Frank Azor, the co-founder and public face of Alienware as well as the longtime overseer of Dell’s gaming and XPS divisions, revealed three weeks ago that he was departing Dell on July 3rd. Having been with Alienware from its inception 21 years ago, Azor announced he was taking on a new challenge with a message of thanks on the Alienware community board.

Wccftech caught wind of Azor’s likely destination, which AMD CEO Lisa Su has now effectively confirmed: he is becoming AMD’s new chief gaming architect, reporting to Sandeep Chennakeshu, who’s the recently appointed vice president in charge of the computing and graphics business group at AMD. When originally reached for comment by The Verge, Azor declined to elaborate on his departure message and didn’t wish to confirm or deny the reports about his next destination.

“The builder and creator in me is ready for the next challenge,” read Azor’s message to Alienware fans. In October 2018, he proudly disclosed that Dell’s gaming business was worth $3 billion, comfortably outpacing any other gaming hardware manufacturers. That seems like a fitting time to look for new opportunities, and AMD is a company on an upward trajectory. This year, it has garnished its gaming credentials by securing the business of providing chips for the next Xbox and PlayStation as well as Google’s Stadia. Apple’s 2019 Mac Pro will also rely on Radeon graphics cards.

Originally, Wccftech said that Azor would serve as AMD’s first “chief gaming officer,” which isn’t a particularly common (or serious, for that matter) title, but seemed plausible given Azor’s established seniority as a leader at Dell. Instead, he’ll be “chief architect of gaming solutions,” a title that still speaks to his likely influence within AMD and the importance of gaming to the company’s future business.

Update, July 15th: With confirmation that Azor has joined AMD, and his correct title of “chief architect of gaming solutions.”

Yesterday, Apple did one of those sleepy summer spec refreshes on its MacBooks that usually passes without much fanfare or celebration. No designs have changed, the problematic butterfly keyboard is still around — albeit in an improved form — and the spec bumps are nice but not earthshaking. But the other thing Apple did was trim down its lineup significantly: it discontinued the 12-inch MacBook, finally stopped selling the ancient old-school MacBook Air to consumers, and it ditched the MacBook Escape, giving its entry-level MacBook Pro a Touch Bar. In this process of downsizing and simplifying its portfolio, Apple has returned to its strength of keeping things simple.

The day before yesterday, a student looking for an ultraportable Apple computer to help with note-taking and essay writing in college faced a cluster of options without a clear delineation between them. They could have bought an iPad Pro with a keyboard, the 12-inch MacBook, or, for a little bit more, the MacBook Air. This knot of overlapping Apple devices was uncharacteristic for the company and frustrating to consumers who mostly want a straightforward answer, ideally without having to perform a spec-for-spec comparison.

The elegance of Apple’s new lineup is in how obvious the choices become and how quickly they can be summarized. If you just want a macOS laptop that covers the vast majority of usage scenarios and needs, you go to the MacBook Air. It’s the closest thing to a “basic” option in Apple’s range. For something below 13 inches, Apple will direct you to the iPad and iPad Pro, which now have their own operating system. This is the most radical change for Apple: the company appears convinced that iPadOS is ready to turn the iPad into a true laptop replacement. Finally, for professional photographers, video editors, and others who require more power from their portable computer, Apple has the MacBook Pro.

We can debate which among these choices presents the best value for money and optimal trade-off between portability and power, but it’s hard to argue that the lines between them aren’t clearly drawn: iPad for portability, Air for versatility, and Pro for extra power.

In whittling down its laptop lineup to just the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, Apple has returned to its core strength of offering simplicity in a world that’s overwhelmed by model names and numbers. And the company has signaled, once more, just how important it considers the iPad to be for the future of its portable computer business.

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Glorious guitar maker Fender got into the headphones business back in 2016 by acquiring Aurisonics, a small Tennessee company manufacturing in-ear monitors. In the time since, the portfolio of Fender earphones has grown to cover budgets from $99 to $1,799 and tastes as diverse as those of bassheads and treble-favoring audiophile purists. Today’s example is the $1,199.99 Fender Ten 5, which leans away from the bass emphasis of my favorite Fender product to date, the dark and rumbling FXA7, and toward a brighter and more accurate sound signature. It’s more money for a more precise and punctilious sound that should entice the pros and enthusiasts while still pleasing casual listeners as well.

After a month of testing the Ten 5s, I find myself surprised by just how much I enjoy their sound, even while I remain an avowed and unrepentant bass devotee.

I’m well aware that, for most people, there are no circumstances in which spending more than $1,000 on earphones is a justifiable expense. And yet, you could say the same thing about Omega watches, Hermès sweaters, or one of Tesla’s fancier paint options. In all cases, the people who splurge on the extra luxury do it with the goal of obtaining something rare, exclusive, or just straight-up better than whatever else is on the market. How does Fender’s new pair of earphones fit into that paradigm?

Well, their sound reminds me of the $4,000 Focal Utopia. I’ve done a lot of reviews since the Utopia, and I’ve never written those words before. Fender’s Ten 5s have a level of detail, clarity, and naturalness to them that genuinely approaches the quality of Focal’s big and mighty over-ear headphones.

When listening to the drums in Kenji Kawai’s “Ghosthack” on the original Ghost in the Shell soundtrack with the Ten 5s, I can practically visualize how open the player’s palm is when hitting the drum’s leather. On the same album, there are a couple of tracks with chants where the vocals just claw at my soul. I mean that as a compliment. The music has emotive urgency but no sonic harshness. Fender has put the spotlight on vocals without overstepping into the eardrum stabbing that headphones with less refined, more shouty treble perform.

Bjork, the ultimate genre-straddling artist, also sounds amazing and engaging through the Ten 5s. Six minutes into Led Zeppelin’s “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” when the song reaches its crescendo and Robert Plant pushes his voice to its limits, I really feel his anguish.

As to digging out the finest detail from a recording, Nero’s My Eyes has some whispering, hissing voices in the background that get veiled or concealed on most other headphones, but I hear them on the Utopias and the Ten 5s. These little nuances aren’t strictly essential for enjoying the music, but they certainly enhance that enjoyment, even if it’s merely by providing the sense that you’re getting the full, unadulterated version of the song the artist recorded.

The Ten 5s have a sonic balance that, to my bass-loving ear, sounds treble-forward. They don’t offer a particularly relaxed listen, and they don’t hold back when singers hit the high notes in their music. And that’s the point of these earphones. There are tons of earbuds, costing a fraction of the price, for when you just want to pump background noise into your skull. The Ten 5s are tuned to make you feel the music, and they’re so damn pure, controlled, and emotive, that I can’t help but be sucked in by their performance.

Fender achieves high marks with almost every genre of music. The obvious weakness of the Ten 5s’ sound is bass-heavy hip-hop and electronica. Exactly the music that made me a little addicted to the Fender FXA7s’ sound in 2016 — Aphex Twin, Booka Shade, Clams Casino, Infected Mushroom, Nine Inch Nails, Two Fingers — just feels a little too light and airy with Fender’s newer and pricier model. No, I’m not about to recommend that you spend even more money to have a pair of each Fender model. Just be aware that if your musical tastes lean toward the more synthetic and darker realms, these are just not the buds for you. I like to listen at loud volumes, which is great with headphones with big bass, but it’s fatiguing when the treble is the part of the mix pushed to the foreground.

Fender’s Ten 5s distinguish themselves best when handling acoustic instruments and vocals, and the detail and airiness of their sound simply comes at the expense of earthshaking bass.

As to the matter of comfort and fit, Fender has a unique advantage over everyone else in its thermo-plastic elastomer tips. These soften with the warmth of your ear and grow more comfortable the longer you wear them. They also offer a great seal to insulate your music from exterior noise. Fender hasn’t much changed the basic exterior shell or these tips from its earliest models, and with good reason. I’d say this design is the closest you’ll get to the fit of custom-designed earphones without actually going to customs.

The one annoyance I have with the Ten 5s is their over-ear cable hook. It’s no worse than any others of that kind on the market, but I’m growing less tolerant of that design these days. In the age of the featherlight and totally wireless AirPods and Galaxy Buds making audio technology basically forgettable, I’m losing my enthusiasm to fiddle with wires, hooks, and seating my earbuds just right. On more than one occasion, I’ve opted to go out with a wireless pair of buds instead of the vastly superior Ten 5s just because I knew my windows for listening to music and radio would be limited or interrupted.

Fender ships the Ten 5s with a detachable, subtly color-coded, tangle-resistant wire, along with a truly heavy duty and enormous carrying case. One of those inclusions encourages the buds’ portable use while the other might help them survive a natural disaster but does nothing to help me use them on my commute. With their good noise isolation and light weight, I think the Fender Ten 5s can definitely serve as a luxurious pair of portable buds.

You’ll want to have a high-quality DAC to feed these on the move, such as on LG’s flagship G and V phone series or from the Hidizs Sonata HD dongle. But that’s just for the sake of quality, the power requirements of the Ten 5s are minimal. They derive their name from the single 10mm dynamic driver and the five balanced armature drivers inside each earbud, which is a lot of tiny speakers to help these earphones get super loud on demand.

The Fender Ten 5s are one of the most articulate pairs of earphones I’ve tested. They draw out details that most other headphones smudge up, and their technical performance is hard to fault. But do they make exemplary sonic performance more accessible physically or more affordable monetarily? It’s hard to argue that they do. And for something that costs as much as they do, Fender’s Ten 5s needed to have some of the enchanting sonic quality that thrilled me with the bassy FXA7s, but that’s exactly the thing I find them lacking.

Photography by Vlad Savov / The Verge

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True wireless earphones are going through an absolute revolution in 2019, with battery life increasing prodigiously and prices dropping precipitously. Cambridge Audio’s first entry into the category, the Melomania 1, is a great example of this trend, coming in at $129.95 while boasting nine hours of battery life in the buds plus an incredible 36 additional hours in its diminutive AirPods-like case. I’ve been testing the Melomania for a couple of weeks, and I still haven’t had to recharge their case.

Verge readers might remember Cambridge Audio from my review of the DacMagic XS, a tiny USB DAC and amplifier that functions essentially like an external sound card for PCs. But the company has a much deeper and longer history than that, with 50 years of audio engineering experience that spans speakers, amps, AV receivers, and even a wired pair of earphones. With the future very much headed in a wireless direction, the Melomania buds come just in time to carve out a new niche for Cambridge Audio.

My expectations of these buds were not super high. They have a Micro USB charging connection, which I’ve been urging against since the end of 2017, and they’re priced keenly enough to sell on their big battery life claim alone. So long as they can play any sound at all, you’d think, plenty of people would buy them just for that long endurance. But Cambridge Audio has done plenty of good work beside the great power efficiency, as the Melomania have impressed and surprised me along a number of fronts beyond their battery.

Firstly, their case. This is the best earphones case I’ve come across outside of the one Apple has crafted for the AirPods. The Melomania case is only marginally larger while fitting in many more hours of extra charge. It has the same clicky snap to its top cover as you get from the AirPods, and I find myself absent-mindedly opening and closing it in the same fashion as I do with the Apple alternative. There’s just a great tactile quality to both products, and both are incredibly rigid and sturdy. I appreciate the strong metal hinge and the magnet that Cambridge Audio uses, and the five LEDs at the front give me an indication of the case’s charge level anytime I crack it open.

The buds themselves have a unique design. Each is a rotund cylinder, entirely symmetrical and making no ergonomic accommodations, and they appear to charge via a metal strip that sits like a belt around their midsection (so no Pogo pins required). I’d describe their fit as very hit-and-miss: I’m able to find a comfortable way to tuck them into my ears, but my friends have found their blocky shape to be unnatural and a little weird to wear. I wouldn’t say the Melomania ever cause discomfort, but they’re far from the effortless comfort of something like Samsung’s Galaxy Buds.

The flat exterior of each earphone is a multifunctional button, framed by an LED indicator light that looks like a little halo. I like both, as I’ve seen too many good headphones spoiled by bad touch controls, and the lights are elegantly integrated.

My biggest surprise came when actually listening to the Melomania, which are really rather good. This starts with good sound isolation, as the Melomania are vastly ahead of Apple’s AirPods when it comes to turning down exterior noise. With these buds, I can still hear things around me and be aware of my surroundings, but I also get a much better sense of the music I’m listening to while walking through busy city streets.

The soundstage, clarity, and tonal balance that the Melomania provide are all better than usual for true wireless earphones. There’s no bloated low end or excessively sparkly highs to speak of, and everything feels coherent and in balance. Voices sound natural and guitars sound like someone’s plucking at their strings. This isn’t to suggest that the Melomania are any sort of high-fidelity, audiophile-grade hardware, because they’re not. They have their limitations, and they do garble up the occasional bit of fine-grained detail. But even without reaching new pinnacles of audio perfection, they are just a very easy listen that reminds me of Apple’s AirPods: not hi-fi or exceptional, but highly enjoyable.

Cambridge Audio has also taken care of the wireless performance of the Melomania, which maintain a flawless connection with both iPhones and Android devices. The buds support Bluetooth 5 and AptX, AAC, and SBC. They have plenty of range, too, so you should be able to roam to the office coffee maker and back without necessarily having your phone in your pocket. It’s just great peace of mind to not have to fret about avoiding interference with your headphones’ wireless signal.

There’s one thing that’s terrible about these earphones, however, and that’s their microphone performance. Even in a quiet room, the Melomania make me sound like I’m calling from the middle of an electric storm somewhere far away. My MacBook Pro’s humble built-in mic totally embarrasses the Melomania’s, and Apple can rest assured that its AirPods’ excellence for taking calls will not be challenged by Cambridge Audio. In short, the Melomania are for listening only, with the mics to be used only in the direst of emergencies or to bark orders at Siri or Google Assistant, depending on your connected device.

As to that big battery life claim, I can’t verify it entirely because I just can’t get to a situation where I listen to true wireless buds like the Melomania for a full nine hours at a time. The only time I heard their “battery low” audio cue was when I first tried them and they weren’t charged. What this means in practice is that these buds will cover you for the vast majority of listening scenarios, and their case provides a reassuring top-up as well.

I’m willing to forgive the Melomania’s Micro USB charging port when their case makes charging such a rare necessity. I can see myself going on week-long work trips without ever carrying a Micro USB cable with me, trusting that the Melomania will have enough juice by themselves. And the obvious upside to the omission of USB-C is that it’s helped Cambridge Audio keep the price of the Melomania below that of the AirPods, which is frankly essential for anyone trying to compete with Apple’s much better-known product.

There are really only two downsides to the Melomania, but they’re major ones. The ergonomics of these buds are rather lacking, and their microphone performance is garbage-tier. On the other hand, if you’re able to find a good fit, as I have, and you don’t particularly need or care for a good mic, these are pretty great. They eliminate range or endurance anxiety for anyone reluctant to get into true wireless buds yet, they have a very attainable price, they’re built well, and they come with a terrific little case. Imperfect, but still highly appealing.

Photography by Vlad Savov / The Verge

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The Universal Serial Bus standard came into being more than 20 years ago, ushering in the USB era, which has been defined by two things: a common, ubiquitous standard for connecting peripherals to PCs, and the daily annoyance of trying to plug things in the right way. USB co-inventor Ajay Bhatt has talked to NPR recently, as spotted by Boing Boing, and given some background on why the plug took the form that it did and what its creation was intended to achieve.

Leading Intel’s team as part of a multi-company effort, Bhatt was seeking to address the rather gruesome mess of device-specific cables, plugs, and connectors that people had to deal with back in the ‘90s. As he’d previously mentioned in an interview with PCWorld, his interest was spurred by the desire to help family members successfully print something out on their home computer without having to call him every time.

“In hindsight, based on all the experiences that we all had, of course it was not as easy as it should be,” explains Bhatt to NPR, confirming that “the biggest annoyance is [the lack of] reversibility.” But, he says, there was good reason for doing things that way: Intel and its partners had to convince famously cost-sensitive PC manufacturers to embrace their standard, and making a reversible or round plug would have doubled the cost of the USB connector.

“A USB that could plug in correctly both ways would have required double the wires and circuits, which would have then doubled the cost.”

At the time of its introduction, the USB connector was aimed at replacing the gigantic (by modern standards) serial and parallel ports, but it was also successful in displacing Apple’s faster but more expensive FireWire standard. Over the years, USB has indeed grown to match its name and become a universal standard, with adapters helping it take over the jobs of some other ports such as Ethernet.

The modern USB standard, USB-C, fixes the reversibility problem and builds on everything good about the original: with greater power delivery, more data bandwidth, and even more versatility. Most laptops now just charge over USB-C, and with Intel’s Thunderbolt 3 also adopting the connector, we’re almost at the point where a laptop can get away with having only USB-C ports. Though we wouldn’t be where we are today if it wasn’t for the original, cheap, not-reversible USB-A plug.