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8 Jul 2025

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Cardrona Hotel sale a record breaker - and it hasn’t even sold yet
The listing for the iconic hotel is tipped to be the most viewed listing of the year after just five days.

Our Changing World: Tauranga’s living sea wall
Manmade rock pools are creating homes for coastal critters along the Tauranga waterfront.

The health crisis pushed by a drug crisis
With Fiji in the midst of an HIV outbreak, UNAIDS warns that other Pacific Islands countries have all the risk factors of a similar crisis.

GPUs are too expensive and too hard to find — here’s the proof
Graphics card pricing sucks, and if you’re looking for any kind of mid-range or high-end card, it doesn’t resemble those “MSRP” prices announced on stage in any way. You probably know that already if you’ve shopped for one this year, but an exhaustive statistical analysis proves it. The Gamers Nexus team, which is no stranger to deep dives on PC hardware, decided to take a good, long look at the current graphics card market. The data they collected in a 20-minute video shows that high-end cards, particularly the RTX 5090 and 5080, and the RX 9070 XT, are consistently sold at 45 to 55 percent above the suggested retail price of the base model — the prices that Nvidia and AMD list. Even allegedly mid-range cards like the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti, and the RX 9070 get boosted by 20-27 percent. And that’s assuming that you can find these cards at all, as stock tends to disappear immediately. Nvidia’s RTX 5090, the most powerful card available to consumers at the moment, is a prime example in the Gamers Nexus data. With an average price of just over $3,000 from listings of available for-sale cards accumulated across Amazon, Newegg, and Best Buy, it’s selling at 53 percent over its “base” price of $2,000. The RTX 5080 has an even worse markup, selling for an average of $1,570, a 57 percent markup. Even Intel’s Arc B580, which is intended to be a more affordable option, is selling at over 50 percent more than its $250 MSRP. The reasons are many, but depressingly familiar. Low stock levels are constant across the industry as PC gamers scramble to try to find an upgrade, to say nothing of scalpers gobbling them up to try and squeeze more money out of people. Add-in board partners and retailers are also trying to make as much as they can out of the situation, with only a tiny percentage of GPUs actually made and sold at the “base price,” flooded out by an order of magnitude more cards made with nigh-useless “upgrades” to drive up the prices. And that’s before you account for Nvidia and AMD’s possible prioritization of corporate and startup partners during the “AI” boom, mirroring the shortages of the cryptocurrency mining race from a few years ago. It is a lot easier to find a few cards, particularly the budget ones… which nobody seems to want. That’s especially true of cards that offer 8GB and 16GB variants, because no one wants 8GB cards when much more powerful ones are available for (allegedly) just $50-100 more. Based on what little data has been made publicly available, 16GB versions of the RTX 5060 Ti and the RX 9060 XT are outselling their 8GB variants by more than ten to one. The RTX 5060 is the most easily available card in Gamers Nexus’ survey… which makes sense, because it reviewed very poorly, when it got reviewed at all (Nvidia didn’t offer it to the media). The whole video is well worth a watch. But if you don’t have the time and you need a takeaway…it’s just a bad time to be a PC gamer in need of a new graphics card. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better any time soon.

Revealed: Couple jailed for neglect of 4-year-old were suspected of his murder
A couple who were jailed for neglecting a four-year-old boy who died after suffering "non-accidental" injuries were initially arrested on suspicion of murder, it can be revealed.

Regulatory Standards Bill: Unions, former MPs, lawyers and retired judge to submit
The first day of hearings saw a wave of opposition, but the minister behind the bill is dismissing concerns.

Wybot S2 Solar Vision review: Same bot, new battery-charging option
At a glanceExpert's Rating Pros Solar charging means that, in theory, you never need to plug in this robot Very effective cleaning (at least while its battery lasts) Lots of operating modes Cons The effectiveness of solar charging varies with the weather, and it can take days even in optimal conditions Couldn’t clean my entire pool on a single charge, due to an undersized battery App is prone to disconnects Our Verdict A solar-powered pool robot sounds like a perfect cleaning solution, but it turns out the sun can provide only so much juice in a day. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Wybot S2 Solar Retailer Price $1,999.99 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Best Prices Today: Check today’s prices The dream of every swimming pool owner is that some device will come along that will clean the pool without requiring much—or any—interaction. Pump-powered robots are obtrusive and unsightly thanks to their snaking cables. Battery-powered robots must be manually retrieved after a few hours, cleaned out, and recharged. The holy grail remains elusive. With its S2 Solar Vision, Wybot takes at least one baby step in the right direction, outfitting a modified version of its existing Wybot S2 robot with a solar-powered docking and charging station. In simple terms, a solar panel sits on the edge of the pool, charging the robot through an inductive plate that sits below the waterline. Better still, the docking station can communicate with the robot while it’s in the water, so it can find its way back to the dock when its battery is getting low. The Wybot S2 Solar Vision does an amazing job on walls and the waterline—it really churns up the water with its front-mounted scrubbers. Specifications The Wybot S2 Solar Vision’s docking station features a solar panel that sits at the edge of the pool, where careless–or malicious–kids might step on it and damage it.Christopher Null/Foundry A few specifics may help fill out the picture. The entire system comes in two boxes. The robot and docking station fill one, the solar panel occupies another. The solar panel and docking station must be connected through a simple, albeit not immediately intuitive, process, and the assembled dock can then be (roughly) adjusted and balanced on the edge of your pool. (The goal is to get the dock reasonably flush with the pool wall, so the robot can easily climb into it unaided.) The 20-pound, treaded robot includes a battery with a 5200mAh capacity. The docking station has a capacity of 2600mAh. The 30-watt solar panel itself has no battery of its own. Both robot and docking station include standard A/C adapters if you want to charge them more quickly, though this, of course, defeats the point of the setup to some degree. The unit promises a running time of 2.5 hours (or longer in its low-speed “eco” floor mode) and an “ideal pool size” of up to 3,230 square feet. My test runs generally ended after closer to two hours. A careful reading of the battery capacity numbers cited above might reveal one of the biggest problems I had with the Wybot S2 Solar Vision: The solar panel charges the docking station’s battery, and the docking station’s battery in turn charges the robot. This is necessarily inefficient and, because the dock’s capacity is half that of the robot, something of a mismatch. The Wybot S2 Solar Vision’s poolside docking station and solar panel.Christopher Null/Foundry Even if 100 percent of the energy in the dock made it to the robot, it would still only be half full. In theory, the sun should recharge the dock while it is discharging into the robot, but even eight hours of sunlight wasn’t enough to recharge the robot in a timely fashion in my tests. In the dead of the Texas summer, it took more than 2.5 days to take the robot from a 19 percent charge level up to 100 percent. That’s bad news if you have a particularly dirty pool and want to run the robot every day—and it’s worse news if the weather isn’t cooperating. You can always revert to removing the robot from the pool and manually recharging it, of course, but if that’s going to be a regular occurrence, you can save $1,000 by forgoing the docking station and solar panel and buying the non-solar Wybot S2—with a larger, 7800mAh battery—for $800. Daily usage testing The Wybot S2 Solar Vision features three operating modes on its touch-sensitive control panel— floor only, walls only, or floor/walls/waterline—but it quickly became apparent in my testing that the unit just doesn’t have a big enough battery to do the entire job effectively. Test runs under the “everything” mode invariably left me with a pool floor that had barely been touched. The Wybot S2 Solar Vision does an amazing job on walls and the waterline—it really churns up the water with its front-mounted scrubbers—but it just didn’t have anything left in my testing to finish the job after all that action. On one occasion it didn’t even have enough power left to return to the dock, and I had to manually rescue it from a corner of the pool with a pole. The Wybot S2 Solar Vision did an excellent job cleaning my pool’s waterline.Christopher Null/Foundry The good news is that in floor-only mode, bypassing the walls and waterline, it also did exceptional work, cleaning up 100 percent of my synthetic test leaves before returning successfully to the dock. The Wybot stores debris in a simple hinged basket, and it comes with an additional filter for finer-grained material. That said, the basket itself, which does a plenty good job on its own. It’s also easy to pop out and clean when needed. When the robot is docked, however, you’ll need to reach about a foot into the pool to grab its handle, which won’t be ideal in the winter months. (A pole is also an option, of course.) The solar panel includes two physical buttons that are usable for impromptu operations. A Play button starts the robot on whatever mode it’s currently in, and a Home button calls it back to base. Both of these worked fine in my testing, although the robot can be quite slow to get back to base when called, and I would often press the home button multiple times to be sure the command was received. The Wybot S2 Solar Vision’s app offers lots of cleaning options.Christopher Null/Foundry Note that homes with small children might want to rethink the S2 Solar Vision altogether, as the panel would likely be destroyed if anyone accidentally—or intentionally—steps on it. The Wybot S2 Solar Vision offers both Bluetooth and 2.4GHz Wi-Fi connectivity and a mobile app, but I had such trouble with the app that Wybot sent me a full replacement robot, docking station, and solar panel after a firmware update killed the system’s wireless connectivity entirely. Wybot’s app is fine, but quite limited. Four additional operating modes are available here, as is a simple remote to manually control the robot for spot cleaning. As with the Wybot F1 skimmer I reviewed on June 18, the app’s battery status reports—one for the robot and a second for the docking station—are prone to inaccuracy unless you force-quit an restart the app. The Wybot S2 Solar Vision’s large debris basket captured a large amount of material during my tests.Christopher Null/Foundry A “weekly cleaning” feature lets you set a daily schedule for operations, including both time of day and type of run; and like the original Wybot S2, you can set options for pool shape and the way you want the robot to go about its work, although I can’t imagine why you’d care whether it cleans in an S pattern, cross pattern, or star pattern. Should you buy the Wybot S2 Solar Vision? One hiccup of note: If the docking station battery dies—which it did frequently, often overnight, in my testing—the system will lose its wireless connectivity during robot recharges. The only solution I’ve found for this is manually turning the base station back on by tapping the home button once it has a small amount of charge on it. But that means another physical trip to the pool. Problems like that further obviate the S2 Solar Vision’s best feature, which is the promise of convenience. Between cleaning out the filter basket, retrieving a wayward robot from the pool floor, waiting for recharges, and rebooting the dock, I found myself trekking out to the pool nearly as much as I would do with a standard pool robot—all while enjoying only a third of the availability due to slow recharging. And for that, you’ll pay $1,800 after using a coupon on Amazon, making this one of the more expensive robotic pool cleaning systems on the market. If you have a small pool, lots of sun, minimal debris to clean up, and infinite patience, the Wybot S2 Solar Vision might work well for you. But for my circumstance, I simply didn’t see enough savings in time or effort to justify the expense.