Square Enix has been on a mission for some time now to breathe new life into its much-revered back catalogue of seminal Japanese RPGs (JRPGs), most notably with its epic three-part modern reimagining of Final Fantasy VII, and its development of what it calls HD-2D graphics technology, applied so far to various Dragon Quest games, as well as the Octopath Traveler franchise.

Over the decades (the first instalment was released as far back as 1987), Final Fantasy has become a labyrinthine franchise with fifteen main iterations and a head-spinning number of spin-offs. In that context, Final Fantasy Resonance looks like an anomaly; nominally, it is based on Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, a retro-style 2015 instalment that, unprecedentedly, was released for iOS and Android.

But as soon as I started playing Resonance, it felt like more than another mere cul-de-sac among Final Fantasy’s ever-expanding streets. Much of its significance comes from being the first time Square Enix has applied its HD-2D technology (underpinned by Unreal Engine 5) to Final Fantasy, opening up all manner of possibilities for revisiting a mouth-watering back catalogue.

An evolution of HD-2D

By now, at least for fans of retro-JRPGs, the visual language HD-2D brings should be pretty familiar: characters in HD-2D games remain 2D and pixelated, but now traverse 3D backgrounds, invariably rendered in bold, lush colour palettes. That basic blueprint applies to Final Fantasy Resonance, but the game also goes noticeably further than existing HD-2D games visually.

For example, it plays much more with perspectives. While there are still plenty of moments when the overall view tends toward the isometric, at other times (such as when wandering around the game’s many towns), the camera moves toward the ground and uses visual effects like depth of field. Plus, there are plenty of cutscenes, some of which use conventional 2D characters on 3D backgrounds, while others (such as special attacks in battle) enter full-blown anime-style visual territory, often mixing 2D and 3D rendering cleverly.

The overall effect always has a retro edge, yet it still feels strikingly modern: I'd say it marks a moment when Square Enix has pushed HD-2D beyond what I’ve seen before, which bodes very well for the future.

A homage to Final Fantasies I to VI

Final Fantasy Resonance Producer Keisuke Nakashima explicitly says that one of Resonance’s raisons d'être was to preserve “The charm of the classic Final Fantasy titles from I through VI” while creating “An experience that modern players can enjoy comfortably.” Roughly translated, that means it has a determinedly turn-based battle system, but also plenty of save points (where I could heal my characters in tents), and I could fast-travel around the map and, in the latter stages, even navigate the game world by airship.

Resonance is positively stuffed with classic Final Fantasy tropes, with airships, Chocobos, Moogles, and crystals featuring heavily. Story-wise, it starts a tad slowly (I found the early dialogue somewhat stilted) but gradually unfurls into something suitably convoluted, with a welter of twists and sideways turns, and even, at one point, a magical excursion into one character's psyche.

The two main protagonists, Rain and Laswell, start as the top Royal knights of the kingdom of Grandshelt; sent to investigate a disturbance at the shrine of the Earth Crystal, which apparently guards Grandshelt, they encounter a mysterious, super-powerful armoured being (one of a group of baddies known as the Sworn Six), who overpowers them with ease and destroys the crystal. Luckily, a young yet powerful girl called Fina magically appears to save them from death, and the trio embark on a quest to save the remaining crystals, dotted around the game world’s other kingdoms, from destruction by the Sworn Six.

Sophisticated, tactical turn-based battles

A growing cast of characters with varied skills soon joins them, from which four can be selected as a battle party. Resonance may be turn-based, but it’s up against titles like Metaphor: Refantazio and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which aim to prove that turn-based battle systems are no less effective than real-time ones.

Resonance’s battle system prioritises staggering enemies: once I reduced them to a dazed state by identifying and exploiting their elemental weaknesses, I could pile on the damage. Staggering all enemies, or the last remaining one, triggers a Sweeping Stagger, which in turn accelerates characters’ ability to launch devastating Limit Bursts and so-called Resonance attacks.

The game's battle system includes a clever device called Visions, which prove handy in combat and make the game’s Final Fantasy nostalgia even more explicit. Visions are ghostly versions of Final Fantasy protagonists, including Cloud Strife, Noctis, the Onion Knight from Dissidia, Cecil from IV, Bartz from V, and Terra from VI. In all, there are 26 of them to find.

Visions are liberated from crystals in caves, and I could equip each of my battle-characters with one, adding the Vision’s abilities and spells to the character’s own. I was rewarded for swapping Visions around, giving my battle-characters improved attributes, perks, and abilities I could equip permanently. Essentially, they let me upgrade characters to my liking. They also let me trigger Resonances, powerful Limit Burst-style attacks with different effects and elemental affinities.

Fina could also summon Espers, elemental creatures (one of which brought defensive perks) that stick around for three turns; they proved particularly handy in boss battles. Towards the end of Resonance, a sequence of consecutive boss-battles tested my intimate knowledge of the battle system, and its impressive tactical versatility, to the limit. The battle system has a lot of moving parts, but it isn’t as complex as it sounds, and it's very satisfying once mastered.

No mere retro exercise

On the surface, Final Fantasy Resonance seems like an exercise in nostalgia, but it's much more than that. Sure, it evokes the feel of those early Final Fantasy games, but its turn-based battle system feels sophisticated, and its production values easily hold their own in the modern gaming landscape.

It feels like a proper, full-blown Final Fantasy game, reinforced by the fact that it takes over 50 hours to complete. Sure, its attempt to create a sort of everyman Final Fantasy story begins slowly, but it redeems itself in the end. It creates a good impression as a harbinger of HD-2D versions of the original Final Fantasy games, but more than that, it stands up very impressively on its own. Let’s hope it's successful enough to spawn a sequel, and thereby a whole new strand of Final Fantasy games.

If you haven't already pre-ordered your iPhone Duo, you have a long wait ahead of you. Delivery dates have slipped into 2027, suggesting demand for the thing is through the roof. Which, considering the starting price tag of $2000, is kind of incredible. If so many people are willing to drop that much money on a device that isn't even in stores yet, it must represent something new.

Which, by the way, foldable aren't. Brands like Samsung and Huawei have been making them for years. But Apple is doing its Apple thing and putting out its own take on a maturing product category. While often successful (the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, nor the Apple Watch the first smartwatch), it hasn't always worked of late. Vision Pro, Apple's attempt at a VR headset, is one of the company's highest-profile flops of recent years.

Everybody blamed the failure of Vision Pro on the price. $3K turned out to be too hard to stomach for most. But the early success of the iPhone Duo is throwing a spanner into the works for that narrative. $2K is arguably a ridiculous amount of money to spend on a phone. But this time, people are going for it. Even Apple is calling the demand "extraordinary".

It's curious that while dramatically new products like Vision Pro have failed to cut through in recent years, so have more minor redesigns of the iPhone itself. The iPhone Air, which shares some DNA with the iPhone Duo thanks to its lightweight titanium frame, failed to capture the public's imagination last year.

But with the iPhone Duo, Apple seems to have finally discovered the sweet spot. Different enough to get people excited, but same enough to make them take a risk with their cash. It's an iPhone. But it's one that unfolds into an iPad. Same but different. Maybe that's what the people wanted all along?

A masterpiece of digital artwork, the new Clayface poster design is both terrifying and oddly beautiful with its intricate design. Perfectly blending comic-style artwork with classic horror, it's certainly set high expectations for the upcoming film.

Created by illustrator Estevan Silveira, the design creates a visceral horror thanks to its skin-crawlingly detailed design. Featuring the hunched form of Clayface clutching at his head, the poster evokes a palpable pain, intensified by his slowly melting body and the glint of his singular eye. His sickly yellow-and-green-toned skin pops against the deep, grungy reds of the background, channelling retro creature feature vibes.

"Loving these grotesque arty posters," a fan on X praised, while another added "Hands down my favorite one". Over on Reddit, the design received similar praise, with one fan writing "Love the body horror vibes of this whole thing," while another agreed, "In an era of floating head slop, it's nice to see some creative and good looking posters," another added.

For more DC news, check out the Clayface poster that gets creepier the more you look at it, or take a look at the salty fan reactions to the androgynous new Batgirl design.

This magical resource shapes not only the local industry but also the culture and daily lives of its people. I wanted the architecture to reflect the relationship between technology and faith, while using the starry sky as the visual core of the scene.

Small props and workshop tools were added to enrich the world and make it feel lived in. Every element reflects the logic of the world (if you need to build your own art setup, see our guides to the best drawing tablets or the best laptops for drawing).

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

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As a Gen Z growing up in the digital age of Instagram and influencers, I'm no stranger to photo editing software, but for some reason, this innocent enquiry from Google stopped me in my tracks. Yes, we live in a filtered online world, but when did it leak into my workday? And more importantly, should I have to touch up my appearance for a meeting?

While I'm partial to a bit of social media brainrot, I've been wise to steer clear of overly filtered influencers for my self-preservation. I learned very quickly that the online world can blur reality and fiction, leading to a good ol' bit of body dysmorphia if I'm not careful.

With this in mind, I no longer edit my Instagram posts – not as some grand middle finger to FaceTune, but simply because I don't feel the need to anymore. This is what I look like... take it or leave it. But in this moment of morning flu-riddled weakness, I thought to myself, wouldn't it be nicer to look a bit more fresh?

Soon I was plunged down the rabbit hole of Google Meet's various appearance filters, from 'dewy fresh' to 'dramatic eye'. Each looks ridiculous on my sallow-skinned, sickness-ridden face – the beauty filter equivalent of a white-painted landlord special.

Each filter is designed in the style of a makeup aesthetic, likely an attempt to make female-presenting folks feel the need to be 'presentable', even when WFH. I note there are no masculine-leaning beauty filters – no 'rugged stubble' or 'handsome glow' to enhance their looks.

And yes, I realise I'm being dramatic (illness tends to do that to me), but Google Meet's silly filters point to a looming issue that worries me. At what point do we start to lose a sense of what we look like? Will future board meetings be full of flawlessly filtered execs? Will beauty become the new predominant form of professionalism?

I do not want to lose the privilege of joining a work call looking slightly haggard. Turning up in my natural form is not just a matter of convenience, but the assurance that I can be taken seriously in my career without the performance of beauty. While the suggestion to "Touch up your appearance?" is an option now, I fear one day it could be a mandatory professional demand.

If you want to read it before Netflix's movie reaches cinemas in February, publisher HarperCollins has a treat for you. It's re-publishing the entire Narnia series with cover art inspired by the film: and the special editions are more interesting to look at that the usual movie tie ins.

The seven books in The Chronicles of Narnia have sold more than 120 million copies worldwide and have been adapted into more than 60 different languages to date. There's long been a debate about the best order to read them: the Magician's Nephew first, or before The Last Battle to reflect the order of publication?

Either way, there's a new Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew Movie Tie-in Paperback going on sale November 10, 2026. But more interesting visually is the Deluxe Collector’s Edition with a shimmery foil jacket, foil-stamped case, digital printed edges and endpapers and vibrant cover illustration.

Unlike many movie tie-in, this edition eschews photography from the film and shows its connection in a different way: the artwork is by Vance Kovacs, who was the concept artist for the film.

Vance's previous work has ranged from Dungeons & Dragons to movies like The Lion King and Jungle Book and Black Panther to games like God of War. His Magician's Nephew cover depicts Aslan singing Narnia into existence, with vibrant streams of light, stars, and colors bursting upward from the lion's mouth.

Five emblems suspended within the rays of light feature key elements from the story: Fledge, the winged horse, Aslan's Profile, the apple of life, the lamppost and a bell-hammer representing the world of Charn.

On sale November 17, 2026, Barnes and Noble, Walmart, Sam's Club and Target have their own exclusive editions with different edge designs, with Target's showing the lamppost that marks the spot where Narnia was born.

There's also a Chronicles of Narnia 7-Book Movie Tie-in Paperback Box Set and Hardcover Box Set all with "movie aesthetic" covers illustrated by Vance Kovacs (above).

Still, a designer has managed to get massive attention on social media this week for a single striking calling card: a highly polished film shot in 8K with a full crew and Barbieland sound stage. The scale of the production has some other designers wondering if making a movie trailer is what it takes to find work these days, but the video's real takeaway is in the content more than the format.

Darshita Patankar is a visual designer and illustrator based in Bengaluru. After what she describes as "a year full of anxiety" amid frustration around the impact of AI, she decided to pitch herself to potential clients in a different way. Instead of persevering with a traditional portfolio site and social posts of previous work, she enlisted her brother Vikrant to produce a sleek four-minute film showcasing her skills and personality, and they really pulled out the stops

"Everyone says design is dead and AI killed it. But the real parasite was hiding in plain sight," is Darshita's hook at the start of Design is Dead. She goes on to discuss her early introduction to design via MS Paint, how that curiosity still influences her work today, the importance of storytelling and specific projects, including how she created a typeface and her visual design work on the Codebusters game.

She also presents an argument for the importance of design itself, not as a mere output but as something that should be at the core of the decision-making process for any brand.

Within less than a day, the video had received nearly 3 million views on X and thousands of likes and comments on Instagram and LinkedIn. It's also generating a debate about the lengths graphic designers need to go to promote themselves in 2026.

Will clients expect every designer to make a 'Hollywood-level' video pitch? No, but Darshita has demonstrated how any designer can make an impression; not necessarily through the same format but through the authenticity of the presentation. The production values on Design is Dead are impressive, but what stands out most is the designer's personality, creativity, and the memorability of the pitch, which is what will really attract clients.

The film shows how, at a time when everyone's worried about AI's impact on the industry, designers can stand out by showcasing storytelling and craft in surprising ways, and most of all by being themselves. You might not have a film crew, but you might find another way of showing the world who you are, whether it's with physical flyers on lampposts, engaging social media content or sending out nudes.

Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Only Thunderbolt input
• Excellent build quality

The Studio Display XDR is a major step up from Apple's standard 27-inch monitor, also called the Studio Display but missing those three key letters at the end. Retaining the same sleek, silvery aluminum build and slim black bezels it looks identical. Round the back, it features two USB-C ports and two powered Thunderbolt 5 ports, one of which is the video input. It also comes as standard with Apple's height- and tilt-adjustable stand, which was an optional upgrade to the non-XDR display, though a VESA-mount option is also available for (surprisingly) less money. Inside, it’s powered by the A19 Pro chip from the iPhone 17 Pro to handle built-in processing, and there's a cooling fan that seems to run all the time the screen is switched on. It’s not particularly loud, and will dissolve into the usual office background noise, but it’s noticeable in moments of silence.

The key upgrades lie within the panel itself. Moving from standard LEDs to a mini-LED backlight, with 2,304 local dimming zones, this version of the Studio Display offers more precise lighting, deeper blacks and brighter highlights. The XDR also adopts Apple’s ProMotion, delivering adaptive refresh rates up to 120Hz for fluid scrolling and cursor movement as well as for high-framerate video and even games. The panel dynamically adjusts its framerate to match media playback, or it can be locked to a specific frequency if that’s what you need.

Connectivity is straightforward: you won’t find HDMI or DisplayPort, but it works with most M-series Macs through Thunderbolt, though driving the display at 5K and the full 120Hz requires an M4 chip or newer (M5 if you’re using an iPad Pro), and the MacBook Neo can drive it at 4K resolution rather than 5K. The Thunderbolt 5 ports support daisy-chaining multiple monitors if you really feel like splashing out on a matching pair. Limited functionality is available on PCs, though you can find adjusting the brightness challenging and it’s not really what the screen was made for, and unlike most monitors with an HDMI at the back, games consoles need not apply.

Design score: 4/5

Features and performance

• Center Stage camera
• Incredible brightness in HDR

The Apple Studio Display XDR is a really exceptional screen, boasting remarkable brightness levels of up to 1,000 nits for standard content and a peak of 2,000 nits when displaying HDR material. Full-screen brightness displaying SDR content was around 500 nits, but the XDR is capable of much more than this if you feed it HDR.

It’s factory calibrated for high colour precision across both the P3 and Adobe RGB gamuts, though our tests show only 83% of Adobe RGB and 91% of P3 using the XDR-P3 preset. You can get this up to 94% of Adobe RGB and 97% of P3 using the XDR-P3 + Adobe preset, but you may need to do a little manual tuning to get any higher. The display adjusts itself for ambient lighting conditions, and it’s noticeable how upon changing the display preset it starts off cool and dim before warming and brightening (Apple’s True Tone technology, which dynamically adjusts colour temperature to minimise eye strain, at work). In our testing lab it always seemed to be just a little too dim, requiring the automatic brightness setting to be switched off, but this may be a matter of personal taste.

Thanks to the pre-calibration, the screen offers an impressive setup for photo and video editing right out of the box. For more specialised workflows – such as video production, colour grading or even medical imaging – Apple enables custom calibrations and provides a comprehensive suite of preset colour reference modes to match industry standards.

Both True Tone and the automatic brightness controls can be quickly toggled off whenever critical colour accuracy is required. An adaptive refresh rate reaching up to 120Hz ensures ultra-smooth scrolling, precise cursor tracking and fluid animation that’s actually rather reminiscent of modern smartphones. The display tailors its frequency to match video playback, or it can be manually locked to a specific framerate if fixed timing is essential.

Feature score: 4/5

Price

With its tilt- and height-adjustable stand, as reviewed here, the Apple Studio Display XDR starts at £2,999 or $3,299, with a nano-texture glass upgrade the only option. You can save some money by choosing the VESA mount adapter instead of the stand, but there's no getting away from the fact this is an expensive screen, with BenQ’s PD2732U 4K 27-incher about a third of the cost. The brightness and Mac-centric features, as well as the 5K resolution, are what makes this screen desirable.

Value score: 3/5

Who is it for?

• Mac users

There's little point in picking up the XDR if you don’t have a recent Mac that can make use of its features. And even then, you’ll have to weigh that fearsome brightness and Centre Stage camera against the savings you’d make from getting just about any other screen.

Buy it if...

• Brightness and colour are king
• You use a Mac every day
• You can swallow the cost

Don't buy it if...

• You’d prefer a 32-incher - or larger
• An HDMI port is important
• As is your wallet

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The heart of Stupid Never Dies is as old as dirt, with a twist: Davy, a zombie, wants to bring a dead girl back to life because he's fallen in love with her. There's a slight snag in this plan, beyond the whole being-dead business: Julia, the girl in question, has never actually met him, so she's not really his girlfriend. Davy doesn't see it that way, naturally, and off he goes into a demon-infested underworld to defeat ‘KOM’ and collect the tech he’s been convinced he needs to defrost her, presumably without much thought for what happens when she wakes up and discovers her devoted ‘boyfriend’ is a complete stranger, and undead.

It's a peculiar setup, and the more you think about it, the more uncomfortable it gets. Back in the human world, Davy picks his nose while his adopted mentor ‘Dr Frank’ explains the plot, rolls around on a Zumba and generally behaves like a man/boy who's never had a sensible thought in his entire undead life. He's a shambling, slow-witted mess, barely interested in anything beyond his own romantic fantasy; then you send him down into the dungeons, and he turns into this zippy, aggressively cartoonish brawler designed around ridiculous transformations – a Mereman that can surf on enemies – and the idea that there’s zero defence and all offence, because ‘stupid never dies’.

A riot of colour and ideas

The art direction, made in Unreal Engine 5, is fizzy, chaotic fun, a surgical mash-up of anime, punk, graphic design, pop art, manga and even some stop motion animation and scrapbooking for good measure, that feels like somebody's put Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Persona 5 in a blender with a bunch of '90s zines and then decided the result needed more colour and a bit of punk’s irreverent attitude. Every menu, character animation, and little flourish seems to have something going on, and I kept finding myself smiling at the sheer cheek of it all. No doubt, Stupid Never Dies will be challenging Romeo Is a Dead Man for the year's most inventive visual design.

The human world, Davy’s mall, has a stark, almost photographic realism, with graphic design and physical details that make it feel solid and lived in, while the demon realm is painterly and splashy, full of loose details and exaggerated shapes. As Davy descends, he runs and brawls through scattered memories of human history, a bit of Norse ice and wind here, a spot of Roman volcanic tragedy there, though these are less sprawling worlds to get lost in than a series of very gamey narrow locations, backdrops as gauntlets to fight your way through.

And then the visual effects kick in. Defeat an enemy and ribbons of rainbow ink explode around Davy and splash across the scenery, while Davy Burst, his temporary powered-up state, arrives with electric-guitar flourishes and multicoloured lighting, as if somebody's cranked the volume up on the entire screen to 11. My favourite touch is the doodled googly eyes and daft little smiles stickered onto enemies, a lovely bit of Spider-Verse-style design that made me smile the first time I noticed it.

There's a lot to look at, and the game knows it. Sometimes it's almost needy in the way it demands your attention, but I was happy to give it, because even when the underlying action starts to feel familiar, the art direction keeps finding little ways to make the next few minutes entertaining.

Bite first, ask questions later

It needs to, too, because beneath all that multimedia animation and graphic-design flair is a very Japanese action RPG that wants you to grind, grind, grind.

The basic loop is simple: head into a dungeon, batter monsters, collect their cores to steal their abilities, gather materials, and return to the Shopping Mall hub to improve Davy before going back in. A trip might take five to ten minutes, and each one gets you a little closer to becoming powerful enough to take on the next boss and, eventually, get Julia out of the freezer. It's a lightly Persona-ish rhythm, with a much quicker turnaround since dungeon reruns and levelling up can be immediate, except your day job here is punching monsters in the face and goofing off on a robot vacuum cleaner.

The clever stuff starts with the Bite system. Davy can consume enemy cores to recover health or access different monster forms, known as Styles, each changing how you fight. You can't bring everything to every run, so choosing what to bring takes some thought. The Cyclops helps when a horde closes in, the Werewolf is handy when you need to move quickly and get into enemies, and the flying Harpy is a good choice against bosses that turn the floor into a dangerous mess, such as a dragon I encountered early on. You can experiment with 11 Styles, and they aren't just cosmetic changes to Davy's appearance; each has its own ranking (Common, Rare, etc.) and different special abilities that develop, like the Cyclops, who can swing a baseball bat and eventually throw spinning clubs.

Some Styles seem underwhelming at first, like the Vampire, which I thought would be a hoot but has specials that layer; he zips in all directions, bites enemies, and then releases a zombie bat for each bite, until you realise what they can do over time, such as making use of dark energy pools to explore hidden areas. It's worth experimenting rather than settling on the biggest monster with the biggest fists, although the game doesn't always make those choices obvious.

Then there's Body Hack, which lets you replace Davy's body parts with Overtech equipment to improve his stats and bolt on new abilities. Missile pods, spinning blades, spiked balls, directional dashes – all kinds of sharp weaponry can be attached to your undead frame, and some of the most useful upgrades aren't even about dealing more damage. Better healing, more item drops and a faster Davy Burst charge can make a much bigger difference to a run than another flashy attack or rocket salvo.

The way these systems overlap is what makes the game interesting, because the core combat is fairly simple and limited to light and heavy attacks and special abilities. There’s no typical dodge, block, or parry as such. Stupid Parry lets Davy charge into incoming attacks and reduce the damage he takes, then refill it by eating enemies’ Cores, which only expose themselves when attacking. So it’s all front-footed, and everything feeds into everything. But don’t expect Devil May Cry-style combos, even though some of the game’s team, Eiichiro Sasaki and Hiroyuki Kobayashi, worked on DMC.

Instead, the hook comes from working out which Styles suit the dungeon ahead, which body parts make sense for your preferred approach, and which abilities are worth keeping around, all while hitting fast attacks and connecting kills (there’s a DMC-like ‘style metre’ that rates your performance and increases things like item drops). It can take a while to get your head around, and you'll grind before the best body parts and deeper buffs start opening up, but there's more going on than the daft art style initially suggests.

Attack and grind, repeat

The idea is that Davy is a zombie, and zombies don't know when they're beaten and technically can’t die, so why should he care about defending himself? Instead of backing away from trouble, you're encouraged to keep attacking, take an odd hit, bite an enemy to recover some damage, and get right back into the fight. Some powerful Heat Attacks, when an enemy glows gold, can be countered with Stupid Impact if you time your Stupid Parry correctly to stun the enemy, while building up enough momentum lets you trigger Davy Burst and turn the whole screen into a colourful, electric-guitar-fuelled mess.

It's a fun idea, and when it works – when you’re Stupid Parrying for damage, breaking down a core, and linking kills – the combat has a tight rhythm, with one action feeding into another and the different systems starting to make sense together. But it can feel a little light where you'd expect more dexterity and combo depth, and the lack of a lock-on makes it frustratingly easy to swing at empty air – particularly on narrow paths above lava or icy drops, and especially when you're trying to punch flying creatures because judging 3D space can be tricky.

The trouble is that Stupid Never Dies can hit the same plateau as plenty of JRPGs: you reach a boss who's just a bit too powerful, head back into the dungeons to gather materials and improve Davy, then try again and discover you probably need to do it all over. The body-part upgrades can get stuck offering the same selection, so you've to grind enough runs to unlock something better, and although each trip is fairly short, the locations start to blur together when you keep visiting them to get stronger.

There's a reason for all this, of course. You're building Davy up over time, collecting resources and improving your chances with every run, and the game wants you to feel the difference between the pathetic zombie you started with and the increasingly Frankensteined monster you've turned him into. But it also feels like a way to stretch a relatively small game, one with a lot of visual personality and a handful of clever systems that don't always have enough new places or encounters to show them off.

The grind can be alleviated by the cast of weirdos you chat to between runs – Acelino's a chihuahua-were-dog who develops the body augmentations, Bessie's a zombie who creates new abilities from fast food, and Goyle is, well… a gargoyle who’s in charge of performance data but can’t remember anything are memorable – and the game has that JRPG quality of just offering enough new conversations, snippets of lore and funny asides to make post-dungeon downtime just a bit worthwhile.

I didn't stop enjoying myself, though, partly because I wanted to see what other daft combination of body parts and monster powers I could put together, and partly because I wanted to see what happened to Davy and his impossible romance. After dungeon runs, you can watch unlocked messages and videos on Julie’s tablet (creepy?) and vicariously get to know her through her life. A strange little tragedy lurks beneath all the silliness, and the game gets more mileage out of its deluded protagonist than you might expect from a story about a zombie trying to thaw out a girl who doesn't know he's alive, dead, or anything else.

Stupid Never Dies is an odd action RPG with enough personality to overcome any of its limitations. The art direction never ceases to impress, turning even the most routine dungeon encounters into little bursts of punk-rock graphic design, and I love how Davy's nice-come-creepy romantic obsession sits alongside all that colour and chaos. The combat isn’t light; it’s just not Devil May Cry, and once you understand how the systems dovetail and feed into one another, and if you’re happy to grind (and grind and grind) for your life, you’ll find a quirky little rockstar in here.

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.