Technologies

What Apple’s ‘Wonderlust’ Event Invite Could Tell Us About the iPhone 15

Commentary: By examining the title and graphic for the next Apple event, we can speculate about what’s coming to the next iPhone.

Apple’s «Wonderlust» event is set for Sept. 12, and the company’s invitation could be our first «official» clue hinting at the rumored iPhone 15. We’ve been collecting rumors about the gadget for months, but Apple sometimes drops an early hint about its September event into the invite. This doesn’t always mean there are true connections between what’s said and shown in the invitation and what actually emerges at the show, but the invite creates a jumping off point for discussing what we think Apple might spotlight.

Examining Apple’s ‘Wonderlust’ invite

Let’s start by thinking about the name: Wonderlust. With this tweak of «wanderlust,» Apple appears to be invoking a travel theme. And it’s no stretch to say phones are essential travel companions: We use them for photography, GPS, looking up where we want to eat — there are endless possible features that could be developed with just travel in mind.

Moving onto the invitation’s design, we get a disintegrating graphic that shows a blue-and-sand-colored Apple logo being blown apart by an invisible force — perhaps the wind? Or perhaps the pieces of the Apple logo are being pulled together via a magnetic attraction? Either way, an atmospheric element might be what we could extrapolate from this design choice, and phones by their very nature are wireless devices that create constant connections through the atmosphere.

(It’s also true that blue and gray have been iPhone colors in the past, and maybe this logo’s colors provide an early look at what a few of the iPhone 15 models might look like.)

I should reiterate that these thoughts are speculation, but they’re enough to warrant a closer look at how Apple could improve the iPhone 15. The following things all tie into the themes of travel and atmosphere, but they’re also areas in which Apple could demonstrate improvement where rival phones have already staked out territory, or they’re realms closely related to iOS 17 features we already learned about at Apple’s WWDC event.

An iPhone 14 showing a text conversation with emergency dispatchers

Even more satellite communication

Tying into both travel and the atmosphere, Apple could make new announcements related to the satellite connectivity features first launched with the iPhone 14 line. Right now Apple’s efforts are focused on its Emergency SOS feature, which lets people with a clear view of the sky use the iPhone to text emergency services where cellular service isn’t available. The iPhone 14 line comes with two years of free emergency satellite service.

Though Apple kicked off bringing satellite service to phones, it won’t be alone for long. Qualcomm, Samsung and other companies have announced plans to bring their own spin to satellite connectivity, including voicing their intention to allow for nonemergency communication over those airwaves.

On this year’s stage, Apple could announce new improvements to its satellite connectivity features, perhaps allowing for an iMessage service while in the wilderness, or limited voice calls.

The iPhone on a MagSafe charger in StandBy mode

Faster wireless charging and more MagSafe

Apple’s MagSafe made a splash when it debuted alongside the iPhone 12 in 2020, very literally snapping separate objects together for enhanced wireless charging and stackable accessories. The particle effect in our Apple event invitation — whether it means the logo is being pulled together or apart — could indicate MagSafe as well as the wireless charging feature that MagSafe supports.

And if so, it’s about time. Apple has room to improve the iPhone’s wireless charging speeds, especially when compared with those of rival flagship Android phones. Currently, Apple supports 7.5-watt wireless charging speeds with a regular Qi wireless charger, and 15W speeds with an officially certified MagSafe charger. Meanwhile, Google’s Pixel 7 can wirelessly charge at 12W on a Qi charger with an extended power profile, and that bumps up to 20W when using Google’s Pixel Stand that has a built-in fan. Previous OnePlus phones can get 15W charging from Qi wireless chargers with an extended power profile, and a ludicrously fast 50W on their official stand, thanks to the use of a split battery. All this leaves a lot of room for growth for Apple, and matching Google’s speeds, at least, would be a solid step in making wireless charging more useful on the iPhone.

A new Qi2 wireless charging standard is in the works though, and Apple is a member of the Wireless Power Consortium that’s developing it. Whenever that standard is ready, that might lead to faster wireless charging speeds on future iPhone models.

Regardless of charging, there’s likely even more room to grow MagSafe into a modular accessory platform. Maybe Apple could create a MagSafe dock that instantly starts an AirPlay session with a TV. Or create an attachable projector like Motorola once tried with the Moto Z phone line. How about a portable HomePod speaker that snaps right onto your phone, similar to a number of magnetic speakers that already exist on Amazon? There’s still a lot of untapped potential for MagSafe.

Two iPhones sharing contact information using NameDrop

NameDrop and new ways to share in person

Another atmospheric idea starts with an iOS 17 feature we already know: NameDrop. This feature lets you quickly share contact information with someone in person by bringing two iPhones together. But Apple could do so much more with local wireless sharing.

For instance, Apple already allows for sharing iPhone audio between two different sets of AirPods. What if this wireless sharing expanded SharePlay, allowing for simultaneously playing music and video across multiple phones at once — without being on a FaceTime call.

This could be instantly useful if you wanted to share a YouTube video with a friend without having to hand over your phone. Or if you wanted to create a quick surround-sound system by syncing five iPhones together to play music during a dinner party, since your phones are probably sitting on the table anyway.

These all could be natural extensions of other features we already know are on the way. For instance, FaceTime on Apple TV will use its own wireless magic to connect an iPhone’s camera and microphone for video calls. Why not think even bigger and let multiple iPhones share even more media, just by being right next to each other?

Using iOS 16's Visual Lookup to cut out a cat in an image

Using your camera to scan even more places

Returning to travel, Apple’s Visual Look Up is already capable of identifying landmarks, plants and pets, but you need to move over to the Photos app to take advantage of those features. Perhaps the next iPhone and iOS 17 could speed this, and let you start scanning these items directly from the camera app.

This would bring Visual Look Up into better parity with Google Lens, which quickly identifies items for you without the need to save them into your camera roll. Maybe you could scan a restaurant while you were standing in front of it, and then get its menu. Or scan a friend’s shirt, and then find it on sale to get it yourself. These scenarios are already possible with Google Lens, making this a very noticeable way for Apple to bring more features into its camera app.

Expanding safety features

When you travel in a vehicle, Apple’s new Crash Detection features could provide an essential lifeline in the event of an accident. As it stands, the feature can automatically contact emergency services should a supported iPhone or Apple Watch detect such an event. But perhaps Apple could augment this further by taking advantage of other sensors within the iPhone or a paired up Apple Watch to activate a heart rate sensor at the same time to provide a quick health check to the wearer.

Or maybe Apple could expand its Crash Detection feature so it shares your physical location with your emergency contacts. This could be similar to Apple’s new Check-In feature, which will proactively send alerts when friends or family make it home safely. And maybe it’s already worthwhile to expand this feature for emergency situations, like being unexpectedly taken to the hospital.

Other iPhone 15 rumors we’re watching

Though we don’t have any solid evidence that the above ideas are coming to the iPhone 15, these are all areas where Apple could improve.

The iPhone 15 rumor mill is a busy one though, and even without an invitation to pore over, we’re monitoring the possibility of a USB-C port arriving to replace Lightning, seeing if the new Dynamic Island will expand to every iPhone model after its debut on the iPhone 14 Pro, and wondering whether the iPhone 15 Pro will move toward solid-state volume and power buttons.

Whatever’s ultimately on the way to Apple’s iPhone 15, we’ll likely find out for sure when Apple’s event begins on Sept. 12.

Technologies

We’re All Flailing With AI: I Tried Art That Pokes Back at the Chaos

A handful of moments at SXSW had me wondering: How much of AI is me playing a game and how much is it a game playing me?

Smack dab in the middle of this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, there was a huge dirt hole in the ground, blocks wide, where there used to be a convention center. The festival’s events continued around it in hotels, but the building’s absence was like a lurking symbol. Of chaos, of disruption. Of the world in 2026, dealing with AI and everything else.

I have no idea what the rest of 2026 will bring, but the vibe I felt at a vibe-filled show made me question how AI can work with our lives, our art and our existence. Instead of fighting it, the conference awkwardly embraced it and challenged it. I saw pockets of work all over the place and wondered about it. Conversations. And how to escape it.

Everyone’s trying to handle a world that’s suddenly way too overloaded with AI, generating documents, images, deepfakes and music, injecting assistant agents into our operating systems, even launching entire unleashed and interconnected agent systems all talking to each other on their own social networks. Job-threatening, constantly shifting, training on our data and aiming for our faces. Do we run from it, try to destroy it, or use art to question and challenge it?

SXSW gave me a lot of the latter, in different slices.

In my panel I was in at SXSW with Meow Wolf’s Vince Kadlubek and Niantic Spatial’s Dennis Hwang about their experiments overlaying tech into art in physical installations, Kadlubek discussed how AI’s infinite slop creative tool becomes uninteresting over time, while intentional art counteracts that. And that’s exactly how I felt moving through intentionally-made experiences that turned my thoughts about AI inside out, all in different ways.

AI seeping into our gaming chats, for better and worse

In a VR headset in a hotel ballroom, I chatted with cartoon fantasy characters in a whimsical game called Fabula Rasa: Dead Man Talking, made by game studio Arvore. I could make any request or beg as much as I wanted from my cage, where I was held prisoner for offending the King and kept dangling over a monster’s mouth for execution. Could I plead my case to them? The cartoonish VR characters responded, but via generative AI improvising off a script from a writing team, using Claude.

The chats were fun, ridiculous. I made myself an irresponsible magician and leaned into improv with the characters who approached me. None of them disappointed, which is a surprise for dialogue that’s somewhat AI-generated. Most interactions felt frazzled and absurd, but it worked for the style and the humor of it all. There was a bit of a delay for responses to kick in, though, standard-issue for a lot of AI conversations.

This was the best use of AI I saw. But what could it mean for future games, like RPGs? It’s an unsettling thought if you’re a writer…or, exciting. Indie games could end up finding ways to branch out responsive dialogue in ways that still feel custom-written and crafted. I don’t know.

On the less successful end was Love Bird, an interactive game show experience directed by Cameron Kostopoulos. I was wowed by the initial onboarding, where the «producers» called me on my phone to interview me. The producer was actually an AI chatbot with a surprisingly rapid response time. I convinced the AI to be a participant, and then was led into a room where I spoke via Xbox controller and headset microphone with a PC game on a monitor, where I was competing with others while carnivorous bird-people threatened to eat us. I’m not sure why, exactly. And I don’t know how it all ended, because my chats with the host and participants fell into broken loops that made us have to quit out early.

Love Bird was fast-paced and responsive, but also too chaotic and weird, even for someone like me who likes weird. It didn’t feel like it was really paying attention to me, and I didn’t feel like I had space to process. Maybe that’s by chaotic design, but after emerging, it just made me want to feel less AI-spammed and have games that didn’t flood me with as much conversation as this one did. I needed a quiet space. My favorite immersive experiences are often the quiet ones, not the chatty ones.

AI as a personal transformational lens

In one room, I stood at a podium and read a portion of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s acceptance speech from November as, before me, video clips of crowds cheering played on a large video monitor, seemingly reacting to me. A few minutes later, I heard my voice delivering more of Mamdani’s speech, AI-generated in my voice, to film clips of inspirational moments of support. I saw my own face layered into the background of some of these clips, too.

The Great Dictator, directed by Gabo Arora, is a museum-style participatory exploration of the power of rhetoric, provocatively named for the Charlie Chaplin satire about Adolf Hitler. The three speeches you can choose from — Mamdani’s, President Ronald Reagan’s on taking down the Berlin Wall, and Malcolm X’s The Ballot or the Bullet speech — are all picked to represent powerful moments in history, and the exhibit is about embodying history and feeling the power of speech and rhetoric in a personal way — and relating to it from a new, personal, and maybe more empathetic angle. The voice AI was generated by ElevenLabs, and the video clips at the end were hand edited, but with AI overlays of my face handled by Runway. What surprised me was how much I ended up being in historical documents. Is this a deepfake? Is it embodiment? Is it both?

Another art experience embedded me into the work: Spectacular, by Jonathan Yeo. Yeo is an artist from London whose portrait work includes King Charles III, President George W. Bush and designer Jony Ive of Apple renown and has played with tech in many of his installations. This gallery at SXSW, replicated from an exhibit that was in Paris before, used Snap Spectacles AR glasses to melt the real portraits with augmented effects and voice narration from Yeo. And, later on, the portraits began overlaying my own face, transformed in art styles that matched Yeo’s using generative AI trained on his work. At the end, I got a printout of my portrait, «signed» by Yeo himself.

I spoke with Yeo in Austin after experiencing his work. He admitted that AI is a provocation here, but that he wants to own the process that AI is trying to take from our own data everywhere. And he’s trying to apply AI and AR in ways that feel intentional and subtle as ways to help play with and bring the art to life, in museums and elsewhere. But again, like with The Great Dictator, I wondered: How much will «permanent» documents of art and history begin to melt over time with AI? What will be kept intact, and who will enforce the line?

AI as broken manipulator

Wearing a pair of Meta Oakley smart glasses, I stood in a room full of objects on shelves as a voice directed me to open a drawer, find a dollar bill there and put it in a shredder filled with bill fragments. I did it. The AI remarked with pleasant surprise at how compliant I was. From there, I «competed» tasks to prove my value as human labor, graded by an AI that saw my actions through the glasses camera and showed my stats on a TV screen, along with a deepfaked dancing version of myself.

Body Proxy, by Tender Claws, applies Meta’s glasses camera feed into its own art AI app on a phone to explore how AI could make us proxies for physical labor. It’s weird and satirical like some of their other VR work (the game Virtual Virtual Reality, among others), but also pushes at a much bigger question: How much is AI breaking us or manipulating us? How much are we willing to be manipulated?

Escape The Internet (Part One), an interactive game I played in a movie theater at the Alamo Drafthouse, turned similar ideas of manipulation into a social experiment. Created by Lucas Rizzotto, another VR/AR provocateur artist, it involved no headsets or glasses. Instead, everyone in the theater used their own phones to connect to a private server that «ran» the game and gave us little personal avatars, feeding us surveys to collect our personal tendencies and then having us play social voting games to see how we’d polarize on decisions like, for instance, who to kill: one person who shared our political views, or five who didn’t?

It’s all absurd and funny and guided by Rizzotto’s in-person guidance at the front of the theater, and along the way, I thought about how social platforms manipulate us with algorithms. Here, in this room together, we’re encouraged to find each other, recognize each other and love each other. The experience has branching paths and can be replayed, and could re-emerge in future conferences and events. But, again, I asked myself: How much of AI is a game that’s playing me, instead of me playing it?

Design for AI is still unfinished (or nonexistent)

In some of the panels I sat in on, and in conversations I had, I got a creeping sense that AI is moving too fast for artists or ethicists — or anyone else, really — to stop and properly process. One panel exploring The Future Design Language of Robots, with Olivia Vagelos of the Design for Feelings Studio, and Savannah Kunovsky, managing director of Ideo’s emerging technology division, tapped into the assumptions we make about robots. I teamed up with someone next to me to try to dream up ideas to break my assumptions and think freshly about what robots could be.

Kunovsky and Vagelos both agreed that designing for AI presents similar challenges right now, particularly because the tech is moving too fast for design to properly attend to it. But sadly, my attempt to record what they said as a quote was sabotaged by my AI-enabled Meta Ray-Ban glasses, which activated as the microphone when I tried recording a voice memo from the panel on my phone, muting the audio completely because of noise cancellation. Wearables are still broken, too.

Another panel, called Generative Ghosts: AI Afterlives and the Future of Memory, led in part by two Google DeepMind researchers, discussed many fascinating angles on how we can responsibly handle archiving our lives via AI as memories in the future, and who controls that ability. The panel had no specific answers but plenty of questions. And, as my own attempt at recording it was also erased by my activated smart glasses, it gave me an additional level of absurd friction which made me wonder: Will these archived memories eventually be lost, too, from big tech companies that sunset services or introduce noncompatible formats, memory-holing the memories?

AI is threatening, but often not successful in fulfilling its promises (or threats). Self-driving Waymo cars flooded Austin during SXSW, with my Uber app often pushing them on me instead of human drivers. I gave in and took a few for amusement, but they usually took longer to get where I was going. And, one unfortunate evening, my Waymo took a weird roundabout route that ended up dropping me off a half mile from my destination on the wrong side of the highway.

My favorite SXSW memory was making an old-fashioned collage out of magazine clippings with friends at an art gallery over wine, something that involved no tech at all. We worked our magic with intuition, scissors, old magazines and good conversation. Was it perfect? No. But it cost a lot less than generative AI. Which also makes me wonder if all these AI tools being offered to enhance or supplant creativity are necessary, or whether we’ll just rediscover that we had more tools than we realized all along.

Technologies

Samsung’s Galaxy A37, A57 New Pricing Tests the Limits of a Plastic Phone

While market conditions are raising the cost of these Galaxy A phones, Samsung’s hopes fast charging speeds, improved water resistance and camera features will provide value for price-conscious buyers.

Samsung’s announcement of the new $450 Galaxy A37 and $550 Galaxy A57 today brings good news and bad news for value-conscious customers looking for a cheaper phone.

Much like we’ve seen on the flagship-level Galaxy S26, both phones are priced higher than the A36 and A56 they are replacing — in this case by $50 — though storage options for both phones still start at 128GB. However, both phones did get a design improvement that features IP68 water resistance and will feature the newly updated Circle to Search, with enhancements like Find the Look for identifying outfits.

Starting with the $450 Galaxy A37, this phone has a 6.7-inch display with a 120Hz refresh rate. It runs on Samsung’s Exynos 1480 processor and has a 45-watt wired charging speed, which Samsung says will recharge its 5,000-mAh battery from 0% to 65% in 30 minutes.

The phone is made from plastic and comes in four colors: charcoal, gray-green, white and — my favorite — lavender. (Note: Samsung adds the word «Awesome» in front of all of these color names, but I’m going to save us from this.) The A37 also comes in a 256GB model that costs $540.

The A37’s cameras include a 50-megapixel wide, an 8-megapixel ultrawide and a 5-megapixel macro on the back, along with a 12-megapixel selfie camera on the front. The A37 gets a sampling of Galaxy AI features, including object eraser for editing photos, language translation and an upgraded Bixby assistant.

The $550 Galaxy A57 moves up from plastic to a metal body but only comes in navy. It also has a 6.7-inch display, but weighs in at 179 grams, which is markedly lighter than the A56’s 198g. During my hands-on time, it was noticeably light, especially for a phone with the larger display size.

The phone runs on Samsung’s Exynos 1680 processor. It also gets a few more AI photo editing tools like Best Face for fixing group photos where someone is blinking.

The cameras on the A57 include a 50-megapixel wide, a 12-megapixel ultrawide, and a 5-megapixel macro on the back and, like the A37, includes a 12-megapixel selfie camera. A step-up 256GB model costs $610, but it’s worth noting that this price is really close to the $650 Galaxy S25 FE, which includes all of the Galaxy AI features along with a telephoto camera.

I’m bummed but not surprised to see the increased cost of the A37 and A57 versus last year’s models, which a Samsung representative said is attributable to current market conditions when I asked about the ongoing RAM shortage.

During my hands-on time, though, I did find both phones to look quite nice, with the lavender model likely providing plenty of competition to the $499 Google Pixel 10A’s colors. Both phones will go on sale on April 9.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for March 25 #752

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 25, No. 752.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle is a fun one, but it might make you hungry. Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Intermission mission.

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Movie candy.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

ROBE, BORE, WEEDS, WEED, RENT, RIND, CORN, SCAN, SPAN, SPANS, SAND, CANE, CANT, CROSS, COIN

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers: