter: The Diva Alta Utopia introduces a new-generation Focal PRISM tweeter. According to Focal, this tweeter combines a multi-material substrate with an advanced micro-structuring process, delivering greater rigidity than beryllium while maintaining a careful balance of lightness, damping, and rigidity. Developed through a major research program, patented, and manufactured in France, PRISM allows Focal to sculpt tweeter membranes with unprecedented precision. More than 20 years after the introduction of the company’s beryllium tweeter, PRISM marks a major step forward in Focal loudspeaker driver development.

New M-profile “W” Midrange: Previously used primarily in Focal’s Utopia M monitors, the M-profile “W” midrange driver makes its debut in the Diva Utopia range with the Diva Alta Utopia. Focal says the new driver improves midrange precision and transparency, while added carbon reinforcement in the Diva Alta Utopia is designed to push performance even further.

Streaming, Inputs, and High-Resolution Format Support

Beyond its advanced acoustic architecture, the Diva Alta Utopia is designed as a complete Focal/Naim wireless hi-fi system with integrated amplification, streaming, and physical connectivity built in. Inputs include HDMI eARC, optical, RCA, and USB, giving owners the ability to connect a TV, digital source, analog component, or computer without building a traditional rack-based system around the speakers.

Wireless support includes Wi-Fi, AirPlay 2, Google Cast, UPnP, Bluetooth 5.3, Spotify Connect, TIDAL Connect, Qobuz Connect, and QQ Music via QPlay. Bluetooth codec support includes aptX Adaptive, SBC, and AAC.

The Diva Alta Utopia also supports internet radio through HLS, DASH, and OGG streaming containers, with MP3, AAC, Vorbis, and FLAC codec support, along with Icecast, Shoutcast, and Xperi Extended Metadata.

File support is extensive, including WAV, FLAC, AIFF, and ALAC up to 24-bit/384kHz, MP3 and AAC up to 48kHz/320kbps, OGG up to 48kHz, and DSD64/DSD128. Focal also specifies smooth gapless playback across all supported formats.

UWB Inter-Speaker Connection: To simplify setup between the primary and secondary speakers, the Diva Alta Utopia uses Ultra Wideband, or UWB, technology. This allows the two speakers to communicate wirelessly at 96 kHz/24-bit, with no compression, no signal loss, and very low latency.

Pro Tip: For 192 kHz/24-bit playback between the two speakers, Focal provides a wired inter-speaker connection. Wireless UWB tops out at 96 kHz/24-bit.

Control Options: Like its Diva Utopia predecessors, the Diva Alta Utopia can be controlled using the supplied remote, the Focal & Naim app, supported voice assistants including Google Assistant and Siri, and smart home control systems such as Control4, Crestron, Savant, and RTI.

ADAPT Technology: You can have the most luxurious speaker system, but it can’t perform at its best unless the speakers work well with your room. With this in mind, the Diva Utopia wireless speaker line provides the ADAPT room acoustic correction system, incorporating each user’s individual hearing perception.

What’s On The Outside

The Diva Alta Utopia is not only packed with the technology needed for a serious wireless, and wired, high-end listening experience; it is also designed to make a very visible statement in the room.

Focal gives the Diva Alta Utopia sculptural lines, balanced proportions, and a commanding, almost architectural presence. At 58 1/4 x 18 1/8 x 24 3/8 inches, or 148 x 46 x 62 cm, and 236 pounds, or 107 kg, per speaker, this is not a compact lifestyle product pretending to be high-end hi-fi. It is a full-scale luxury loudspeaker system that happens to remove the need for a traditional stack of electronics.

The Diva Alta Utopia also features interchangeable floating side panels, allowing owners to change the speaker’s appearance without altering the speaker itself. Finish options include felt panels in Grey or Ivory, along with lacquer panels in Black High Gloss, Off-White High Gloss, and Dune High Gloss.

Focal has clearly designed the Diva Alta Utopia to elevate both the listening experience and the living space it occupies. Just make sure the living space is ready for a pair of 236-pound French loudspeakers that do not exactly disappear behind a ficus or your collection of Charlotte Gainsbourg records.

Comparison 

Features in Common

• Primary loudspeaker inputs:
  • HDMI eARC, CEC
  • Optical TOSLINK
  • Analogue RCA
  • USB 2.0 Type A
  • RJ45 Ethernet
  • RJ45 Speaker Link
• Secondary loudspeaker:
• Audio formats:
  • WAV, FLAC and AIFF – up to 24 bits/384 kHz
  • ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) – up to 24 bits/384 kHz
  • MP3 – up to 48 kHz/320 kbps (16 bits)
  • AAC – up to 48 kHz/320 kbps (16 bits)
  • OGG and AAC – up to 48kHz (16 bits)
  • DSD64 and DSD128
  • Bluetooth – aptX Adaptive, SBC, AAC
  • Note: support for smooth, continuous playback on all formats
    Multiroom Synchronizes up to 32 Focal & Naim streamers,
    controlled from the Focal & Naim app
• Wireless streaming:
  • AirPlay
  • Google Cast
  • UPnP
  • Bluetooth 5.3
  • Spotify via Spotify Connect
  • TIDAL via TIDAL Connect
  • QQ Music via QPlay
  • Qobuz via Qobuz Connect
• Music streaming services via the Focal & Naim app:
  • TIDAL
  • Qobuz
  • Internet radio
  • Podcasts depend on services available in each country
• Network: Ethernet (1000/100/10 Mbps), Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi 6)
• Wireless connection: UWB 96kHz/24bits
• Connection with Hi-Res Link: 192kHz/24-bits
• Handheld:
  • Integrated remote control
  • Dedicated control app on iOS and Android
• Remote control: Zigbee

The Bottom Line 

The Focal Diva Alta Utopia is not merely a larger, more expensive version of the Diva Utopia formula. It is Focal and Naim pushing the active wireless loudspeaker concept into true ultra-high-end territory, with a four-way architecture, new PRISM tweeter, new M-profile “W” midrange driver, UWB inter-speaker connectivity, extensive streaming support, and 600 watts of Naim Class A/B amplification inside each speaker.

Based on our experience listening to the earlier Diva Utopia models at recent shows, including AXPONA, the promise here is not theoretical. Those systems filled a large hotel ballroom with surprising ease, even with a crowd in the room and multiple display areas competing for attention. If the Diva Alta Utopia delivers greater dynamic headroom, higher resolution, a larger soundstage, more refined low-end control, and even better midrange presence, it is clearly aimed at larger rooms and buyers who want scale without the traditional tower of electronics.

The earlier models were already as impressive as some of the $250,000 systems we heard at the show, which makes the Alta’s price easier to understand, even if it still requires a very deep wallet and possibly a quick lie-down afterward. How French.

The price might be the hard part. At $210,000 per pair, the Diva Alta Utopia three times than the Diva Mezza Utopia and over five times more than the original Diva Utopia. That puts it in the same conversation as the Bang & Olufsen Beolab 90, not the usual premium wireless speaker category. But a passive Utopia-based Focal system with high-end Naim amplification, source components, cabling, racks, and installation can also become a six-figure exercise very quickly. In that context, the Diva Alta Utopia may be outrageous, but not automatically irrational.

What is missing? Vinyl listeners will still need a turntable and a proper phono stage unless their deck already has one built in. This is also not a replacement for a full multi-channel home theater system, and at 236 pounds per speaker, nobody is casually repositioning them after dinner. The Diva Alta Utopia is for the buyer who wants ultra-high-end Focal/Naim performance without the traditional tower of electronics. Everyone else can admire it from a safe financial distance.

Price & Availability

The Focal Diva Alta Utopia will be available beginning August 2026, exclusively through the Focal Powered by Naim network of authorized retailers for $210,000 USD and $260,000 CAD per pair.

Finishes include grey and ivory felt, three lacquered and varnished finishes, Black High Gloss, Off-White High Gloss, and Dune High Gloss. All finishes are hand-crafted in the Focal Ebénisterie Bourgogne workshop.

The Diva Utopia ($39,000/pair) and Diva Mezza Uptopia ($69,000/pair) are also currently available through Focal Powered by Naim Network and authorized dealers.

Related Reading:

Samsung Display is using AWE 2026 to push RGB OLEDoS as a core building block for the next wave of XR hardware. The showcase centers on displays designed for mixed reality headsets and augmented reality smart glasses, where brightness, size, and efficiency all collide.

The standout spec is a 1.3-inch RGB OLEDoS panel rated at 40,000 nits. Samsung Display is presenting it in a dark-room Big Dipper installation, where only two of seven panels use the ultra-bright tech to make the brightness and color gap obvious. It’s a booth demo with a sharper message underneath.

Why brightness decides the experience

XR displays have a brutal job. They need to stay vivid and precise inside hardware that’s also fighting optics, battery life, heat, and weight.

Samsung Display’s 40,000-nit panel targets that pressure point directly. In a headset or glasses-style device, the display can’t simply be big and bright. It has to push strong visuals through compact optical systems without turning the product into something bulky.

The company’s smaller 0.62-inch RGB OLEDoS panel points in the same direction for smart glasses. Samsung Display is using it in a prototype that can show AR information such as translation, navigation, and weather over a Long Beach backdrop.

Can RGB OLEDoS shrink the hardware

Samsung Display is also making a production argument. RGB OLEDoS builds OLED on a wafer and uses a single-panel structure, which the company says can make manufacturing less complex than some other microdisplay approaches.

That could help smart glasses makers chase thinner designs, since optical complexity is one of the barriers between impressive demos and wearable products. Samsung Display also says RGB OLEDoS skips the color filter used in white OLEDoS, helping light efficiency, lifespan, brightness, and color performance.

The less flashy engineering may carry the most weight. XR gets easier to wear when the display stack gets simpler.

What comes after the booth

Samsung Display is widening the showcase beyond headset and glasses panels. It’s also presenting a stretchable display that can rise from a flat surface, plus a Light Field Display that creates 3D-like visuals without glasses or a headset.

Those demos make the company’s ambition clear, but they leave the commercial picture unfinished. Samsung Display hasn’t provided product timelines, customer names, pricing, or availability details for the technologies in this showcase.

AWE USA is a flex, not a launch. The real test is whether Samsung Display can turn these RGB OLEDoS panels into production-ready parts for headset and smart-glasses makers trying to make XR feel less awkward.

Kodak’s quirky Charmera camera is getting a nostalgic refresh with the new Charmera Millennium Edition.

It swaps the original’s retro disposable-camera styling for a collection of shiny Y2K-inspired designs. These designs look like they came straight from the early 2000s.

The update introduces seven new finishes, all inspired by the technology and aesthetics of the millennium era.

At $34.99/£35, the new models retain the same affordable price point. This helped make the original Charmera a hit among collectors and fans of lo-fi photography.

OS PLaTFORMS

There was a time when Microsoft cared about every KB

Microsoft’s latest Windows update might or might not have improved performance for the company’s flagship operating system, but there was a time when its engineers cared about performance. A lot. 

Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen on Monday hearked back to that time by telling another war story from the glory days of Windows, when a team was working on an x86-32 emulator for an unnamed processor (though it isn’t particularly difficult to identify potential candidates).

The emulator used binary translation – native code was generated for the original x86-32 code. Chen explained, “This offered a significant performance improvement over emulation via interpreter. You can imagine that x86-32 is just a bytecode, and the emulator is a JIT compiler.”

The team came across a function that needed to allocate 64 KB of memory. Simple enough stuff – check that there is enough memory available, subtract 65536 from the stack pointer, and then initialize the memory in a loop.

Use the comments to correct me, but this sounds like loop rolling, where repetitive code gets condensed into a loop.

However, it appeared that a compiler had … optimized … the code “by unrolling the loop into 65,536 individual ‘write byte to memory’ instructions, each 4 bytes long.”

Perhaps a bit quicker, but goodness – quite the memory hog. “All in all,” wrote Chen, “it took this program 256 kilobytes of code to initialize 64 kilobytes of data.”

Almost like a glimpse into a future where operating systems don’t appear to give two hoots about efficient use of storage. What would that look like?

As for the engineers working on the CPU emulator, Chen said, “This offended the team so much that they added special code to the translator to detect this horrible function and replace it with the equivalent tight loop.”

It would be interesting to know what that same team would make of the internals of some Windows binaries today, but it is heartening to know that, at one point, engineers cared about memory efficiency enough to reroll something. Sure, there might, just might, have been a performance hit, but spitting out 256 KB of code just to initialize 64 KB of data?

Naughty. Very naughty. The much younger version of this hack, optimizing the heck out of code to fit within the confines of computers from yesteryear, would have been horrified. ®