Everyone's getting back into vinyl these days, whether it's for that hit of nostalgia or because you don't want Spotify feeding you AI slop (vinyl, at the time of writing, does not facilitate AI slop… let us all hope it stays that way). And a new discount from Fluance makes picking up its entry-level turntable even easier.

This is the Fluance RT81, which we called "Easily the best starter turntable you can buy" when we tested it back in 2024. And it's a relatively affordable model even without a discount, designed to offer you the record-playing basics without expensive audiophile features.

But right now, it's 20% off, taking $60 off its already-affordable asking fee to make it just $239.99 (was $299.99) on Amazon.

A warning: turn back now if you're not reading this between 8:25am and 8:25pm ET on Wednesday, June 4 (that's 5:25am - 5:25pm PT, though it's not clear if Fluance will budge the window for Westerners). This discount is available as a Lightning Deal on Amazon, as part of Prime Day deals, so it's only live for a slender 12-hour window.

• Shop more Prime Day deals at Amazon US

Hold the needle a sec: the Fluance RT81 does miss one feature common in entry-level turntables, which you should probably know about before you buy.

The turntable doesn't feature Bluetooth connectivity (which plenty of new spinners do in 2026), so you can't pair it with your JBL speaker to enjoy your tunes, say. Instead, you'll need to connect wired speakers via RCA (those white and red dual cables).

While audiophiles prefer to avoid Bluetooth for record listening, due to the compression inherent in Bluetooth losing some of the detail within the vinyl, it's much more common in entry-level record players. The feature makes it much easier to integrate a player into your home hi-fi set-up if you only own wireless tech.

So it's only worth buying the Fluance RT81 deal if you can fit a wired turntable into your home, or you already have a set of stereo speakers that you want to put to good use.

If that's no issue, you'll find the RT81 a nice, good-looking and convenient starter turntable. It's easy to set-up and use, and it sounds pretty great.

The deal will save you $60 which, admittedly, is about the cost of one record these days, but you've probably inherited a collection of those. Instead, I'd put the money towards one of the best stereo speakers so you can use the Fluance properly.

I’m under no illusions that John Ternus’ Apple will be the exactly same as it has been under Tim Cook. Initially though, there will be few, if any, changes. Ternus is not an outsider with wild anti-Apple ideas intended to wake a sleeping giant. He's been here for decades, through all the major releases that made Apple, well, Apple. Claims that he's arriving in September to revive Apple's design excellence are, if not off base, then just wrong-headed.

First of all, the argument presupposes that there is something fundamentally lacking in Apple's Industrial design: Jony Ive was obviously lighting in a bottle, and current design lead Molly Anderson is a pale, albeit also British, imitation. (Granted, Anderson has not been in the position that long, taking over from Evans Hankey, who left in 2023.)

But accepting that presumption is to ignore all the beautifully designed products that have arrived under Cook's leadership, with and without Ive, and also often under the watchful eyes of Ternus.

Remember the Pro — oh

But since Ive's skills as a designer are so vaunted, let's start with a failure. Perhaps you remember the Mac Pro. No, not the cheese-grater design unveiled in 2023. While that had its detractors, it was miles above the trashcan design unveiled in 2013.

It was the ultimate expression (at least in PC terms) of Ive's "form meets function" obsession. The internal structure was sort of a triangle of boards that seemed perfectly wrong for a squat, circular enclosure. Ive's fingerprints were all over the impractical system, one that Craig Federighi later admitted to me (during a mea culpa meeting on the Pro) had boxed Apple into a thermal corner. It was hard to upgrade and was roundly rejected by pro system users.

Ive was also responsible for the Apple Pencil. With it, his penchant for skeuomorphism extended from app design into the physical world. The Apple Pencil fully resembled a white plastic version of a real, pencil, and to accommodate that, it had, under a custom cover, a hidden Lightning charging plug. You even needed a special adaptor to charge it. Later, wirelessly charging Apple Pencils, which I think Ive also designed, fixed this mess.

Naturally, Ive's hits far outweighed his misses, and many big ones came during the Cook-Ive collaboration period, including the iPad Air, the Apple Watch, and AirPods (which started awkwardly but gradually improved).

The more divisive Apple Vision Pro was likely designed under Hankey and Anderson's watchful eye. I do think it's a pleasant intersection between the needs of extremely high-end innovation and aesthetic appeal. Goggles will be goggles, after all.

Even iPhone design has remained, if not excellent, interesting.

The iPhone is still beautiful...discuss

When Apple introduced the first iPhone in 2007, there really was no other handset quite like it. Apple set the bar and, over the years, every other manufacturer followed. It became harder and harder for Apple to differentiate its metal and glass slab from its competitors. The ever-larger camera arrays have provided a sort of design challenge and an opportunity at the same time. Hankey and Anderson, at least, came up with a giant island that's quite recognizable from a distance. And let's not discount color. The orange was a stroke of genius and the new MacBook Neo's playful Blush and Citrus colors are lively, proving Anderson knows how to marry form with expression.

Ternus' role as hardware lead means he's been seeing these designs for years. My sense in sitting down with him after the launch of the iPhone Air is that he is intimately involved with the process of shoving all that technology into ever-thinner, but shockingly strong frames. He gets that you need to marry engineering skills with industrial design to get a durable and usable product that's still attractive.

When I think about what Ternus will do when he finally takes over in September, I am reminded of relay race runners. Cook continues to pace around the track while slowly holding out the baton behind him. Ternus is nearby, running just behind Cook with one hand outstretched. Neither man will stop. The handoff will happen in a few months, with everything still in motion.

The process of finishing the rumored iPhone Ultra (the folding phone) continues as we speak, and Ternus is not going to suddenly pull a Steve Jobs and throw the design into a fish tank, to see if bubbles rise, thus proving they could make it smaller. He won't demand that all plastic be replaced with glass, or even that one more color be added to the mix.

When, as the recent Bloomberg report claims, Ternus said of Apple's design history and appeal to customers, "We’re going to make sure that stays the case,” he's not talking about making huge changes to achieve that goal.

Ternus will stay the course and support Anderson. He may hire more design support and, down the line, Ternus will look for his signature initiative or product; he will want to have his own iPhone or iPod. But that's a natural inclination for any incoming CEO. Job one, though, is staying the course, shepherding the in-the-pipeline products to market and ensuring that Apple remains Apple.

I think Ternus knows exactly how to do that.

For the first time, archaeologists have analyzed the genetic material of Homo naledi, a mysterious 300,000-year-old relative of modern humans discovered deep in a South African cave system. What they found is unique in human evolution studies: Every skeleton known from the species is female.

"I think it is fair to say that they surprised us," Lee Berger, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, told Live Science in an email, but H. naledi "has always been an enigmatic discovery."

Since 2013, Berger has headed the Rising Star project, which discovered nearly two dozen skeletons of small-brained, two-legged creatures, which the research team named H. naledi, within a cave system in South Africa's Cradle of Humankind.

Research over the past decade has revealed that H. naledi was unusual for having a small brain and upper body, similar to earlier australopithecines like Lucy, but a face, hands and lower limbs that were more human-like. In 2023, the Rising Star team suggested H. naledi may have used fire in the cave, and in 2025, they advanced the controversial claim that H. naledi buried their dead — a complex behavior unexpected for a human relative with such a small brain.

But a new study of H. naledi teeth published Wednesday (June 24) in the journal Cell may bolster the team's interpretation of the Rising Star cave as a burial site.

An international team of experts studied 20 teeth from H. naledi skeletons using proteomic analysis, a minimally destructive technique that sequences genetic material from ancient proteins. Proteomics is a burgeoning field, especially because these proteins can last longer than DNA. The team focused on amelogenin genes (AMEL), which code for proteins in dental enamel and vary by sex. While the gene variant called AMELX is found in both males and females, another one, AMELY, is found only in biological males.

In analyzing the H. naledi teeth, the team found no AMELY genes but plenty of AMELX ones, suggesting that all of the skeletons were from females. These included the nearly complete skeleton of Neo and DH1, the main representative of the species, both originally assumed to be male.

The result is surprising because there are no known ancient human cemeteries or collections of nonhuman primate skeletons that contain only females.

"The most likely reason for these robust results are, in my opinion, cultural selection after death for burial by sex and perhaps gender," Berger said. "There are many past human societies with sex-specific burial practices," study co-author John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement, but the H. naledi skeletons "are older than any known Neanderthal or modern human burial site, and it's remarkable to see that they may all be female."

"An already weird hominin"

The discovery that everything we know about H. naledi comes from female skeletons has surprised paleoanthropologists.

"The bottom line is this is a weird result from an already weird hominin," Elizabeth Sawchuk, curator of human evolution at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "The key thing to remember is that failure to detect evidence of AMELY does not mean there are no males in the sample — it just means that none were detected."

One possible reason for the lack of this gene in H. naledi skeletons is an AMELY gene deletion that is known to occur very rarely in some modern-human populations and that has been found in one Neanderthal male. If the AMELY gene doesn't exist in this H. naledi group, then the protein profiles of males would look identical to the profiles of females.

However, "it's very unlikely that this would be the case among even half of the 20 individuals we studied or for an entire population," study co-author Enrico Cappellini, a paleoproteomics professor at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, said in the statement. "Either scenario, namely the absence of H. naledi males in the Rising Star cave system or a systematic deletion of their AMELY gene, is fascinating and would have deep implications for a better understanding of the biology and evolution of this species."

Studies of H. naledi, a species known from a single site, "continue to yield more questions than answers," Sawchuk said. "As the authors point out, this is a surprising result that requires more investigation."

Other hominins in South Africa

A second surprising result in the proteomic analysis was that H. naledi shares a gene variant with Paranthropus robustus, a human relative with a massive face and teeth that lived in South Africa around 1 million to 2 million years ago.

Proteomic analysis of four P. robustus skeletons in 2025 proved that limited genetic material could be recovered from ancient human relatives in Africa. The new study has revealed that some members of this species and H. naledi shared a gene variant related to collagen production, which is different from the genes found in modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans.

While H. naledi and P. robustus inhabited the same general geographic area, it is unclear if they lived there at the same time and overlapped or if they may have had an ancestor-descendant relationship.

"It is early days for sampling fossil hominins with ancient proteins, and until we build a better, bigger sample, we just don't know" what the shared genetic variant means, Berger said.

Building a larger database of ancient proteins from other human relatives that evolved in Africa, such as Australopithecus africanus and Homo erectus, may clarify where H. naledi fits into the picture of human evolution.

"Key data are missing from H. erectus and A. africanus that would help put this evidence into context," Sawchuk said. "For now, this is another curious finding that bears further investigation."

What does sex change?

In 2015, Berger and colleagues named the new hominin H. naledi and described what they presumed to be male and female variants of the species based on the skeletons' sizes. In many groups of human relatives and in modern humans, males are physically larger than females, on average. This assumption led the researchers to classify the presumed male individual DH1, discovered in the Dinaledi chamber of the cave, as the main representative of the new species.

But a 2024 study was the first to question the assumption that the H. naledi skeletons came from two sexes. In that study, researchers found variation in the teeth of H. naledi that was "so low that the possibility that one sex is represented by few or no individuals in the sample cannot be excluded," they wrote.

"Our study helps resolve the long-standing mystery of why Homo naledi lacked significant variation," study first author Palesa Madupe, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, said in the statement. "It's probably because they could have all belonged to one sex."

If the proteomic sex analysis is correct and H. naledi does not have AMELY deletion issues, it means everything we know about the species comes from females. But this doesn't mean interpretations of the species are wrong.

"The only thing that has changed is that we have never seen a male!" Berger said. "When and if we do, we will have to extend the description to include male sex characters and the likely extension of certain aspects of variation."

The researchers hope their study paves the way for more proteomic analyses of human relatives in the future.

The new analysis proves that protein analysis of fossils from the Pleistocene (2.58 million years ago to 11,700 years ago) can be done in a minimally destructive way, Madupe said. "This means potentially opening the door to a whole new way of sustainably investigating the differences between sexes in groups of extinct hominins and other animals without causing visible damage to these priceless fossils."

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