Modern games are quite often limited by the amount of volatile memory available to the GPU. Games can require many gigabytes of data during the rasterization process. So the obvious solution for better performance would be to buy a faster GPU, right? Well, not for [AssassinWarlord], who decided to find just what happens when you double the VRAM on an RTX 3070. The forum post is in German, but a translator gets the job done rather nicely.

For those of you following along at home, you will need a set of eight Samsung K4ZAF325BM-HC16 GDDR6 memory modules. In this case, the memory modules were salvaged from an AMD RX6900XT with a defective core. Naturally, you will need to re-ball the chips. To help the process, [AssassinWarlord] bought a stencil from AliExpress, with a 3D-printed holder for the memory modules.

It was a bit of a headache getting the card to actually reach the higher power states that the increased memory allows. Changing the “shunt” resistors allows the card to increase its power draw, but this proved ineffective. Some tuning and memory speed mapping at last proved successful in running the card stably.

But what happens when you benchmark the card? Well, not much. Most synthetic loads are compute-bound, not memory-bound. Therefore, overclocking the GPU would yield a greater performance increase than merely changing the memory modules. However, in some game titles, there is a marked performance benefit by nature of relying less on the glacially slow system memory. Is the performance difference worth the time and effort? No, probably not. The games that see an uptick in performance are few and far between (for now), so it’s not exactly a good effort-to-performance ratio.

If you are looking to follow along at home, make sure to check out this memory transplant next! 

Thanks, [f!P[z]y] for the tip!

Xbox is more negatively affected by the ongoing component crisis due to choices made by the company, Asha Sharma said.

Microsoft’s Xbox is reportedly planning “significant” layoffs next month as new CEO Asha Sharma attempts to tackle the gaming division’s declining financial standing.

Bloomberg reported that the scale of the layoffs – expected to be announced shortly after the close of Microsoft’s fiscal year on 30 June – is not known. Xbox is also expected to make major cuts to budget for marketing and other areas, sources told the publication.

Yesterday’s (10 June) report shortly followed a memo Sharma and Xbox’s chief content officer Matt Booty sent to employees titled “Xbox Reset”, which outlines some of the division’s spending-related issues.

Over the past five years, Microsoft poured more than $20bn into gaming content, platform and hardware subsidies, Sharma said, but saw revenue declining by nearly $500m during that time.

“We are in a hardware component crisis,” Sharma said. “When I joined as CEO in February, the price we paid for console storage components was over [twice] as high as we paid last fall. These costs have since doubled again.” Sharma expects a further hike in hardware and memory prices.

“While the entire industry is facing a components crisis, we believe we have been impacted more greatly than many of our peers due to the choices we made over the last half decade.”

Sharma pointed to declining profit margins and said that Xbox is unable to produce enough consoles for consumers to purchase.

“For some of you, these realities will be surprising and even frustrating to discover,” she said, hinting at possible layoffs at the division.

Sharma has publicly spoken about Xbox’s organisational challenges since her appointment as head in February. At the recent Bloomberg tech conference, she said that she planned on “resetting the business”, which was “not in a healthy spot.”

“We are the fortunate stewards of industry-defining franchises that have enormous potential and player demand, but we have not adequately funded them to compete and win,” Sharma wrote in the memo.

Xbox has seen its revenue decline in four of the last six quarters, with Xbox Series X and Series S consoles also posting poor sales. Once a gaming juggernaut, Xbox has in recent years fallen behind its rivals Sony and Nintendo. Last November, Xbox was outsold by the motion-controlled Nex Playground console, which was launched in 2023.

“Going forward, we’ll evolve and rebuild our stack, and look at capabilities across all of Xbox and potential M&A [mergers and acquisitions] to help us win in hardware, PC, mobile and streaming,” Sharma said.

Microsoft last announced major layoffs in July 2025, with reports suggesting that the company would cut around 9,000 jobs. Some of Microsoft’s approximately 3,500 Dublin- and Belfast-based employees were affected in the layoffs.

Xbox was expected to be hit the hardest in last year’s round of cuts, which was announced alongside news that the division would be cancelling a number of planned video game projects.

As of the close of Microsoft’s last fiscal year on 30 June 2025, the company employed approximately 228,000 people on a full-time basis, with more than 103,000 based outside the US. According to tech layoffs aggregator Layoffs.fyi, the company cut more than 15,000 jobs in 2025 alone.

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Compare the Top 7 Drip Coffee Makers

Frequently Asked Questions

More Coffee Makers We Like and Love

Photograph: Cavanaugh/Oxo

Oxo Brew 9-Cup Coffee Maker for $250: The 9-cup Oxo (9/10, WIRED Recommends) is a lovely, SCA Golden Cup coffee maker capable of making tasty drip coffee that would please any connoisseur. Five years ago when WIRED reviewed it, it was arguably our favorite batch coffee maker. Alas, the world of drip coffee relentlessly keeps moving forward. It still might be your favorite, given that it costs 40 percent less than my top-pick Aiden and offers a feature that’s indispensable for some: a timer that allows you to schedule your brew overnight, so it’s ready when you wake up.

Oxo 12-Cup Coffee Maker for $350: The Oxo 12-Cup Coffee Maker (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is another previous top pick for as a large-batch brewer, and it’s still a worthwhile choice. This Oxo is not overtly pretty, but, like the Luxe above, it’s SCA-certified, can be set on a delay timer, and can adjust heat and flow rate of its showerhead to account for batches from large to small. Which is to say it wakes up each morning and brews excellence. WIRED contributing reviewer Joe Ray prized, in particular, the machine’s water tank, which operates as a kettle, heating the water precisely before brewing rather than heating up during the brew—a quality quite rare among home brewers.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

12-Cup Breville Luxe Brewer for $350: Sometimes nothing less than 12 cups will do. WIRED has previously recommended this big-batch 12-Cup brewer as a top pick for those who want good-tasting coffee in large batches. Among the big boys, this Breville Luxe (7/10, WIRED Recommends), the update on the prior Breville Precision Brewer, has the best feature set and the best capabilities. It can reliably make balanced, aromatic 60-ounce batch of coffee thanks to a lot of technical sophistication under its hood: PID temperature control, water sensors, brew algorithms, customizable settings, the same thermocoils and pumps you’d use to make espresso. It also has an excellent cold brew function, which can make real, actual, cold brew overnight or over the course of the day, timed out with a drip stop. Even so, the device has a number of quirks and particularities in terms of water volume, water left in the reservoir, and an entirely different brew mode for small batches that’s not well explained in the product documentation. After noticing a lot of frustrated user feedback online, I’ve moved this down to my honorable mentions despite the machine’s many admirable qualities.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Ninja Hot and Iced XL for $160: Arguably Ninja’s top-line coffee maker of the moment, the 12-cup Ninja Hot and Iced XL has many features to like: timed brew for sluggish risers, the ability to choose your batch size from single mug to 12-cup carafe without having to measure water, because the device simply sucks the desired amount out of the tank; options on iced coffee and cold brew. It is what Ninja does: It has the features. The coffee is not as well-extracted as our top picks, whether on classic or rich settings. But at its price, and with its many little conveniences, it may still be the coffee machine you desire. It’s best for those who like medium roast or darker, though—it’s not a pick for delicate, aromatic light-roast drinkers.

Ninja 12-Cup Programmable Brewer

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Ninja 12-Cup Programmable Brewer for $90: At less than $100, this 12-cup Ninja is a perfectly serviceable brewer with a bloom function, a timer so you can wake up to hot coffee on a hot plate, and a half-batch setting to help optimize your brews. At the same price range, I far prefer a coffee pot from the five-cup Zojirushi Zutto. But if you want to caffeinate an office or community rec room on a budget, this larger budget brewer might still be your choice.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Ninja Dualbrew Hot & Iced Coffee System for $170: Lordy, this one really does it all. Hot coffee, cold coffee, iced coffee, pod coffee. This machine is designed for the family who can’t agree, or the person who wants everything, but only sometimes. It’s among WIRED’s top-pick pod machines for this wild versatility, and while the drip coffee doesn’t stack up to my top picks, it’s perfectly good for those more likely to make the occasional carafe from store bags.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Gevi 10-Cup Touchscreen Brewer for $160: Gevi is a relatively new brand out of China—part of a wave of new appliance makers who’ve moved from manufacturing expertise to product design. And lately, Gevi has been shaking up a lot of assumptions about what goes in a drip coffee maker and what doesn’t. This 10-cup batch brewer, usually on sale around $160, comes with a host of customizable brew settings, a timed-brew delay, and a conical-burr grinder to brew fresh coffee beans—a style of grinder you’d rarely find much below $100 all by itself. The resulting coffee is not at the level of my top picks: The grinder tends to grind too much coffee, and brew times are quite long, a combination that has led to some bitterness unless you adjust your grind to fairly coarse settings. But this Gevi does make brewing drip coffee from fresh coffee beans encouragingly easy and affordable for non-coffee-geeks. If you want a budget coffee maker for pre-ground coffee, though? You should probably get our budget pick five-cup Zojirushi or the 12-cup Ninja instead.

Aarke Coffee Maker With Thermal Carafe for $480: This shiny, SCA-certified Swedish-made system (6/10, WIRED Recommends) is beautiful, in the Swedish modernist sense: It looks like a Turkish tea service has been redesigned into a brand new gasworks. It makes quite lovely coffee. And in a novel twist, the coffee brewer can be paired with the matching flat-burr grinder so the grinder theoretically churns the exact right amount of ground coffee. Alas, this grinder pairing wasn’t quite perfectly calibrated, requiring much tweaking. And though I didn’t have this problem, users online have reported that the grinder jams up very easily—a troubling worry on such an expensive device. I remain nonetheless affectionate.

Other Brewers Tested

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Oxo Brew 8-Cup Coffee Maker With Glass Carafe for $180: I leapt at the chance to try an updated version of Oxo’s modern-classic 8-cup coffee maker, now available with a glass carafe and a warmer. When first reviewed in 2020, the Oxo Brew 8-Cup received a rare 9/10 score from WIRED reviewer Joe Ray for its elegant simplicity, its “rainmaker” showerhead meant to mimic the agitation of a pour-over, and a SCA Golden Cup certification attesting that the machine was able to stay within tight temperature and time parameters. Six years later, the coffee flavor and extraction is still amid the upper echelon of drip coffee brewers, at a sub-$200 price that’s a bargain in its class. It no longer being a top pick is simply a sign of how far other drip coffee makers have come—including the newer 9-cup and 12-cup machines from Oxo. In particular, I wish Oxo had since updated the 8-Cup’s showerhead design to be more in line with its newer machines. The six-hole showerhead erodes pits into the brew bed and causes channeling. This adds up to less even extraction than the newer Oxo machines. It’s not that I don’t like the 8-cup, it’s just that I think you should probably get the 9-cup or 12-cup instead.

Mr Coffee Perfect Brew

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Mr. Coffee Perfect Brew for $169: This SCA-certified Mr. Coffee brewer amounts to a giant leap forward for the drip-coffee pioneer. It does indeed make an aromatic and flavorful, if somewhat thin-bodied brew. That said, the controls interface is maddening, and the device tries to do too many things without succeeding at all of them: The cold-brew function, in particular, is just a recipe for lukewarm, watered-down coffee. The tea basket is a pleasant addition, however.

Melitta Vision Luxe 12-Cup

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Melitta Vision Luxe 12-Cup for $227: This quite large and fetching machine was designed under the Melitta brand by Hong Kong design firm Wabilogic. It’s full of interesting touches like a water reservoir that lights up red when it heats, and a control panel that can swivel for convenience. Alas, I never found a way to get the even extraction I was looking for, and much coffee came out somehow thin but bitter. Worse, the immovable water reservoir stayed constantly humid after brewing—a recipe for either constant cleaning or something worse.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Gevi 10-Cup Grind-and-Brew for $150: This is a slightly lower-cost version of Gevi’s other, more digital 10-cup grind-and-brew device. Both include a built-in conical-burr grinder at a relatively low cost, and making fresh-ground coffee was easy and affordable for many drip coffee lovers. Both also brew similarly, a bit slow and strong, requiring coarser grinds. But at $20 or so more, I recommend Gevi’s touchscreen device instead for two reasons: a removable water tank, and a removable top granting access to the grinder to clear beans or jams or change out the burr. The touchscreen device has both. This one has neither.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Cuisinart Grind and Brew for $250: Cuisinart’s new entrant in single-serve, grind-and-brew coffee machines is a bit of a neither-here-nor-there machine that shows why it’s so hard to find integrated grinder-brewers. The grinder means it’s priced close to the top picks among stand-alone drip brewers that offer delicate and nuanced takes on even pre-ground coffee. But the Cuisinart’s integrated grinder has only one setting—which means the only way to adjust flavor is by adjusting brew strength. This makes it not great for the light or lighter-medium roasts favored by third-wave coffee lovers, the very people who tend to be sticklers about having their coffee ground fresh before brewing. The grinder adds a bit of versatility for those who favor medium-dark roasts, and the conical burr grinder is a step up from a blade grinder. But this machine remains a bit of an odd duck.

De’Longhi TrueBrew for $700: Like a lot of De’Longhi espresso machines, this TrueBrew (4/10, WIRED Recommends) is a superautomated machine with a bean reservoir up top. This one makes something akin to drip, grinding and brewing coffee ranging from a dense, 3-ounce-cup “espresso” to a classic mug. But the “espresso” was weak, and the drip coffee was sad, according to contributor Joe Ray. Plus, the machine was just kind of messy and expensive.

GE Café Specialty Drip Coffee Maker for $299: GE is a big name but a less common one in the world of high-quality coffee. This SCA-certified Café Specialty Drip Coffee Maker (4/10, WIRED Recommends) seemed initially promising, according to contributor Joe Ray, but turned out to extract coffee unevenly and led to flat, coppery flavors—a fatal flaw in a premium-priced machine.

Balmuda The Brew for $699: Balmuda is a brand known for lovable design, and this coffee maker (5/10, WIRED Recommends) is no exception: petite and handsome, with a habit of steam-blasting the coffee carafe in advance of brewing and ticking like a clock as the coffee dribbles down. But it brewed weird, wrote contributor Joe Ray, making concentrate at low temperatures then diluting it with extra water. Maybe it’s cute, but the coffee doesn’t taste good unless you do some serious gymnastics. It also costs a steep $700.

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I’ve struggled with insomnia since I was very young. Like many chronic overthinkers, I tend to fall asleep best when my mind is occupied by something else, such as podcasts, YouTube compilations, or my personal favorite: rain sounds. But earbuds can be uncomfortable, and playing audio out loud isn’t exactly considerate when I’m staying at my partner’s place. 

That’s why I was intrigued by the new Peace Duo Under-Pillow Speaker from Jabees.

Launched last month, this ultra-thin speaker utilizes bone conduction technology—which sends vibrations through your skull directly to your inner ear—to transmit sound through your pillow and into your ear privately. Just place it beneath your pillow and listen as you drift off.

In my testing, I found the Peace Duo was so thin that I almost forgot it was there. I mainly used the built-in sleep sounds, which come preloaded on a micro SD card with four hours of soothing soundscapes, including gentle waves, light rain, rain with thunder, and soft wind. For more personal content, the Peace Duo also offers Bluetooth connectivity, so you can connect your phone and stream your favorite audio.

Battery life is another standout. A single charge lasts up to ten nights of one-hour listening sessions, so you won’t have to remember yet another device that requires nightly charging. The foldable design also makes it easy to put away in the included magnetic fabric travel case.

There is one important caveat: it doesn’t work well with thick memory foam pillows. Unfortunately, that’s what I normally use, so I switched to a regular cotton pillow and the sound came through clearly. (The company claims that thinner memory foam pillows should work fine.)

Priced at $59.99, the Peace Duo comes in two colors: Sunrise Yellow and Mist Green. It also offers personalization; users can swap out the magnetic snap-on frames for custom images and even add their names, making it a great gift for families, students, or anyone who needs extra help getting restful sleep.

The Peace Duo won’t cure insomnia, but it’s a practical, unobtrusive sleep gadget — and for what the company is charging, it’s a small price for a decent night’s sleep.

Google may have a workaround for Pixel owners whose phones have been trapped in a bootloop following recent software updates.

While the company has largely directed affected users to contact support, some users have found success using Google’s Software Repair tool. This tool can reinstall a device’s software and potentially bring a bricked Pixel back to life.

For anyone unfamiliar with the issue, a bootloop occurs when a phone repeatedly restarts without ever fully loading into Android. On Pixel devices, that often means getting stuck on the Google logo before rebooting again, effectively rendering the handset unusable.

The Software Repair tool isn’t a guaranteed fix, but it appears to have worked for at least some users dealing with the problem. The catch is that you’ll need access to a computer, as the process requires connecting your Pixel and reinstalling its software from scratch.

Anthropic’s AI restrictions caused concern among founders, researchers and developers following the release of the Mythos-like model.

It was just this week that Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5, an AI model that the company described as “Mythos-class”, but with additional significant security restrictions in place to prevent misuse. 

Already, however, the organisation is facing backlash from founders, researchers and developers who find the ‘secretive’ large language model (LLM) policies to be deliberately limiting competitors and users in the development of alternative AI models. 

In its statement announcing the availability of Claude Fable 5, Anthropic explained that the model has barriers designed to block responses that stray into high-risk areas – notably cybersecurity, chemistry and biology. Such interactions, it stated, would instead be rerouted to Opus 4.8, a less powerful model.

This has reportedly drawn some criticism from researchers and developers in the AI space, as there is a concern that work derived this way is deliberately degraded in a manner that is invisible and secretive. 

Anthropic has since responded to the backlash, indicating plans to address the issue by making Claude 5’s safety rails visible to all users. If the company suspects that a user is attempting to develop their own high-powered AI system, it will send a clear prompt informing them that the request is being refused based on policy, or that it is being rerouted to a less capable model. 

It is currently against Anthropic’s terms of service to use Claude technology as a means of training competing AI models. 

In a statement to Wired, a representative for Anthropic said, “We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible. We made the wrong trade-off and we apologise for not getting the balance right.”

Among the critics of Anthropic’s decision-making was Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and a former adviser to the White House on AI. In a post published on X, Ball described deliberately degrading “ML research” performance without informing the user as a “shockingly hostile and terrible look”. 

He further explained its potential to “silently damage all sorts of work” and “raise the eyebrows of antitrust enforcers worldwide.”

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Yale Linus Smart Lock L2 Lite: two-minute review

Smart locks in Britain have always been the awkward cousin of the smart home. American buyers get deadbolts and endless choice; we get multipoint mechanisms, lift-to-lock handles and a nagging sense that retrofitting anything to the front door will either void the insurance or fall off.

Yale’s answer with the Linus L2 Lite is to keep things small, cheap and reversible — and, crucially, to build in Matter over Thread so the lock works with whatever smart home system you already rock.

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The L2 Lite is a compact, round-knob unit that mounts on the inside of your door over the existing thumb-turn. Your key still works from the outside, which matters both for emergencies and for landlords.

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Inside the Yale Home app, you get the modern smart-lock toolkit: digital keys and PIN codes you can share and revoke, an activity feed of who came and went, Auto-Unlock that opens the door as you approach with your phone in your pocket, and KeySense — a button on the knob for a quick press-to-lock or a long-press delayed lock as you leave.

Because it supports Matter over Thread alongside Bluetooth 5.4, the L2 Lite joins Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa or Samsung SmartThings locally and responds fast, no Yale-specific bridge required — provided you already own a device that acts as a Thread border router, such as a recent Apple HomePod or Amazon Echo.

Apple’s forthcoming macOS 27 doesn’t run on Intel Macs at all, and that’s just the beginning of a timeline that will complete a years-long transition to Apple Silicon. Here’s what to expect, and when.

When Apple unveiled macOS 27 during its WWDC 2026 opening keynote, it put into motion its previously announced plan for the end of Intel Macs. Not only will the update not support any Intel Macs, but it also removes the Rosetta 2 translation layer that allows Intel apps to run on other Macs, too.

Apple announced the transition away from Intel chips in 2020, choosing to use its own in-house silicon instead. Now, six years later, it’s getting ready to complete that transition, and app developers are on notice.

Apple has long warned that support for apps designed for Intel would need to be updated. With macOS 26.4, it also started to warn Mac users when they launched an Intel app.

Now, time is almost up. Here’s how Mac support for Intel will finally end.

Fall 2026: macOS 27 releases, uninstalling Rosetta 2

Apple’s macOS 27 is in developer beta testing right now, but it will be released to the public this fall. It will only be available for Macs running Apple’s M1 chip or newer, removing support for Intel Macs entirely.

During the installation process, macOS 27 will also remove Rosetta 2 if it was previously installed. This will prevent any app designed for Intel chips from launching.

The removal of Rosetta 2 will also affect apps that use any Intel-only frameworks. This will most likely affect older games and specialist apps or plugins.

If required, macOS 27 will allow Rosetta 2 to be reinstalled. But users and developers alike should take this as a last warning for what will come next.

Fall 2027: macOS 28 releases, ending Intel support

Fall 2027 will see the release of macOS 28, Apple’s next big Mac software update. Apple warned developers as far back as June 2025 that macOS 28 would not support Rosetta 2 for most apps.

Apple Silicon will soon see the end of Intel support

With macOS 28 installed, apps built for Intel Macs will no longer function. Users will need to update the software to a new, Apple Silicon version, if one is available. Otherwise, they’ll have to find an alternative app or some kind of bottle like Crossover or Parallels to use instead.

There will be some concessions made, however. Apple has confirmed that Rosetta 2 functionality will remain available, but only for specific older and unmaintained games. These games rely on Intel-based frameworks and cannot be updated to support Apple Silicon.

Fall 2029: Apple no longer offers security updates for Intel

Prior to the release of macOS 26 Tahoe in the fall of 2025, Apple confirmed that Intel apps would not be supported by macOS 28. But it did say that Intel Macs running macOS 26 Tahoe would receive security updates for three years.

The macOS 26 Tahoe update was released in September 2025. With that in mind, we can expect Apple to cease security updates for Intel Macs in or around September 2029.

We’re in the Apple Silicon endgame

Six years after Apple began to move away from Intel Macs, the transition is almost complete. Seven years after release, it will be done. Apple has made it very clear that it’s ready to move on.

For now, Intel Macs and Intel apps will continue to work. Even after Apple stops offering security updates for Intel Macs, they’ll continue to function just fine, albeit with increasingly degraded security.

The bigger issue may be the lack of Intel app support starting in late 2027, though. If you rely on an app that still hasn’t been updated for Apple Silicon, it’s time to bug its developer. If it hasn’t been updated by now, there’s a good chance it never will be.

With all of this being said, Apple’s message is now loud and clear. If you still own an Intel Mac and haven’t updated to a newer model running Apple Silicon, now is the time to do so.

The 2nd edition of the newest race on the World Tour will see the World’s best sprinters take centre stage again in their bid for victory and bragging rights within the peloton.

It’s rare that so many big names line up in one place out side of the Tour de France to show who really is the best, so we will likely be treated to one of the sprints of the year at the end of the 228 kilometres into the heart of Copenhagen.