Some carriers are claiming earlier arrivals Verizon was stating a 5 November delivery at the time of writing, but its website seems to be struggling. Xfinity states 13 November and AT&T early December . Those aren't guarantees, but they could be the best chance right now of getting a Duo before the end of the year.

• Preorder iPhone Duo at Apple
• Preorder iPhone Duo at Verizon
• Preorder iPhone Duo at Xfinity
• Preorder iPhone Duo at AT&T
• Preorder iPhone Duo at T-Mobile

Was the iPhone Duo sellout a 'mistake'?

The Apple website continues to state a 25 January delivery expectation for the iPhone Duo at the time of writing. That compares to a three to four-week wait for the iPhone X in 2017.

Three months is a long time for a phone. Part of the hype around the annual product cycles is the newness of each release. According to Apple's estimate, customers who order now will be getting their devices just eight months before we might see the iPhone Duo 2 announced if the company sticks to the same schedule. Gougers are already taking advantage, with iPhone Duos appearing on Ebay over $4,000.

There's been a lot of debate about whether the quick depletion of availability is a sign of massive success or poor preparation. Apple blames "extraordinary" demand, promoting the idea that initial stock flew much more quickly than it had anticipated.

But the company's not disclosed production numbers or allocation figures, so it's hard to say whether there was genuinely unprecedented demand or merely scarcity, planned or otherwise.

Bloomberg's Apple expert Mark Gurman said it was a "major mistake" for the company to launch the $1,999 foldable when it did. In his Power On newsletter, yesterday, he suggests the launch was rushed so sales would be included in first quarter financial results despite the manufacturing pipeline not being able to produce enough handsets to meet demand. Apple also pressed ahead with a global launch across more than 70 countries after previously considering restricting initial sales to the United States and China.

But the decision might not be such a big mistake. It's true that there are some angry complaints on social media from people disappointed at having to wait, but Apple's also benefiting from the massive hype that the scarcity creates, generating more headlines about the Duo and potentially encouraging more people to place orders before the delivery date gets pushed back even further.

A staggered roll out also makes a lot of sense for a product for which it was hard to estimate demand in the first place. Apple is relatively late to a foldable phone space where Samsung and Google have an established presence, and the Duo comes at a time when the global chip shortage has pushed costs upwards. Apple also released the iPhone 18 Pro just a month ago, another expensive phone that. While not revolutionary in its form factor, it has a much better camera than the Duo.

The wait may not be as long what Apple is currently citing. It says it's working to fulfill orders as quickly as possible, and, it has sometimes moved orders forward in the past when production improves or other customers cancel purchases. With the iPhone X, cited waiting times of five to six weeks were generally reduced to fewer than three.

As noted above, carriers and authorised retailers may get the device sooner too, with some citing delivery dates in November and December.

Those hoping to beat the queue by going to an Apple Store in person on Friday might be in for disappointment. According to MacRumors, some employees have been urged to discourage customers from visiting if they don't have preorder reservations because inventory is likely to be limited. Apple’s online store suggests checking again on 24 October for pickup availability.

With the HomeView releasing next month, you might think Apple already has enough on its plate, but it's just announced what will be its third launch event in two months. 'Pro and tell' will take place on 28 October, and the biggest rumour is that the highlight will be an OLED touchscreen MacBook. Will 2026 be the year that Apple caught up on everything?

Google’s latest attempt at making laptops (though it’s not actually building them, and the example we have here is from Acer) extends to a new OS that’s part Chrome and part Android, even running Android apps, but they’re super high-end with OLEDs and the latest Intel chips.

What this means for creative users is that the mobile versions of things like Photoshop and Lightroom run in resizable windows with mouse support. While they’re not completely like the desktop apps, and video editing is a notable weakness, the Googlebook has become the best way to run them. Whether that makes one a worthwhile purchase is up to you – they will certainly be contenders for our best laptops for students guide.

Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Well built
• 2-in-1 design

The Googlebook looks like every other laptop, just as Chromebooks did. Acer’s model has the word ‘Googlebook’ below the keyboard, so you don’t go in expecting Windows, an Acer logo on the back of the lid, all very understated, with the Glowbar at the top right of the lid. This is one of the Googlebook’s new features, a close cousin of the Hilight LED on the back of the Google Pixel 11 Pro smartphones. It’s a visual way to get quick feedback about what your Googlebook is doing, a bar of rainbow LEDs that tells you about battery charge and pulses blue and purple when you’re talking to Gemini.

The Googlebook is very much built with Google’s chatbot in mind. There's no key on the keyboard to invoke it directly, like Windows’ Copilot key (though there is a Google key, it brings up the equivalent of the Start menu) so you use a key combo or, even better, say ‘OK Google’. There are other AI functions too, such as Magic Pointer, which opens the AI’s visual search capabilities when you wiggle the mouse pointer, allowing you to click on something to ask about it.

The dark blue finish of the Acer Googlebook is very professional-looking, and it has one more trick up its sleeve: this is a 2-in-1 design, the screen folding back to produce a pseudo-tablet that you can daub at with either your fingertip or a stylus. The OS adapts to the positioning automatically, and being Android-based it’s a touch-friendly environment from the start, with the OLED touchscreen and the way you only have to click on icons once to open them.

Design score: 4/5

Features and performance

• Decent battery life
• Limited software offering

Setting up a Googlebook is easy, and if you’re an Android phone user you’ll be able to log in with the same account, unlock it with the same PIN (there’s a fingerprint reader too) and even transfer over your apps. The OS acts a lot like ChromeOS, though Android apps are more prominent, and there's a new menu on the taskbar that allows you to access the apps on a paired Android smartphone, the app executing on the phone’s processor but streaming over a network connection and appearing in a window on the laptop screen, with mouse support, and this works fairly well though some apps with ads can look a little strange when they’re stretched out of their preferred aspect ratio, and others, such as Amazon Music, display a ‘rotate screen’ message. Some apps in the Play Store, such as CapCut Pad, are starting to have a ‘compatible with desktop’ flash on their listing page, indicating they’ll work well on the laptop.

With a third-gen Intel Core Ultra processor inside, and Snapdragon models available too, we should expect decent performance from the Googlebooks. Using the mobile version of Geekbench 7 gives a score we can compare across platforms, with the Google Tensor G5 of a Pixel 10 Pro phone scoring 2011 for single-core tasks and 5858 for multicore, the M5 in an iPad Pro scoring 3598 and 16614, and the Googlebook scoring 2498 and 11061.

In the Jetstream 2 Javascript and Web Assembly benchmark from Browserbench, which tests a machine’s ability with web apps, the Googlebook manages 404.246. This compares to the Pixel 10 Pro’s 231.237 and the iPad Pro’s 431.947. The Apple device is clearly ahead in raw processing grunt, but costs more even before you add a keyboard case to your order. It's also not all that far ahead when it comes to web apps, which are likely to be a common use case for the Googlebook.

Creative software on Android can be hit and miss, with the mobile versions of Photoshop and Lightroom usable but much simpler than their full Windows or MacOS cousins. Video editing apps tend to be aimed at social media use, particularly with portrait video in mind, and while there's an iPad version of Affinity coming later this year, that app doesn’t support Android.

Battery life, as we’ve come to expect from the third-gen Core Ultras, is excellent, with the laptop able to keep going for a day and a half - 12 hours - before it needs a recharge.

Feature score: 3/5

Price

If you’ve become used to the idea of Chromebooks being budget computers, then the price of the Googlebook - starting at £999 or $899 - might come as a shock. And they’ve launched into a very competitive market, with Windows 11 spreading out to cover Snapdragon chips as well as the upcoming Nvidia RTX Spark releases, and Apple striding ahead with its M5 and M6 lines, as well as the iPhone chip that powers the excellent MacBook Neo, which is cheaper than the Googlebook in its lowest-cost incarnation.

Value score: 2/5

Who is it for?

• Android workers

Without extreme cheapness to recommend it, you’ll have to like web apps or Android to buy a first-gen Googlebook. With the power of Google and the hardware manufacturers (HP, Lenovo and ASUS are also making them) behind it the platform is bound to take off, it just needs a better app selection.

Buy it if...

• You want a lightweight laptop that lasts all day
• You’re happy with Android apps
• You’re deep into the Google ecosystem

Don't buy it if...

• The apps you want aren’t on Android
• Adobe’s web apps don’t cut it
• You’re not a Google account user

Also consider

I've got two CMF Speaker S models on my desk, one black and one reddish-orange, and when they arrived, I was pretty sure I'd be keeping the black one. Black goes with everything, doesn't it? But the more I see that orange milk carton sitting there, the more I like it, and now I'm not so sure. It's a silly thing to get hung up on with a Bluetooth speaker, perhaps, but that's part of the appeal of CMF's little box of tricks; it makes you care about what is essentially a small plastic box that plays music.

CMF is Nothing's more affordable sibling brand, and it has a knack for making everyday tech look a bit different. Previously, I've been impressed with CMF Headphone Pro, a budget version of the excellent Nothing Headphone (1) Pro. The Speaker S is a pint-sized milk carton with a square body, tapered shoulders, and a pinched top, and it looks fantastic. The larger Speaker M looks more like a two-pint milk carton but retains the same approach, with an extra speaker.

The shape also serves a purpose, which is always nice to see: the top doubles as a handle (it has a slight soft give), and the little circular hole lets you hang it from a hook in your room, clip it to a bag, or dangle it inside a tent when you're off camping. At 334g, it won't weigh you down, and with IP68 dust and water resistance, you don't have to fuss over it as much as some of your other gadgets.

Then there's the front button, a chunky cross-shaped toggle that could easily have been a boring round switch, but isn't. It turns smoothly for volume and presses in with a soft, satisfying clump, and I keep finding myself fiddling with it. There's thought behind how it works, not just how it looks, too: a single press plays or pauses, a double press skips forward, a triple press goes back a track, and a long press toggles Ultra Bass. It's the kind of physical control I enjoyed on Nothing's headphones, where standard buttons are swapped for toggles and paddles and do enough that you don't have to keep reaching for your phone. Same here with Speaker S.

How does Speaker S sound?

All very nice, but a speaker has to play music, and I was genuinely surprised when I first pressed play. I ran through tracks from The Postal Service, The Jayhawks, and Failure, and the sound coming out of this tiny milk carton had much more weight than I expected. The music has decent body, the bass has some punch, and it doesn't immediately fall apart into the thin, tinny sound you get from cheap little Bluetooth speakers. Given the size, I found myself turning it up and wondering how CMF had managed to squeeze quite so much sound out of it.

The hardware is fairly straightforward: a single 45mm full-range driver, two passive radiators, and 10W RMS output, but the radiators add some extra oomph to the low end. The Nothing X app also offers EQ tweaks, including presets for more bass, treble, and voice, so you can fiddle if the default sound isn't quite right for you.

I'm not going to pretend this is a miniature hi-fi system, and anyone who spends their weekends arguing about speaker placement and the finer points of instrumental separation will find things to pick at. But for music while I'm working, listening around the house or sticking something on while cooking, the Speaker S sounds really good for the money.

Take it outside, though, and things change a bit. The sound can spread out and lose some of that focus, becoming more diffuse than it does indoors. It's not terrible, and I don't expect much more from something this small, but it's worth knowing if you're planning to use it as the soundtrack to a garden party or a weekend at a festival. Personally, I'd take that trade-off for something I can sling in a bag without thinking about it, rather than lugging around some hefty Bose monster that takes up half the space I've got for everything else.

With that said, Nothing / CMF has a workaround. You can connect multiple speakers (including the larger CMF Speaker L using Auracast Party Mode to spread music around a space, or pair two Speaker S models in Stereo Mode. I tried two together in Stereo Mode and Wide Soundstage Mode, and the result was much more spacious than I expected from a pair of these little things. The Postal Service's bleepy 'Such Great Heights' felt like it was bouncing around the room. The sound filled the space with a rounder, more spread-out feel, and it made a real difference compared with listening to a single unit on its own. So that's the caveat: Speaker S sound is full and wraparound if you buy two or more.

I'm sure anyone who takes their speakers seriously will have a field day moving them around, trying different positions and working out how to get the best sound from a pair. There's something appealing about placing two small speakers where they work best, rather than relying on one big box to do everything.

And at $59 / £49 each, you don't really need to spend a fortune to try it. Two will set you back $118 / £98, still a reasonable price for a stereo setup, while Party Mode gives you another option if you want to spread the sound outdoors and hook up even more speakers. I'd definitely opt for at least two Speaker S, see how you get on, and add more later if you fancy it (or if you're huge Pink Floyd fan and what the full experience).

Make it your own (literally)

The boxy, compact design makes it easy to use multiple speakers, hooked and hung around the room. And it means I keep coming back to the design because it's what makes the Speaker S stand out. Plenty of small Bluetooth speakers do a decent job, but most are black cylinders or little fabric-covered bricks, and you forget what they look like about five minutes after you buy one. CMF Speaker S doesn't want to be forgotten, and like other Nothing devices, it wants to start a conversation.

And you can mess around with it too, which is even better. The front panels and knobs can be swapped out, so you can change the colour scheme, and Nothing has released official design files for 3D printing your own parts. If you've got a printer, you can try making something that suits your desk, your room, or whatever odd colour combination you've decided you need this week. (For example, my black and orange Speaker S also have different shaped buttons.) I'd love to see what people come up with, especially if they push the milk-carton idea in stranger directions.

The rest of the spec is pretty good for the price, too. Nothing claims up to 18 hours of battery life, and you get Bluetooth 6.0, NFC pairing, USB-C audio and the ability to connect two devices at once. Battery life depends on how loudly you play music and how you use it, of course, but it's enough to make it useful beyond sitting on a shelf looking pretty.

Should you buy the CMF Speaker S?

For $59 / £49, I reckon CMF is onto something. The Speaker S looks great, sounds better than its size suggests and has enough practical touches to make it a genuinely useful little speaker, whether you're listening at your desk, taking it away for the weekend or hanging it up in the garden. It won't satisfy anyone looking for huge bass or the last word in audio detail, and the sound loses a little focus outdoors, but those are reasonable compromises for something this small and affordable.

What I like is that the design hasn't been left at the level of a novelty. The handle and hanging hole make sense, the cross-shaped control is a joy to use, and the removable panels and 3D-printable parts give you a reason to keep playing with it long after you've unboxed it. Add a second speaker, and you get a surprisingly good little stereo setup, too.

I started out thinking the black model was the one for me, but that orange one is winning me over by the day; and, since it sounds best as a pair, I don't really feel forced to decide. It sounds daft to say a Bluetooth speaker has a bit of personality, but this one does, and at $59 / £49 I can forgive it for not sounding like a much bigger, much more expensive speaker. Speaker S is a fun little thing that also plays music well and can be expanded to play music really well, which is pretty unique and very Nothing by design.

Go to any second-hand bookshop, and you'll find an array of raunchy romance novels all with the same book cover design – a female protagonist in the throes of intimate ecstasy, with a strapping hunk by her side. Only this time, he's made of Wicker.

The unconventional film poster features lead actress Olivia Colman draped in the arms of her sentient wicker basket lover. From her enraptured expression to Skarsgård's protective embrace, the design wouldn't look out of place among a lineup of old-school romantasy book covers (so long as you don't notice he's made of wood...)

While the design is clearly a pastiche of these stereotypically schlocky novels, the poster itself is oddly beautiful. With rich jewel tones and elegant portraiture, the design has a timeless feel, only enhanced by its intricate gold script typography.

"Dressing a wicker husband movie up like a paperback romance is elite packaging" one fan on X wrote. "Homage to the 80's-90's bodice ripper mass market paperback covers. Loveee ittt!!!!" another praised, while the best comment by far was the simple sentiment, calling the design "Fifty Shades of Hay".

For more Wicker news, check out IKEA's cheeky homage to the film or take a look at Alexander Skarsgård's wood(en suit).

This sequel picks up directly where the original Boltgun left off. This time you can play as Ultramarine Sternguard Veteran Malum Caedo or the swifter, flame-wielding Sister of Battle Nyra Veyrath, fighting through a branching campaign that stretches from the towering heights of a hive city to the dense mangrove swamps of a jungle world. Expect new weapons, new locations and new foes, including the bloodthirsty Bloodletters and their daemonic Juggernauts.

For artists, the real draw is how it all looks. Boltgun 2 is a 'boomer shooter', but its sprites are far from hand-placed relics of the 1990s. Characters begin life as 3D models, are captured from eight camera directions, and are then converted into sprite sheets packed with normal, ambient occlusion and emission data, before being projected onto billboarded planes in the game world.

It's a clever balancing act: crisp, chunky pixels on the surface, modern rendering underneath, and the sprawling detail of the Warhammer 40,000 universe squeezed into silhouettes that read instantly at speed. I spoke to Chambers about how the team pulled it off, and where retro game art limitations end and modern polish begins.

Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 is out now for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S (with a Nintendo Switch 2 version still to come).

Consoles to play Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 on:

The original campaign centred on a video in which the AI-animated sheep was shown drinking a flat white and going for a sheer, urging viewers not to follow the flock but to choose a bank that was "born to buck the system". There was barely a bleat about it outside of New Zealand – until one user declared in an all-caps post on X that they wished to have carnal intercourse with the alluring ovine.

In two shakes of a lamb's tail, Buck was elevated to digital bombshell status, and non-official lewd AI-generated images of her began circulating on furry forums. A lot of old memes about New Zealanders resurfaced too. The fervor might have blown over in a few days, but Kiwibank went on a legal blitz issuing takedown requests, which reminded everyone that, far from bucking the system, it is the system.

Should it have accepted that in 2026, brands can sometimes benefit from surrendering a little control?

Buck's a great example of a brand mascot escaping its creator's control and being reinterpreted by the internet. The attempt to regain control generated a classic Streisand effect.

As reported by the Spinoff, the bank filed a series of copyright claims against the unauthorised use of Buck’s image (US courts have previously ruled that AI art can't be copyrighted, but Kiwibank says Buck was created by artists, with AI only used to animate the character). Its clampdown led to accusations of censorship, amplifying the story and shifting the discussion from the campaign to questions around free speech.

Mascots are big in branding in 2026. Even AI companies have realised they can help humanise their brands. Meta has Jolly, OpenAI has its Dots. But the public increasingly treats brand characters as open-source cultural assets available for remixing rather than intellectual property. The US White House has set the example, regularly turning a blind eye to copyright law to post AI-generated videos of Super Mario.

Once a mascot becomes popular, audiences feel a sense of ownership. If the narrative takes an unexpected direction, brands tend to assume they need to correct or remove the narrative. But some have shown that accepting, or joining, the new story is also an option.

The Grimace Shake trend took McDonald's by surprise back in 2023. Social media creators began posting horror-style videos in which Grimace appeared terrifying and the milkshake caused an agonising death. Rather than trying to suppress it, McDonald's occasionally acknowledged it with playful responses. It benefited from massive visibility, younger audiences felt they were driving the conversation, and the brand remained part of the joke rather than the target.

Duolingo understood the power of this earlier than most. When users turned its mascot Duo into an obsessive, threatening owl, the company embraced the characterisation, and the joke became one of the most successful social media mascot strategies of the past decade. Duo evolved from a language-learning mascot into an internet meme machine and the start of a story worthy of a soap opera, complete with faked death.

Other examples include Reddit's Snoo, who's seen as belonging as much to the community as the company, and GitHub's Octocat, which has become an creation platform in its own right, spawning hundreds of unofficial variants that have largely been encouraged.

Brands need to distinguish between genuinely harmful content on the one hand and fan art and undesired but harmless remixing on the other. Aabuse, harassment, hate speech or scams have to be addressed. Japan has been taking diplomatic steps to try to get the White House to stop using Nintendo characters out of a real fear that the US government's copyright theft could harm the company's reputation and business because people could think it's an approved collaboration.

But trying to eliminate jokes, memes, or parodies from ordinary people is often unwinnable. The internet often interprets suppression as evidence that a joke is worth repeating, and a legal response can transform a niche joke into a national news story.

In contrast, a humorous response can often diffuse a situation. Back in 2016, Kellogg's Frosties made a perfectly elegant response to furries who had been creating Tony the Tiger porn: "let’s keep things gr-r-reat – & family-friendly if you could. Cubs could be watching", it wrote on X.

Today, the ubiquity of AI-generated imagery makes it even harder to keep control. If the brand itself used AI like Kiwibank did, audiences might be more likely to consider a mascot as fair game. The smartest strategy might be to accept that the attention has value, leave room for audience creativity and to try to remain part of the conversation after control has inevitably been lost.

Laptops with new processors in them are always exciting, as we find out how well they can perform in creative apps. Nvidia’s RTX Spark combines a Grace CPU - in this case 20 Arm cores, though an 18-core version is also available - with a big GPU from the Blackwell generation (aka the GeForce 5000-series). Given how well the Arm-based Snapdragon CPUs have performed in the past, and how we’ve lamented that they’re not being paired with the kind of GPUs that could make creative apps sing, this would appear to be the answer to our prayers.

However, Nvidia isn’t aiming its new system directly at creatives, nor at gamers, but squarely at AI development, particularly the running of agents. Happily, this has the side effect of making RTX Spark machines useful for creative purposes, especially as AI tools are creeping into our apps (see our initial Blender testing), and there are other things to like about them too, including excellent battery life and bright OLED screens.

RTX Spark laptops run Windows 11, so software compatibility shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Let’s see how this one stacks up and if it's heading to the best laptops for game development list.

Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Lightweight metal shell
• Bright, punchy screen

As the smaller of the two ProArt laptops available at the launch of the RTX Spark chips, (the other being the P16) the ProArt P14 is a compact and lightweight machine, the sort of thing dished out to remote workers the world over. It’s got a very nicely engineered shell, with speakers either side of the keyboard and ProArt branding rather than ASUS logos everywhere.

Place it next to a MacBook Pro 14, and it becomes clear who this new laptop is aimed at. ASUS is targeting a professional demographic here, with a metal finish that feels great under your fingers and a low-profile, lightweight build. It has a lighter, magnesium-esque look about it rather than Apple’s Space Grey, and the keyboard feels like it has slightly more depth than the Mac’s, for a satisfying feeling while typing.

The OLED touchscreen is magnificently bright, as we’ve come to expect from ASUS devices, and the colours are punchy. Having a 120hz maximum refresh rate means everything feels very smooth, and the colour response displaying 97% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut using the display’s built-in profile, along with 100% of sRGB and 94% of Adobe RGB. It puts out a maximum SDR brightness of 640 nits, which is excellent, and over all it’s a good choice for colour grading or print design, as long as 14 inches corner to corner is big enough for you.

Design score: 4/5

Features

• Lots of fast ports
• All-day battery

With a trio of USB4 ports and a full-size HDMI, the ProArt P14 is made to connect to all kinds of peripherals and monitors. You’ll be able to dump camera footage onto its SSD through the SD card slot or via a cable connection, though a 1TB SSD is the only build to order option here apart from boosting the RAM from 24GB to 32GB. The RTX Spark platform uses a unified memory architecture, where one RAM pool is shared between the CPU and GPU, rather than having two allocations as is the norm with Nvidia GPUs paired with AMD or Intel CPUs. This means you’ll need to calculate your RAM needs when you buy, and it supports up to 128GB of the currently very expensive stuff. More is, of course, always better.

The fan in the ProArt P14 came on when it was updating software and not being pushed remotely hard (we’d locked it into Performance mode to get the best results from testing, which might have something to do with it), and it’s possible software support could be as big an issue for the new platform as cooling is. The Windows on Arm ecosystem is larger now than when the first Snapdragon chips launched, but not perfect, and Microsoft’s Prism translation layer, which allows older apps to run on the new chips, has an overhead in terms of processor cycles and can slow things down. It’s better to run optimised software, and there is a lot of it out there, especially if you’re using it for AI work, where the apps are all fairly new.

If you don’t like the fans you can put it in Whisper mode, which is where we found the best battery life. It’ll go all day (8.5 hours) if you’re just editing text documents, watching videos and browsing the web, and if you leave it playing a video you can get more than 11 hours out of it. Naturally it drops more quickly when you’re making it work harder, and some of our AI benchmarks took several percent off the battery in about 15 minutes.

Feature score: 4/5

Benchmark scores

We test every one of our laptops using the same benchmarking software suite to give you a thorough overview of its suitability for creatives of all disciplines and levels. This includes:

• Geekbench: Tests the CPU for single-core and multi-core power, and the GPU for the system's potential for gaming, image processing, or video editing. Geekbench AI tests the CPU and GPU on a variety of AI-powered and AI-boosted tasks.
• Cinebench: Tests the CPU and GPU's ability to run Cinema 4D and Redshift.
• UL Procyon: Uses UL Solutions' Procyon software suite to test the system's ability for AI image generation in Stable Diffusion, its Microsoft Office performance and its battery life in a looping video test.
• Topaz Video AI: We use Topaz Video AI to test the system's ability to upscale video and convert video to slow-motion.
• PugetBench for Creators: We use the PugetBench for Creators benchmarking suite to test the system's ability to run several key tasks in Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro, as well as its performance when encoding/transcoding video.
• ON1 Resize AI: Tests the system's ability to resize 5 photos to 200% in a batch process. We take the total time taken to resize the images and divide by 5.

Performance

• Good for AI use
• Holds up in games and creative apps

For the N1X, Nvidia has created a 20-core CPU on what it calls its Grace microarchitecture. Grace has been around for a bit as a server platform, but this is the first time we’ve seen it in a consumer product. In this configuration, you get ten Cortex-X925 cores - for high single-threaded performance - along with ten more Cortex-A725 cores that are a bit more power efficient but still potent enough to make up the majority of the cores in Google’s Tensor G5 smartphone chip.

This is then joined by a Blackwell GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, a figure that sits somewhere between the laptop versions of the RTX 5070 and 5080 GPUs. This all sits on the NVLink-C2C interconnect, which has 600 GB/s of bidirectional bandwidth, enough to keep all the bits talking to each other more quickly than a standard PCIe connection. The whole SoC has a TGP of 85W, rather less than some RTX 5080-equipped gaming laptops which can go as high as 175W, and pointing toward quieter operation and a longer battery life.

In tests, it pays off. While gaming isn’t the ProArt 14’s forte, it can manage 60FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 (ray-tracing ultra) at the screen’s native resolution if you enable Nvidia tricks like DLSS and frame-gen, something that puts it in the same ballpark as an RTX 5070 laptop GPU. The new GPU in the Spark wasn’t supported in Cinebench at the time of our testing, and that was also true of many of our other standard tests. Adobe is already trotting out optimised versions of its apps for the architecture, with betas of Photoshop and Premiere available that will take advantage of its potential. In the 32GB configuration we’ve got here, 12GB is allocated to the GPU by default, but you can change this in the ProArt Creator Hub.

As Nvidia is pushing the AI capabilities of the Spark so hard, it made sense to try some AI benchmarks. Creative Bloq has been running Geekbench AI for a while now, but we also turned to MLPerf to get a tokens per second figure, running the Llama 3.1 8 Billion Instruction LLM benchmark on a few different computers using the most appropriate framework for the processor.

The obvious winner here is the RTX 5080 desktop card, which has a TGP of 350W so jolly well should be better than laptops running at 85W or less. The ProArt P14 slots in nicely as the best laptop in this test, producing more than twice the tokens per second of Apple’s M5 (the vanilla non-Max or Ultra version), and this workout also proves Nvidia’s claims that the system’s performance is the same whether it’s plugged in or running on battery: with only two points’ difference between the scores, the difference is negligible.

In Topaz Video AI, the P14 sits with the lower-end gaming laptops, coming up just behind the RTX 5050-equipped Lenovo LOQ 15i Gen 10 and ASUS TUF Gaming A16. This could be explained by the software not being optimised for the RTX Spark. In ON1 Resize, which uses machine learning to up-res image files, it sits just behind the Acer Predator Triton (RTX 5070).

Performance score: 4/5

Price

The prices of some of the new RTX Spark laptops are enough to make you gasp. Not only do they have a new SoC architecture inside them, but often a lot of RAM too. The ASUS ProArt P14 starts at £2,699.99 or $2,599 for the version with 24GB of RAM, and hops up to £3,199.99/$3,099.99 if you choose the 32GB upgrade. That’s MacBook Pro money, and you can get a 14in M5 model with 32GB of RAM for less.

Value score: 2/5

Who is it for?

• AI agents

This is a laptop, and indeed a whole platform, designed around the emergent field of the locally-run AI agent. Nvidia thinks it’s going to change the way we interact with our PCs, and for some it will be important to be in on this from the start. For anyone looking for something to edit video on, then while this is a fine laptop, it’s too new and expensive for many creative uses that don’t involve AI.

Buy it if...

• You’re running a team of AI agents
• You like to have the newest thing
• You’re in the market for a slim and light laptop

Don't buy it if...

• You can’t stretch to the cost
• You need even more CPU or GPU grunt
• AI doesn’t matter to you

Also consider

Praised for her candid lyrics and immersive tour performances, Lily's West End Girl era has embraced chaos and the clumsiness of love and sex. Her strikingly lewd poster is yet another example of why the album's raw approach to music has earned her a shot at this year's Grammys.

The design features the polka-dot-patterned novelty USB flash drive butt plug that became the unexpected star of the singer's cheeky album campaign. Immediately contrasting the domestic connotation of polka dots with the sexualised object, the poster embodies the themes of the album with a wonderfully unserious playfulness.

The FYC phase of the Grammys is a chance for artists to promote their work in hopes that voting members will cast ballots in their favour. Lily's casual and provocative approach to this historically professional artist pitch is a wonderfully refreshing subversion of the rules, once again proving the artist isn't afraid to challenge convention and taboo.

For more design inspiration, take a look at why Gen Alpha are spending $30+ on records over streaming services, or check out the best album covers of all time.

Tung tung tung sahur is one of many characters who've emerged from an internet culture called Italian brain rot, which emerged in early 2025 and has since taken over online spaces and physical playgrounds across the world.

These absurd, AI-generated creatures are have Italian-sounding names and are typically a mashup of two things that would never normally go together.

For instance, Ballerina Cappuccina is a dancer with a coffee cup for a head. Tralalero Tralala is a three-legged shark who wears Nikes on his, er, feet. Bombardiro Crocodilo is a crocodile crossed with a wartime bomber plane. You get the picture.

It's utter nonsense, but like a lot of utter nonsense, it's become big business. There are trading cards, a Panini sticker album, toys, Fortnite skins and a Roblox game called Steal a Brainrot.

And here's where things get relevant for anyone who's passed puberty. The latter has sparked a court case that could change what copyright means for anyone who uses generative AI in their work.

The subject of the case is Tung Tung Tung Sahur: a grinning wooden figure carrying a bat. It’s essentially an anthropomorphic rendering of the kentongan, a wooden drum beaten to wake Muslims for their pre-dawn meal, or sahur, during Ramadan in south-east Asia.

The character was created by an Indonesian teenager, known as Noxa, using OpenAI's image generator. It became a global sensation, and now Noxa is represented by a French agency that specialises in this kind of thing, called Mementum (see what they did there?).

In September 2025, Mementum sent a cease and desist letter to the owners of Do Big Studios, the company behind Steal a Brainrot, over its use of the character. Do Big initially pulled the character, tried to negotiate a settlement, but when that failed they sued Mementum in a California federal court.

Do Big Studios' position seems watertight. In the US, copyright only protects work made by humans. A 2025 report by the US Copyright Office stated that you cannot copyright purely AI-generated material. There's some grey area, though: the same report said that work with sufficient human creative input might be protected, but would have to be considered on a case by case basis.

So how much human input went into Tung Tung Tung Sahur? Well, the character was literally generated about 15 minutes using seven prompts, starting with “draw a pentungan sahur with a face and legs”. Can me an old fuddy-duddy, but that doesn't sound like a lot of human input to me. But I'm not a legal expert, so we'll just have to see what the legal experts make of it.

Why it matters

And let me clear: the stakes are serious. If the court decides that a handful of prompts isn’t enough "human input" to protect creative work, that has big implications for how you make things for clients.

For example, if you create a logo, character or illustration for them partly or wholly using AI, that work might be unprotected. Which means, at the extreme, that the clients' rivals could copy it freely without any comeback. Which would beg the question what exactly the client is paying you for.

On the other hand, if the court finds that Tung Tung Tung Sahur is copyright-protected, that poses a lot of questions for clients employing freelancers and agencies who spend a lot of time painstakingly creating everything by hand. The idea that the client could make similar work themselves, just by a typing a few prompts, and still have it protected in law would make that option seem much more tempting.

Whatever the court decides, then, an entire profession of adults is about to be profoundly affected. Not bad for a teenager typing a few prompts into an AI bot.

We caught up with her to learn more about her career and cartoon characters. If you need to upgrade your own setup for digital art, see our guides to the best drawing tablets and the best laptops for drawing.

You can see more of Isabella’s work on her ArtStation profile. .

This article originally appeared in ImagineFX. Subscribe to ImagineFX to never miss an issue. Print and digital subscriptions are available.

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The good news is that there's finally a deal that reverses that hike – and then some. Right now Amazon has this year's MacBook Pro 14in reduced from $2,499 to $2,049. That's a saving of $430 on a M5 Pro, 24GB memory, 1TB SSD configuration.

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London startup Electronic Materials Office (EMO) has set out to change that with Altar II, a fully mechanical keyboard that’s just 4.75mm thick. Think about it: that's less than half a centimetre. Super-thin or what?

Machined from a single block of aluminium, the Altar II packs in haptic feedback, a built-in speaker, red backlighting, up to 30 days of battery life and a magnetically detachable dial for volume and media. It’s designed first and foremost for Mac users, though it works with Windows and Linux too.

Altar II launches on Kickstarter on 10 November, and will retail at $349. But if you reserve one on EMO’s website now for a refundable $1, you can buy it for $249. Delivery is expected in early summer 2027. I asked founder Andrew Emerson how it all came together.

How did it all start?

Mechanical keyboards were a lockdown hobby for me. We all had our weird things to keep us busy I suppose. Most people baked sourdough but I became fixated on mechanical keyboards. I was obsessed with how they felt, and how far people would go to get their keyboards just the way they liked. A keyboard is also something you use every day, so I figured it was a worthwhile investment.

But after trawling the internet and Reddit, watching all the reviews, and buying a few keyboards, I just couldn’t find anything I liked. They all looked horrendous. Creaky plastic, glossy, gigantic, obnoxiously loud, and RGB (I hate RGB). It was really dreadful. So I decided that I would try and make my own.

The learning curve was huge. CAD, 3D visualisation, DFM, CNC milling, electrical design, firmware. This was all very much outside my wheelhouse as a software designer at the time. But it was a lot of fun to learn everything and pour myself into the project on nights and weekends. Eventually I came out the other side with a functional prototype of what would ultimately become Altar I.

I stood up a small website for Altar I with an email sign-up field, posted it online and... crickets. Annoyed, I went for a quick lunchtime run. When I came back the website had blown up on Hacker News (a popular tech forum), had hundreds of comments, and by the end of the week there were 10,000 people on the waitlist. That month I told my boss I was quitting to make keyboards full time.

Why did you make the keyboard so thin?

Firstly I will say I am absolutely not chasing the title of “thinnest keyboard ever”. The slim design of Altar II is the result of a few things.

Typically, keyboards come in two flavours. The first is thin keyboards, like the Apple Magic Keyboard, Logitech MX Keys, or the keyboard in your laptop. These keyboards usually look really nice on a desk. The switch mechanism they use is a rubber dome that collapses a membrane, which feels squishy, indistinct, and generally pretty bad.

The other kind of keyboard is the mechanical keyboard, which is typically tremendously thick because it houses a large mechanical switch. These switches have springs and electrical contacts, and when you press them, they feel really nice and tactile.

Altar II takes the best aspects of both these worlds and puts them together: an amazing-feeling mechanical switch, housed in a very slim chassis. That is the true innovation of Altar II. You can have your cake and eat it too. It also helps that a thin keyboard is more ergonomic and easier to transport.

There is a philosophical aspect to making Altar II as slim as possible too. I believe that technological advancement comes in two modes: miniaturisation and higher performance. I think we tapped out on increasing performance on computer keyboards in the mid 1980s, which leaves us with miniaturisation.

Making a very thin mechanical keyboard wasn't enough of a challenge though, I also wanted to pack in as much technology as possible: wireless Bluetooth, haptic feedback, a speaker, a magnetic dial. To me that really represented a technological leap and a challenge.

Are you still doing all this by yourself?

Altar I was very much a one-person passion project, with a little help from a few people along the way. But with Altar II the ambitions have been raised significantly. The device is an order of magnitude more complex and it really swings for the fences. To do this the team has expanded from one person to a small team of very talented people.

I look after the industrial design, graphic design, the website, conceptualising, marketing, and day to day running of the company. Steven and Jessica Nersesian, of Metric Designworks, are the people who make the designs reality, looking after CAD, DFM, mechanical engineering, and being the link between us and our manufacturers.

They have worked on products like the Playdate and various Teenage Engineering products. Kurtis Lew is our embedded engineer and is responsible for firmware, and Moritz Plattner is our electrical engineer and looks after things like our circuit board design.

Where exactly one person’s role ends and another’s begins is not clear in reality. Everyone has opinions and thoughts on everyone else’s domain. Altar II is a single product, and all these domains live within it. People using Altar II don't care whose idea a detail was, they just care that it feels right.

As for my background, before EMO I spent about ten years as a software designer across automotive, music, healthcare, and fashion. I’m also a traditionally trained graphic designer. At design school I focused on editorial design and typography. I think you can see some of that in EMO’s products.

Overall, Altar II is a much more professionalised operation than Altar I. Rather than being a pure passion project, we are now building Electronic Materials Office to be a long-term sustainable business.

The M-dial is genius: how did you come up with it?

M-Dial is a magnetically detachable, swappable, clickable dial for Altar II. It sticks on to the keyboard in a very satisfying way. There are two M-Dials included in the Altar II box: a standard issue size and a low-profile variant for travel. We’ll also be releasing the specs for M-Dial publicly, so you’ll be able to 3D print your own in whatever shape and size you like.

Why a dial at all? When you use a dial to change the volume on your computer, it just makes sense. It’s so much more intuitive than using buttons. There are a few extra niceties built into M-Dial too: you can click the dial once to play or pause media, double click to skip, triple click for previous, and long press to invoke Siri on macOS. These are all customisable in our companion app as well.

When we launched Altar I we got some feedback that although the overall shape of the device was easy to transport, the dial would sometimes get caught on things like people’s bags. So now it’s detachable. It also lets us slim down the Altar II packaging to make it more efficient, which is better for the environment.

What are the main changes from Altar I?

There’s a question to answer here first: Why make a successor to Altar I at all? When I sat down at my desk after shipping Altar I, I put it next to my Apple Magic Keyboard, and I thought: 'Hmm, I think I have unfinished business here.' Don’t get me wrong, I adore Altar I, and I’m incredibly proud of it. I thought with all the learnings from Altar I, it'd be possible to go even further and make an even more impressive product that could supplant the likes of the Magic Keyboard. But I would only make a successor product if it could be a true generational leap and an improvement in every way over Altar I.

And that’s what Altar II is. It really is a generational leap. Almost nothing carries over between the two devices, we’ve taken the opportunity to build everything from the ground up.

The most noticeable difference is the thickness. Altar II is almost 70% thinner than Altar I. Which is especially impressive when you consider that Altar I is itself a “low-profile” keyboard!

The other notable differences are that the switch platform is completely different, so the keycaps and stabilisers are totally redesigned. Of course the Altar II dial is magnetically detachable, and Altar II has a backlight, haptic feedback and a built-in speaker. We really threw everything we had at Altar II, and took so many lessons from Altar I as well.

I was going to be mainly writing and editing, rather than designing or making videos. So although it was basic, it did everything I need. A stopgap, I told myself, until I could afford something “proper”.

I said all this to myself, I have to add, through gritted teeth. This machine was a huge step-down, power-wise, from the top-of-the-range desktop Mac I'd been able to access as associate editor of Creative Bloq. So what happened next was a total shock. My little Chromebook turned out to be the most enjoyable computer I’ve ever owned.

Why? Partly because it was so simple. Pretty much all there was on my screen was a browser, and it turned out, that was pretty much all I needed. But also, because it had a touchscreen. And oh my gosh, did I love using that.

Suddenly, scrolling through a feature, tapping a link or nudging an image into place felt natural in a way a trackpad never had. It felt like walking on air. I was getting more done, more quickly, but it all seemed so effortless.

Goodbye to my Chromebook

It didn’t last, though. As time went on, I started to do different types of work, some of which needed software that wouldn't run in the browser. So over time, I moved to Windows and eventually back to a Mac.

Today, macOS is the best home for the creative tools I rely on. But because there are no MacBook touchscreens, I’ve never experienced that sense of flow I had on that little Chromebook. Which means I'm super-excited that Apple is about to make my dreams come true.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who's rarely wrong about these things, has said that Apple is preparing to unveil OLED touchscreen versions of the MacBook Pro at an event on 28 October. And the actual laptops could theoretically be in shops as soon as 6 November.

That’s a shock, because suspicions of touchscreens has been in Apple's DNA ever since Steve Jobs called touchscreen laptops ergonomically terrible back in 2010, stating that stating that "touch surfaces want to be horizontal". Similar remarks have been made since, by software chief Craig Federighi in 2018 and John Ternus, now Apple’s CEO, in 2021.

A mixed experience

I get their point, in theory, at least. Holding your arm up to poke a screen all day isn’t ideal, and nobody wants a display covered in fingerprints. But what I think they're missing is that no one uses a touchscreen as the sole input on a laptop. On my old Chromebook, I didn’t abandon the keyboard and trackpad. I just used whichever one was easiest and quickest in the moment.

And I think for a broad range of creative work, the potential is huge. Think about scrubbing through a timeline in your video editing software, cropping a photo in Photoshop, pinching to zoom on a layout, or flicking through a client’s PDF proof. These are the kind of tasks that a trackpad is just not designed for. And exactly the kind of tasks that a touchscreen is.

So I'm excited. Although as ever with Apple, I'm not sure I'll be buying one straight away, because the price is likely to be super-high, especially with memory costs soaring right now. I'm also happy for other people to discover the bugs that will inevitably come with a new release, and for Apple to fix those over time at their expense.

Over time, though, assuming prices come down, I reckon it's going to be a winner. Because in my view, Macbooks can't be beaten in terms of specs. But using a laptop for creative work isn't just about specs, it's about user experience. And if Apple can recapture that sense of joy I had from that first Chromebook, I’ll be a happy man indeed.

A spokesperson for Goth has called the viral ruse "disconcerting on a fundamental level," pointing the blame at Instagram for allowing the false image to circulate. But could pointing the finger at Meta just be scratching the surface of the issue?

The AI images of Goth appeared on the verified @miagoth_ Instagram account, which, despite the name, has no affiliation with the actress. Believing the fan account was real, numerous news sources reported on the AI images, further spreading the false information.

“The fact that this fan account meets Instagram’s criteria to qualify for a ‘blue check’ is disconcerting on a fundamental level,” says Christine Tripicchio, spokesperson for Goth. “Beyond that, it is incomprehensible that Instagram evidently prioritizes the dissemination of forged and manipulated images over the protection and integrity of a public figure’s likeness.”

While Meta certainly has its own issues with AI slop, it's worth bringing into question how audiences and 'news' sources alike are quick to be trusting of AI imagery. AI labelling is simply not keeping up with the quantity of slop content. And when fan accounts can easily charade under the status of a blue checkmark, is it surprising that Goth's AI likeness went viral?

There's an undeniable level of parasociality between celebs and the public when it comes to social media, making stars appear more accessible and relatable. The internet loves a bit of drama, and the refinement of AI technology only makes it easier to stir the pot; Mia Goth's 'selfie' was too good to resist.

Whether the AI image of Goth was created as a playful (albeit inappropriate) gesture to her divorce news or with the more malicious intent of creating fake drama, the rise of AI celebrity hoaxes is concerning. With recent deepfake drama like the Taylor Swift TikTok scam, it's unsurprising that stars are increasingly taking a stand against AI deepfakes by trademarking their voice and likeness.

The production car won't arrive until at least 2028, may not be road legal and can be reserved by invite only, reportedly requiring a deposit of $500,000. For anyone not able to part with that amount of money on a reservation agreement that explicitly states that there's no guarantee of delivery, Ikea thinks it has a safer, more affordable option that's available in store today.

Ikea's marketing departments already have a reputation for ingenious quick thinking. We recently saw it jump on 2026's Wicker trend faster than you can say "Alexander Skarsgård". But Ikea Taiwan's response to the Tesla Roadster concept's flying abilities is as impressive as the car's own 0.9-second 0-60mph record.

Its answer for a Tesla Roadster Rocket Edition setup suitable for any home is to combine a 4-piece $12.99 Ikea Lillabo toy car set with a Brokglim bath towel. "Real life, baby," it says in the Instagram post above, echoing Tesla's caption in its own post below, before adding "Safe, affordable."

I'm not sure how you're supposed to fix the towel in the air like that, and I don't think the Lillabo has a fan-based suction system to keep it on the track, but kids have even more imagination than Tesla; I'm sure they can work something out. You could also try a slot car race track.

The good news for non celebs is that the Sennheiser 480 Pro is reduced by £40 from £339 to £229 at Wex. We've tested and reviewed dozens of headphones and this is our favourite closed-back option so far, as reviewed in our guide to the best wired headphones.

Why the Sennheiser 480 Pro are our favourite closed-back wired headphones

The Sennheiser HD480 Pro only came out in the summer of 2026, but they immediately stood out in the world of closed-back wired headphones. They're very well tuned, incredibly comfortable and they look cool too. While designed for professional studio use, they're also a treat for audiophiles or anyone who wants to discover what makes a neutral wired earphone so special.

The clear, largely uncoloured sound profile evades the issue of overly boomy bass and unrealistic timbre that haunts the closed-back headphone space. Passive noise isolation is well executed and the mature tuning fits all kinds of music at all volume levels.

While the music video itself is a masterpiece of storytelling, set and character design, a tiny animated section has been accused of using AI. Having previously denounced the use of AI in her music, the allegations come as a shock for many of Rodrigo's fans.

The controversial scene in question features cartoon Rodrigo and Roan flying past on a wheel-of-fortune-inspired spaceship. Observant fans were quick to notice that one shot appears to remove one of Chappell's hands, while Olivia appears to have inherited her missing extremity.

Is it the work of AI, or simply a bit of good ol' human error? Either way, fans were dissapointed by the blunder. "Not the AI..." one fan wrote, while another added, "No way, and I just liked a tweet cheering her for not using AI."

Recently telling The Hollywood Reporter, "I would never use AI in any of my music. Absolutely no,” the AI allegations came as a surprise to many. Some fans came to Olivia's defence, claiming, "This mistake happens in 2d animation all the time," while another wrote, "Honestly, I think the artist might’ve just messed up the colors because honestly it’s the only mistake I saw in those drawings and it’s a minor mistake."

For more design news, check out why Tyla was hit with heated AI allegations over her new animated music video or take a look at Apple Music's new logo that's giving major mixed messages.

It might seem sensible at this for anyone else to stay out of it and let them sort it out between themselves, but not Angry Birds 3. The upcoming movie has jumped on the controversy to cheekily remind the world that it's due for release at cinemas in a couple of months.

If you somehow missed the online scuffle of the week, the controversy is basically a “he said, she said” row over a $15,000 mechanical bird, and whether Kelly Clarkson was or wasn't treated like she couldn't afford it. The singer says that when she asked about the bird at Art of Play, a member of staff offered to find her a cheaper alternative. Writing on X, she compared the experience to a scene from Pretty Woman in a post that's received over 11,000 comments.

The shop then responded to complain that it was being hounded by Kelly Clarkson fans and claimed that the bird, called Molly, hadn't been for sale in the first place.

It's not an obvious branding opportunity, but Angry Birds 3 quickly saw the potential. In the animation above posted on the same platform, Chuck, AKA Yellow Bird, is cast in the role of Molly. He doesn't take sides, instead sitting back to watch others being angry for a change, but the animated poster design pokes fun at Molly's price tag, pointing out that we can see Chuck for the price of a movie ticket.

In a pre-programmed sequence with no driver, the two-seater concept vehicle performed a kickflip off a half-pipe before gliding to the ground. It was later shown to lift off from stationary and 'hop' over a row of parked vehicles.

"Flying cars are real," Elon Musk said, perhaps referring to rival company Alef's Model A?

Tesla's next-gen Roadster electric sports car has been in development for around a decade. Musk wrote on Twitter back in 2018 that there would be a "SpaceX option package" featuring "10 small rocket thrusters" to improve acceleration, top speed, braking and cornering. "Maybe they will even allow a Tesla to fly," he wrote then.

Delivery was initially slated for 2020. The company now says 2028.

The concept car at yesterday's event was fitted with rechargeable "ultra high-pressure air tanks" to achieve vertical propulsion and to cushion landings. It was able to cling to the steel ramp in the demo thanks to a fan suction system.

The thrusters can also fire rearwards to increase acceleration. This allowed the car to reach 60 miles per hour in 0.81 seconds, Tesla said.

Tesla chief designer Franz von Holzhausen has said that the Roadster's angular design and scissor doors were inspired by an "aerospace aesthetic", while Musk described the concept vehicle as "what happens when you have a collaboration with the world's best car company and the world's best rocket company".

"Success is not guaranteed" but "it will probably work" said the CEO, who in 2022 claimed that the Cybertruck would be "waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat, so it can cross rivers, lakes & even seas that aren’t too choppy".

The concept Roadster's gymnastics were impressive, but whether there's any real-world use for them is another matter. Requiring heavy tanks packed with compressed air, along with the valves and thrusters needed to contain and release it, the 'flying' can only last a matter of seconds before the tanks need to be refilled. That inefficiency makes the flying Roadster feel like a very elaborate gimmick.

On the Tesla website reserving a basic version with no boosters requires a £50,000 deposit while a “Thrust” version with rearward boosters for acceleration requires a $250,000 deposit. A single-seater “Rocket” variant with a “full flight system” is labelled as being available only by invitation. It's not clear whether that variant would be road legal at all, but buyers certainly won't be jumping over traffic or driving up buildings along public roads.

The bigger question is whether yesterday's theatre matters for regular customers and whether it can do anything to help repair confidence in the Tesla brand. Since the announcement of the Roadster in 2017, competitors like Rimac, Porsche, Xiaomi and BYD have already delivered high-performance electric cars, nudging Tesla out of the spotlight in a category it once hoped to dominate. There's also the upcoming Jaguar Type-01, Bentley Torcal and Ferrari Luce.

It seems the markets may have become skeptical of the CEO who cried wolf. Tesla shares remain down by 4.5% on last week and over 16% for the year to date.

The Roadster isn't the first design for a car that can hover a bit. Alef Aeronautics has begun limited hand-built production on its Model A for controlled testing.

“Welcome, Tesla, to the flying car race; we’ve been here alone for eleven years,” CEO Jim Dukhovny commented after Tesla's event. The California-based company posted a video on YouTube showing its Model A 'flying' over a Tesla Roadster. "This flight marks 1000th recorded flight by Alef flying car," it claimed.

While Tesla's Roadster uses compressed air thrusters for short hops and glides, Alef's much lighted Model A uses distributed electric propulsion via eight internal, enclosed propellers integrated into a mesh-like shell.

The banner recreates Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto VI cover art, with Lucia and Jason front and centre and joins the growing marketing campaign that started in earnest with yesterday's GTA 6 launch trailer. Look closely, though, and two weapons have vanished: the pistol Lucia holds in the original, and an assault rifle in another panel. Kotaku spotted the changes after fans started comparing the finished banner with the official image (X user Rockstar Mags had been following the ad's creation and took photos).

On paper, removing a gun from an image sounds like a five-minute job. In practice, it leaves Lucia with no pistol and no hand to hold it, and the character in the lower image with an arm thrust into thin air, as if they’ve just spotted a particularly interesting cloud, so a canny zoom has solved the problem.

But these guns aren’t background clutter for GTA 6; Rockstar’s art centres on its characters, their poses, and what they’re holding, and the weapons give those silhouettes attitude and tell us a little about who they are and what we can expect from the game. Take them out and the balance tips, leaving gestures that no longer quite make sense. It's a similar, though perhaps less dramatic, edit that made Amazon's shockingly bad James Bond posters so appalling by removing Bond's famous pistol.

No guns, no problem

It’s a handy reminder of how tricky it is to adapt key art for different spaces. An image designed for game boxes, websites, and trailers won’t always hold up when blown up across the side of a building, especially when bits have to be cut out because locals don't want a 30ft gun staring down at them as they pop out for a croissant.

Other GTA 6 murals in the US reportedly keep their weapons, so this looks like a Paris-only tweak for the local area, which also shows how aware Rockstar is of the impact its campaign can have. I get the feeling Rockstar doesn't want to start culture-war fires this time and wants people to focus on the game.

That said, it’s a strange compromise for a game defined by crime, chaos and bad behaviour. A gun-free GTA is a bit like advertising a racing game without the cars, or James Bond without a Walther PPK. And once you’ve spotted those empty hands, you can’t stop looking for them.

However, Powerade's response, the 'Never Just Sports' campaign, adds one word and turns the whole furore into a different debate about women in sport. The Ogilvy-made campaign has been running on digital screens in New York's Times Square, directly opposite the Novig billboard, with images of women swimming and clearing the high jump, and it never mentions Sweeney or Novig; it just nicks the phrase, changes it just enough to make a difference and trusts you to remember the original – but it's also right there next to Sweeney, so it's not hard.

What interests me more than who has the better line or how clever Coca-Cola feels right now is why an ad with a Hollywood actor in a cheeky pose ended up as a row about how women are shown in sport at all, whether we really are returning to 'ads' old dirty tricks', and whether Millennials and Gen Z read the same pictures differently, because I suspect the answer is messier than one lot being offended and the other shrugging.

One word, a very different picture

Novig's idea is commercially clear: it wants to stand out as a sports-only prediction market app, unlike platforms that let you trade on politics and world affairs. Its CEO says Sweeney helped develop the campaign's creative, and that it's an eye-catching way into something few people care about (I mean, really?). The gag is that she's wearing "just sports", footballs and other kit doing the job of clothes, a play on words that's as subtle as "good jeans".

Just like American Eagle's slogan, it worked for what was needed at the time, with plenty of attention both good and bad, and Novig reporting a rise in activity on its platform: it claims first-time depositors rose more than 218% in the 20 days around the 9 September launch, and the Instagram reel passed 37 million views in four days. (Honestly, if you, like me, never felt clear on what a naked Sweeney and Novig were selling, I'd argue that alone could have driven the search.)

By contrast, Powerade's athletes skip the Austin Powers prancing-around-his-love-pad routine and use their bodies for sport. The physicality remains, shown as the result of training and competition, with no '90s lads mag revival.

Yet the bad-ad-versus-good-ad framing is too easy, because women can be glamorous without undermining what they've achieved; Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka have done just that in their careers. So what are these ads actually saying, beyond getting people to look? And who comes out on top?

Gen Z versus Millennials (again)

The easy answer is Millennials raised on lad mags and tabloids against a Gen Z fluent in social media and the language of representation, but plenty of Millennials hate sexualised advertising, plenty of Gen Z see Sweeney confidently making her own choices (she's Gen Z herself), and a fair few probably think it's ordinary attention-seeking marketing, so you can't pin a view on a whole generation.

Millennials watched brands move from traditional ads to blogs, Facebook, and YouTube, and saw influencers take over, while Gen Z grew up with influencer celebrities selling them everything from games to makeup, with brand deals and staged images all muddled together. Gen Z has its own cues for knowing when they’re being sold to (the #ad tag, the suspiciously candid photo), plus the vocabulary to call it out on the spot. Which is how the same billboard can be a knowing joke with one lot and the oldest trick with another.

So we're in a place where one person sees Sweeney owning her image and getting paid on her own terms, while another sees the old shortcut of using an attractive woman to grab attention, and both can be right, since she can have agency over her image while a brand still uses it to sell something. Powerade is selling too, using a live row to position itself alongside female sports achievement, and it's playing the same attention-grabbing game.

We've been having the same debate since tobacco ads became a thing in the 1870s, and I'm old enough to remember Madonna making a career out of it, from Material Girl to the Sex book. So what's changed?

We’ve been here with Sweeney before

Sweeney's American Eagle 'Great Jeans' campaign had already been through this, with arguments about beauty standards, race, genetics and political identity, because the "genes" pun plus a blonde, blue-eyed actor led some people to read it as being about far more than denim, and it showed how an ad can pick up a meaning its makers never intended and can't control once the internet gets hold of it. Adweek's Weissbrot called it a return of “male gaze” advertising, and many people read it as the end of the brand-purpose decade.

In many ways, that's what American Eagle can teach us about branding in the 2020s, because the Novig row is really about how women are presented in ads, here in sports, and whether sexualised imagery undermines female athletes, and whether criticising the ad is an attack on Sweeney's right to make her own choices. When Madonna did it, the provocation at least started a conversation; now polarisation turns everything into a shouting match.

Female athletes have criticised it, from Ariarne Titmus to Felicity Palmateer and Gracie Kramer; Novig has defended it and kept promoting it, and Powerade elbowed its way in with a polar opposite view, one that, let's be honest, is happy to play off the furore too, only from a different angle: women powering through the water and lifting the weight.

Reactive ads are easy

Powerade's timing has an obvious commercial angle: it chose to wade into a mess, make a point without building awareness from scratch, and the one-word swap hands journalists like me a simple way to describe the idea and write about how clever it all is.

But Powerade has a history of campaigns focused on mental and physical well-being, hard work, and training, which gives this context beyond a swipe at a rival brand. The response has landed with at least some of the people it's aimed at, too: a female athlete working in marketing wrote in PRWeek that many women in sport, herself included, greatly appreciated it.

A reactive ad like Powerade's still has to be judged as advertising, so it's fair to ask whether it gives female athletes a real platform, changes how people see their achievements, or just gets remembered as a clever troll to another saucy Sydney Sweeney campaign. The same goes for any brand taking a stand, because people are wary of companies that adopt a cause only when it becomes useful.

Powerade could have issued a statement or run a montage of sporting achievements, but instead it took a phrase with a public meaning and flipped it, short enough for a bold ad and with a second life for anyone who's seen Sweeney's butt on a billboard and Novig's pun. For brands, an empowerment slogan, a provocative image or a well-timed reply only gets you so far; what lasts is whatever holds up once the joke or shock wears off.

Will Gen Z and Millennials agree on what that is? Probably not. As a Gen X, I've seen it all before too. Move on.

Featuring one of the most iconic typefaces of all time, the design has surprised creatives thanks to its unexpected appearance on the single's branding. But while some are clutching their metaphorical pearls, others see the controversial font choice as a return to form for the pop music design world.

So what typographical sin has ol' Tate committed? She's used an ultra light Helvetica font. I know, the horror.

"She will pay for her crimes," one X user wrote, while another joked, "It's grotesque tbh." While one critic claimed "Tate McRae has NO REASON to be using an ultra light Helvetica font," others gestured to album covers of the early 2000s, like Britney's I Love Rock 'N' Roll, and Madonna's Bedtime Stories. Remember those? Exactly... that's why we don't use ultra light Helvetica, folks.

For more music news check out why Kpop group IVE's new album cover felt so unsettling or take a look at Phoebe Bridgers' 'internet-free' album campaign.

Below, he talks us through four examples of his work.

Wrath Unleashed

“This creature contest entry was a specific challenge for me to switch to realism, leveraging my professional skills in texturing and dramatic, mood-driven lighting.”

Pastel & Bones

“I aimed for a natural flow within a highly stylised look, paying special attention to the hair shapes while maintaining a rapid, decisive sculpting process.”

Project Zero

“This piece focuses on complex metal panelling, precise armour modeling, and glowing emissives. I wanted to balance futuristic cybernetics with an ornate, regal silhouette.”

Fractured Personas

“Inspired by Ev Ganin’s concept, this piece explores character identity. I focused on telling a deep story while keeping my process streamlined through sculpting and hand-painting in ZBrush.”

You can see more of Skander’s work on his ArtStation profile

This article originally appeared in ImagineFX. Subscribe to ImagineFX to never miss an issue. Print and digital subscriptions are available.

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With the new iOS 27.2 update, Apple debuted a new icon for Apple Music, which caused quite a stir among users. Monochromatic and confusingly basic, the new logo design feels like a regression to Apple's minimalist roots, but not all fans are on board.

The new design is essentially a black-and-white version of the previous music note logo, with slightly bolder lines. Completely flat and admittedly a little characterless, the new look confused fans who believed Apple was on the road to embracing a quirkier look. With the recent leak of the new Apple Music wordmark, it appeared the brand was waving goodbye to minimalism, but now I'm not so sure. Talk about mixed messages...

"This ain’t it chief," one X user wrote. "The new Apple Music branding is miserable how do you sap a thing of all of its colour like this and think it's okay?" another added. "My best guess is that they want to turn Apple Music into more of a brand to compete with Spotify, and this new mark will allow artists to provide the color and emphasis in billboard ads," one X user theorised.

For more Apple news, check out the chaotic Apple HomeView advert that's proving to be stressful for viewers or take a look at Apple's perfect iPhone Duo TikToks that nail foldable phone marketing.

After the great Hexed vertical orientation conspiracy theory and the character design disappointment, the latest issue concerns an unexpected addition to the cast. It's reminding some people of where they think Disney took the movie's concept from.

Throughout the build up to the release of Hexed, some fans of The Owl House, Dana Terraces' Disney Channel animation that was cut short, have insisted that they think the cancelled show inspired the movie. Disney chief creative officer Jared Bush denied the idea at D23, but it's come up again now that Disney has named Sarah-Nicole Robles as part of the voice cast. The actor previously voiced Patience in Knights of Guinevere and Luz Noceda in The Owl House.

"They're not even trying to hide it any more," one person complains.

I'll point out that Sarah-Nicole is a fine actor and previously voiced Señora Ozma in Encanto. I don't think Disney is trying offend anyone here. But it shows the sense of grievance that remains among TOH fans.

Meanwhile, people continue to dissect the Hexed character designs and to diagnose an acute case of Disney same-face syndrome. Attention has turned to the question of why mother and daughter Alice and Billie Doe look the same age.

Disney has a 'rule' that makes it almost impossible for its animations to show a mother who looks a believable age, one person believes. It all goes back to a 1943 paper by Konrad Lorenz "about why babies look cute", apparently: large eyes, a high forehead, small nose and chin and round cheeks.

"Disney will even draw an old woman with real wrinkles when the role calls for it, like Gramma Tala in Moana. The mom in her forties is the one who falls through the cracks, and Disney Animation hasn't had to solve that much, because it almost never puts a mom at the center of the story," they suggest, writing on X.

The movie's directors, Josie Trinidad, who was head of story on Ralph Breaks the Internet and Zootopia, and Jason Hand, co-director of Moana 2 head of story on Encanto, have said that Billie is very different from Disney heroines like Moana or Mirabel, with a sharp and more dangerous personality.

The ensemble voice cast also includes Henry Winkler, Dan Stevens, Rachel Dratch and Ariana Madix.

Hexed will be released on 25 November.