The splashy iPhone Air and improved iPhone 17 make the upgrades on the Pro and larger Pro Max seem particularly incremental, even as the Pro’s price inched up $100. Apple kept the display sizes the same (6.3 and 6.9 inches) but added the new A19 Pro chip, which is more capable of tackling Apple Intelligence…
Ostensibly, plant lovers should be the easiest to shop for. Just get them a plant, right? Wrong. (Well, most of the time.) I review indoor hydroponic gardens for WIRED and have been a proud plant parent for almost 30 years, so I can say that even if you have a running mental catalog of all…
An image from the study illustrating how plastic bottles reach Latin American Pacific coasts. Illustration: Garcés-Ordóñez et al. (2025) (CC BY 4.0) The scientists found that, like other marine debris, the bottles and caps they retrieved were sometimes colonized by immobile organisms called epibionts, which live on the surface of other organisms or materials. The…
Jim Sanborn couldn’t believe it. He was weeks away from auctioning off the answer to Kryptos, the sculpture he created for the CIA that had defied solution for 35 years. As always, wannabe solvers kept on paying him a $50 fee to offer their guesses to the remaining unsolved portion of the 1,800-character encrypted message,…
To develop our in-depth toilet ratings, Consumer Reports’ engineers put the fixtures through a battery of tests involving waste removal, bowl cleaning, and drain-line clogs. We also measure how loud a toilet’s flushes are using a decibel meter. Based on performance in these tests, we give each toilet an Overall Score. To test solid-waste removal,…
Spend any time at all researching outdoor gear, whether it’s a new tent or a new rain jacket, and you’ll quickly find yourself awash in a confusing array of jargon. Silnylon, polyurethane, X-Pac, cuben fiber, ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE)—what are these things? What none of them are is perfect. Each has its own weight,…
The caveat is that you cannot see your workout information on the watch if you have this passive method turned on. You can start the workout manually, but if you forget, the watch will not ping you 10 minutes into your workout to ask if you want to start tracking. Some folks may find that…
Allen St. John Allen St. John has been a senior product editor at CR since 2016, focusing on digital privacy, audio devices, printers, and home products. He was a senior editor at Condé Nast and a contributing editor at publications including Road & Track and The Village Voice. A New York Times bestselling author, he’s…
But a pill organizer is only as useful as its ability to hold all your pills, suit your lifestyle, and support different dexterity needs. Different people take different amounts of medication and supplements, and there are major differences among pill organizers. We found popular pill organizers in a variety of styles, materials, prices, and sizes,…
Crude powertrain: The Wagoneer S’s 500 hp is of little use if it can’t be efficiently (or even adequately) employed to move the SUV down the road—and that’s a problem for this SUV. As one tester put it, “Unfortunately, the electric powertrain is one of its worst qualities. It is unrefined in a number of…