This week, on a more focused episode of The TT Show, Jak and Kosta break down and go through the crazy Helldivers 2 controversy on PC. If you were offline for a few days (and this all played out throughout a single weekend), the decision to force the Helddivers 2's PC players to link their Steam Account to a PlayStation Network (PSN) account caused a veritable backlash storm.

From the review bombing to developers being grilled to Sony and developer Arrowhead's damage control to the surprisingly swift happy ending, Jak and Kosta discuss the implications and consider what might happen in the aftermath.

This week's other big story comes from the world of Apple, with the company lifting the lid on its new iPad Pro lineup powered by the new AI-powered 3 nanometer M4 chip. The big thing here is that it represents Apple's first dip into the world of OLED displays, with a groundbreaking 1000-nit SDR and HDR screen that has two OLED panels in one!

The last few weeks have been full to the brim with rumors of impending AI improvements coming to the iPhone and other Apple platforms. Those improvements have so far revolved around new features coming to existing apps like Messages, Notes, and others. But now a New York Times report hints at a big improvement coming to one aspect of the iPhone that really does need it.

Siri has been around since 2011 but it has proven to be lacking in a variety of ways, especially when compared with more modern alternatives like ChatGPT from Open AI and Google's Gemini generative AI. Apple is rumored to be nearing a deal with the former to bring its technology to the iPhone, and now the New York Times claims that the technology will help give Siri a big shot in the arm.

The report claims that Apple has been aiming for Siri improvements since executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI's new chatbot, ChatGPT. The executives found that while Siri often struggled to respond to requests properly, and even when it did it could only do it to one request at a time, ChatGPT and similar tools are completely different beasts. Generative AI tools can understand subsequent requests and use the context of the existing conversation when responding.

All of the rumors ahead of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference next month point to some big new AI features coming to the iPhone and other Apple platforms, likely including the Mac and iPad. We've been hearing a lot about what those features might be as well as how they'll actually work, and a new report suggests that Apple might finally have found itself an AI partner to handle some of the more complex AI features.

Previous Bloomberg reports had Apple in discussions with OpenAI about using the generative AI technology behind the popular ChatGPT to power futuristic AI features on the iPhone. The same reports also suggested that Apple was having similar discussions with Google, potentially choosing to use its Gemini chatbot technology instead. Now, Bloomberg has added an update to those reports, saying that Apple now appears to be within touching distance of agreeing a deal with OpenAI.

The report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman cites unnamed sources familiar with the matter when saying that Apple has closed in on an agreement. It's believed that the OpenAI technology could be just part of the AI push that Apple is about to undertake, too.

I still remember using and playing games on the Commodore 64, but I never thought I'd see the day when the old-school PC was running generative AI to generate creative retro sprites. Check it out:

Nick Bild is a developer and hobbyist who documented his journey of building a generative AI tool for the Commodore 64, that can be used to create 8 x 8 sprites that are displayed at the 64 x 64 resolution. The idea behind this is to use AI to help inspire game design concepts, but we're talking about the Commodore 64 here, so we're not going to get some AI-powered Crysis on the C64.

Training the generative AI model was done on a traditional PC, so while the AI model itself runs on the Commodore 64, you'll need a modern PC to get it up and running. It will take 20 minutes or so to run just 90 iterations for the final 64 x 64 image, so it's not going to blow NVIDIA's current-gen Hopper H100 AI GPU out of the water, or put AI companies out of business. Impressive for the Commodore 64, nonetheless.

Synopsys and Samsung have announced its hit first production tapeout of its next-generation flagship mobile CPU on Samsung Foundry's GAA process.

The companies announced that they have achieved successful production tapeout for its high-performance mobile SoC design, including flagship CPUs and GPUs, with 300MHz higher performance using Synopsys.ai full stack AI-driven EDA suite and a broad portfolio of Synopsys IP on Samsung Foundry's latest Gate-All-Around (GAA) process technologies.

Kijoon Hong, vice president of SLSI at Samsung Electronics, said: "Our longstanding collaboration has delivered leading-edge SoC designs. This is a remarkable milestone to successfully achieve the highest performance, power and area on the most advanced mobile CPU cores and SoC designs in collaboration with Synopsys. Not only have we demonstrated that AI-driven solutions can help us achieve PPA targets for even the most advanced GAA process technologies, but through our partnership we have established an ultra-high-productivity design system that is consistently delivering impressive results".

Windows 11 has some interesting new features incoming based on the latest preview version of the operating system.

As well-known leaker on X (formerly Twitter) Albacore noticed, in the fresh preview build 26212 (deployed in the Canary channel), Microsoft has introduced what are called 'companions' for the Start menu.

These are widget-style concoctions that are attached to the Start menu in a floating panel that can be docked to the left or right-hand side, piping through info in real-time to the UI in a kind of 'Live Tiles' style. (Which of course was a piece of functionality Microsoft previously did away with - these were introduced with Windows 8, but Windows 11 dropped them).

While the iPhone 15 Pro might have only been on sale for a few months, Apple and its supply chain partners are already likely gearing up for what comes next. For Apple, that's thought to be the iPhone 16 Pro and the larger iPhone 16 Pro Max and we've been hearing l;eaks relating to the two phones for a few months now. The latest leak suggests that buyers can look forward to a big display upgrade.

That leak, which comes via the Weibo leaker known as Instant Digital, suggests that Apple intends to make a change to the display that is used in its best iPhones later this year. The leaker says that the new iPhone 16 Pro models will feature a display that is 20% brighter than the previous models when displaying SDR content. That means that when using the phone normally, using apps, and sending messages, the display will be notably brighter when required. Such a feat would be useful for a variety of situations, not least using the iPhone outside in strong sunshine.

The Weibo post, seen by MacRumors, claims that the iPhone 16 Pro will be capable of a brightness of 1,200 nits when showing SDR content. That's a 20% increase over the iPhone 15 Pro while the peak HDR brightness is expected to remain the same at 1,600 nits. Apple hasn't increased the SDR brightness of the iPhone's display since the iPhone 13 Pro arrived in 2021 so this improvement would be a significant one.

With the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus having not been around all that long, you might be surprised to learn that plans are already afoot to replace them in the lineup. But you probably shouldn't be, Apple gets the ball rolling well ahead of the expected September release date and that means that we tend to start seeing more and more leaks the closer we get to September. The latest leak comes via a post on the X social network that appears to show an iPhone 16 dummy unit in all its pink glory, including the expected camera redesign.

The dummy unit was shared to the X social network by Jon Rettinger and it definitely appears to be the real deal. The unit has the same pill-shaped camera layout change that previous rumors have told us to expect as well as the color-infused back glass that looks so good on the current iPhone 15 models.

The most obvious change that we see in the photo shared by Rettinger is that new camera system, with Apple ditching the familiar diagonal layout in favor of a more vertical one. It's similar to the iPhone X and iPhone XS layout, but the change is about more than nostalgia.

Apple announced the new iPad Pro with a superfast M4 chip earlier this week as well as what is reportedly the best display money can buy in terms of a tablet. The OLED displays are incredibly bright, but despite that in combination with the new chip, the analysts at TrendForce aren't expecting any big sales boost. In fact, they think that Apple could have to deal with a slowdown in sales instead.

That's according to a TrendForce report picked up by 9to5Mac that suggests Apple will sell between 4.5 million and 5 million iPad Pro tablets this year. That represents a year-on-year fall in demand, but the report suggests that there are a couple of good reasons why people might not flock to the new tablet.

At the top of the list is price. The new iPad Pro models are $200 more costly than the ones that they replaced, thanks in part to the increased costs incurred by the OLED display and that M4 silicon. Couple that with the fact that buyers will need a new Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil Pro to make the most out of their new tablet and it won't take long for that order to get very expensive indeed.

WhatsApp, the Meta-owned instant messaging platform that works on just about everything with a display and an internet connection, has announced some changes to its iPhone and Android apps. The updates aren't new features as such, but more tweaks to the existing interfaces that people use daily. Changes include an upgraded color palette, an improved default chat background, and more.

WhatsApp made the changes known via a lengthy post to the Facebook blog in which Idit Yaniv, VP, Head of WhatsApp Design, detailed the changes that are being made. All of these changes are rolling out to users now, although they require a server-side flick of a switch. Make sure that you have the latest version of WhatsApp installed on your iPhone or Android phone and hang tight if you don't see them just yet.

Meta explained that there are a number of different changes that have been made including the use of a new color palette that will allow the company to make better decisions about the way the app uses color as a whole. As part of that, the post also announced that Android users can expect a new, darker dark model. WhatsApp says that people had requested that the dark mode be less bright, so it's now one shade darker.

When Apple announced the new 6th-generation iPad Air earlier this week it updated the existing 11-inch model and then added a whole new 13-inch model for good measure. We expected that beyond the new display size the two iPads would be identical, but as it turns out, that isn't the case at all. In fact, that 13-inch display isn't just bigger, it's also 20% brighter than the display used in the 11-inch iPad Air.

The news was first spotted by YouTuber Saran of the SaranByte channel and then picked up by MacRumors. The information itself comes from Apple's tech specs for the two devices, and it's confirmed that the 13-inch display is indeed brighter than the 11-inch one.

The figures themselves confirm that the peak SDR brightness for the 11-inch iPad Air is 500 nits whereas the peak SDR brightness for the 13-inch model is 600 nits. The change isn't a huge one, but it's notable and an interesting statistic given the fact that we don't know what. Our guess would be that the two displays are produced by two different manufacturers - likely LG Display and Samsung Display - and that's where the different capabilities come from.