There is one thing about the iPhone that I’m unreservedly happy about, though, a feature that I’m happy to call the best in its class.
It’s not the Dynamic Island with its useful notifications, nor the 48MP main camera with its excellent low-light performance, nor the USB-C port with all its interconnectivity – in fact, my favorite thing about the iPhone 15 is something that’s been part of the iPhone lineup since the very beginning.
I’m talking about the humble speaker, situated along the bottom edge of the iPhone 15 and paired with the speaker grille along the top of the screen for stereo sound. I have been continually amazed by how fantastic this tiny dual-channel system sounds, especially compared to the other handsets in my rotating smartphone loadout.
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Sounding off
As a lover of both music tech and consumer tech, I’ve found myself genuinely confused at how Apple has managed to wring so much bass and presence out of such a physically small speaker, but at full volume I find I’m able to hear songs clearly from any room in the house.
I can clearly remember a time when phone speakers were something of an afterthought, a definitively sub-optimal way of listening to music on a phone. My first ever smartphone, an early HTC One, had a speaker grille about a centimeter wide that sounded predictably atrocious.
However, this didn’t stop me from listening to music on it – I’ve continued to use phone speakers in the years since, mostly just to put something on while I’m doing chores or getting ready to head out.
That said, the iPhone 15 is the first phone I’ve used that I feel offers a proper listening experience, rather than just a way to have something playing.
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Lately, I’ve found myself eschewing the Amazon Echo smart speaker and Presonus Eris 3.5 monitors I’ve got dotted around the house for the convenience of the iPhone – it’s physically impossible to replicate the rich sound of a 3-inch speaker with a smartphone, but the iPhone 15 gets close enough that I rarely feel like I’m missing out for background listening.
It’s not that I don’t care about audio quality either – I quite regularly buy music online for the sake of getting the best quality sound and even produce my own music. The blend of simplicity and quality offered by the iPhone is just really tough to beat.
In fact, with the option of proper speakers already in place and portability solved by the iPhone, I find that I’m not tempted by even the best Bluetooth speakers – a necessity in my music listening arsenal in years past.
Overall, the iPhone 15 is a reminder of Apple’s engineering prowess and just how far the phone speaker has come. Audio is rarely the reason a phone makes it to our list of the best phones, but music lovers shouldn’t ignore this underrated aspect of the iPhone experience.
I used to hate jigsaw puzzles. I thought they were frustrating, messy, and took way too long to solve. But my wife showed me how those parts of jigsaw puzzles can actually be fun: there’s something satisfying and meditative about working through those frustrations, sorting through the mess, and putting a picture together, one piece at a time, over the course of a few hours. (Or days.)
The makers of Wilmot Works It Out, a new puzzle game, understand this, and everything about the game is designed to make solving puzzles fun instead of annoying.
In the game, you play as Wilmot, an adorable white square with a face who has a puzzle-by-mail subscription. (He’s the same smiley square from Wilmot’s Warehouse, a 2019 puzzle game also made by developers Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg and published by Finji.) Every time you open a new package delivered by Sam, your mail carrier friend, the pieces appear in a jumble on the floor so you can match them together into a picture to put on the wall.
When you’ve put up a completed puzzle, Sam typically comes knocking with a brief conversation and a new box of pieces to sift through. After you finish a bunch of puzzles, you’ll complete a “season” and can move on to the next, which amps up the difficulty.
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It’s fun to sift through the pieces scattered about.Image: Finji
Wilmot Works It Out has a few clever ways to iron out the process of putting pieces together. Unlike every jigsaw puzzle I’ve done in real life, the puzzle pieces in Wilmot are all square. That sounds annoying, but because you don’t have to rotate the pieces to match them, it’s much easier to compare pieces side to side to see if they might fit together. When you slide a piece next to its correct counterpart, the piece you’re holding flashes once, and you’ll hear a soft but satisfying chime. I loved chasing those chimes.
Those design choices make it much easier to quickly assemble puzzles. But the game’s best trick is that puzzle packages typically contain a few pieces that connect to a puzzle you can’t finish yet. Because of that, you’re constantly trying to figure out which pieces fit a puzzle you can solve now and which pieces are supposed to be set aside for later.
Some puzzles are quite tricky
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In the early seasons, I didn’t find this to be too difficult. That changed in the later seasons, though, as the developers have some devilish tricks to make you really work to figure out which pieces belong with which puzzles.
One season, for example, featured pieces that seemed to assemble into a peacock with big colorful circles on its feathers. Then, I started matching pieces with more colorful circles, but they turned out to be owl eyes. I tried to find a way for the owls and peacock to connect for longer than I care to admit — until I eventually realized that they were two separate pictures.
Two of my biggest problems with jigsaw puzzles have been how long they take and how messy they are. They can take what should be a fun activity and turn it into a chore. But Wilmot Works It Out fixes both, highlighting what I love about jigsaw puzzles in a delightful video game.
It was only a few days ago we heard rumors around OpenAIlaunching a next-gen ChatGPT-5 model – rumors dismissed as “fake news” by OpenAI chief Sam Altman – and now we’re hearing Google Gemini 2.0 could be made public in the next couple of months.
Like the ChatGPT rumor, this comes from The Verge (via 9to5Google). The last major Gemini upgrade came back in February, when Gemini 1.5 was pushed out. Google uses the Gemini name for both its AI bots, and the underlying models.
What we don’t get in this report are any indications of what might be new and improved in Gemini 2.0. If previous releases are anything to go by, expect smarter answers, faster processing, support for longer inputs, and more reliable reasoning and coding.
As per the report, Gemini 2.0 doesn’t offer the sort of performance increases its developers were originally hoping for – but the article also notes that this is a trend affecting all large language models (LLM) in general, not just those at Google.
Keeping up the pace
If Google (and perhaps OpenAI) did indeed launch AI model upgrades before the end of the year, it would be further evidence of the time and resources that companies are investing in artificial intelligence in order to stay ahead.
That said, we’re still waiting for Google to launch the next-gen Project Astra AI assistant we saw demoed at Google I/O 2024 back in May. Project Astra combines multiple inputs and outputs in a more advanced and natural way than ever.
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While we have previously spent some hands-on time with Project Astra, it doesn’t seem as though it’s directly connected to Gemini 2.0 – though it may be powered by it. Of course as soon as anything is made official, we’ll bring you the news here.
Off late there have been talks about Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, two accomplished NASA astronauts, who are currently aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and awaiting their return to earth. Originally scheduled to depart on June 13, their mission has been indefinitely postponed due to technical issues with the Boeing Starliner spacecraft that transported them to the ISS.
The delay is attributed to a series of helium leaks and thruster problems detected on the Starliner. NASA and Boeing engineers are diligently working to resolve these challenges and ensure the safe return of the astronauts. While the mission has faced setbacks, NASA has emphasised that Williams and Wilmore are not ‘stranded’ and can undock from the ISS and return to Earth whenever necessary.
But only time will tell as to when and how both the astronauts return to Earth. NASA is taking a cautious approach, allowing mission teams ample time to thoroughly review the spacecraft’s propulsion system data before authorising the return. This decision reflects the agency’s commitment to prioritising the safety and well-being of the astronauts.
“The challenges faced by the Starliner are not unprecedented in the history of space exploration. Previous missions, such as the Apollo 13 incident in 1970, have also encountered unexpected obstacles, requiring astronauts and ground crews to demonstrate resilience and ingenuity. The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Gaganyaan mission has also faced delays due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite the current setbacks, NASA and Boeing remain dedicated to the successful completion of the Starliner’s inaugural crewed mission. This mission is a crucial step in the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, which aims to establish reliable and cost-effective access to the ISS for American astronauts,” remarked Srimathy Kesan, founder and CEO of Space Kidz India, which is into design, fabrication and launch of small satellites, spacecraft and ground systems.
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However, there is no denying the fact that Boeing’s first manned flight of its Starliner spacecraft did not go as planned. Despite claiming they were prepared after years of testing, the spacecraft encountered problems and had to remain docked to the International Space Station (ISS). The issues include helium leaks and malfunctioning thrusters in the propulsion system. Consequently, the spacecraft’s return to Earth has been postponed indefinitely while the team works on fixing the glitches.
“Ensuring the safe return of NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore is NASA’s main priority. However, the recent technical delays faced by Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft raise concerns about the future of the programme and the company’s involvement in space missions. Boeing’s prime concern is to prove it can safely transport mission crew and overcome the technical snags afflicting both the spacecraft and the company’s commercial aviation division,” pointed out space expert Girish Linganna.
After the mission is over, NASA and Boeing will need to go through a thorough certification process in order to use the Starliner spacecraft for regular crew rotation missions. This will involve flying a full crew of four astronauts for extended stays on the ISS. Once certified, the Starliner will join SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft as a transportation system for NASA.
“NASA is keen on having two reliable systems for transporting astronauts to the space station, as it provides a backup in case one system encounters any issues. This is all part of a $4.2-billion contract that NASA awarded to Boeing 10 years ago and they are eager to see the Starliner fulfil its role in space exploration. Boeing has faced numerous challenges, including an expensive failed test flight in 2019. Currently, the company is focused on launching the Starliner for regular crewed missions that are vital for Boeing to recover from significant financial losses and begin generating revenue,” added Linganna.
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As per media reports, Wayne Hale, a former director of NASA’s space shuttle program, has observed that Boeing was carefully evaluating the situation and would not risk astronaut safety. Securing post-certification missions is critical for both Boeing and SpaceX, as these missions are essential for their financial recovery and profitability. The success of the Starliner programme is crucial for determining Boeing’s financial future.
The Starliner spacecraft has encountered multiple challenges related to small helium leaks, which have caused significant delays in its launch and return. Initially, NASA and Boeing attributed the leaks to a faulty seal. But later, they admitted to being unsure about the exact cause. The teams are also investigating the sudden failure of five of the spacecraft’s thrusters during its approach to the space station on June 6. This unexpected event compelled NASA to request Boeing to manoeuvre the vehicle backward and reactivate the thrusters to bring them back online.
“The situation is more complicated because the helium and thruster issues are in Starliner’s service module. This part of the spacecraft provides most of its engine power. Before the spacecraft returns to the Earth, the service module is detached and burns up in the atmosphere. Engineers want to figure out the problems while they still have access to the hardware,” explained Linganna.
Originally, the Starliner was scheduled to return home on June 18, but NASA moved that date to June 26. However, on June 21, NASA delayed the return once again to some time in July. They have cited the need for more time to address issues with the spacecraft’s propulsion system.
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NASA has stated that there is no urgency to bring the astronauts back home and that the helium leaks do not pose a risk to their return. Despite some propulsion system problems, four of the five thrusters are now functioning normally out of the 28 on board, providing enough failover options. The spacecraft has the ability to stay docked in space for up to 45 days, giving the crew enough time to troubleshoot the issues. Both NASA and Boeing have held out the assurance that the Starliner will remain in good condition and can be used in case of an emergency on the space station to safely transport the astronauts back to Earth.
Steve Stich, who manages NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, has told the media that they were proceeding carefully and adhering to their standard procedures and has said the team was prioritising data-driven decisions when addressing the issues with the small helium system leaks and thruster performance observed during the rendezvous and docking process. Resolution of these problems is crucial for ensuring successful certification, according to officials. According to Stich, the whole team is trying to figure out what is going on with this vehicle for the crewed flight test and planning its return. Later on NASA is planning to review all the tasks that lie ahead once this vehicle returns with the crew.
Boeing and NASA are gathering a lot of data on their systems to prepare for their work. They have already tested the thrusters while the spacecraft was attached to the space station. Now, they are using simulators on the ground to explore different scenarios. This helps them find and fix issues to make sure the spacecraft is safe. Safety is the top priority, especially with the memory of the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, where astronaut Kalpana Chawla and her crew lost their lives when the shuttle broke apart during re-entry.
As the space community closely follows this unfolding saga, it serves as a testament to the perseverance and innovation that define the pursuit of human spaceflight. Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore’s extended stay on the ISS is a testament to their expertise and the resilience of the space program, as they patiently await their safe return to Earth. At the same time it has been reported that Williams and Wilmore are also eager to stay in orbit. Williams last went to space in 2012 and Wilmore in 2015.
For more than two decades we’ve heard about the death of Moore’s Law. It was a principle of the late Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, positing that the number of transistors in a chip would double about every two years. In 2006, Moore himself said it would end in the 2020s. MIT Professor Charles Leiserson said it was over in 2016. Nvidia’s CEO declared it dead in 2022. Intel’s CEO claimed the opposite a few days later.
There’s no doubt that the concept of Moore’s Law — or rather observation, lest we treat this like some law of physics — has lead to incredible innovation among desktop processors. But the death of Moore’s Law isn’t a moment in time. It’s a slow, ugly process, and we’re finally seeing what that looks like in practice.
We have two brand new generations from AMD and Intel, neither of which really came out of the gate swinging. As you can read in my Core Ultra 9 285K review, Intel’s latest attempt pulls off a lot of impressive feats with its radically new design, but it still can’t hold up to the competition. And the Ryzen 9 9950X, although a clear upgrade over its Zen 4 counterparts, doesn’t deliver the generational improvements we’ve become accustomed to.
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Consider this — looking at Cinebench R23, the multi-core jump from the Ryzen 9 5950X to the Ryzen 9 7950X was 36%. Between the Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 9 9950X? 15%. That’s less than half the improvement within one generation. In Handbrake, the Ryzen 9 7950X sped up transcoding by 34% compared to the Ryzen 9 5950X. With the Ryzen 9 9950X, the improvement shrunk to just 13%.
This isn’t just one odd generation, either. Looking at the single-core performance of the Core i9-101900K and Core i9-12900K, Intel delivered a 54% improvement. Even comparing the Core i9-12900K, which is three generations old at this point, to the latest Core Ultra 9 285K, we see just a 20% improvement. Worse, the new Core Ultra series from Intel shows oddly high results in Cinebench, and if you break out to other applications, you can actually see some regressions compared to a generation or two back.
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Even within just a few years, the rate of performance improvements has slowed considerably. Moore’s Law doesn’t directly talk about performance improvements — it’s simply concerned with the number of transistors on a chip. But that has clear performance implications. Throwing more transistors at the problem isn’t practical like it once was — read up on the death of Dennard scaling if you want to learn more why that’s the case.
AMD and Intel may not talk about it publicly, but both companies clearly see the writing on the walls. That’s likely why Intel pivoted to a hybrid architecture in the first place, and why it’s introduced a radical redesign with its Arrow Lake CPUs. And for AMD’s part, it’s no secret that 3D V-Cache has become a defining technology for the company’s CPUs, and it’s a clear way to skirt the bottleneck of Moore’s Law. A large chunk of transistors on any CPU die are dedicated to cache — somewhere in the range of 40% to 70% — and AMD is literally stacking more cache on top that it can’t fit onto the die.
One important factor to keep in mind when looking at Moore’s Law and Dennard scaling is space. You can build a massive chip with a ton of transistors, sure, but how much power will it draw? Will it be able to stay under a reasonable temperature? Will it even be practical to place in a PC, or in the enterprise, a server? You cannot separate the number of transistors from the size of the die.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had with AMD’s Chris Hall, where we told me: “We were all enjoying Moore’s Law for a long time, but that’s sort of tailed off. And now, every square millimeter of silicon is very expensive, and we can’t afford to keep doubling. We can, we can build those chips, we know how to build them, but they become more expensive.”
I’m not here to defend Nvidia’s insane pricing strategy, but the company has reportedly seen higher pricing from TSMC with its RTX 40-series GPUs than it saw with Samsung with its RTX 30-series GPUs. And, the RTX 4090 does deliver more than twice the transistor count as the RTX 3090 at a very similar die size. If there’s a commitment to Moore’s Law across chips, I’m not sure we as consumers will like the outcome when it comes time to upgrade a PC.
That’s not to mention the other problems a card like the RTX 4090 has faced — high power requirements, an insane cooler size, and a melting power connector. Not all of these problems are a function of doubling the number of transistors, not even close, but it plays a role. Bigger chips for more transistors, more heat, and usually at a higher cost, especially as the cost of silicon continues to increase.
Moore’s Law is dead, PC hardware is getting more expensive, and everything sucks — that’s not how I want to leave this. There will be more ways to deliver performance improvements year over year that doesn’t rely solely on more transistors on a chip at the same size. The way we’re getting there now is just different. I’m talking about AI.
Wait, don’t click off the article. Tech companies are excited about AI because it represents a lot of money — cynical as that perspective is, it’s just the way trillion-dollar corporations like Microsoft and Nvidia work. But AI also represents a way to bring a new form of computing. I’m not talking about a slew of AI assistants and hallucinatory chatbots, but rather applying machine learning to a problem to approximate results that we would previously get with pure silicon innovation.
Look at DLSS. The idea of using upscaling to maintain a certain level of performance is controversial, and it’s a nuanced conversation when it comes to individual games. But DLSS is enabling better performance without a strict hardware improvement. Add on top of that frame generation, which we now see from DLSS, FSR, and third-party tools like Lossless Scaling, and you have a lot of pixels that are never rendered by your graphics card.
A less controversial angle is Nvidia’s Ray Reconstruction. It’s no secret that ray tracing is demanding, and part of getting around that hardware demand is a process of denoising — limiting the number of rays, then cleaning up the resulting image with denoising. Ray Reconstruction delivers a result that would require far more rays and much more powerful hardware, and it does so without limiting performance at all — and once again, through machine learning.
It really doesn’t matter if Moore’s Law is dead or alive and well — if companies like AMD, Intel, and Nvidia want to stay afloat, they’ll continually need to think of solutions to address rising performance demands. Innovation is far from dead in PC hardware, but it might start to look a little different.
Uhh, OpenAI? Are you okay? It seems like the AI juggernaut OpenAI just can’t hold onto its top minds. The increasing number of departing executives seems to be the latest story arc in an ongoing saga of OpenAI drama. Miles Brundage, OpenAI’s senior adviser for the readiness of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), just announced that he’ll be leaving the company.
Top executives leaving a company is nothing new, but it seems that one walks out of OpenAI once every 1 – 2 months at this point. We’ve already seen Ilya Sutskever (chief scientist), Jan Leike (former Superalignment team leader), John Schulman (Co-founder), and Peter Deng (VP for consumer product) leave the company over the year. Also, the company’s chief technology officer and interim CEO during OpenAI’s massive coup last year, Mira Murati, left just recently.
Miles Brundage is now leaving OpenAI
Another departing leader, another heartfelt post; Miles Brundage posted on X Wednesday that he’s departing OpenAI. He’s been there for six years, which was long before many people knew that OpenAI even existed.
Along with his post on the platform, he left a TLDR for a blog post talking about what’s going on. According to the post, he’s not leaving on bad terms. He said that OpenAI will “support [his] work in various ways.” So, we’re sure that he’ll have some backing for his future endeavors. Unlike some other past employees who went on to other major companies, Brundage has decided to focus on independent AI policy and advocacy.
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People who are interested can read his blog post. In it, he dives into topics such as whether companies are ready for AGI, whether people should work at OpenAI, where he’s going from this point on, and more.
With this role vacant, it seems that OpenAI has some hiring to do. The company hasn’t made any posts about Brundage’s departure or who they’re going to replace him with.
What’s going on at OpenAI?
There’s no telling if these individuals are leaving because they’re seeking and better opportunities or there’s something else going on. OpenAI seemed to be rather drama-free for the first year after ChatGPT blew up. However, since the huge coup that saw Sam Altman ejected from OpenAI for a weekend, we’ve been hearing some rather unsettling rumors regarding the company.
Some people who left talked about the toxic work environment they had to endure and the fact that the company deprioritized AI safety. We also can’t forget about the serious dirt that surfaced about Sam Altman and his actions.
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It’s just so coincidental that all of these rumors are leaking from the company and head executives are dropping like flies. Only time will tell if there’s some drama brewing at the company.
Another day, another publication contributes to the rise of AI. First, the likes of Time andDotdash Meredith partnered with OpenAI to license their property, now Reuters is giving Meta’s AI chatbot access to its news content for responses to current events and news questions, Axios first reported.
Basically, the multi-year deal allows users in the US to now receive real-time news details from Meta’s AI chatbot tool, with these answers citing and linking out to Reuters’ relevant stories.
This deal marks Meta’s first AI news deal, but Reuter’s has worked with the company as a fact-checking partner since 2020. “We’re always iterating and working to improve our products, and through Meta’s partnership with Reuters, Meta AI can respond to news-related questions with summaries and links to Reuters content,” a Meta spokesperson said.
The pair have not disclosed whether Meta will get access to Reuters’ library to train its learning language model, Llama. The exact figures of the deal also aren’t clear, but sources report that Reuters is receiving compensation for this access. Money isn’t the only form of payment companies have made in such deals with the devil — *coughs* AI (Lionsgate receives a custom AI model for production and editing in its agreement with Runway).
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