- PS Plus Games for July 2021 Revealed – IGN Daily Fix IGN
- PlayStation Plus games for July: Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, WWE 2K Battlegrounds, A Plague Tale: Innocence PlayStation.Blog
- Here Are The July 2021 PlayStation Plus Games Kotaku
- PlayStation Plus Games for July 2021 Announced – IGN IGN
- July’s PlayStation Plus games include ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’ Yahoo Tech
- View Full Coverage on Google News
TechNews
An intrepid YouTuber created a handheld that runs macOS Big Sur
Have you ever been using a recently updated Mac computer and thought, “Man, I would love to use this operating system with a really tiny keyboard and a really tiny screen?” Okay, me neither, but I certainly would love the opportunity to carry a MacBook around in my pocket and whip it out on command.
Apparently, YouTuber Ike T. Sanglay Jr., or “Iketsj,” has had this thought as well. In this eight-minute vlog, the YouTuber builds a tiny handheld PC that can run macOS Big Sur, and it’s very fun.
The PC includes a LattePanda Alpha SBC (single board computer) with an Intel Core m3 CPU and 8GB of RAM, as well as an Arduino Leonardo microcontroller board, a 240GB SATA SSD with the operating system preinstalled, and a 3D-printed case (of course). Watch as Sanglay winds cables, cleans screens, cuts screws, and plugs things into ports. The device comes together slowly but surely, to the tune of some serene music that’s much catchier than a YouTube background tune has any business being.
Sanglay eventually boots the thing up, and sure enough, macOS Big Sur is there. The battery indicator doesn’t appear to be working, but the interface otherwise seems fully operational in the limited footage we see.
Now, does this device have a real purpose in the working world? Probably not, and its creator admits as much. “Maybe you’ll say that the handheld macOS is not practical, yada yada yada. Well, sure, you’re right. I just want to make one for myself,” Sanglay notes on camera.
The YouTuber is also fully aware that the price of the parts required for this stunt comes out to more than the price of an actual M1 Mac Mini. “I know, but where’s the fun in that?” he says.
Still, as someone who’s long been an advocate of macOS in more creative and portable form factors, I am all in favor. While I can’t imagine actually using macOS on a screen this small, I love the idea of being able to carry its powerful functionality around in such a small package. Plus, it’s just a cute little device.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart – Zero Punctuation
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You may recall my first and only experience with Ratchet and Clank was playing that one on the PS4 that was tying in with the movie, and which made me go “Hm, is that the smell of distended rectum, or has this franchise gone completely up itself?” Always an occupational hazard when a series goes on too long, runs out of new territory to explore and instead decides to settle down and curl up inside its own bum. But what an excellent setting of tone for the latest one, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. Incidentally, speaking of bums, whatever happened to the tradition of Ratchet and Clank games having slightly risque subtitles like Going Commando or Up Your Arsenal in the grand Dreamworks movies Grabbed by the Ghoulies stealth joke for the mums and dads tradition? Suppose we’re above that kind of cheeky fun these days, aren’t we, Sony. Probably got nixed by someone in marketing whose only experience with comedy is having had it patiently explained to them at a mandatory seminar. I’m trying to think of ways the title “Rift Apart” could apply to bums but all the possibilities make me feel uncomfortable.
CORRECTION: (ahem) While rewatching this video prior to final upload, it occurred to me that “rift apart” might be intended as a sort of pseudo-spoonerism for “ripped a fart.” Which would be a bum joke and if that was intentional I hereby retract the preceding complaint about the subtitle not being a bum joke. I repeat, Ratchet and Clank’s issues may not presently be for want of bum jokes. We now resume your snarky internet video.
LG’s Mini LED TVs to release in the US starting in July
LG’s new range of Mini LED TVs, which it’s branding “QNED,” are releasing worldwide starting next month, the company has announced. The lineup consists of three sets, the 8K QNED99 and QNED95, and the 4K QNED90, ranging in size from 65- to 86-inches. LG says the TVs will launch first in North America, with additional regions following “in the weeks ahead.”
Mini LED is a relatively new kind of display technology which uses an array of thousands of tiny LEDs as a screen’s backlight. Because there are so many (up to 30,000 in the case of the 86-inch QNED99), they can create a sharper contrast between light and dark areas of an image. LG says the technology, which has previously been used on some TVs from TCL as well as Apple’s latest 12.9-inch iPad Pro, allows for “10 times better contrast ratio” than normal LCD TVs.
LG is marketing Mini LED as a “giant leap forward in LCD TV picture quality,” but it’s not quite at the level of an OLED TV, where its the individual pixels themselves that are illuminating to create an image (with Mini LED, the LEDs are still shining through an LCD layer). Mini LED should not be confused with Samsung’s outrageously expensive MicroLED technology, which also uses an array of tiny LEDs but without the need for an LCD layer at all.
We’ve reached out to LG to clarify pricing for its full lineup of QNED TVs (LG’s US site still lists them as “coming soon”) but based on a previous report from FlatPanelsHD they’re unlikely to come cheap. The 8K QNED99 will reportedly start at $5,000 for the 75-inch model, rising to $8,000 for the 86-inch version, while the 4K QNED90 will reportedly cost up to $4,000 for the 86-inch model.
Apple says in-person work is ‘essential’ and will not go back from its hybrid work plan
Earlier this month, Tim Cook announced in an internal memo that Apple is going to adopt a new hybrid work plan that will require employees to work in-person at least three days a week . While this has resulted in some controversy, the company reaffirmed that it has no plans to go back on its decision, as it considers in-person work “essential.”
In an internal video obtained by The Verge, Senior VP of Retail and People Deirdre O’Brien said that Apple believes that “in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future.” O’Brien also mentioned that the products and services introduced by Apple in the past have all been the result of in-person collaboration.
“If we take a moment to reflect on our unbelievable product launches this past year, the products and the launch execution were built upon the base of years of work that we did when we were all together in-person.”
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Apple had to close its offices in 2020, which resulted in more than a year of completely remote work. Now that the situation is better in the US, the company wants its employees to return to in-person work, but there’s a group of people who have taken a stand against this decision.
Employees have sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook asking the company to let them choose to work in-person or remote, but Apple is denying this request. As mentioned by the report, the company will consider each case individually, but the order now is to return to the office on the hybrid model.
Now, Apple is essentially denying that request, saying any remote work decisions will be made “on a case-by-case basis with any new remote positions requiring executive approval.”
Although a hybrid working model is part of a new, more relaxed approach from Apple, it’s still quite traditional when compared to other companies like Google and Facebook, which let their employees work remotely indefinitely.
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Apple isn’t backing down from its hybrid work model, according to internal note
Apple isn’t backing down from its hybrid work model that will require most employees to return to the office three days a week starting in early September. Fully remote positions will be extremely limited.
“We believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future,” said Deirdre O’Brien, senior vice president of retail and people, in a video recording viewed by The Verge. “If we take a moment to reflect on our unbelievable product launches this past year, the products and the launch execution were built upon the base of years of work that we did when we were all together in-person.”
The news comes nearly a month after Apple CEO Tim Cook sent out an email telling employees the company was rolling out a new work model that would require them to return to in-office work on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays starting in the fall.
In the wake of that announcement, Apple employees wrote a letter saying some employees had been forced to quit because of the policy, and asking Cook to change his stance. They asked that all teams be given the option to work remotely, noting “without the inclusivity that flexibility brings, many of us feel we have to choose between either a combination of our families, our well-being, and being empowered to do our best work, or being a part of Apple.”
Now, Apple is essentially denying that request, saying any remote work decisions will be made “on a case-by-case basis with any new remote positions requiring executive approval.”
World of Warcraft Shadowlands: Chains of Domination – Official Launch Trailer – IGN
- World of Warcraft Shadowlands: Chains of Domination – Official Launch Trailer IGN
- World of Warcraft’s new patch, Chains of Domination, is now live Polygon
- Chains of Domination – Launch Trailer World of Warcraft
- World of Warcraft Patch 9.1, Chains of Domination, now live Dot Esports
- World of Warcraft’s new Shadowlands raid finally lets us fight Sylvanas Polygon
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Dark Alliance – Official Launch Cinematic Trailer – IGN
Windows 11 will leave millions of PCs behind, and Microsoft is struggling to explain why
Microsoft has had six years to prepare for the launch of Windows 11, but the company is still struggling to explain its new hardware requirements. Windows 11 will officially support Intel 8th Gen Coffee Lake or Zen 2 CPUs and up, leaving behind millions of PCs that were sold during the launch of Windows 10.
It’s an unusual surprise if you purchased a new PC for Windows 10, or perhaps you have a perfectly capable machine that’s even older. Windows 11 will require Intel 8th Gen Coffee Lake or Zen 2 CPUs and up, TPM 2.0 (Trusted Platform Module) support, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage.
Microsoft doesn’t typically enforce such specific processor requirements with Windows — with both Windows 8 and Windows 10 only requiring a 1GHz processor, 1GB of RAM (2GB for 64-bit), and 16GB of storage (20GB for 64-bit). Power users of Windows, and IT admins alike, have built up an expectation of being able to upgrade to the latest OS, regardless of what hardware they’re running. It looks like that’s about to end with Windows 11.
After much confusion last week, Microsoft attempted to explain its hardware requirements again yesterday, and it sounds like the main driver behind these changes is security. Coupled with Microsoft’s hardware requirements is a push to enable a more modern BIOS (UEFI) that supports features like Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 (Trusted Platform Module).
When you combine TPM with some of the virtualization technologies that Microsoft uses in Windows, there’s an understandable security benefit that we’ve discussed in detail previously. Microsoft claims that a combination of Windows Hello, Device Encryption, virtualization-based security, hypervisor-protected code integrity (HVCI), and Secure Boot “has been shown to reduce malware by 60 percent.”
You obviously need modern hardware to enable all these protections, and Microsoft has been building toward this moment for years. TPM support has been a requirement for OEMs to gain Windows certification since around the release of Windows 10, but Microsoft hasn’t forced businesses or consumers to enable it.
Microsoft’s decision to force Windows 11 users into TPM, Secure Boot, and more comes at a pivotal moment for Windows. It’s Microsoft’s operating system that’s always caught up in ransomware and malware attacks, and things are only going to get worse if the level of Windows hardware security doesn’t go up a notch.
That delicate balance of security and the typical openness of Windows is something that Microsoft will struggle with over the next decade, as it wrestles with modernizing Windows and the understandable backlash. While Microsoft is waiving its new hardware requirements during the preview phase of Windows 11, we still don’t know exactly what devices will be supported when it launches later this year.
Microsoft tried to offer some more clarity around this yesterday, but it wasn’t the level of detail we were hoping for. “As we release to Windows Insiders and partner with our OEMs, we will test to identify devices running on Intel 7th generation and AMD Zen 1 that may meet our principles,” says a blog post from the Windows team. That could be good news for the Surface Studio 2, a $3,499 device that Microsoft still sells with a 7th Gen chip that’s not on the Windows 11 list.
This same blog post also revealed that 7th Gen is probably as far back as Microsoft is willing to concede. “We also know that devices running on Intel 6th generation and AMD pre-Zen will not” meet Microsoft’s minimum system requirements, said the blog post before it was edited to remove this line. It’s not clear why Intel’s 6th Gen chips are definitely off the list, but part of this decision could be related to Spectre and Meltdown — two major computer processor security bugs that affected nearly every device made for 20 years.
“Microsoft’s CPU selections for Windows 11 don’t appear much at all to do with performance but look like security mitigations for side-channel attacks,” says Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. “It also helps chipmakers focus driver work on the future, not the past.”
Side-channel attacks like Spectre and Meltdown were revealed just before Intel implemented hardware mitigations to protect against some speculative execution attacks in some 8th Gen chips in 2018. Not all of Intel’s 8th Gen chips include these hardware mitigations, though, but Microsoft has set a specific cutoff of 8th Gen and beyond. Microsoft hasn’t fully explained that decision, and the company is now telling people to wait and see if it’s able to include more older machines during its testing. Either way, there’s going to be a CPU cutoff that will affect millions of PCs.
Critics of Microsoft’s approach note that this move will generate unnecessary e-waste as consumers move to upgrade PCs that are more than capable of running Windows 11. The complexities of TPM and UEFI are also being debated by IT admins, particularly if devices aren’t set up to use these technologies yet.
Security expert Kevin Beaumont, who spent nearly a year working at Microsoft during the pandemic, has criticized the company over its Windows 11 hardware requirements. “In the middle of a pandemic when orgs are hurting, with a global chip shortage, Microsoft [is] trying to get people to replace things for security reasons that are questionable,” said Beaumont on Twitter. “Buy a Surface? No. Make a better OS.”
In the middle of a pandemic when orgs are hurting, with a global chip shortage, MS are trying to get people to replace things for security reasons that are questionable.
Buy a Surface? No. Make a better OS.
— Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) June 28, 2021
Microsoft’s hardware changes also arrive just weeks after Apple announced macOS Monterey, with support for Mac Pros sold in late 2013 and beyond, and Mac Minis sold from late 2014 onward. Apple obviously doesn’t have to support a massive range of hardware configurations like Microsoft does, but the latest version of macOS will still run on systems that are eight years old. Microsoft’s changes mean that some PCs that are only three years old will be excluded from the Windows 11 upgrade.
There will be some exceptions to Microsoft’s new rules, though. “Windows 11 does not apply the hardware-compliance check for virtualized instances either during setup or upgrade,” notes a Microsoft document (PDF) on minimum hardware requirements for Windows 11. That means if you run Windows 11 as a virtual machine, you can ignore the CPU and security requirements. That flies in the face of Microsoft’s big security push here, but the reality is that most consumers and commercial customers won’t be running Windows 11 in a VM.
Microsoft still has a few months left to test Windows 11, and feedback from the preview will inform “any adjustments [Microsoft] should make to our minimum system requirements in the future.” The software maker has also removed its PC Health Check app that led to a lot of confusion around Windows 11 upgrades. “We acknowledge that it was not fully prepared to share the level of detail or accuracy you expected from us on why a Windows 10 PC doesn’t meet upgrade requirements,” says the Windows team.
That gives Microsoft some breathing room between now and launch, and enough time for testers to play with Windows 11 free from these new restrictions. But if you’re testing Windows 11 right now on an older CPU that’s not on the official list, the chances are you’ll need to reinstall Windows 10 at the end of the preview period.
Microsoft is allowing testers to access Windows 11 on a wide range of hardware during the preview, but it’s planning to apply these new restrictions at launch. I would be surprised if there is a major change to these hardware requirements later this year, other than Microsoft stepping down to some 7th Gen chips. So enjoy testing Windows 11 while you still can.
Dell’s versatile UltraSharp 4K webcam uses AI to keep you in the frame
Dell has launched the high-end UltraSharp webcam that costs $199.99 and is available now worldwide. Its cylindrical design is reminiscent of Apple’s old but iconic iSight external webcam, but its features are aimed to compete with Logitech’s Brio and other modern 4K-ready webcams. In addition, it aims to serve as a more affordable and easier-to-set up alternative to mounting a DSLR camera behind your monitor.
The UltraSharp is a USB-C webcam that houses a Sony STARVIS CMOS 8.3-megapixel sensor. It’s capable of recording or streaming in 4K at 30 or 24 frames per second and in 1080p or 720p at 24, 30, or 60 frames per second. You can tweak the field of view (FOV) between 65 degrees for a close crop, 78 degrees, or 90 degrees for the widest crop available. The webcam has a bevy of auto-light correction features that aim to make your picture look good regardless of your lighting. It supports up to 5x digital zoom and has autofocus. Dell claims the UltraSharp offers the best image quality in its class.
This webcam can work without drivers on Windows 10 or macOS computers, but many of its features are accessible only in Dell’s Peripheral Manager software. One of the most appealing features that the software unlocks is the AI auto-framing mode that lets it follow your movements to keep you centered in the frame. The webcam doesn’t actually move, but the video feed appeared to pan and deliver smooth, seamless motion tracking during a live demo shown to The Verge. (The GIF below is an accurate portrayal.) A similar feature has appeared recently in Amazon’s new Echo Show smart displays and the latest iPad Pro, and it’s a perk that currently sets Dell’s webcam apart from the rest.
Other noteworthy features include its infrared sensor that can log you in to your PC via Windows Hello facial recognition. It also has a proximity sensor that, on Dell PCs, can take advantage of the company’s Express Sign-In feature that can log you in and out automatically depending on whether you’re sitting at your PC or not.
The UltraSharp includes a standard monitor mount as well as a tripod mount. It can connect magnetically to either one. (There’s also a magnetic lens cap included.) The monitor mount seems like it’ll be a solid option for most — even for people who own monitors with the slimmest of bezels. And for streamers or people who are looking for a specific angle, it’s great to have the option to easily put it on a tripod.
But $199.99 isn’t cheap for a webcam, and I haven’t even gotten to its biggest omission: it doesn’t have an internal microphone. Dell said it was focused primarily on optics for this model, so you’ll need to source your own microphone — whether that’s a standalone USB or XLR mic or a headset. That might be a deal-breaker for some, but mic aside, this one’s stacked with enough thoughtful features that might make it worth the price still. We’ll be testing this one, so check back for more in-depth impressions soon.