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Microsoft's gaming division outperformed expectations and beat the highest internal forecasts by over $100 million.

Xbox is soaring right now. Microsoft's gaming branch just acquired Activision Blizzard King, folding in 8 more billion-dollar video game franchises into Xbox's mighty war chest. Starfield has propelled Xbox revenues to all-time highs, setting a record for Q1 results while proving the efficacy of new subscription-based monetization methods.

Starfield's success and subsequent bleed-over into Game Pass not only helped drive $3.92 billion revenues in Q1, making this the highest non-holiday quarter in Xbox history, but the game actually helped Microsoft exceed the highest upper limit of its internal earnings forecasts. Last quarter, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood forecasted that Xbox would make around $3.791 billion as a topline estimate.

If you've ever looked at Apple's laptop lineup and wished that there was something cheaper to choose from, you might be in luck. Rumors of Apple working on a more affordable laptop have bubbled up here and there of late, and now they're back once again.

This time it's the well-connected and well-known supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo who has mentioned the unconfirmed laptop, with the suggestion being that Apple could choose to add it to the mix in an attempt to drive sales that have so far been disappointing.

There have previously been claims that Apple intends to introduce a cheaper MacBook that will go head-to-head with Chromebooks, especially in the educational market. However, that isn't the tact that Kup goes with, saying that Apple might instead choose the cheaper route in an attempt to simply drive sales. It's thought that Apple is still deciding on whether to move forward with the laptop, but if it does it will be part of a larger push to try and increase sales that will include the launch of new M3-powered machines.

Apple last updated the 24-inch iMac when it was first released way back in 2021. That iMac is powered by the Apple-designed M1 chip, a chip that started the whole transition away from Intel and towards chips built for Apple by TSMC. Now, as we get nearer to the release of the M3 series of chips, it looks increasingly likely that the iMac is finally about to get the love it deserves.

That's because Apple is set to hold an online, streamed event on October 30 with multiple Macs likely to be announced. A refreshed 24-inch iMac is thought to be one of those new Macs and a new report says that it will indeed get an M3 chip to call its own. That's the good news, but as always, there's bad news to go alongside it.

The bad news comes courtesy of Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. In a post on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, Gurman says that Apple is indeed planning to launch the M3 iMac and that it's been working on it for some time. He goes on to add that the machine entered mass production months ago, too.

Apple has already confirmed that it will be holding an online virtual keynote on October 30, with everything now very much expecting the company to announce a number of new Macs. Those Macs are expected to include both desktop and laptop machines, but you likely won't be able to buy them immediately. That's the norm, but when should you expect to be able to pick up the new hardware?

That's something that we would normally have to wait for the event to find out, but a new MacRumors report claims to have the answers ahead of time. That report doesn't say where the information came from, but ti does claim that the new hardware will go on sale on November 8.

That's a mid-week date, which is odd for Apple. Normally it would make new products available on the Friday, but it now seems that it is aiming for a Wednesday this time out for reasons unknown.

When Apple announced the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra last month it confirmed that both wearables would support Double Tap. The new feature allows users to double-tap their fingers together to interact with on-screen buttons, perfect for those times when they don't have a free hand to tap the display with a finger. The feature itself wasn't available at launch, with Apple saying that it would ship later in the year. Now, with the release of watchOS 10.1, the new feature is here.

Apple has been beta testing watchOS 10.1 for a few weeks now which has given developers the chance to take the new Double Tap feature for a spin. But this is the first time that it has been made available to the public with Apple announcing its arrival via a press release posted to its Newsroom site.

Apple's announcement shows the new feature being used while also outlining some of the ways it can be used. The Double Tap feature won't work with all apps, for example, but it can be used to answer and end phone calls, pause, resume, and end timers, snooze alarms, and more. We can likely expect the functionality to expand in the future, too.

Apple's entire lineup looks set to get a big overhaul, according to a new report. The changes will touch every corner of the lineup starting with the base model AirPods and continuing through the AirPods Pro into the range-topping AirPods Max.

That's according to a report by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, citing unnamed sources who are reportedly familiar with Apple's plans for the earbuds and headphones Apple will make over the next year or two.

Starting with the AirPods, Gurman says that Apple intends to do away with the current AirPods 2 and AirPods 3 products, choosing instead to replace them with two new pairs of fourth-generation earbuds. Those new earbuds will be similar to AirPods Pro in appearance, with shorter stems. The two models will be differentiated by functionality - one will offer active noise cancelation technology like AirPods Pro, but the other won't. Neither pair will have ear tips like Apple's best earbuds, but will rather sit in the year like normal AirPods. Both new pairs will get a new charging case with support for the Find My network. Look to 2024 for this all to happen.

Here's some more bad news in the world of streaming services, as Apple is hiking the price of Apple TV+ - and sadly, it's a big old increase, plus it's not the only subscription charge to increase among Apple's offerings.

As TechSpot noticed (and Mark Gurman raised on X), Apple TV+ is going to increase from a $6.99 monthly fee to $9.99, which is a 43% hike - ouch indeed. The yearly price will go up from $69 to $99, we're told.

It's particularly painful as with the pricing on other streaming services like Netflix on the way up, and Amazon planning to show ads with Prime Video (and charge to remove them) early next year, Apple has remained a wallet-friendly alternative.

Microsoft's games division now owns the rights to upwards of 17 separate video game franchises that have generated $1 billion in lifetime revenues.

Following the combination with gaming titan Activision-Blizzard, Xbox gaming has grown tremendously. Microsoft has acquired a war chest of some of the most highly-lauded and -profitable video game IPs on the planet, including the $31 billion Call of Duty franchise. In a recent Q1 earnings call, company CEO Satya Nadella puts the value of the Xbox brand into a more long-term perspective by highlighting the sheer breadth and volume of its new catalog.

According to Nadella, Microsoft will have access to 13 video game series with billion-dollar revenues...but our count puts this even higher. "With Activision Blizzard King, we will now add significant depth to our content portfolio. We will have 13 billion dollar-plus franchises - from Candy Crush, Diablo, and Halo, to Warcraft, Elder Scrolls, and Gears of War," the Microsoft CEO said during the call.

The Starfield community has collectively produced a sizeable patch for the game which fixes a lot of problems that Bethesda has yet to get around to resolving.

Specifically, this is a mod, and one packed with numerous fixes for the PC version of Starfield. Naturally, it's unofficial - of course - and you download and use it at your own risk. There are no guarantees it might not break other stuff in the game (and this is an early working version, too, v0.01 to be precise).

The patch authors note:

Microsoft has a long history of trying to promote Edge over Chrome in one way or another - and indeed just trying to advertise Edge full-stop in Windows 11 - but the latest development in this kind of 'nudging' is an eye-opener.

Neowin reports that when attempting to download Google Chrome recently using the Edge browser, a poll popped up in the sidebar.

In the poll, Microsoft asks the Edge leaver if they can take a moment to inform the company why they are trying a rival browser.

A Redditor has shared a gargantuan project onto the Skyrim subreddit, revealing the finished product of Skyrim successfully recreated within Age of Empires 2.

Yes, that's right, Skyrim within Age of Empires 2 - specifically Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition. The Reddit post was by user Grouchy_Bluejay4511, an alias account for Bubbabaelor, the mastermind behind the project, which took more than 400 hours of work and more than a year to complete. Bubbabaelor explained that their mod contains more than 50 quests, 100 unique characters, and the ability for players to "play as one of the Holds vying for control of Skyrim."

Bubbabaelor talked to GamesRadar and gave some backstory on the project, saying that the inspiration for it originally came from numerous mods for Age of Empires 2 HD that were based on books. Around that time, Bubbabaelor discovered a Skyrim map created by Zarko, but it was never fully completed. Bubbabaelor decided to take it upon himself to complete the project in their own way.

NASA has taken to its social media channels to share an epic image snapped by the iconic Hubble Space Telescope.

The space agency briefly explains in the above post on X that this image contains a menacing pair of "eyes" that create what seems to be a "cosmic skull". However, on its website, which has a more in-depth explanation of what we are looking at, the space agency explains that the "eyes" are actually cores of two galaxies that are on a collision course.

The entire system is officially cataloged as Arp-Madore 2026-424 (AM 2026-424), and according to NASA, while galaxy collisions are quite common, especially in the early universe, what isn't common head-on collisions such as this highlighted Arp-Madore system. The system is located approximately 704 million light-years from Earth.

A university within the US has issued a public warning to students on campus to avoid robots over a potential "bomb threat".

That message was rolled out to students on Tuesday by Oregon State University, which took to its dedicated X account to announce an "urgent OSU alert" for students to avoid Starship delivery robots across campus. The institution wrote, "Do not open robots", and to "avoid all robots until further notice". In an update posted to X its revealed that the bomb threat can be traced back to a student that was playing a practical joke, or a prank.

Starship has since responded to the alert by OSU, writing that despite the bomb threat being a joke it has decided to suspend all Starship robots across the campus until further notice as a precautionary measure. Notably, the Starship fleet consists of 20 food delivery robots that have been running across campus since 2020. OSU allows students and faculty to order food via the delivery robots from surrounding restuarants.

NASA has issued an update on its asteroid sample collection mission, officially dubbed OSIRIS-REx, revealing a problem with the container that transported the sample back to Earth.

The space agency took to its website to announce that preliminary analysis of the asteroid sample has proven extremely valuable as scientists identified the sample is both rich in carbon and water. The confirmation from NASA that the sample contains both carbon and water, the building blocks of life, adds to the theory that asteroids such as Bennu (the asteroid the sample was taken from) could have played a critical role in life on Earth, and perhaps other planets in the universe.

However, not everything is sunshine and rainbows, which is typically expected with a mission in space, as it's not often that every single aspect of the mission goes to plan. NASA writes in its blog post that the capsule containing the sample, officially called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM), is much harder to open than initially expected, with NASA writing, "two of the 35 fasteners on the TAGSAM head could not be removed with the current tools approved for use in the OSIRIS-REx glovebox."

Microsoft is forging ahead with adding AI into, well, everything it can right now, and the latest recipient in this respect is the Paint app in Windows 11 preview builds.

You may recall that Paint Cocreator was introduced to the app in testing in Canary and Dev channels back at the end of September, and subsequently has progressed through the Beta channel, and the functionality just hit the Release Preview channel (the final stage before actually landing in the finished version of Windows 11).

For those who missed this, Cocreator is an AI-driven feature based on Dall-E which works like the Bing AI image creator. You can simply describe a picture you'd like to have composed, select an art style (if required), and then the AI will knock up an image based on those criteria.

A "devil comet" is about to make its close approach to Earth, and despite its name, that certainly comes with an uneasy sentiment, our planet isn't in any danger.

The comet is officially called 12P/Pons-Brooks, and the last time it came this close to Earth was more than 70 years ago, as the comet's orbit takes it far away from the planet to the outer reaches of the solar system before it makes it way back toward the inner solar system. Astronomers have measured the nucleus, or the core of the comet, and estimated that it's approximately the size of two Mount Everests stacked on top of each other, or 12.6 miles across.

By comparison, most comets are between 0.6 and 1.8 miles wide, according to Teddy Kareta, a postdoctoral researcher at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. So, why is it called the "devil comet"? Well, it has "horns," or what appears to be horns. The comet's outgassing produces what looks like horns through astronomers' observations. As stated previously, the "devil comet" poses no risk to Earth and, at its closest approach, will come within 1.5 astronomical units (AU) of our planet. 1 AU is the distance between the Sun and Earth.

Data acquired by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may be used to finally understand the weird signals coming from a super-Earth planet within our galactic neighborhood.

That planet is 55 Cancri e, which, according to reports, is the first super-Earth that astronomers ever discovered. The planet is located just 40 light years away from Earth and was originally discovered in 2004. Since then, astronomers have been puzzled at the strange signals coming from the planet, which indicate that the planet's atmosphere is continuously being produced but also quickly burned away.

In a new paper accepted into the Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers argue that these strange signals are a result of intense volcanic activity on the surface of the planet. According to the study, constantly erupting volcanoes eject hot gas and carbon-rich elements that produce an atmosphere that is then ripped away from it by its parent star, located nearby. Notably, 55 Cancri e is positioned just 2% of the distance Earth is located to the Sun, meaning the planet completes one full orbit of its parent star in just 17 hours.

NASA has released a new image snapped by the iconic Hubble Space Telescope, and this time, the powerful space telescope has honed its sensitive instruments in on two objects in deep space merging into one.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has taken to its website to detail the new image, writing that the objects within the image are galaxies officially called NGC 7733, which is the smaller one located in the bottom right, and NGC 7734, the much larger galaxy located in the top right. However, those aren't the only galaxies present in this picture. There is another galaxy officially called NGC 7733N that's located within the upper spiral arm of NGC 7733.

Originally, NGC 7733N was obscured by dust and gas, but astronomers used Hubble's data to discern a knot located in the galaxy's upper spiral arm. The below image clearly points out the galaxy, but it's easily identified by its different colors in comparison to the spiral arm.

A massive snake head has recently been unearthed in Mexico City after a powerful earthquake hit the region. The discovery certainly excited archaeologists as years of painfully long excavation were just fast-tracked.

The earthquake struck the region on September 19, and according to reports, it reached 7.6 on the Richter scale. Specifically, the earthquake hit Mexico's west coast, but was big enough to be felt by residents in Mexico City, located approximately 400 miles away. The shockwaves from the earthquake caused some damage to buildings in Mexico City, in particular, a law school near the city center.

Reports indicate that beneath this law school, a team of archaeologists from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) discovered an ancient snake head that dates back 500 years - to the time of the Aztecs. The snakehead is on the large side compared to real snakes, with the relic measuring 5.9 feet long, 3.3 feet wide, 33.5 inches wide, and is estimated to weigh 2,645 pounds.

Activision posted the PC system requirements for the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III release a little early. The post from the company, which has since been taken down, outlined the minimum and recommended specs for the next Call of Duty - and based on what we've been seeing of late (looking at you, Alan Wake 2), it's pretty modest stuff.

The minimum specs on the GPU side only require an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970, GeForce GTX 1650, or AMD Radeon RX 480 to get a playable version of the game. Of course, playing any PC release with the minimum specs, especially a fast-paced shooter, is a dangerous game - it's always best to look at the 'recommended' options to ensure a somewhat smooth experience.

Activision's 'recommended' specs for 60FPS "in most situations" ask for an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 or GeForce RTX 3050. Compared to last year's recommended GeForce GTX 1060 - it's not that big of an increase. This means most PC gamers shouldn't have an issue playing the game with a stable frame rate.