For years, innovation in earbuds centered on sound quality, battery life, and noise cancellation, while aesthetics converged on a single in-ear silhouette. Today, designers and brands are challenging that orthodoxy, reimagining earbuds as jewelry-adjacent objects that sit visibly on the ear, more ear cuff than invisible tech. The idea of elevating earbuds into luxury objects is not new. Over the past decade, bespoke jewelers have produced gold-plated AirPods, diamond-encrusted headphones, and one-off couture audio pieces intended as collector's items or status symbols.
This was a surprisingly fun year for smartphones. I wasn't expecting it to be; the category is often described as stale or "plateaued." But as WIRED's resident phone reviewer, I've tested nearly all of this year's handsets-devices as cheap as $130 all the way to an eye-watering $2,000-and I don't think there's been a year filled with as many varied styles in quite some time.
New in this release JDK 25 delivers sixteen enhancements that are significant enough to warrant their own JDK Enhancement Proposal (JEP), including four preview features, one experimental feature, and one incubator feature. These features cover innovations to the Java language to the libraries (with two improvements specifically to security libraries), performance and runtime, and monitoring improvements. Language Innovation Primitive Types in Patterns, instanceof, and switch 3rd Preview
The approach is detailed in a paper authored by MIT's Eagon Meng and Daniel Jackson, titled "What You See is What it Does: A Structural Patten for Legible Software". They flag up the problem of "illegible" modern software, which lacks "direct correspondence between code and observed behavior". Modern software is often, also, "insufficiently modular" they continue, "leading to a failure of three key requirements of robust coding": incrementality, integrity, and transparency.
At a buffet, instead of getting to choose the dishes you want, you are handed a large tray filled with everything - sushi, pizza, hamburgers, and a weird-looking dessert. If all you wanted was a slice of pizza, you would find the whole platter a tad overwhelming, right?
For outdoor lovers and trailblazing explorers, rugged phones have always been the trusty sidekicks: reliable, resilient, and ready to take a beating.
