The announcement caught many fans off guard, given the film’s epic scope and blockbuster-level cast.
What is the Voltron live-action movie based on?
For those unfamiliar, Voltron: Defender of the Universe is a beloved 1984 animated series that followed a group of pilots who commandeer five giant robotic lions that combine to form a colossal warrior robot called Voltron. The team uses this mighty machine to battle an intergalactic warlord named Zarkon and his army of monsters.
Henry Cavill, best known as Superman and The Witcher‘s Geralt of Rivia, will play King Alfur, a legendary warrior and former ruler of planet Altea. Sterling K. Brown plays Zarkon, the film’s primary villain and Alfur’s nemesis.
The rest of the cast includes Rita Ora, Alba Baptista, John Harlan Kim, Samson Kayo, Tharanya Tharan, Daniel Quinn-Toye, Laura Gordon, Tim Griffin, and Nathan Jones.
Everything about this movie screams big screen, so the streaming news hits differently
The idea of turning Voltron into a live-action movie has been floating around Hollywood since 2005, passing through several studios before Amazon MGM Studios finally secured the rights.
Filming wrapped last year, and the movie is expected to arrive sometime in 2027. Rawson Marshall Thurber, who directed Red Notice, helmed the project alongside a script he co-wrote with Ellen Shanman.
The production even built a massive physical rig called the “Lion’s Den” to throw actors around and capture their reactions during robot combat sequences, minimizing heavy CGI reliance.
Given all that ambition, bypassing theaters feels like an odd call, and fans will inevitably start asking whether the decision is about convenience or something more telling about the final product.
How are fans reacting to this?
Fan reaction to the streaming news has been mixed. Some called it “genuinely disappointing” for a film with obvious big-screen potential, while others were perfectly happy watching from home.
Hey, @AmazonMGMStudio It’s genuinely disappointing to hear the new live-action Voltron movie is skipping theaters and going straight to streaming on Amazon Prime. This felt like a film with real theatrical potential….A massive sci-fi spectacle that could’ve brought audiences… https://t.co/YiEgpH4erupic.twitter.com/PQbkeGkTTj
Man, I want to see this in the theater!!!! Come on, at least give us a limited theater release. Maybe like 2-3 weeks. Something! 80’s babies need to see @Voltron on the big screen! https://t.co/FbxHTnlK5Kpic.twitter.com/IOciEsBe06
Love the hell out of this. Going to theaters is in the past for me and the majority of us have a subscription to watch stuff. It’s time all new movies just go directly to streaming or a couple weeks after theater release.
Whether the streaming decision signals anything about the film’s quality remains to be seen, but Voltron is clearly one to watch when it finally lands on Prime Video.
Owners of Google smart displays and speakers have several new updates to look forward to. The company has released a new wave of enhancements for Gemini for Home, boosting both the intelligence and speed of the assistant on these devices.
Gemini for Home becomes more intelligent and personalized
Perhaps the most notable new feature is Gemini’s ability to leverage data stored in Ask Home to respond to queries about security cameras. For instance, if you’ve stored a note identifying your nanny as Alice, you can inquire when Alice got home, and the assistant will automatically retrieve the corresponding video footage. Users can also request a Home Brief through their speaker or display for a concise rundown of household events during their absence. Additionally, smart displays will now present thumbs-up and thumbs-down options following most voice commands, streamlining the process of providing feedback to Google.
Response speeds have been enhanced overall as well. With optimized backend processing for routine commands, actions such as activating lights, creating alarms, and handling timers should now feel significantly more responsive. Adult users will additionally receive more useful answers to general questions, such as requests for cocktail recipes, while existing parental controls continue to safeguard younger household members.
The Google Home app also receives practical improvements
The Gemini updates coincide with the release of Google Home app version 4.16, which introduces its own enhancements. Setting up new devices is now more straightforward due to a redesigned QR code discovery process that automatically guides users to the appropriate configuration steps. Those with Nest Thermostats can now temporarily suspend outdoor temperature settings with one tap, without disrupting their established long-term schedule. Furthermore, thermostat schedule banners will now show more pertinent and up-to-date details. Finally, iPhone owners can now control compatible third-party thermostats and air conditioning units directly within the app, a capability that was previously available only to Android users.
Thinking Machines Lab says it’s building full duplex AI, which means an AI system can take in what someone is saying while generating a response. In plain English, it’s closer to a phone call than a walkie-talkie.
The startup, founded last year by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, announced interaction models, starting with TML-Interaction-Small. It says the system can respond in 0.40 seconds, a pace that puts it near ordinary human back-and-forth.
There’s a catch for anyone hoping to try it today. This remains a research preview, with limited access planned in the next few months and a broader release expected later this year.
A faster kind of AI exchange
The core idea is easy to understand, and the change is meaningful. Instead of waiting for someone to finish speaking before working on an answer, the model processes incoming speech while preparing its response.
That delay matters because pauses make AI assistants sound artificial. Thinking Machines Lab frames TML-Interaction-Small’s 0.40-second response time as close to natural conversation speed, which would be a noticeable shift for voice tools.
It also claims that pace is faster than comparable models from OpenAI and Google. The benchmark gives the announcement weight, but outside users still need to test whether the experience works as smoothly as the number suggests.
When speed becomes behavior
An assistant that answers while it’s still taking in information changes what users expect from a voice chat. The conversation can move faster, but the system also has to manage timing with much more care.
That tradeoff matters when someone wants quick clarification instead of a long generated reply. Faster responses won’t help much if the assistant jumps in too early, misunderstands the speaker, or breaks the flow it’s supposed to improve.
For now, the architecture is the news. The real product test is whether the interaction model can make better timing feel automatic.
What to watch before launch
The release timeline is the key detail now. Thinking Machines Lab says a limited research preview is coming in the next few months, followed by broader access later this year.
Availability, pricing, supported platforms, and performance outside controlled testing are still unclear. Those missing pieces matter because a faster model only helps if people can use it in everyday voice tools.
For anyone who uses AI voice assistants, the practical move is to watch the preview closely. Full duplex AI has promise, but hands-on testing should show whether faster responses actually make daily AI conversations easier.
Signal users should take note: the encrypted messaging platform has launched several new built-in protections aimed at defending against phishing and social engineering schemes.
The update follows a March incident in which Signal acknowledged that its service had been hit by phishing campaigns targeting government personnel and members of the media. These latest enhancements appear to be a direct reaction to those events.
To help protect Signal users from phishing and social engineering attacks, we’ve introduced additional confirmations and educational messaging in the app to help people better detect fraudulent profiles, especially message requests from scammers posing as Signal. More changes… pic.twitter.com/ASZNCXHNFM
— Signal (@signalapp) May 11, 2026
See More
What do the new safety features involve?
The standout update is a “name not verified” label now shown on profiles. This matters because Signal has no way to authenticate the names people choose to display—since users set their own profile names, anyone can pretend to be someone else.
The app has also added an additional confirmation prompt for incoming message requests, encouraging users to approve only contacts they genuinely know. This mirrors WhatsApp’s approach to conversations from unrecognized numbers, giving you the choice to accept or decline.
Signal is now also displaying more comprehensive security tips within the app itself. Users will be warned not to engage with messages purporting to come from Signal, as the company will never request your PIN, registration code, or recovery key. Any such request is fraudulent.
It also flags ambiguous messages intended to provoke a response, dubious URLs, and conversations promoting financial advice as warning signs to be wary of.
Why does this matter?
Social engineering remains among the most prevalent methods of online compromise. No sophisticated technical breach is needed—just deception to extract sensitive details from you.
Fraudsters posing as Signal are especially insidious, capitalizing on the trust users have in the service. The company has indicated that further improvements are coming, marking this as the start of a wider effort to bolster safety across the platform.
SpaceX is leasing the full capacity of its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, to Anthropic, giving the Claude maker a sudden infrastructure windfall while xAI’s Grok fights for ground in the AI race.
The early May 2026 agreement, reported by the Wall Street Journal, gives Anthropic access to more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs and over 300 megawatts of processing power. That’s the kind of xAI compute edge Musk’s chatbot business would normally want nearby.
Now Claude gets the benefit. For Anthropic, the lease helps ease pressure on Claude Pro and Claude Max demand. For SpaceX, it turns unused data center capacity into revenue ahead of an anticipated IPO.
Claude gets the fast lane
The sharpest detail is timing. Anthropic isn’t waiting for late-2026 capacity from Amazon, Google, and other partners to fully come online. It gets a live Memphis cluster now, just as AI labs are competing on power, GPUs, and model quality at the same time.
That matters for Claude’s paid tiers, which need reliable infrastructure as demand grows. The added GPU supply can support heavier usage, faster responses, and future model work, though exact user-facing changes weren’t detailed in the source material.
The scale makes the optics harder to ignore. More than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs and 300-plus megawatts look less like spare capacity and more like ammunition in the model race.
Musk’s business case wins
The deal lands with extra irony because Musk had recently described Anthropic in hostile terms, then found a reason to work with it anyway. His later comment that no one at Anthropic triggered his “evil detector” makes the turn feel more transactional than friendly.
The business case is clear. SpaceX gets a way to monetize a major asset before an anticipated IPO, while Anthropic gets a shortcut around a near-term capacity crunch. Grok can still improve, but xAI now looks like it’s fighting from behind while Claude draws power from inside Musk’s orbit.
In AI, data centers can matter as much as demos.
What Claude users should watch
The next test is whether Anthropic turns the Colossus 1 lease into visible improvements before its larger cloud partnerships fully ramp up. Claude users should watch for steadier access, faster responses, fewer plan constraints, or new features tied to heavier workloads.
For xAI, the takeaway is harsher. Grok’s next challenge is infrastructure, especially when a rival can rent power from inside Musk’s own corporate orbit.
“An astonishingly good laptop that’s also a pricey Mac anti-dote.”
AMD chip is a powerhouse
Utterly generous RAM situation
Pixel-dense OLED screen
Pleasantly light and compact
Pretty rugged and convertible
Decent port selection
60Hz refresh rate is a sin
Fans get loud under stress
Battery drains rather fast
Display could’ve been brighter
Deserves a better webcam
Oh-so-expensive
Quick Take
Engineering a compact laptop without too many functional compromises is hard. Making one that is targeted at content creation is harder. How do you balance firepower inside a small chassis? What about the battery uptake and thermals? And how do you make it appealing to the audience when there are plenty of options in the market, including the venerable MacBooks? Well, you go all-in.
With the ProArt PX13, Asus went all-in and delivered a banger.
Now, ideally, you shouldn’t care too much about a co-branded laptop. With the PX13 GoPro Edition, the situation is no different. But on its own merit, this laptop is no less appealing to creators. Whether it’s video editing, bulk image creation, or even local AI processes, this laptop can handle it well without breaking a sweat. Or crashing down to a sloth pace.
When I first came across this machine, my eyes rolled. Co-branded laptops are usually the tech equivalent of a celebrity perfume. A gaudy logo slapped onto a chassis, a custom wallpaper, a hotkey nobody asked for, and a $400 markup for the privilege. I’ve reviewed those laptops. I’ve returned them quickly, and I’m tired, too.
So I’ll save you the suspense and admit I was wrong. The Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition is not a fan-service machine wearing a workstation costume. It’s a workstation wearing a fan-service costume, and after three weeks of cutting 4K timelines, running local LLMs, dragging it through four airports, and sketching on a couch in tablet mode, I’ve fallen in love with this compact beast.
It’s also a laptop of bizarre paradoxes. It costs $2,999 (yep), packs 128GB of unified RAM (more memory than my first three PCs combined), and has an integrated graphics card that can outrun a discrete RTX 4000 series while living in a chassis that fits in a sling bag. It also has a 60Hz screen in 2026, which is the kind of decision that makes you check blink twice, think thrice, and check the specs sheet one more time. Moreover, under load, the fans can quickly get vexing without earplugs.
Battery life is fine until you actually use it for what it’s built for, and then it isn’t. If you’re a video pro, an on-location creator, or a software developer who wants a real workstation that doesn’t require a rolling suitcase, this machine is quite a pleasant (read: practical) revelation. For everyone else, it might be a bit too extreme, and that’s coming from someone who likes extreme.
Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition design and build quality: It’s plain gorgeous
I’m a sucker for gear that feels like it can survive a drop without ending its life. I’ve scuffed and broken more laptops than I have the guts to admit (or tell my father, for that matter). The Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition can handle someone like me. A majority of creator-focused laptops feel like a single bumped corner away from a warranty claim, and that’s because they focus more on sleek aesthetics than practical durability.
The PX13 GoPro Edition is the opposite. It feels like a piece of equipment, not jewelry. Instead of the smooth, fingerprint-magnet finishes we usually see on high-end laptops, Asus went with a ribbed metal lid that mimics the textured front of a GoPro action cam. It’s bold, matte black, and unapologetically tactical. Run your thumb across it, and you can feel the grooves catch.
It’s not quite the same satisfying micro-resistance you get from the rubberized clamp of a real action cam, but it gets pretty close. It does, however, get grimy against oily fingers. The kit tips the scales at about 3.06 lbs (1.39kg), but I certainly didn’t feel the heft hurting me at all. It felt just barely heavier than the MacBook Air.
It’s not the lightest 13-incher out there. That distinction goes to the latest Zenbooks and MacBook Airs of the world. But where it loses by a few ounces, it makes up for it with other hardware perks. Pick it up by a corner, and there’s zero flex. The keyboard deck doesn’t bow under a palm rest, and the lid doesn’t ripple when you grab it.
Asus treated this machine to an MIL-STD-810H certification, which is the kind of certification you nod at on a spec sheet and then forget about until you actually slide a laptop off a passenger seat onto an airport floor. Brands like to market it as military-grade. That’s not fully accurate, but compared to an average laptop, these laptops can brush off drops and scuffs with ease.
The 360-degree hinge is the other unsung hero. It’s stiff, resistant, and predictably smooth without any mushy mid-travel or wobble. Tent mode is solid enough to use on a tray table without rocking. Tablet mode is where the form factor really earns its keep. At 13 inches and three pounds, this is one of the few hybrid workstations you can comfortably draw without your arms going numb in minutes.
The GoPro details are everywhere if you look for them, and Asus mostly stays on the right side of the brand integration. The embossed “GoProArt” logo on the lid is subtle. The keyboard backlight glows in that signature electric blue instead of white. The F8 key is a dedicated GoPro hotkey that summons the GoPro Player and can pull footage straight off a connected Hero.
There’s a thoughtfulness to the whole engineering endeavor here that I didn’t initially expect. This isn’t a regular ProArt PX13 with a different sticker. It’s a ProArt PX13 designed from the ground up to look and feel like it belongs in a gear bag with a tripod, a drone controller, and a GoPro camera. Whether or not you’re its target customer, you can tell that a true enthusiast made the design calls. It’s absolutely eye-catching and practically gorgeous.
Score: 9/10
Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition display: Vivid wins, vexing losses
The 13.3-inch 3K OLED panel is simultaneously this laptop’s greatest strength and its most infuriating flaw. I’ve gone back and forth on it more times than I want to admit. OLED is ideal for a reason, and this panel is a particularly good one. Blacks look lovely without any undue backlight bleeding or uniformity issues.
Color accuracy is essentially calibrated-monitor territory, with 100% DCI-P3 coverage and Pantone validation. Asus actually ships it tuned out of the box rather than leaving you to fiddle with profiles. For photo editing, color grading, and any kind of paint or design work, it is mesmerizing. Moreover, the touch response is snappy, and that applies to the bundled stylus as well as your fingertips.
The included Asus Pen 3.0 delivers the standard 4,096 levels of pressure detection and almost no perceivable lag. It’s not quite the Wacom territory, but it’s as good as it gets in the laptop territory. The 3K resolution (2880 x 1800) on a 13.3-inch panel is abundant in terms of pixel density, and you won’t be left yearning for a dash of extra sharpness.
This is where the happy tale ends.
This is a $2,999 laptop, and it’s a sin that the beautiful OLED screen is locked at 60Hz. Once you’ve tasted 120Hz on a Windows machine, or grown used to the ProMotion panel on a MacBook Pro, the 165Hz panels on mid-tier gaming rigs, or even the 90Hz screens on budget phones, a 60Hz panel feels visibly slow.
While dragging app windows across the desktop, I could easily feel the pixel-level stutters. Scroll through a long document, and you notice the frames are hurting your eyes. It’s not unusable by any stretch of the imagination, but if it were just a tad faster, every computing experience would be buttery smooth.
It’s a shame this machine is geared towards creators with GoPros, who routinely shoot 120fps, 240fps, even 400fps in slo-mo modes. Of course, you cannot preview any of that natively at full speed on this screen. You’ll get the data and all the color, but to truly enjoy them, you’ll be plugging into a faster external panel or resort to downsampling.
For a laptop sold to creators, I can’t quite wrap my head around this miss. If Asus had shipped a 120Hz version of this OLED panel, this experience would have been dramatically different. Another hiccup is the brightness levels, which max out at a paltry 400 nits. For comparison, the MacBook Pro can muster 1,000 nits sustained brightness on its mini-LED display, and the difference is noticeable.
Score: 8/10
Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition ports and connectivity: It’s fairly versatile here
Usually, when you compress a laptop down to a 13-inch form factor, the Port Apocalypse happens. I use a MacBook Air, so I know the pain well. You’re lucky if you get two USB-C ports, without any apology from the manufacturer. Asus, thankfully, did not go down that unholy computing route.
On the left, you get a dedicated DC jack, even though the laptop is happy to charge via USB-C if you’d rather travel light. Next, you’re also treated to a full-size HDMI 2.1 port, a USB-4 Type-C port pushing 40Gbps, and a 3.5mm audio jack. On the right, there’s another USB-4 Type-C, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, and a microSD card reader.
That microSD slot is a small point of contention, but not much to fuss about. For the intended audience, it makes sense. Most GoPro-havers I know carry a microSD card, but if you’re a stills photographer who loves their SD cards, be prepared for the proverbial dongle life. Asus seems to have some unshakeable clarity of thought for this machine. It’s a video and motion-first machine, and traditional photographers are not the primary audience. Knowing the rest of the laptop, that’s the right call.
It still stings, though.
The HDMI 2.1 alone is worth a small parade of its own. Plugging directly into HDMI and watching the second screen pop up for the first time is a huge relief from digital anxiety. Overall, neat job with the I/O selection on this one, Asus!
Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Editionperformance: A loud, fire-breathing dragon
Raw performance is where the Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition stops being a cutesy convertible and truly evolves into its intended form, emerging as a legitimate threat to desktop PCs. I do not say that lightly. The heart of this machine is the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, a sixteen-core silicon in AMD’s high-end Strix Halo portfolio. Then we have the integrated Radeon GPU that has no business performing the way it does.
And here’s the fun part. The actual headline isn’t the CPU. It’s the 128GB of LPDDR5X RAM, up to 96GB of which can be allocated to the Radeon 8060S integrated graphics as VRAM. In a world where Apple is still selling “Pro” laptops with 16GB of unified memory as a baseline and charging hand over fist for upgrades, the fact that you can spec a 13-inch Windows convertible with 128GB of unified memory is charmingly ridiculous.
In CPU-based benchmark tests, it rubs shoulders with Intel’s Core Ultra 9 silicon and leaps ahead of the base M5 at multi-core synthetic runs. Expectedly, single-core performance is where Apple still maintains a comfortable lead. In graphics capabilities, however, it smokes Apple and leaps into the gaming laptop category with discrete Nvidia GPUs.
3DMark TimeSpy benchmark put it slightly behind a Lenovo machine with an Nvidia RTX 5060 inside, in case you want to compare with the latest-gen mobile graphics cards. As far as games go, Cyberpunk 2077 managed over 60 FPS at FHD, and the situation was similar with Elden Ring. That’s pretty impressive, even when seen from the lens of a gaming laptop.
In real-world testing, this setup essentially matched the performance of an RTX 4070 mobile laptop in the workloads I care about, and absolutely smoked it in any task that’s memory-bound. I ran a local large language model entirely on this laptop and still had firepower to spare. That is not a sentence I expected to write about a 13-inch convertible in 2026.
Premiere Pro and DaVinci worked smoothly. I scrubbed through a 10-minute 4K timeline with three layers of effects and color grading, and didn’t run into sustained stutters or crashes. DaVinci Resolve was particularly snappy. In Adobe Lightroom, batch editing felt buttery smooth. Turning over to games, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, on high settings at native resolution, sat in the high 50s — a number that thicker, heavier, gamer-coded laptops sometimes can’t reach.
There’s a category of machines that exists between ultraportable and mobile workstation, and it usually involves making a tough compromise on one or the other. The Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition is the first laptop in a long time that feels like it has picked both. The catch, however, is the noise.
To keep the Strix Halo chip from melting through the chassis, the fans have to work, and when they work, you will hear it. In Performance mode, they’re loud, serving a high-pitched whir that deserves a pair of headphones to drown it. In quieter modes, they’re polite, but if you’re actually leaning on the silicon, you’re going to hear it.
This isn’t unique to Asus, and it isn’t disqualifying. Every performance-first machine in this size class makes the same trade, but it’s worth flagging. If you’re imagining a silent video editing session in a coffee shop, you might want to reset your expectations.
Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Editionkeyboard, trackpad, and webcam: A mostly successful endeavor
In the obsession over silicon and chassis, the everyday surfaces of a laptop sometimes get overlooked. Asus skirted around that pitfall. The keyboard is fantastic. Key travel is on the deeper side for an ultraportable, with crisp tactile feedback and barely any mushy character to it. The layout is full-size, with no weirdly compressed arrow keys or sacrificed punctuation.
I wrote this whole review on it without a second thought. The trackpad is also generous for a 13-inch chassis, and it’s engineered fairly well. It’s not quite in the MacBook Pro territory, but once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to love.
The 1080p IR webcam is not embarrassing, which is a high bar these days. Image quality is usable for calls, and low-light performance is just about decent. It definitely could’ve been better. A sweet perk is Windows Hello, which logs you in faster than a fingerprint reader would with the IR face scan. The mic array is competent, while the speakers are sufficiently loud. Of course, they’re crammed in a thin and light chassis, so don’t expect any soul-pleasing bass or refined audio with the volume levels cranked to max.
The software story is mostly clean, which is a low bar Asus often manages to limbo under. The bundled MyAsus software is reasonable. Driver experience has been clean, and no random update has broken anything in weeks, which is nothing short of a miracle on a Windows machine.
Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition battery life and charging: It’s just passable, at best
The PX13 GoPro Edition packs a 73Wh battery, which is pretty generous for a 13-inch chassis but not record-breaking. In real-world use, the numbers split sharply along usage lines. For light office work spread across Microsoft Teams, Slack, a half-dozen Chrome tabs, and Spotify, I consistently saw around hours.
That’s solid, but nothing extraordinary. The current crop of Panther Lake and Snapdragon X2 series machines is doing far better. For pro use, the numbers fall off a cliff. Render a 4K timeline, run a local LLM, or fire up a 3D workload, and you’re looking at 2.5 to 3 hours, at best.
That’s the unsurprising trade-off you sign up for when you ask a 13-inch chassis to behave like a workstation. Alas, there’s no clever workaround to bend the laws of electrochemistry when a tiny machine is pushing all the firepower. It’s good for a Windows workstation.
It is not going to touch the 15-plus hours you see on the latest Apple Silicon MacBooks, and pretending otherwise would be unwise. The included 200W charging brick is reasonably compact for the wattage, but it adds another pound to your bag. Unfortunately, you’ll need it for a quick top-up. Thankfully, USB-C PD charging works flawlessly, so a standard 100W fast charger will keep it ticking and juicing up, slowly.
Should you buy it?
The Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition is not a mainstream laptop. It isn’t trying to be, and treating it like one would be doing it a disservice. It’s an over-built, over-specced solution to a very specific problem. For the people who have that problem, it is one of the most exciting machines on the market.
It’s a 13-inch convertible powerhouse that tries to do everything at once and almost pulls it off. It’s built like a tank, and by that, I mean the kind of weight and density that can quietly survive the chaos of a backpack. The headline silicon is AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395 paired with a frankly ludicrous 128GB of LPDDR5X memory and Radeon 8060S integrated graphics that punch comfortably above their weight class.
But it’s a device of sharp contrasts. The 3K OLED touchscreen is gorgeous, color-accurate, and yet locked at a 60Hz refresh rate. Battery life is respectable for what it is, but no Apple Silicon machine is sweating. On top of it, the fans get loud, and the price is utterly aspirational. At $2,999, this is a specialized tool for a very specific niche.
If you’re a video professional, a field-deployed AI engineer or researcher, or any kind of creator who actually works on location, feel blessed. The 128GB of RAM, the rugged convertible chassis, and the surprisingly well-considered port selection make this a one-of-a-kind tool for local AI inference, heavy video editing, and any workflow where being plugged into a desk for ten hours a day is not an option.
Skip it if you’re a student, a casual user, or someone whose hardest workload is a few dozen browser tabs and a Teams call. The $2,999 price tag is a hard barrier, and the 60Hz screen is a potent letdown for almost anyone. There are better, cheaper, and quieter options if your needs are mainstream. So, here’s the bottom line.
The Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition is an unapologetically weird laptop, and that’s exactly why it works. It picked a niche and built every decision around that user. The 60Hz panel and the loud fans keep it from being a slam-dunk, and at $2,999, it’s asking for a multi-year commitment. But for the right person, this is the most interesting 13-inch machine I’ve used in a long time.
Why not try
HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14 (roughly $3,000) — A head-to-head competitor on the market, packing the same AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 silicon, a different chassis, and a different audience. The ZBook Ultra is a traditional clamshell with HP’s mature workstation pedigree, ISV certifications, and enterprise manageability, but no convertible hinge, no GoPro flair, no MIL-STD bragging. With this one, you’ll trade the touchscreen, the stylus, and the rugged personality for slightly steadier sustained performance and a generic look.
MacBook Pro 14 (M5 Pro) (approximately $2,800) — The 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro chip, 48GB of unified memory, and a 1TB SSD is a beast. The trade-offs are obvious, though. You get easily 5–7 more hours of real-world battery life, a 120Hz ProMotion Mini-LED display that humiliates the PX13’s 60Hz panel, and the kind of fanless that makes the Asus sound like a leaf blower. You give up Windows compatibility, the convertible form factor, the stylus, and any chance at 128GB of memory short of a much pricier M5 Max configuration.
Razer Blade 14 (2026) (currently at $2,900) — The Blade 14 lands at almost exactly the same price as the PX13 GoPro Edition and approaches the same problem from the opposite direction. You get a discrete Nvidia RTX 50-series GPU, a crisp 240Hz QHD+ OLED display, and the kind of all-aluminum unibody build Razer has been refining for a decade. What you lose is the convertible form factor, the absurd 128GB memory ceiling, and the chassis toughness. This one is more gamer-friendly than a creative chum.
How we tested
For a spell of three weeks, I carried the Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition as my primary laptop. In that duration, it served as my primary computing machine, handling 12-14 hours of Chrome usage across three windows with a dozen tabs in each one, Claude for app development, and Davinci Resolve for editing video clips.
My usage of Adobe’s suite was mostly restricted to daily image edits and some light work in Premiere Pro. The laptop was consistently used in Balanced mode when on the move, and when plugged in, it was pushed in Performance mode by default.
For testing display quality, I tested it outdoors in a park, a well-lit cafe, and a dark room without any specialized software. Basic quality tests were performed using the online EIZO and Blur Busters UFO Motion tests. Screen brightness usually hovered between 60-70% while working, with color profile set to standard.
WhatsApp is apparently going to look a lot more at home on the latest version of iOS. A new report has suggested that the chatting app for iPhone is getting a new look inspired by iOS 26‘s UI. According to WABetaInfo, WhatsApp for iOS version 25.28.75 is rolling out Apple’s new Liquid Glass design language. The update is available through the App Store, though the visual refresh is being enabled gradually.
WhatsApp on iOS is getting more premium
The redesign brings WhatsApp closer to the system-wide visual style introduced with iOS 26. Meaning, iPhone users can expect to see more transparency, depth, layering, and fluid animation across the app. This would make it look more fluid than the flatter interface that people on iOS are used to seeing.
The most obvious change is to the bottom bar. WABetaInfo report shows a semi-transparent surface that subtly blurs the content behind it, creating a floating effect. Icons also respond with smoother animations when tapped, while the active tab indicator adjusts dynamically to match the selected icon. WhatsApp is bringing this change to both light and dark themes, adjusting transparency and background effects depending on the mode.
What else is changing?
WhatsApp is also adopting the iOS 26 native keyboard style. So users get the translucent and reflective look to the typing experience. The keyboard adapts to the chat background as well. Buttons across the app have been redesigned with semi-translucent surfaces and smoother tap animations. Meanwhile, context menus are getting the same glass-like treatment, with adaptive transparency and a more modern layered appearance.
As of right now, the rollout is still limited, and even users who install the latest update may not see the new design immediately. WhatsApp is enabling the feature on select accounts to monitor its stability and gather feedback before a wider release. The Liquid Glass experience isn’t complete either. The chat bar does not fully support this look yet, and keeps elements of the older flat design.
Every student who takes handwritten notes faces the same problem come exam season. You have done all the hard work, filled page after page with everything your professor said, and now you are staring at a pile of paper with no idea where to start.
Gemini has released a surprisingly simple solution for this. It now lets you scan your handwritten notes and turn them into study guides.
How does it work?
The process to convert your notes into a study guide is straightforward. You capture a photo of each page of your notes, upload the files to Gemini, and use the following prompt: “Create a study guide based on my course materials for my exams.”
That’s it. Gemini will take your handwritten pages and turn them into a clean, structured study guide. If you already have a good handle on the basics, you can tell Gemini to skip the intro material and focus on the more complex topics.
You can also ask it to generate flashcards instead of a full study guide, which is great if you prefer a more bite-sized way to review. This makes learning and revising the material so much easier compared to going through the entire year’s worth of handwritten notes.
What else can Gemini do with your notes?
Uploading your notes also unlocks a few other useful tools. You can ask Gemini to create a custom practice exam based on your materials, which is a great way to figure out what you actually know versus what you only think you know.
You can also ask it to turn your notes into an Audio Overview, where two AI hosts break down your material in a conversational format. The feature was first released as part of NotebookLM, but now Gemini can do it too. It’s surprisingly good for reviewing while commuting or doing something else.
Gemini is packed with features that can help you study. The only thing missing was a way to incorporate your handwritten notes. With the new update, even that’s not an issue.
The announcement was made on X, where the company also dropped a new image of Sauron wearing a crown. Earlier reports had suggested a 2027 arrival, so this is a welcome surprise for fans.
— The Lord of the Rings (@TheRingsofPower) May 11, 2026
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What does Rings of Power season 3 have in store for us?
Season 3 jumps forward several years from where Rings of Power Season 2 left off. The story takes place at the height of the War of the Elves and Sauron, as the Dark Lord works to forge the One Ring and bend all of Middle-earth to his will.
Returning faces include Charlie Vickers as Sauron, Morfydd Clark as Galadriel, and Robert Aramayo as Elrond. New cast members joining the show include Jamie Campbell Bower, best known as Vecna in Stranger Things, alongside Eddie Marsan, Andrew Richardson, Zubin Varla, and Adam Young.
Showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay return alongside executive producers Lindsey Weber, Justin Doble, Kate Hazell, and director Charlotte Brandstrom.
Middle-earth has never been this busy
The Lord of the Rings universe is having quite a moment right now. Andy Serkis’ The Hunt for Gollum recently confirmed some major casting news, and Stephen Colbert, a well-known Tolkien superfan, is co-writing a brand new film called Shadow of the Past. So the big-screen side of the franchise is very much alive.
Amazon is also making sure the TV side doesn’t get lost in the noise. The Rings of Power is set thousands of years before The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, during the Second Age of Middle-earth, an era never brought to screens before.
Season 3 is also expected to explore the origins of Rivendell, the downfall of Númenor, and Gandalf’s path as a wizard. Amazon has five seasons planned in total, and with the One Ring finally entering the story this season, things are only going to get more intense from here.
“Sonos went back to the drawing board and delivered a truly rewarding hybrid speaker.”
Clean looks and solid build quality
Packs quite an audio punch
waterproofing is an underrated perk
Good mileage and replaceable battery
Doubles as a power bank
No power brick in retail box
You can’t take calls
Stereo pairing only over Wi-Fi
Limited Bluetooth functionality
Quick Take
Sonos has had a rough couple of years. The 2024 app rollout turned into a disaster that still shows up in the support forums, and the hardware pipeline went quiet for so long that I’d genuinely started to wonder whether the company had decided to take a sabbatical from making new speakers. So when the Sonos Play showed up in the lineup at $299, I was obviously skeptical.
After six weeks of using it as my primary kitchen speaker, my weekend patio speaker, and my impromptu bathroom-radio speaker, I can confirm something I didn’t expect while unboxing this speaker. This one can bring back the irked Sonos fans. It sits between the Roam 2 and the Move 2, while delivering the best of both worlds.
At $299, in a market crowded with cheaper Bluetooth options on one side and pricier smart speakers on the other, it had to land precisely. Somehow, it did. It sounds good, packs a replaceable battery, doubles as a power bank, and still remains portable. It just loves Wi-Fi a little too much, and that often turns into a functional drawback.
Sonos Play specs: What you get from this middle-weight warrior?
Amplifiers
Three class-H digital amplifiers tuned for the acoustic architecture.
Drivers
Two angled tweeters for crisp highs and one mid-woofer for deep bass.
Microphones
Far-field array with beamforming and echo cancellation.
Audio Tuning
Automatic Trueplay and adjustable EQ (Bass, Treble, Loudness).
Battery Life
Up to 24 hours of continuous playback; user-replaceable battery.
Charging
Includes Wireless Charging Base; supports USB-C PD (18W+).
Durability
IP67 rating (waterproof up to 1m for 30m) and drop resistant.
Connectivity
WiFi (802.11a/b/g/n/ac) and Bluetooth® 5.0.
Dimensions
192.3 x 112.5 x 76.7 mm (7.57 x 4.43 x 3 in).
Compatibility
Sonos app (S2), Apple AirPlay 2, Spotify/TIDAL Direct Control.
Controls
Tactile buttons for playback, volume, and a physical mic privacy switch.
Sustainability
Made with bio-based plastics and FSC-certified recyclable packaging.
Box Contents
Sonos Play speaker, Wireless Charging Base, and Quickstart Guide.
Sonos Play design and build quality: Clean, mean, and easy to lug around
Pick up the Sonos Play, and the first thing you notice is the density. It weighs 2.87 pounds, which is deceptively heavier than what its size suggests. But that’s in a way well-built things tend to be. It stands a hair under eight inches tall, flaunting a stout tubular body with a subtle taper and a polycarbonate mesh. At the top, you’re greeted with a soft matte layer that hides fingerprints better than I expected.
Mine came in white. There’s a black option on the table, as well, but I’d pick the white variant because it blends more easily with the interiors, whereas the latter color option stands out as a dark monolith. Either way, this is firmly in the “grown-up audio” school of design. The speaker disappears onto a bookshelf or kitchen island instead of screaming for attention the way some rugged portables do.
The small choices are where you can tell Sonos really pored over the details. The controls on top are real, clicky, physical buttons, and not the finicky touch-capacitive sliders you’ll find on the Era line. That difference becomes apparent the moment your hands are wet, or you’re outside in 45-degree weather with sweaty palms, or you’re trying to skip a track with moist fingers after a workout.
The touch-cap sliders feel premium in the showroom and tactically infuriating in the kitchen. Sonos clearly took notes and went with a thoughtful approach. The rear has a rubberized utility loop you can hook a finger through, and I kept catching myself grabbing the speaker by that loop and moving it from counter to patio table without consciously thinking about it coming loose or snapping. It’s a small thing that turns out to matter every day, and I’m glad Sonos didn’t compromise on the material quality here.
Durability has been baked in seriously. The IP67 ingress protection rating means the device is fully dust-proof and can withstand submersion in up to one meter of water for 30 minutes. But let’s be honest here. You likely aren’t going to treat this speaker to a “pool oopsie” and watch it prove the durability claims. It doesn’t float, which is the one trick the Bose SoundLink Plus has over it.
The shock-absorbing mesh exterior and the ruggedized internal housing have already shrugged off a couple of careless bumps during my testing without a cosmetic scuff to show for it. Phew! The whole design philosophy here is hybrid. The Sonos Play is just as happy docked on the wireless charging base in your living room as it is blasting music in wireless mode atop a fridge, and it feels equally at home if you’re lugging it around.
Yanked off the base and tossed in a tote bag with a wet towel, it acts like a rugged outdoor speaker. Most products in this price band can do one of those two jobs convincingly. The Play does both, and that’s no mean feat. Whether you want a speaker to complement your lifestyle or the adventure mood swings, the latest from Sonos fares well on either end of the spectrum.
Score: 9/10
Sonos Play audio quality: Pleasing, with a serious stereo ace up its sleeve
Sound quality is where Sonos earns the premium asking price. Even though the audio cabinet is small enough to carry in one hand, it somehow houses three Class-H digital amplifiers driving two angled tweeters and a dedicated mid-woofer, plus a pair of passive radiators handling the low end.
The tweeters fire at roughly right angles to each other, which is the engineering trick that gives the Play a soundstage no single-enclosure portable has any right to produce. Most speakers this size sound like they’re firing from one point in space. The Play sounds like it’s coming from a wider strip than the actual cabinet, and on tracks with strong stereo imaging and separation, you actually hear the trick working.
It’s not magic, exactly, but for a sub-eight-inch speaker, it’s the closest thing to it. The midrange is where the signature Sonos character lives, one that has been the company’s audio fingerprint for years. Vocals come out pleasant and natural, with a warmth-inclined, slightly-forward presence that makes it a lovely choice for podcasts and audiobooks.
If you’re into listening to your morning news briefings, they sound like a real person standing in the room rather than an audio stream with weird tinny resonance. On denser tracks, the speaker keeps everything legible without me having to crank the volume to compensate. The bass isn’t earth-shaking, but you can still feel the thump. It isn’t quite the kick-in-your-chest low-frequency output, but there’s still enough oomph to enjoy those bass-boosted playlists.
The dual passive radiators add real weight to the low-mids, and on dance tracks at outdoor volume, the speaker holds its own instead of turning the instruments into a screeching cacophony of distortion. I’ve spent a lot of time with portable speakers that sound great at certain volume levels but awful at others. The Play is a rarity, thanks to a flatter volume curve that maintains composure across the board range.
Between the crooning of Hamaki and Nayyara Noor, and the autotuned drops by T-Pain, there’s barely any mainstream track the speaker can’t handle. If you’re listening to layered instrumentals, some overlap happens once you cross the 60% volume levels, but within the halfway threshold, the likes of Tom Holkenborg are a blast to hear.
One reasonably clever trick is Automatic Trueplay. The Play’s onboard microphones continuously sample the room and adjust the EQ on the fly. The first time I really noticed it working was when I carried the speaker mid-song from a cramped bathroom into a spacious living room.
The tuning shifted within a couple of seconds, and the bloated bass that had been booming in the bathroom got pulled back to something sensible. It’s not a fix-everything feature, and on a windy patio with no walls to reflect from, the soundstage understandably narrows. But in practice, it means you don’t have to think about where you’re putting the speaker. I’d call it a win.
Score: 9/10
Sonos Play app and software: Gets the job done, but still needs some polish
Let’s address the elephant in the room, which is the Sonos companion app. After the 2024 redesign meltdown, a high number of long-term loyalists had a genuinely bad spell with woes such as randomly disconnecting speakers, lost groups, and broken Trueplay, to name a few. I won’t pretend the experience is fully back to where it was before the redesign, but it’s much, much closer than it was six months ago.
Stereo pairing works without any hiccups. Settings stick instead of mysteriously resetting overnight. The integration is still the actual reason you’d pay Sonos money over any random Bluetooth speaker. If you want Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, YouTube Music, and a handful of internet radio stations on call from one app, this is the cleanest way to do it on the market.
What I like more than anything else, though, is that the Play has finally fixed the Bluetooth/Wi-Fi schism. Older Sonos speakers forced you into a binary. You had to pick between the high-fidelity multi-room Wi-Fi convenience or the dumber Bluetooth world. Switching modes felt like punishment, and you couldn’t group across modes at all.
The Play now supports Bluetooth grouping of up to four Play speakers, or you can pair two Plays over Wi-Fi for stereo syncing. Bring them home, drop them on their wireless bases, and they automatically rejoin the rest of your Sonos system. I love these quality-of-life conveniences.
Voice control comes in two flavors. Amazon Alexa works the way it works everywhere else, with the same charms and the same low-level eavesdropping concerns. Sonos Voice Control is the more interesting option, by the way. It processes commands locally on the speaker itself, so nothing leaves the device. Plus, the assistant who does all the talking has the voice of Giancarlo Esposito of “Breaking Bad” fame.
It’s a small touch but a delightful one, and the voice is pretty soothing to hear. The local processing also means it’s noticeably snappier than cloud-based assistants for the small handful of commands it actually supports. It’s not outrageously smart. For the most part, it handles play, pause, next, volume, group, and ungroup. You get the drift. In hindsight, these are the core commands you actually use 95% of the time.
The one persistent nag is that getting the speaker into the Sonos system still requires Wi-Fi for the initial setup and any system-level configuration. If you only ever plan to use the Play as a dumb Bluetooth speaker on a beach somewhere and never touch the app again, that’s a big hurdle.
The newer Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3 radios are up to the mark, though not the latest protocols. In my testing phase, pairing has been quick and reliable. Reconnections, however, are iffy. Plus, there’s still a sub-second delay between issuing an in-app command and it registering on the speaker. But the drill is clear. Sonos still very much wants you to live in their app, and the Play isn’t shy about reminding you of it, with the connectivity limitations in tow.
Score: 8/10
Sonos Play battery life: This one’s built for longevity
Sonos quotes 24 hours of playback on a charge. In real life, while listening at moderate to loud volumes (imagine filling a kitchen during or a moderate lobby), I’m seeing 14 to 17 hours, which is not too bad for a speaker of this acoustic class. The charging story is the most thoughtful part of the whole package.
The Play ships with a wireless charging base that doubles as a permanent docking station. You simply drop the speaker on the base, and it picks up where it left off in the multi-room system without any manual fussing. For travel, the bottom has a USB-C port that’s also bi-directional, meaning the Play can charge a dead phone from its own battery in a pinch.
I haven’t had to use that yet, because I always carry a wireless power bank with me, but it’s the kind of feature you’ll be grateful for exactly once and remember forever. The base itself sits flush enough on a counter that I keep mine permanently on the kitchen island, and the speaker just lives there, fully charged, ready to grab.
The biggest surprise is that the battery is user-replaceable. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Lithium cells degrade over time. Whether it’s your tiny earbuds or the hulking cell packs in an electric car, the electrochemical degradation is unavoidable. After three or four years of daily use, every portable speaker on earth gets noticeably worse at holding a charge. The solution? Buy a new one and add to the e-waste pile.
Sonos is taking a better route. The Play lets you swap the cell yourself with a few screws and a replacement part, extending the useful life of a $299 piece of hardware potentially by another half-decade. This should be a checkbox feature for the entire industry, but it isn’t, so credit where it’s due. Sonos took the complex (read: more expensive) engineering path here, and the world is better for it.
The one thing missing from the box is the wall adapter. You get the wireless base and a cable, but if you don’t already own a USB-C PD brick rated at 18W or 45W, you’ll have to fork extra cash for it. Sonos frames this as a sustainability decision, just like Apple and Samsung, which means fewer bricks ending up in landfills, since most of us already have one lying around.
That argument is at least partially honest, but on a $299 product, it still feels like a pinch. If your customer is paying premium money for a premium speaker, just throw in a brick, will ya? That’s the one piece of friction in an otherwise unnaturally well-thought-out package.
Score: 10/10
Should you pick up the Sonos Play?
The Play is the most coherent answer Sonos has had to “which one should I buy?” in years. If you want a speaker that lives in the kitchen on weekdays, follows you to the patio on Saturday, and comes camping with you on Sunday, this is the one. The acoustic step-up is significant for its class, especially if you are confused between the Era 100 and the Roam.
The Play is for the hybrid user: someone who wants Sonos’s seamless ecosystem at home but doesn’t want to own a separate, cheap Bluetooth speaker for outdoor use. If you’ve ever found yourself with two speakers in two different ecosystems and wished one device could do both jobs without compromise, the Play is the one to pick.
It’s a thumping comeback for Sonos. The hardware is excellent. The software is mostly recovered. The price is fair for what you’re getting. This is the kind of device you ship to win customers after a fiasco. Whether one good product is enough to repair the trust is a longer question, but as a piece of hardware in 2025, the Play deserves all the applause (and easy recommendation).
Why not try
If the Sonos Play doesn’t quite fit the bill for you, there’s a healthy bench of options you can consider:
Bose SoundLink Plus: The closest competitor to the Play. Priced at $269, it delivers a warmer sound profile and the genuinely useful trick of floating in water if you drop it in the pool. What you give up is the Sonos ecosystem. No Wi-Fi multi-room, no app-based streaming integration, and no whole-house grouping. If you’ve never owned a Sonos and never plan to, the Bose is the simpler choice without sacrificing audio quality.
Sonos Move 2: It’s the bigger sibling for buyers who need a primary-room speaker that occasionally travels rather than the other way around. At $499, it’s significantly pricier, but the extra cabinet volume translates into genuinely deeper bass and substantially higher peak loudness. If you regularly host backyard parties or you want a single speaker capable of filling a large living room, the Move 2 earns its weight.
JBL Charge 6: The budget-conscious pick at $170, though the sticker price is $200. It’s rugged, loud, and ships with its own power bank trick. You’re giving up the soundstage, the Wi-Fi, the multi-room, and the smart-home integration. But if good ‘ol Bluetooth is all you need, it’s a hard speaker to argue against on pure value.
UE Everboom: This one typically goes for $179.99 and leans heavily into a punchy sound output. The audio fidelity isn’t in the same league as the Play, but the design and durability are excellent for the money. If the Play is the grown-up choice, the Everboom is the fun one. Both have their place, but the Boom app is loaded with features that are tailor-made for outdoor parties.
How we tested
For a spell of three weeks, the Sonos Play speaker had a place atop my kitchen counter and my workstation. I used it standalone and in a stereo pair, as well. Over the course of testing, it was pushed at movies, music streaming (Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Spotify), live TV, and podcasts. It was connected to a 500Mbps Wi-Fi connection and linked to an iPhone 17 Pro.
I also traveled with the Sonos Play speaker, using it as a portable speaker in the car, camping sites, and exclusively as a Bluetooth speaker in a large hall that also served as my vacation work spot. I used a generic 50W power brick to charge the speaker and a generic USB Type-C cable to use the speaker as a power bank to charge my phone.
For comparison, I tested it against rival speakers in a closed room with minimal acoustic interference, playing the same tracks via Apple Music.
