Latest News - Page 553

Between 2015 and 2019, Apple decided to use butterfly switches on its MacBook laptops, and that decision has led the company to pay out $50 million in claims back to customers.

During that four-year period, Apple keyboards using the butterfly switch design were upgraded with new generations, but all had a critical failure point that led to thousands of customers reporting keys becoming sticky, repeating inputs, and becoming unresponsive. Unfortunately, when Apple launched its repair program for the issue in June 2018 for MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro models released during the aforementioned years, they were replaced with new butterfly keyboards, which eventually led to more failures.

Apple learned from its decision to place butterfly switches in its keyboard and has since swapped back to scissor-switch mechanisms. As for the payment, Apple paid $50 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its faulty keys, and now MacBook owners who lodged a claim with the company will begin to receive their payment by August 2024. According to reports, MacBook owners who had at least two topcase replacements from Apple within four years of purchase can receive a maximum payment of $395.

Windows 11 users know how much bloatware, or useless programs, Microsoft's most recent operating system comes with upon its first installation. There are many tools out there to remove this bloatware, but imagine if Windows 11 could be installed at its most rudimentary level.

Another big problem for many Windows 10 users is the stringent hardware requirements for Windows 11, but what if those were gone as well? Introducing Windows 11 "Government Edition," an unofficial version of Windows 11 that doesn't have any bloatware at all and dramatically reduces system requirements. It should be noted that despite the name, Microsoft hasn't officially released a "government" version of Windows 11, and this "Government Edition" is likely a community-developed project.

How does this unofficial version of Windows 11 stack up against the official version? The Government Edition reduces hardware requirements significantly, enabling older PCs the option of upgrading. For example, based on the above screenshots the OS keeps RAM usage at around 1.2GB on a system that only has 4GB of RAM. Additionally, the Government Edition removed bundled applications such as Microsoft Edge, Windows Security suite, Camera, Media Player, Paint and more.

Valve is improving controller support on Steam and has provided some interesting data on PC gaming as part of an update. Valve says daily controller use has tripled from 5% of all sessions to 15% since 2018. We've also got a breakdown of the most popular controllers on the platform, with Xbox leading the charge with a 59% controller share on Steam.

This is followed by PlayStation controllers at 26% - a higher number than expected, considering Xbox controller integration has been a part of Windows for far longer. This is followed by Steam Deck, with a 10% share of controller use.

Valve has worked with Sony to improve PlayStation controller support on the platform, including the PS5's DualSense Edge 'elite' style controller. It's also great to hear that future third-party PlayStation controllers will be supported on Steam.

VAIO (yes, the former Sony brand) has announced that it has created the world's lightest (and thinnest) portable display with the new VAIO Vision+ 14. The display is designed for those who work in various locations and use a laptop, where a second display would come in handy. The new VAIO Vision+ is a 14-inch 16:10 aspect-ratio portable display with a 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution and weighs 325 grams.

It's undoubtedly light for its dimensions-312 x 12.4 (3.9mm at the thinnest part) x 211mm - but there is a catch: The cover/stand attaches to the display, bringing the total weight up to 440 grams. Yeah, calling it the lightest without factoring in the cover and stand is a little bit 'hmm,' but it still looks like an impressive portable and external display for work.

Carrying a laptop and a portable display isn't ideal; lighter is better, so the VAIO Vision+ 14 is impressive.

Nintendo is known for its tight grip around its IP, being one of the many companies that is ready to file lawsuits against anyone that has violated its policies.

Once again, the Mario and Zelda maker has filed lawsuits against people that it believes are misusing its intellectual property (IP), and this time, they are hitting two individuals who are allegedly involved in a piracy network of Nintendo content. In the past Nintendo has forced the shutdown of Switch emulators for PC, claiming the company behind them was making profit off its IP.

The same principle applies here but in the world of piracy, with Nintendo filing lawsuits against James Williams "archbox" [PDF] of Surprise, Arizona, and Ryan "Homebrew Homie" Daly of Flint, Michigan. Nintendo has accused Williams of being involved in creating, operating, and promoting not only pirated Nintendo content, but also assisting others in creating, operating, and promoting a network of online shops dedicated to storing pirated Nintendo Switch games that are available to download.

Sony's annual business segment meeting underlines the dominance that just a handful of franchises exert over the entire video games industry.

With a staggering $29.6 billion generated in FY23, PlayStation is gaming's single largest platform by revenue. Although over 9,000 games were purchased on the PlayStation Store during this time, PlayStation gamers spent the bulk of their money on less than a dozen game franchises.

According to Sony's latest Game and Network Services annual segment report, just 10 video game franchises made up 51% of total revenues generated in FY23. These games, some of which are single titles like Genshin Impact and Fortnite, accounted for roughly $15 billion in revenues for this period.

Face it, we all want the fastest internet connection speed possible... downloading games in just milliseconds sounds like it'll never happen. But now, Japanese researchers have done it: hitting 400Tbps internet connectivity speeds, forming a new world record.

In a new report by Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, the team reported that they hit speed of a truly insane 402 Terabits per second (402Tbps). The previous records for internet connectivity speeds were breached in October 2023, with 321Tbps, and then back in March 2022, with 226Tbps. 402Tbps is a damn big leap in speeds, which is why they achieved a new world record.

402Tbps works out to an astonishing 50TB/sec download speeds, which no computer on the planet could handle, period. Most systems feature on-board 1GbE ethernet connectivity, allowing for 110MB/sec speeds, while 10GbE can usher in over 1TB/sec (1000MB/sec+). So even with 10GbE ethernet, you're not going to get anywhere near 50TB/sec, and even the fastest Gen5 SSDs are pushing 14GB/sec.

KIOXIA is teasing the future of SSDs. The memory chip company aims to scale up flash memory to a 1000-layer beast, ushering in future-gen NVMe SSDs with insane 20TB capacities... selling for as little as $250.

The company announced its goals at the recent International Memory Workshop held in Seoul, South Korea. During its keynote speech, KIOXIA explained how 3D NAND flash has rapidly advanced in the last few years and that the amount of storage in one square millimeter chip has grown by 10x in just 8 years.

KIOXIA highlighted that this is through the stacking process, with multiple layers of memory cells are crammed together in a vertical stack, which is why it's called 3D NAND. Each individual memory layer is small, which keeps wafer yields high and keeps them cost-efficient to manufacture. This is why we have super-fast 2TB SSDs for under $150, which would've been a dream in the years past.

A Starfield gamer has come up with one of the most aspirational mod ideas of all time...and it would be an incredible feat to pull off.

Bethesda games are no stranger to incredibly ambitious world-changing mods. Creations like Fallout London, Skywind, and Skyblivion aim to add new maps and recreate whole games within another game.

So...what about Starfield? One fan has pitched a crazy idea: What if a team of modders could recreate the whole landmass of Elder Scrolls' fantasy world of Tamriel within Starfield's next-gen Creation Engine?

Acer is preparing its new Swift 14 AI laptop powered by AMD's upcoming Zen 5-based Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" APU, with some new Geekbench results showing up.

The new laptop was spotted on Geekbench rocking the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" APU, which means it is one of the first entries in Geekbench with the APU's full retail name. AMD's upcoming Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" APU features 12 cores (4 x Zen 5 and 8 x Zen 5c cores) that boost up to 5.1GHz and AMD's beefed-up XDNA2-based NPU for AI workloads.

Acer's new Swift 14 AI laptop powered by the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" APU has a single-core performance score of 2689 points and 13515 points for the multi-core run. The default TDP of the APU inside of the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop is missing from the results, but the results show it beating the Phoenix and Hawk Point APUs with TDPs between 28W and 45W.

Elon Musk's AI startup is training its next-generation Grok 3 LLM model, which is being trained on a monster 100,000 x NVIDIA H100 AI GPUs.

In a new post on X, the SpaceX and Tesla founder talked about his xAI start-up, replying to @BasedBeffJezos on X who was replying to @BasedBeffJezos who posted a video from Aidan Gomez, the CEO and co-founder of Cohere, who said "models training on each other's data is like a human centipede effect".

This is where Musk replied, saying: "Sadly quite true. It takes a lot of work to purge LLMs from the internet training data. Grok 2, which comes out in August, will be a giant improvement in this regard". This is where @BasedBeffJezos said "Grok 2 in August will be Based AGI". Musk replied again, saying: "Grok 3 end of year after training on 100K H100s should be really something special".

Sabrent is excited to announce its latest product, the new Rocket V60 microSDXC memory card which is part of the company's National Camera Day discounts.

The new Rocket V60 microSDXC memory card is available in 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB capacities with minimum write speeds of 60MB/sec, ensuring smooth and reliable 8K video capture, with support for various devices through backwards compatibility.

Sabrent's new Rocket V60 microSDXC memory card is the company's latest storage solution for photographers, videographers, and everyday artists. With support for 60MB/sec minimum write speeds, quickly capturing photos and high-end 8K video "without any hitches" says the company, is fantastic. Sabrent explains: "Get up to 512GB of memory that meets the V60 specification, which means a minimum write speed of 60MB/s with 8K video performance guaranteed. Other files will work just great, too, with enough IOPS - meeting the A1 specification - to ensure that things never bog down".

SEGA reveals new info about its upcoming Crazy Taxi game, confirming that it will have multiplayer elements. It's likely that Crazy Taxi is part of SEGA's ambitious Super Game initiative.

Like most publishers these days, SEGA is also chasing the billion-dollar live service craze. SEGA recently announced that new games based on classic franchises like Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi were in the works, and now we have solid confirmation that at least one of these will be an online-driven game.

According to a new SEGA developer interview, the new Crazy Taxi title will have live service elements complete with online multiplayer. This isn't a surprise--we've discussed this in the past--but we now have a better understanding on what to expect from the outrageously chaotic racer.

BioWare has baked in a number of new accessibility options into Dragon Age: The Veilguard, including a neat addition that gives players much more control over their in-game experience.

Dragon Age games haven't typically been known for their difficulty, but with a multitude of build options, team synergies, and combo effects, the RPG systems can be intricate and layered. With the new Veilguard entry, BioWare wants to allow players to better customize how they tackle everything from battle systems to navigation and everything in between.

As revealed in a new Game Informer feature, the new Dragon Age: The Veilguard sequel will put even more emphasis on "approachability," complete with big QoL improvements and options to scale the gameplay based on difficulty--but this balancing goes beyond combat.

Metal Gear Solid Survive producer Noriaki Okamura wants to work alongside Hideo Kojima on the series once again, but that is highly unlikely to happen given past history with the Japanese publisher.

Back in 2015, Konami surprised the gaming world by firing Hideo Kojima, the creator of the best-selling Metal Gear franchise. Not only was Kojima fired, but Silent Hills, a horror game starring Norman Reedus, was cancelled. A lot of Kojima's original MGS team also left Konami and together they formed Kojima Productions.

But the current Metal Gear producer Noriaki Okamura wants Kojima to come back. In an ideal world, Okamura would team up with Kojima and other former MGS alumni to expand the franchise. But Kojima has moved on with his own fully-fledged game-and-film production studio and created a big hit with Death Stranding, and is currently working on an experimental film-game hybrid OD, as well as Death Stranding 2.

Windows 11 just got yet more adverts, you'll be unsurprised to find out, as Microsoft seems very keen to push as much promotional activity as it can get away with in the OS.

This time around, rather than sneaking ads into the core Windows 11 interface, at least they're tucked away in an app - the Weather app to be precise (which is a stock application installed with the operating system).

The bad news is that these adverts - which were introduced via a server-side update, Windows Latest reports - follow you around wherever you may scroll, like something out of a horror movie. Alright, a spy movie might be more fitting, though the idea of inescapable adverts trailing you everywhere certainly seems a rather horrific prospect to us.

ISPs or Internet Service Providers are generally not the biggest fans of Torrent traffic on their networks. Popular peer-to-peer traffic accounts for a large percentage of all web traffic, with most Torrents relating to pirated copies of media - games, movies, music, and TV shows. Several ISPs worldwide have resorted to things like throttling or outright blocking specific port traffic to combat the nonstop flow of peer-to-peer data.

That's not the case for South Korean ISP KT, which created a new division to interfere with customer data transfers and distribute malware. Yes, an ISP deliberately infected 600,000 of its customers. KT Corporation is one of the largest telecommunication companies in the country, and this was only discovered after a lengthy investigation that began in 2020.

Webhard, a popular Korean cloud service and BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing provider thought it was dealing with malicious hacking attempts when users began reporting issues. However, upon closer inspection, Webhard noticed that all affected users were KT customers.

Sony plans to eventually stop producing consumer-grade recordable Blu-ray discs, but commercial products such as game and film Blu-rays will still be produced.

Sony Group will lay off 250 employees at a division that produces recordable media discs, and start winding down the production of specific Blu-ray products, sources have told Japanese newspaper Mainichi.

However, contrary to recent reports, this decision will not affect Blu-ray discs that contain games, TV shows, or films. The staff reduction is happening to the Sony Sendai Technology Center, which produces recordable disc formats like CD-R, DVD-R, BD-R and archival discs for the Japanese region.

AMD's Zen 5-powered Ryzen 9000 Series CPUs are on track for release later this month. The latest rumors and leaked retail listings point to a July 31 launch date for the Ryzen 9 9950X, the Ryzen 9 9900X, Ryzen 7 9700X, and Ryzen 5 9600X CPUs. AMD's next-gen desktop processors are compatible with the AM5 motherboard standard, so they'll work just fine with current AM5 boards for the Zen 4-powered Ryzen 7000 Series.

AMD announced Zen 5 and the Ryzen 9000 Series at Computex 2024, where it also announced new X870 and X870E motherboard chipsets. The new motherboards will include USB 4 and PCIe Gen 5 for storage and graphics as standard, as well as improve DDR5 memory support and faster AMD EXPO memory overclocking.

Several board makers showcased their new X870 and X870E motherboards at Computex (ASRock's X870E Taichi is pictured below); however, a new report (via Wccftech) indicates that these next-gen AM5 boards won't hit retail until September 30. The reason could be to align with the highly anticipated Ryzen 9000 X3D launch, which should be happening around that time.

Unlike competitors like Xbox, who are embracing artificial intelligence to help write in-game quests and dialog in future games, Nintendo has no plans to use generative AI tech in its first-party titles.

As the games industry cuts thousands upon thousands of jobs, publishers are looking for new ways to save on costs. AI is one potential solution: in theory, the technology may be able to speed up game development and potentially even replace positions through automated processes. AI has become a controversial topic because of this, yet despite this sensitivity, publishers like EA and Microsoft are big proponents of the new tech.

Nintendo, however, is dubious about using generative artificial intelligence in its games. The rationale is pretty simple: Nintendo knows that generative AI can have implications for IP rights, and as one of the most litigious companies in the entire industry, Nintendo is one to protect and respect all forms of copyright and intellectual property law.