Technology

I’m generally a person who appreciates physical media. I collect vinyl records, buy print books, and like to watch 4K Blu-ray movies. But for a variety of reasons, I switched entirely to buying digital games on each platform as soon as the option became available. Now that Sony and Microsoft have revealed their next-generation consoles in full, a lot more people may well choose to do the same. To recap, yesterday Sony announced the pricing for its upcoming PlayStation 5 — both the regular model and the disc-less Digital Edition. The standard PS5 is $499.99 and the otherwise identical Digital Edition is $399.99, saving you a full $100 if you swear off physical games for good. Microsoft, meanwhile, has gone even further to incentivize digital game purchases and Game Pass subscriptions. The S...

Microsoft revealed its Xbox Series S console last week, aiming to offer more budget-friendly next-gen gaming for $299. The console is specifically targeted at 1440p resolution rather than 4K, leading to some lingering questions and confusion around just how well it will play next-gen games. There are concerns around the GPU performance, memory, and whether the Series S could hold back next-gen gaming. I got a chance to speak with Jason Ronald, Microsoft’s director of Xbox program management, to dig into what’s really going on with the Xbox Series S. The biggest difference between the larger Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S, apart from the size and design, is the GPU inside. The Xbox Series S has 4 teraflops of GPU performance, compared to the 12.15 teraflops on the Xbox Series X. The sm...

iRobot has announced a pair of new midrange vacuum cleaners that have some of the perks of its top-range models but a few compromises, too. They are the $599 i3 Plus, which comes with the company’s automatic bin-emptying station, capable of holding 60 days’ worth of dirt, and the plain old $399 i3, which has no emptying station but is otherwise identical. The big drawback for these vacuums compared with iRobot’s pricier models — the i7 Plus and i7 ($799 / $599 with and without automatic emptying) and s9 Plus and s9 ($899 / $1,099, ditto) — is that they don’t include the company’s smart mapping features. This allows the Roombas to map your house so you can tell them to clean specific rooms and even specific areas of specific rooms (like “under the kitchen table” or “under the sofa”). That p...

Nintendo has discontinued every model of the 3DS, according to its Japanese website. The page listings for the New 3DS LL, New 2DS LL, and 2DS are still live, but each product lists “out of production” under its name, and a message on the main page says that the entire series has ended production. It’s not clear when the change was made; several Japanese Twitter users noticed it this afternoon. Nintendo’s US site, meanwhile, appears to have scrubbed all mention of the 3DS sometime in the past few hours. The homepage doesn’t feature the handheld console at all other than a support link all the way at the bottom — under a similar link for the definitely-dead Wii U. Nintendo shipped more than 75 million 3DS consoles worldwide The 3DS was announced in 2010 and released the following year. It s...

Sony is continuing its refresh of its smartphone line to focus on photography and video with the new Xperia 5 II. It’s the smaller sibling of the very tall and weirdly expensive Xperia 1 II, and this newer phone betters it in several regards. It’s cheaper, for one thing, going on sale on September 29th for $949. The other major improvement is that Sony has put in a high-refresh-rate 120Hz panel. Oddly, though, Sony says it’s not shipping until December 4th and even more oddly, it will have 5G but won’t work with the 5G networks in the US — just like the Xperia 1 II. The basic idea of the Xperia 5 II is that it’s a phone with a tall 21:9 screen, but it’s relatively small at 6.1-inches. That sounds big, but since it’s so tall it works out to only about 2.68 inches wide. It’s a much more pock...

Social networks contain multitudes. One day you’re writing about internal dissent over the company’s ability to uproot influence campaigns and election interference; the very next, you’re watching a live stream of the same company’s foray into virtual reality helmets and designer mixed reality glasses. At a company with as many interests as Facebook has, different days call for different kinds of stories. And so today’s edition will be a lot different from yesterday’s. This is all a roundabout way of saying that I talked to Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook Connect. The event, which was previously called Oculus Connect, gives the company an annual opportunity to discuss the latest advances in next-generation computing platforms. Facebook has sometimes faced doubts over why a social network wo...

Sony ended its presentation today with the long-awaited price and release date for the PS5 — but stopped short of telling gamers when and where to buy one, until a tweet seemed to make things clearer: pre-orders would begin tomorrow on September 17th. Or so it seemed for an hour or two. Now, it’s become an utter mess. Perhaps eager to capitalize on the demand, retailers quickly turned the pre-order situation into a free-for-all, opening the floodgates a day early and allowing the quickest and savviest buyers to swoop in. Some called or walked into their local GameStop to secure a pre-order a day early, or seemingly lucked out with one of Walmart’s listings for the PS5 and PS5 Digital Edition. Walmart even gleefully tweeted that it was pushing the console out ahead of schedule: Soon, GameSt...

Sony revealed the PlayStation 5’s price and release date ($399 for the all-digital version, and $499 for the one with a disc drive, both out on November 12th), as well as the company’s six launch titles that will be available at release. That’s not a huge lineup, and you might be wondering if you can play some of your PS4 collection on your new PS5 as more games become available — and fortunately, it seems like there’s a good chance you will. The new console is “99 percent” backward compatible with the PS4 games the company has tested on it so far, Sony PlayStation boss Jim Ryan said in an interview with The Washington Post. In March, Sony said it believed the “overwhelming majority” of PS4 games would be backward compatible with the PS5, so hearing that “99 percent” should work on the new...

Sony’s PlayStation 5 opened pre-orders today, and it’s an utter fiasco so far — there was no communication about when, where, or how to get one without competing with scalpers. But perhaps we can help you get your hands on Nvidia’s new RTX 3080 graphics card, a GPU that finally powers 4K 60fps gaming or better for $700? Truth be told, we don’t know when precisely these orders will begin, but it should be sometime between now and the end of day tomorrow, since September 17th is launch day. But we do know where you might want to look: Amazon, Best Buy, and Newegg all have dedicated landing pages that list all the cards they plan to sell — though do note that they’re mostly third-party designs from the likes of EVGA, MSI, and Gigabyte, each with different coolers than the ones you’ll find on ...

Sony has confirmed its PlayStation 5 first-party launch lineup, as well as confirming some details around PS4 versions of its exclusive titles and how the transition from current-gen to next-gen will work. In a blog post published after revealing the price of both of its upcoming consoles (the standard for $499.99 and the digital edition without a disc drive for $399.99), Sony says it has six launch titles confirmed for the PS5 on November 12th. Here’s the full list, including pricing and confirmation for the first time that Sony intends to raise the price on some exclusive titles by $10 to a max of $69.99: Astro’s Playroom (Japan Studio) – pre-installed on PS5 Demon’s Souls (Bluepoint Games / Japan Studio) – $69.99 Destruction All Stars (Lucid Games / XDEV) – $69.99 Marvel’s Spider-Man: M...

Alongside the reveal of the PlayStation 5’s $399 and $499 price tags and November 12th release date, Sony also announced how much the various accessories for the upcoming console will cost. The most important price is that of Sony’s new DualSense controller, which will cost $69.99 for additional gamepads. That’s a $10 increase compared to the $59.99 MSRP for the DualShock 4 — apparently all the fancy haptic feedback technology and adaptive triggers that Sony is adding don’t come cheap. And the charging station, which can recharge two DualSense controllers at once, is set to cost $29.99. Meanwhile, the Pulse 3D wireless headset — which will support Sony’s big push for 3D audio — is set to cost $99.99, while the PlayStation 5’s media remote will cost $29.99. Lastly, the HD Camera, which feat...

Over the last several months, I have seen a great many comparisons of fabrics that can be used to construct homemade face masks to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, but I have not seen anyone discuss the use of live snakes. I assume it is because of this crucial omission that a man boarded a UK bus using a live snake as his face covering. Snakes are adorable, so I understand the temptation. However, it is worth considering that a good face mask needs to be made of a breathable material, and a live snake, unfortunately, is not that. Because this man cannot breathe through his snake, which looks to my non-expert eye like a ball python, he is inhaling and exhaling through the gaps around the snake’s body — which means his breath isn’t being filtered at all. “Do not kiss or snuggle with rep...