Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

Happy belated July 4th to all the readers from the United States — hopefully you aren’t reading this from a hospital bed after losing a hand or burning off your eyebrows. While we suspect amateur firework shows and their related injuries will be around for many years to come, we did note that many major cities switched over to drone shows this year.

At least on paper, the appeal is obvious. Beyond the fact that drones are safer and quieter than pyrotechnics, they’re also capable of far more complex displays. Good luck trying to draw George Washington’s face in the sky with exploding rockets. But even if it’s a little more than nostalgia, there’s still something about the sights and sounds of fireworks that enthrall audiences. For many, the whole “rockets’ red glare” thing is a bit more meaningful than the “drones’ red LEDs.”

Earlier this week, we brought you news that Sony would stop producing physical PlayStation discs in January 2028. Many gamers are understandably concerned about the long-term implications such a move will have for software ownership, and while the negative reactions online haven’t bothered Sony enough to get them to amend their plans, they have clarified the situation with developers by explaining that games published before the cutoff date aren’t impacted. So if a developer has a hit title that drops in the summer of 2027 and they want to keep cranking out discs, additional orders can still be placed. Not much of a reprieve, but it will give the community a little more time to figure out what comes next.

While plenty would argue that the death of physical media has been exaggerated, the same can’t be said about 3D TV. Engadget has a piece that goes over what went wrong with 3D home media, and not all of it is on the technical side. Of course, a big part of the problem was the glasses — they were goofy and added per-viewer expenses that consumers weren’t thrilled with. But some of the blame also has to be put on Hollywood and the content they were producing. There were a few big-name movies like Avatar that were filmed in 3D, and computer-generated films could be rendered to take advantage of the third dimension, but the rest were lazy at best. Getting folks to spend thousands on a 3D-capable home theater was tricky enough, but asking them to do it if there were only a handful of movies worth watching on the thing was simply asking too much.

Speaking of tech heading off into the sunset, it looks like the end may be near for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, as they’ve announced they’ll no longer be taking new customers after this month. For those unaware, Mechanical Turk connected bored humans with customers that had repetitive tasks they needed completed. Think of somebody spending an afternoon sorting images and making a few cents a pop.

When the service launched 20 years ago, tasks like this were difficult to automate, and it made sense to pay humans to do it. But in the age of AI, it comes as no surprise to hear Amazon is looking to wind things down. Existing Mechanical Turk users will be able to continue using the service after July, but with no new jobs coming in, the writing is clearly on the wall.

Finally, things seem to be going well so far for the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory rescue mission. On July 3rd, the robotic LINK spacecraft that will eventually link up with the Observatory and push it into a higher orbit was successfully air-launched aboard a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket. Teams on the ground have already made contact with the rescue vehicle and are performing health checks on it before committing to a rendezvous with the ailing Swift.

Once it has attached itself to Swift, LINK will push it up to an altitude of around 640 km (400 miles), which should keep it from burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere for another decade or so. We’ve had our eye on this ambitious mission for some time now, and will keep you updated as it progresses.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line; we’d love to hear about it.

There was a point where Google could, seemingly, do no wrong. It did surprising things, and it would often launch products carefully. Take the launch of Gmail, which came into existence as a beta product on April 1, 2004.

It remained a beta service until July 7 2009, even though it was much better than that status suggested and quite possibly the best email service available. How things have changed, as the launch of the Google Home Speaker has demonstrated. 

In my review, I like the hardware, but its voice assistant, Gemini For Home, is bad beyond belief in so many ways, and the service is so sluggish. On the /rgooglehome Reddit, there have been a lot of complaints about how slow the speaker is to respond to even simple things. 

Google even commented: “We’re aware of an issue causing increased latency or timing out. We are working on a fix ASAP and will circle back once this is resolved. Thanks for your patience.”

It’s nice to know that something is being done about one issue, but the speaker and Gemini for Home have other, bigger issues. I documented some of the problems I’ve had with Gemini for Home already, but here’s what I think Google needs to do if it’s to be taken seriously in the smart home space.

Anything released after 2028 will still be digital-only.

In this week’s “Sunday Reboot,” scientists somehow say iPhones lowered birthrates, and Musk’s AI prototype story shows that specialist hardware is coming, even if we don’t necessarily want it.

Sunday Reboot is a weekly column covering some of the lighter stories within the Apple reality distortion field from the past seven days. All to get the next week underway with a good first step.

iPhones up, birthrate down, “research” questionable

The iPhone is a mere 19 years old this week, first going on sale on June 29, 2007. It’s old enough to drink in the UK, if not quite in the United States.

Before it flies across the Atlantic to buy a brew from a bar in Basingstoke, some pesky scientists have tried to spoil the party.

Raised on July 1, a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research proposes “Is the iPhone Birth Control?” If we follow Betteridge’s law of headlines, the answer is “No.”

The paper proclaims “National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency” in the United States

Apple launched the iPhone in 2007. Scientists say it was too hot for the U.S. Birth Rate – image credit: Apple

Hearing that for the first time, you’d nod and agree with it. That song from the puppet musical “Avenue Q” is right, and so is the abstract.

However, AppleInsider William Gallagher looked into the report and realized that there are some catches to this assumption.

First, that it’s not really a phenomena associated with just the iPhone. I recall there were many different other devices on the market at the time that were capable of being used in illicit ways.

However, the writers decided to focus on data of AT&T users between 2005 and 2011. That’s two years before the iPhone and the years when it was exclusive to AT&T.

Except it doesn’t really take into account the fact that AT&T also sold many other early smartphones too. Blackberries, the HTC-based AT&T Tilt, the Nokia N75, and others were all buyable from the carrier, not just iPhones.

Even the report writers acknowledge this, saying they don’t claim the iPhone was the sole cause of the post-2007 decline.” Indeed, they say the estimates imply that the modern smartphone played a “sizable role” in the decline of US births.

But, before the puritan complainers can get a word in about how smartphones are evil, and demand retribution from the House of Jobs, the report goes on to work against the implied statement.

A graph used as proof the iPhone affected the U.S. birth rate. Except it doesn’t… – Image credit: National Bureau of Economic Research

Searches for “porn” shot up in 2014, but have gone down to almost 2009 levels again by 2024. Almost as if society had the novelty of trying to access specialist content wherever they want, then the novelty wore off.

It’s an odd report that tries to prove a point, but works against itself in many ways, and with too many asterisks to really be taken seriously.

In which case, was it really a clickbait way to try and secure some grant funding during some downtime? Or maybe some scientists placed bets that they could get it published.

Maybe it was an excuse to get to look at adult material while working without needing to face an investigation from HR.

Either way, Betteridge’s law is maintained once again.

Don’t stop believing in AI devices

People working in the tech editorial space, such as this very publication, are all too familiar with the notion of prototypes being shown to others. Especially if it’s for a future product in a category where there’s no real dominant option.

Cue a story about one of the Elon Musk companies supposedly sharing a prototype with investors for an AI device. SpaceX’s xAI apparently did that, though Musk has since called the claim “utterly false.”

Your mileage may vary on whether or not to blame the extremely rich man, but he did threaten to go all Futurama Bender on the iPhone in 2022. As someone in charge of tech companies with massive resources capable of doing just that, there was every chance that Musk would do it.

He didn’t, but the opportunity was there.

What the modern-day report provides in detail is minimal. It was shown to investors and was thinner than an iPhone.

While Musk’s insistence that it’s not happening puts a downer on things, it does, however, mean that there’s still an appetite for something to happen in that area.

The Humane AI pin failed. Won’t stop others from doing the same thing – Image Credit: Humane

After the Humane AI pin’s crash and burn and the Rabbit R1’s lack of popularity with consumers, companies should be treading carefully. Those were two high-profile AI device failures, and no-one wants to pay for the third.

Rumors and patents certainly point to Apple continuing down the path of a more AI-focused future. Sure, there’s the questionable pendant, and the ever-present smart glasses, but it’s also looking at non-standalone items too.

We have had rumors insisting that the AirPods will get cameras, providing an environmental view for Apple Intelligence running on an iPhone.

The key bit here is that it’s all feeding back to an iPhone. Something that is obviously a device that has a lot of AI prowess, and could do the same job as Humane’s pin if you push it.

The only difference is that AirPods with cameras, or smart glasses with cameras, would enable that sort of functionality without needing to touch the iPhone at all.

The AirPods don’t have to be “smart” in their own right. They only have to pass along data to the iPhone as the actual “brain” of the operation.

You don’t really need a dedicated device, just a way to interface with what already exists.

So, with the hardware side “solved,” there’s the actual AI bit to cover. Again, Apple Intelligence on the iPhone comes to the rescue, but there is another way.

Humane was painful, particularly since you had to pay a $24 per month subscription for the AI bit. We may not have liked paying a subscription for questionable AI back in 2023, but in 2026, we’re intimately aware of how much people are spending on access to ChatGPT and Claude.

Weirdly, it only took a few years and society is perfectly fine with one of the biggest stumbling blocks that Humane ran into.

It’s not hard to imagine OpenAI releasing hardware that taps into ChatGPT’s paid services. You don’t even have to imagine, as your friendly LLM can tell you about the hardware work with Jony Ive.

Humane flopped so OpenAI and others can walk, run, or be a patronizing yes-man that really wants to explain your assumptions back at you with a more academic style.

Musk may deny the existence of an xAI hardware prototype now, but it would be astounding if one wasn’t being actively developed.

Putting Grok access on a device like that isn’t hard to imagine. For Musk, with an eye staring at his finance teams, it seems like a natural progression of the form, and he gets his own iPhone rival to boot.

Just hope that we don’t get headlines in 20 years time about Musk’s prototype lowering the birth rate again.

Last week’s Sunday Reboot talked about Apple TV and its fear of gameshows. That, and a reminder that it is also bad at making gameshows.

What do an instinct to fix things and the 1999 global panic over whether computers would survive the date change to 2000, known as the Y2K bug, have in common? Both helped shape IEEE Senior Member Ajay Prasad’s career.

Prasad is an industry process director at Dassault Systèmes in Detroit. His focus is global oversight of industry process experts specializing in Enovia, a product lifecycle management (PLM) solution and one of the company’s flagship products.