News

• Daisy One: new headphones from a new brand — and they're not cheap
• No app, heavier than average build, smaller drivers…
• …but I truly think the dedicated on-ear 'Still Mode' button could be a winner

You’ve never heard of Daisy (the Californian tech company; you may have heard of the flower) but it wants you to hear of it. Or hear it…’s debut over-ear headphones, which are called the Daisy One.

These new cans retail at the not-insignificant price point of $399 / £364 (about AU$700), money which could, it's important to say, be buying you some Sony or Bose cans. So why buy these instead? Refreshingly, rather than play the heavy-hitters at their own game, Daisy's throwing out the rule book on how to convince you.

Take the cans’ audio chops; instead of using the same 40mm drivers that almost everyone opts for, Daisy’s gone for a 35mm option, tuned by former Harman engineers and weighted towards the low-end. That’s pretty uncommon in pricier wireless models, where neutral sound is the typically the goal.

Then there’s the design: it’s heavier than average, at 318g, and uses a more slender, metallic look than your average over-ears and comes in silver, dark green or blue (no traditional 'charcoal' option here).

Perhaps the biggest selling point — something many brands (and reviewers) could consider a minus — is the lack of an app. Instead, controls are done on the headphone, with a dial for volume controls and play/pause, and a dedicated button that plays soundscapes recorded from around California. And what a dial/button it is! It puts me in mind of Montblanc's bijou earbuds or indeed the tip of a Montblanc pen.

What this button offers is called the 'Still Mode', and it includes access to rainfall sounds, five-minute breathwork tracks, ocean tides and more, but from the headphones themselves — ie. without the need to open an app or keep your phone connected to its source device.

There is a noise cancellation listed on the spec sheet too, but perhaps Daisy knows it can't beat the class-leaders at that game. Where most flagship cans want to give you silence with ever-improved ANC algorithms, Daisy is pushing a different route straight to the desired effect of said silence: a calmer mind — and one that is better able to focus.

By turning traditional headphone flaws (see the lack of an app and a slightly smaller driver) into selling points, Daisy makes it clear that it’s trying something different.

It’s not clear if that’s by design, or by accident. In an interview with Wired, company CEO Jack Mulroe confirmed the designers were “from outside the audio industry”. So the brand brings some fresh perspectives, but potentially some shortcomings — Mulroe admits “I tweaked out on transparency for months” when trying to fix its issues.

In recent years, we’ve seen that headphone fans will welcome in new brands, perhaps more so than in other tech sectors. The likes of the CMF Headphone Pro, Nothing Headphone (a) and Soundcore Space 2 have proven popular (at least, I’ve seen people out and about wearing them) and you can see from the very end of the next train carriage that they’re not from the traditional Sony, Bose or Sennheiser roster.

We've seen other headphone startups try to help wearers stay calm and focus, albeit using very different tech. Take Neurable's 'brain-hacking' headphones, which monitor your brain activity while you wear them and thus aim to help you achieve a flow state. But Daisy's this approach is different again, and it does strike me that by taking a more hands-off approach (and leaving our gray matter alone) Daisy's approach perhaps sounds more conducive to calmness…

Ultimately, it’s always good to see a new brands step up to the plate, especially if it thinks it can do things differently to the big dogs. It’ll be very interesting to see what impact the Daisy One has, and where the company goes from here.

One of my favorite things about the best music streaming services is that they’ve evolved into more than just audio platforms — they give you the freedom to create your own digital music space.

Take Spotify for example, the platform I’ve been using for over a decade. Not only does its algorithm learn to understand your tastes (though it takes quite a bit of time and effort to train it), creating playlists and folders gives you another way to make your Spotify space your own.

One of Spotify’s most handy features is pins, which places select playlists, albums, and artists, as well as audiobooks and podcasts to the top of your Library for quick and easy access, but the four-pin limit is a pain point that pretty much every subscriber has been asking Spotify to upgrade since the pins feature was rolled out some five years ago.

In the case of Apple Music, you can pin up to six different items which, while it’s still a small number, is better than four. Users have been begging Spotify to increase this number for years — and you’ll be relieved to learn that change is finally coming.

I first spotted signs of a possible update after coming across a Reddit post (see below) in which a user shared that they had somehow found a way to pin more than four items in their Library. Apparently all they did was update their Spotify app, but other users responding in the comments saw no such change — myself included.

After coming across the post, I reached out to Spotify, which confirmed that it’s increasing the four-pin limit, which was one of the improvements I wanted the most in 2026. A spokesperson shared the following comment:

“Spotify is updating the number of items listeners can pin at the top of Your Library from 4 to 20. This gives our users more flexibility to keep the music, playlists, podcasts, audiobooks, and creators they care about most within easy reach. It's still rolling out and will be available for Free and Premium listeners around the world in the next month”.

I can imagine many people will read this and question the fuss over such a small feature, but there’s a lot more to it. For those who are seasoned Spotify users, the platform is much more than a music haven — it’s their source for podcasts and audiobooks.

When you factor this in, having only four pins across music, podcasts, and audiobooks is rather stingy — "Does Spotify think we only listen to 1 of each at a time?", someone commented on the post shared to the Spotify Community page. But it’s not just about being able to pin music, podcasts, and audiobooks simultaneously; it’s about enhancing the user experience.

Whenever you follow a new artist, pre-save an upcoming album, or save a new playlist, it all appears as one messy collection in Your Library. This forces you to scroll through a hoarding eyesore to find what it is you’re looking for, so pinning items bumps your most-used content to the top saving you bags of scrolling time.

Though you can simply search for the playlist you want to listen to, regular listeners have tons of them (I know I do), so it’s much easier having all of your music there at the tap of a button in Your Library. For others, it’s about more than making your playlists easier to navigate; it's about having more say in how you choose to curate your digital music collection — “we should get full control”, another user puts it plainly.

All things considered, then, avid Spotify users everywhere will welcome this update with open arms.

For a company that prides itself on delivering polished, functioning hardware and software, Apple dropped the ball with its original AI-powered Clean Up tool.

Not only did this Apple Intelligence feature arrive almost a year after similar tools from Samsung and Google, but by all accounts, it was objectively worse at removing unwanted objects in images than those big-name rivals. We tested Clean Up against Galaxy AI last year, and found that the former “comes incredibly short of the mark when Samsung’s offering is capable of truly achieving what it sets out to do.” Ouch.

But Apple has promised to make things right in iOS 27. At WWDC 2026, the company announced that Clean Up will be faster and more capable in your iPhone’s next software update — and so I put that claim to the test by comparing Clean Up as it exists in iOS 26 against Clean Up as it exists in the iOS 27 developer beta (if you’re keen to try an early version of iOS 27 for yourself, here’s how to download the iOS 27 developer beta).

Before we dive into the image comparisons, an important note: Clean Up is better in iOS 27 because it’s capable of engaging Apple’s powerful Foundation models when needed. Say, for instance, you want to remove an obstruction from your face; your iPhone will employ a ‘High Quality’ version of Clean Up that taps into Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute servers to access these Foundation models. But it doesn’t do this all the time.

For small touch-up jobs, your iPhone employs a ‘Fast’ version of Clean Up that uses Apple's on-device AI models to complete your request, just as it does in iOS 26 (albeit not under this 'Fast' banner). This version is (surprise!) faster than the ‘High Quality’ alternative, but it's also not as effective at removing objects.

In iOS 27, your iPhone defaults to using an ‘Auto’ version of Clean Up that switches between ‘High Quality’ and ‘Fast’ depending on the edit request you’re making, but you can force your iPhone to use one or the other by selecting your chosen mode in a drop-down menu.

For this comparison, I stuck to ‘Auto’ to test how well my iPhone recognizes when (and when not) to use the more power-intensive ‘High Quality’ version of Clean Up — and because most people will use Clean Up in this default ‘Auto’ mode. I also wanted to see whether ‘Fast’ in iOS 27 — which my iPhone surely used for a few of the photos below — is more effective than it is in iOS 26.

I've added a separate section for comparing ‘Fast’ and ‘High Quality’ results in iOS 27, which is the starkest example of how much Apple's Clean Up tool has been improved.

And, of course, my results are based on the iOS 27 developer beta, not the finished version of iOS 27. There's every chance that Clean Up will be improved further once iOS 27 proper arrives later this year.

In this first example, iOS 26 leaves behind an unnatural smear in place of the dog, while iOS 27 adds a more detailed, natural-looking replacement. The latter looks more like a bush than grass — and the end of the dog's tail is still visible in both examples — but iOS 27 delivers the better overall result.

iOS 26 actually delivers the better result here, leaving behind a slightly less visible L-shape than iOS 27. I suspect this is an example of that 'Fast' version of Clean Up in action, and that if I manually selected 'High Quality', the iOS 27 version would be superior (see the 'Fast' vs 'High Quality' comparison at the bottom of the page to see what I mean). This comparison also proves that 'Fast' in iOS 27 doesn't always deliver superior results to Clean Up in iOS 26 (at least as far as the developer beta goes).

Again, I'd say iOS 26 delivers the better result in this example — focus on the llama's erased head in both photos to see what I mean.

This is the first example in which I'm convinced my iOS 27-enabled iPhone switched from 'Fast' to 'High Quality'. When asking Clean Up to remove the long strands of hair over my left eye, the iOS 26 version completely botches the job, adding random ugly smears and not actually removing anything. The iOS 27 version, meanwhile, serves up a genuinely impressive result. It's not completely devoid of fakery, but it's certainly the more usable of the two results.

Now you see him, now you don't. At first glance, both iOS 26 and iOS 27 appear to do a similarly OK job at removing Bad Bunny from the roof of La Casita, but if you look closely, iOS 26 doesn't recognize that there are stairs behind him. The iOS 27 result isn't that much better, but it's the objectively superior of the two.

Another slim win for iOS 27 here. Neither version of Clean Up completely removes the dog's shadow, but iOS 27 makes a slightly better go of it than iOS 26.

In this example, the iOS 27 result is the much better of the two. Not only does iOS 26 leave behind a smeary cloud, but it also adds a random shape and (badly) generates an extra helping of mountain in the background. None of these mistakes are visible in the iOS 27 result.

iOS 27 wins again here, but not by much. The dark splodges left behind in the iOS 26 result are a tad more visible than those in the iOS 27 result, and I'd be more comfortable passing the latter off as reality.

This is probably the most challenging request of the bunch. I'm sitting on a backless bench while pedalling a piece of urban gym equipment, and I asked Clean Up to remove me, but keep everything else intact. iOS 26 fails miserably, and while iOS 27 doesn't totally succeed either — it leaves my right foot behind and removes the end of the bench entirely — it does do a better job of replacing what it removes with real-looking imagery.

Here's an example of the different results you can achieve by manually selecting the 'Fast' and 'High Quality' versions of Clean Up in iOS 27.

As you can see, the difference is huge. The 'Fast' result is a total mess, while the 'High Quality' result is genuinely real-looking. The latter isn't perfect — it's changed the menu art, for instance, and reduced the menu count from two to one — but I suspect that's because a portion of the menu was caught in the circle I drew around the coffee cup (and for that reason, I hope Apple reduces the thickness of the Clean Up line when iOS 27 releases in full later this year).

In all but three of the comparisons, the iOS 27 developer beta version of Clean Up delivered the better result; however, it's clear that, when your iPhone opts for the 'Fast' version of the feature, the gulf in quality is not dramatic. In fact, in some examples, the iOS 26 result is better — so it's probably best to think of 'Fast' Clean Up and iOS 26 Clean Up as the same tool.

It's a different story for the 'High Quality' version of Clean Up in the iOS 27 developer beta, which delivered vastly superior results to Clean Up in iOS 26 when my iPhone auto-selected that option, or when I manually enabled it (as in the coffee cup example).

This proves beyond doubt that Apple has improved Clean Up in iOS 27 as it exists right now — but unless users manually select this 'High Quality' option (or always request complex edits that trigger its automatic use), the difference in Clean Up's capabilities may not be all that noticeable.

Again, though, I've been careful to specify that these iOS 27 results are from the developer beta — Apple will likely further tweak Clean Up between now and iOS 27's September release, so I expect the tool to get even better.