Tech
The Best Puffer Jackets for Packable, Stuffable Warmth
Mountain Hardware’s Ghost Whisperer UL hoodie has been a popular pick among ultralight backpackers since it was introduced a few years ago. It remains the best puffer jacket for anyone trying to shave every last ounce off their pack weight. It weighs just 6.7 ounces for a men’s medium (7.3 ounces for the men’s large I tested), packs down to a tiny little thing (stuffing into its own pocket), and the 1,000-fill-power goose down offers one of the best warmth-to-weight ratios on the market. The very lightweight shell material is a mix of 5D and 7D ripstop nylon, which is a bit more fragile than heavier jackets, but it has held up well so far in my testing. I can safely say that the Ghost Whisper UL is everything I ever wanted in an ultralight down puffer and then some.
What sets it apart from some other very nice puffers out there are the little details. First there’s the 1.9 ounces of 1,000-fill-power down, which is as high a fill power as you’ll find in a jacket of this class, meaning you’re getting the maximum warmth and loft that you can for the least amount of weight. My only caveat for this jacket would be, if you are the type of person who gets cold easily, you might want something with a bit more fill. The classic Ghost Whisperer Down Hoody (not the ultralight) has 3 ounces of 800 fill power and is slightly warmer in most scenarios, the trade-off being it’s heavier as well (about 9 ounces for a men’s medium). Also check out the Katabatic Gear puffer below, which is considerably warmer. I do not get cold easily, and I have found the Ghost Whisperer UL works well for me as a warm layer to throw on in camp at high elevation is summer, a mid-layer for hiking in cold conditions, and a mid-layer under the Rab Glaceon Pro in extreme cold.
Other details that make the Ghost Whisperer UL our top pick for ultralight hiking include two very nice zippered hand pockets with a good amount of space to stash little stuff like a three-season hat and some gloves, along with an adjustable drawstring at the waist to keep drafts out. I also love how small this thing packs down, well under the size of a 1L bottle (see photo). It packs into its own left pocket with a reversible zipper, although it will stuff down even smaller if you get a separate stuff sack.
My only gripe about this jacket is that there’s no drawstrings. The hood, cuffs, and waist hem are all elastic. This works fine for the cuffs and hood, but I wish there were a drawstring for the waist. For this reason, if I am expecting temps below 40, I bring a heavier puffer. The rest of the time, this is what you’ll find in my backpack. Note that I found the fit to be a little small. According to the fit guide on the Mountain Hardware website, I am right between medium and large. I tried both and found the large fit much better.
| Specs | |
|---|---|
| Down fill power | 1,000 |
| Fill weight | 1.9 oz. |
| Weight | 6.7 oz. |
Great iPad Accessories
iPad accessories are endless. Below, we’ve highlighted some of our favorites to round out your tablet experience, and you can find more in our Best iPad Accessories guide.
Zugu Case for $50+: This is our favorite folio case for the iPad for multiple reasons. It’s not only durable (complete with a rigid bumper), but it also has a magnetized cover that stays shut and a flap that allows you to position the screen at eight different angles. The case is magnetic, allowing you to stick it on the fridge securely. It’s also reasonably priced, comes in an array of colors, and has a spot for your Apple Pencil.
Satechi M1 Wireless Mouse for $30: We’re already big fans of Satechi’s accessories at WIRED, and this mouse didn’t disappoint. It has a comfortable ergonomic design, a sleek aluminum finish, and smooth scrolling. It has great battery life too—with a built-in lithium-ion battery, I’ve been using it for the past four months and have yet to charge it.
Mageasy CoverBuddy Case (iPad Pro) for $70: This case allows you to magnetically connect it to Apple’s Magic Keyboard case without having to take off the case each time. It feels durable and doesn’t add too much bulk to the iPad. There’s also a slot for the Apple Pencil Pro or the USB-C version. The company also offers the CoverBuddy Lite for the iPad Air (M2).
-SOURCE-Brenda-Stolyar.jpg)
Photograph: Brenda Stolyar
Logitech Combo Touch (10th-Gen) for $260: The Combo Touch (8/10, WIRED Recommends) comes with a built-in keyboard, trackpad, and kickstand, making it ideal for getting work done on your iPad. It’s also detachable, so you can easily remove the keyboard when you don’t need it. It connects via Apple’s Smart Connector, meaning you never need to tinker with Bluetooth or bother charging it. It’s also available for the iPad Pro (M4) and M5 (although it does add a bit of weight to such a thin tablet) and the iPad Air (M2).
Casetify Impact Screen Protector for $56: If you’re worried about damaging your iPad screen, I recommend this protector from Casetify. It’s super thin, has excellent touch sensitivity, and is mostly fingerprint-resistant (I’ve wiped some smudges here and there). It’s painless to apply—the company supplies a microfiber cloth, a de-dusting sticker, and wet and dry wipes.
Paperlike Charcoal Folio Case for $65: Paperlike is known for its screen protector, but the company also offers a great case. It’s designed to feel like a sketchbook, complete with a polyester fabric cover that feels lightweight and high-quality. You can also prop your iPad up at two different levels. It doesn’t come with an Apple Pencil slot, but there is a large flap closure that keeps it from falling out. I tested it with the iPad Air, but it’s also available for the iPad Pro (both sizes).
Twelve South StayGo Mini USB-C Hub for $60: Ports are limited regardless of the iPad model. This hub from Twelve South has an 85-watt USB-C port with passthrough charging, a USB-A port, an HDMI port, and a headphone jack. If you have trouble fitting it on an iPad with a case, the included socket-USB-C-to-plug-USB-C cable will fix this.
Apple Magic Trackpad (USB-C) for $120: For a spacious trackpad, the Magic Trackpad 2 is a great choice. Instead of physical buttons, it has Force Touch sensors where you can feel different levels of pressure on the pad. With support for various iPadOS gestures, you won’t have to touch the screen as much. It automatically pairs with your iPad via Bluetooth and recharges with the Lightning port.
Logitech K380 Bluetooth Keyboard for $40: If you prefer an external keyboard, it’s hard to go wrong with the Logitech K380. It’s lightweight and portable and can be connected to up to three devices via Bluetooth (with dedicated buttons to switch between them). The keyboard is powered by AAA batteries, which lasted us around four months, so you don’t have to worry about carrying a charger around.
Twelve South HoverBar Duo 2.0 for $80: The HoverBar serves two purposes. You can mount it to the side of your bed, kitchen counter, or shelf (to view content comfortably and hands-free), or you can use the included stand at your desk. With the 2nd-gen version, you can now remove the arm from the clamp and attach it directly to the stand, making it easier to swap between both modes.
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Tech
Pure Storage rebrands to Everpure as storage maker’s business expands focus to data management | Computer Weekly
Pure Storage has rebranded to Everpure. The one-time flash storage hardware supplier characterised the move as an “expansion of the brand” based on the growing importance of data management. It will coincide with the addition of functionality to increase visibility “inside” data and enhance customer control over datasets.
Pure founder and chief technology officer (CTO) John “Coz” Colgrove summed up the company’s evolution from a provider of storage hardware to an ever-greater involvement in managing data.
“Everybody’s very focused on how to use their data more effectively, especially for AI [artificial intelligence]. They need to understand what data they have, where it is, what’s in the data, what the provenance of the data is,” he said.
“We’ve been around 16 years and started out completely focused on data storage,” added Colgrove. “As we started doing more with [Pure’s] Enterprise Data Cloud and Pure 1, we’ve moved up the stack to where we’re doing more around governance of the data, tracking the data, understanding the data, managing the data, rather than just storing it.”
Colgrove emphasised that Pure will “leave nothing behind”. It will still sell data storage products, but recognised that for the C-level executives in enterprises, the conversation goes beyond that.
“Conversation with customers is moving up to a higher level,” he said. “If you’re a senior executive, you don’t care about how many gigabytes a second we get out of this, whether it’s connected by Fibre Channel or Ethernet, is it NVMe, or RDMA enabled.”
“What you care about is, where’s my data? Who has access to it? How is it protected? What’s stored in each piece of data? What am I letting my AI use? What am I training my AI on? We’re focusing on these conversations around the data, how it flows through different systems, where it originated, what is actually in it, where it’s allowed to be stored physically in the world.”
Pure already has some functionality in these areas. At its Accelerate event in June 2025, it launched Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC).
EDC effectively bundles existing Pure Storage architectural elements, which include its Purity storage operating system (OS), common to all the company’s arrays; Fusion, which allows discovery and management of storage resources; Pure1, which allows for fleet management in terms of performance and detailed management of resources; and Evergreen, which is the company’s consumption purchasing offering that allows for as-a-service procurement.
Now, with the rebrand to Everpure, the company promises more functionality to help customers understand their data, which will be released starting this year.
“New capabilities that we will come out with will look inside the data to understand what is actually in the data, so that then becomes data management and governance,” said Colgrove.
“We will add new capabilities and improve this for several years. We’ve shipped some of the basic capabilities already this past year in EDC. We will have a number of features coming out that support this direction in Pure1, and we’re putting more engineers on it than we have before.”
Pure Storage will begin trading as Everpure on the New York Stock Exchange on 5 March 2026.
ChatGPT, launched in 2022, began making a significant impact on the market by late 2023, according to Synergy Research Group. The company’s chief analyst, John Dinsdale, points out that cloud market leaders have experienced accelerated revenue growth over time. Additionally, the emergence of numerous neocloud companies (see box: What is a neocloud?) has further strengthened the already positive momentum in the market.
This sentiment is reflected in the Rethinking AI sovereignty whitepaper, published to coincide with the World Economic Forum, which notes that surging demand for compute is spawning new AI infrastructure development models, such as neocloud providers, national cloud providers and industry-specific artificial intelligence (AI) clouds. While hyperscalers offer global reach and full-service cloud ecosystems, neoclouds provide specialised, high-performance compute infrastructure tailored to AI training and deployment.
This surge in demand for AI acceleration has seen a surprising benefactor. According to Tiger Research, cryptocurrency mining firms, seeking to reduce their exposure to bitcoin’s volatile pricing, are redirecting their graphics processing unit (GPU) farms toward AI acceleration applications.
One example is the Australian bitcoin mining company, Iris Energy. In 2021/2022, Neel Khokhani, a Dubai-based fund manager, acquired shares in the small Australian datacentre for $1 per share. By assisting the company in leveraging its substantial physical assets to transition into an AI infrastructure provider, the share price surged to $63 by 2026. This transformation led to a $60m increase in the company’s valuation, which is now operating under the name Iren.
More choice
Before the emergence of neoclouds a few years ago, if an organisation wanted to work with AI, it had no choice but to go to a hyperscaler like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google. While the hyperscalers offer AI infrastructure as part of their vast public cloud services portfolio, Roy Illsley, chief analyst at Omdia, says the hyperscalers tend to be expensive and, as he recalls, a few years ago, there was very little choice other than Google’s AI offerings.
Analyst firm Gartner estimates that by 2030, neocloud providers will capture around 20% of the $267bn AI cloud market. Neoclouds are purpose-built cloud providers designed for GPU-intensive AI workloads. They are not a replacement for hyperscalers, but a structural correction to how AI infrastructure is built, bought and consumed. Their rise signals a deeper shift in the cloud market: AI workloads are forcing infrastructure to unbundle again.
In a recent Computer Weekly article, Mike Dorosh, a senior director analyst at Gartner, said IT buyers face three interrelated constraints, which influence their AI infrastructure decisions. First, there is what Dorosh calls cost opacity, which he says is rising as GPU pricing becomes increasingly bundled and variable, often inflated by overprovisioning and long reservation commitments that assume steady-state usage. Then there are supply bottlenecks, which he says constrain access to advanced AI accelerators. This results in long lead times, regional shortages and limited visibility into future availability. For Dorosh, the third area of concern for IT buyers is performance trade-offs, where virtualisation layers and shared tenancy reduce predictability for latency-sensitive training and inference workloads.
According to Dorosh, these pressures are no longer marginal. They create a market opening that neoclouds are designed to fill.
One example of a neocloud provider is CoreWeave, which the authors of the Rethinking AI sovereignty report say is undergoing a capacity expansion, having secured funding of $25bn since 2024. AI infrastructure buildout is also expanding through national cloud providers such as Humain (Saudi Arabia), G42 (United Arab Emirates), Outscale (France) and StackIT (Germany).
Another neocloud company that has been making headlines is Nscale, which has committed to delivering approximately 12,600 Nvidia GB300 GPUs at the Start Campus datacentre in Sines, Portugal, in the first quarter of 2026. This multi-year agreement sees Nscale offering Nvidia AI infrastructure services to Microsoft while providing European customers with sovereign AI within the European Union.
This deal builds on plans announced by Nscale and Microsoft in September 2025 to deliver the UK’s largest Nvidia AI supercomputer at Nscale’s Loughton AI Campus. The 50MW facility, scalable to 90MW, is expected to house approximately 23,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs from the first quarter of 2027 to power Microsoft Azure services.
Gartner’s Neoclouds: The next offering arrow in the service provider quiver report notes that the consumption-based economics and transparent pricing offered by neocloud providers address the overprovisioning and hidden costs often associated with the offerings from hyperscalers. In fact, Gartner reports that by offering transparent, usage-based billing, IT buyers can expect to see cost savings of 60-70% on GPU instances compared with hyperscalers.
However, Dorosh says the more significant change is architectural rather than financial. Neoclouds encourage organisations to make explicit decisions about AI workload placement. Training, fine-tuning, inference, simulation and agent execution each have distinct performance, cost and locality requirements. Treating them as interchangeable cloud workloads is increasingly inefficient and often unnecessarily expensive.
As a result, AI infrastructure strategies are becoming inherently hybrid and multicloud by design – not as a by-product of supplier sprawl, but as a deliberate response to workload reality. The cloud market is fragmenting along functional lines, and neoclouds occupy a clear and growing role within that landscape.
“Neoclouds started as GPU as a service. If you needed GPUs, these companies bought or leased GPUs from Nvidia, and then they would slice them and sell them off to people in smaller groups and bundles,” says Omdia’s Illsley.
However, over time, neocloud providers have added software stacks and developed other services to meet the demand of IT buyers who need GPU power and the software stack required for AI training or AI inferencing.
Getting started on deploying AI workloads for inference or training is arguably not as simple as the one-click option offered on something like the AWS Marketplace, Illsley says the neocloud providers are maturing to a point where they have partnered with AI software providers and can therefore offer a full set of services to meet the requirements of IT buyers who need AI compute capacity. “They are saying that they have GPUs and now provide access through partnerships to the software to run AI workloads,” he says.
As an example, CoreWeave and Nvidia recently expanded their relationship to accelerate CoreWeave’s build-out of more than 5GW of AI factory capacity by 2030. Along with the hardware commitment, according to a market insight report from Macquarie Group, the agreement shows that CoreWeave is also working with Nvidia to incorporate its AI-native software within Nvidia’s reference architectures for Nvidia’s enterprise clients and cloud partners.
One neocloud benefit identified by Gartner is access for IT buyers to specialised hardware, since neoclouds tend to prioritise cutting-edge GPUs, often securing first-to-market access through strategic partnerships. They also cater to bare-metal performance and optimised networking, since neoclouds are able to eliminate the layers of server virtualisation needed in multi-tenanted hyperscaler installations. Instead, they are able to offer direct hardware access, which Gartner says reduces latency and makes it possible to deploy high-bandwidth connectivity such as NVLink and InfiniBand for optimal GPU-to-GPU communication.
Choosing between a neocloud and a hyperscaler
While they may have begun as GPU-as-a-service type offerings, the evolution of neoclouds means there is now less of a gap between their AI services and the full-blown AI platform offerings from the hyperscalers.
Clearly, hyperscalers will eventually offer more attractive pricing to compete with neoclouds, but as Gartner senior director analyst Rene Buest points out, neocloud providers are trying to deliver more predictable pricing.
“Hyperscalers are very transparent in terms of their pricing models, so pay as you go, but at the end of the month, you don’t really know what you will pay,” he says. In other words, when using hyperscaler IT infrastructure, the monthly cost of compute resources consumed cannot be determined in advance.
IT leaders can benefit, at least in Buest’s view, from 70% cost savings by choosing a neocloud over a hyperscaler. “They also provide instant direct access to advanced GPUs, which tend to outpace the hyperscalers in speed and transparency,” he says.
Buest says neoclouds are very niche, “providing purpose-built infrastructure for AI workloads”. This not only meets customer demand today, but also suggests that neoclouds will be viable in the foreseeable future.
Khokhani’s successful investment in the former bitcoin miner Iris Energy, now known as Iren, suggests that the long-term AI capacity contracts secured by neocloud providers indicate a stable and robust business model.
He says: “People still think of Iren through a bitcoin-mining lens, but that misses what the business has become. What attracted me was the transition to long-dated, contracted datacentre infrastructure. When you have multi-year take-or-pay style contracts with an investment-grade counterparty like Microsoft, the economic risk starts to resemble infrastructure credit rather than crypto volatility.”
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