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If you own a PS4 or PS5 you can now get yourself an extended Apple TV+ trial to watch shows like Ted Lasso and Succession without having to pay a penny.

Surprisingly, this offer seems to also extend to people who are already current members or have previously used a free trial, which is unusual. But that's the way this seems to have been set up. At least, that's on the PS5. Those who own a PS4 are only getting three months and it's only available to those who haven't previously been a subscriber.

Signing up for the freebie isn't difficult, thankfully. All you have to do is open the Apple TV app on your PlayStation and then sign in using an Apple ID. You can also create one if you don't yet have one of your own.

There can't be all that many people using the fourth or third-generation iPod Shuffle, but for those people, Apple has now released a new macOS Ventura software update to fix an issue that caused them to be unable to sync their music.

The new software update is called macOS 13.5 and it's specifically built to deal with a problem that meant that some iPod Shuffle owners received an unknown error (-244) message when trying to sync their iPod Shuffle. To be clear, Apple discontinued that iPod way back in 2017 which makes this particular fix interesting. How did Apple ever realize this was an issue and how much of a priority inside the company did it become?

The iPod Shuffle is of course an iconic product and some people absolutely loved theirs. It was first introduced in 2005 and was the first iPod not to have a display. Not being able to choose your songs was both a limitation and a feature, with Apple leaning into the fact that people would have to leave the shuffle feature to choose what track would play next.

After analyzing Activision's business in the context of Xbox's post-merger growth, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood and her team of financial experts found "five different mobile and PC gaming opportunities" with the proposed $68.7 billion merger with Activision Blizzard King.

The FTC v Microsoft case has revealed quite a bit about Xbox, PlayStation, and the games industry as a whole. The secretive curtain that shrouds the world's most lucrative entertainment medium has been pulled back, showing things like $200 million+ game budgets, the sheer size of mobile gaming, and how tough it is for a platform-holder to compete without a strong presence in relevant markets--console, mobile, and PC.

While Xbox is behind on many of these fronts, the buyout of Activision-Blizzard is a three-pronged approach to give the division more long-term growth potential, provide mid-term stability, and boost overall profits. The exact plans remain unclear, but we do know that Xbox leadership sees Game Pass as the core of the business, and intends to spin the subscription service upward and outward in all possible ways. Activision's 8x separate billion-dollar franchises will give Xbox a competitive edge, especially the $31 billion Call of Duty franchise.

With the FTC defeated in the U.S., trillion-dollar tech giant Microsoft is now focusing on winning over UK regulators at the CMA to get the $68.7 billion Activision merger approved.

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled against the Federal Trade Commission and effectively signalled a greenlight for the Microsoft-Activision merger to close in the U.S. While the FTC can still appeal the decision and request an extension of the temporary restraining order that goes past the merger's deadline of July 18, experts believe that it's "extremely unlikely" that the FTC would be able to obtain an emergency order.

With the merger approved in the European Union, and the FTC having been defeated in the preliminary injunction hearing, Microsoft is now turning to the final hurdle in their $68.7 billion buyout: the United Kingdom.

Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh desktop processors should arrive in a few months, and we've just been treated to a leak of the whole line-up, with some particularly interesting CPUs in the mid-range category.

YouTube leaker RedGamingTech (RGT) provided us with rumored core configurations for the Raptor Lake Refresh (14th-gen) desktop family, and we should regard these through seriously narrowed and skeptical eyes. As is the case with anything that comes trundling down the rails from rumor-town.

Without any further caveating, let's look at the purported chips and their respective core counts as RGT asserts they will be:

Square Enix President and Representative Director Takashi Kiryu had some interesting comments about the Japanese publisher's new game plan.

In 2019, Square Enix consolidated its 11 game development teams into 4 groups called "Creative Business Units". The hierarchy sees each individual team handling specific projects like:

On the heels of releasing Final Fantasy XVI, Square Enix currently has a number of new games in production including Kingdom Hearts IV, Dragon Quest XII, and more Final Fantasy XIV content. These games take a while to make, and are quite expensive to produce...but the company wants to double-down on team expansion in an effort to release games more quickly.

The battle between the social media billionaires, Twitter owner Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is heating up ahead of the purported cage match.

For those that don't know, Elon Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match prior to the launch of Meta's new social media app Threads. Zuckerberg accepted the challenge, and Musk suggested that it should be an MMA fight held in Las Vegas. UFC owner Dana White confirmed that both parties are "dead serious" about this fight happening, and that it's currently in its early planning stages.

Then Meta launched Threads, the purported "Twitter killer", which has since gained more than 100 million users within the first five days of it being available. Online discussion between Musk and Zuckerberg began heating up, with Musk describing the new app as just Instagram without any of the "thirst pics".

Based on NVIDIA's surging stock price and the importance of high-end GPUs when it comes to the incredible progress being made in the field of AI, and the fact that all the big tech companies are diving head-first into AI and creating supercomputers to train models, it's no surprise that the future of hardware is intrinsically tied to the future of AI. Are chips being designed to accelerate AI tasks? Yes, and that's where we're at in 2023.

Though new comments from AMD CEO Lisa Su highlight that not only is the hardware being designed for AI, and we've seen the flow-on effect of that in the consumer space with gaming technology like NVIDIA DLSS and Intel XeSS, but AI is also going to be used to design the chips of the future.

AMD currently uses AI in its chip design process, where the technology is used to optimize performance and improve energy efficiency. All AI is based on training and learning, continuously leading to better results; it improves over time.

Chalk this one up as a tech demo or a "let's see if it works" situation as NTDEV, as the creators of the lightweight tiny11 version of Windows 11 have managed to get the OS up and running on a system with only 176 MB of RAM. The minimum specs for Microsoft's latest OS list 4 GB for RAM, so you're looking at a system with 40 times less memory.

However, if you expect this build to load into the standard Windows 11 desktop, it doesn't. You're looking at a "heavily trimmed down" version of tiny11, to the point where all you've got is the Command Prompt to do things. Even so, the demonstration video shows the build opening up Task Manager and Notepad to showcase this build's multitasking capabilities.

NTDEV notes that this experiment resulted from extensive trial and error, where it went through countless drivers and services to find which ones were necessary for Windows 11 to boot, as well as limiting the disk drive to IDE without SATA or NVMe support. Can it run Crysis? Most definitely not.

At a glance, you'd think that the state of classic and retro gaming was in a good place - from remakes to remasters to Atari bundles featuring games from the 1970s to being able to fire up classic 1990s Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo games on the Nintendo Switch. In reality, though, it's a very different situation - and a cause for concern.

A new in-depth study from the Video Game History Foundation has found that 87 percent of classic games released in the United States are out of print or no longer commercially available. The study defines classic games as titles released before 2010, with games taken from the impressive MobyGames database serving as the basis for the study.

Is it surprising that you can't enter a retail outlet and pick up a copy of Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire for the Nintendo 64? No, but the study highlights the need for proper videogame preservation outside companies like Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft bringing their catalog of classic games into the digital era. The study shows that after Nintendo shut down its 3DS and Wii U eShops in March 2023, the number of Game Boy games you could legally obtain "declined sharply."

With high-profile releases like the Steam Deck from Valve and the ROG Ally from ASUS, portable PC gaming handhelds are more popular than ever. One of the reasons we are seeing powerful handhelds is due to advances in hardware, specifically when it comes to mobile Ryzen chips from AMD, like the new AMD Ryzen 7 7840U being able to deliver excellent game performance.

The new AYANEO AIR 1S is taking the idea of a portable and powerful PC gaming handheld one step further by making it thin, light, and comparable to something you might see from Nintendo regarding compact pocket-size gaming. Specs-wise, the AYANEO AIR 1S features the Ryzen 7 7840U APU, 16 GB or 32 GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and a 5.5-inch 1080p AMOLED display.

Although a 5.5-inch display is smaller than what you'd find on the ROG Ally, the AYANEO AIR 1S weighs a lightweight 405 grams, with the thinnest part of the Ultra Thin and Light Limited Edition being only 18mm. This makes it substantially lighter than the Steam Deck, the ROG Ally, and even the Nintendo Switch.

As part of AMD's massive Starfield Game Bundle deal that covers all current Ryzen 7000 CPUs as well as Radeon GPU from both the RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 generation (check out the full info here), the company has included some requirements of what you'll need to play the game at the three main desktop gaming resolutions.

As this info comes from a marketing page, it's limited to the brand-new hardware you can pick up to grab a copy of the game, so there's no mention of comparative Intel Core or GeForce RTX products - which is understandable. However, it makes the list a little pointless, as limiting the requirements to CPU, GPU, and motherboard omits that Starfield will require an SSD to play the game.

For the 'Legendary Experience,' AMD describes as "for the no-compromise 4K gamers who want the absolute best Starfield experience," it recommends an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU, an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT GPU, and an AMD X670 motherboard. On the opposite end, the 'Heroic Experience' "is for 1080p gamers to experience great visuals and framerates," and AMD recommends an AMD Ryzen 5 7600 CPU, an AMD Radeon RX 7600 GPU, and the entry-level AMD A620 motherboard.

Starfield is one of the year's biggest game releases, and the ambitious sci-fi RPG from Bethesda Game Studios is coming to PC and Xbox Series X|S in September. Ahead of its debut, we got word that the team at Bethesda has been working closely with AMD to optimize the release for multi-threaded CPUs and add support for technology like FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR 2) as part of an exclusive partnership.

And now, after rumors that it was coming, AMD has launched its big Ryzen and Radeon Starfield Game Bundle, covering almost all AMD hardware. The pitch is simple, buy a Ryzen CPU or a Radeon graphics card, and you'll get a copy of the game.

Buy a high-end component, and that copy will be the Starfield Premium Edition which includes Early Access to play the game before its official launch, the Shattered Space Story Expansion, Constellation Skin Pack, digital artbook, and original soundtrack.

It's official: The FTC has lost its fight to obtain a preliminary injunction that would forcibly prohibit the Microsoft-Activision merger until the completion of the FTC's internal administrative hearing, and the two companies can potentially commence the merger in the coming days.

Microsoft is on the cusp of merging with Activision and forming a mega-publisher that brings multiple billion-dollar franchises to Xbox Game Pass. Today, federal judge Jacqueline Scott Corley denied the FTC's request for a preliminary injunction order on the Microsoft-Activision merger, and Judge Corley also ordered that the temporary restraining order enjoining Microsoft and Activision be lifted by July 15. The merger is expected to close ahead of the FTC's Phase III administrative lawsuit starts in August.

In a 53-page report, Judge Corley outlines the reasons why she denied the FTC's preliminary injunction request. This includes eight separate key reasons why Microsoft does not have the incentive to withhold access to the $31 billion Call of Duty franchise from Sony's PlayStation games division. While the report acknowledges that Microsoft certainly will have the ability to withhold Call of Duty because they will own the franchise, Judge Corley says that the FTC has not adequately shown that the Xbox games division does not have the incentive to do so.

Dave the Diver is the latest PC indie game to take Steam by storm, racking up a million sales in not much more than a week.

PC Gamer spotted that Dave the Diver is going great guns on Steam, with review scores that are 'overwhelmingly positive' (at least at the time of writing, though we can't see that changing in the near future anyway).

As one reviewer puts it: "I stopped playing Zelda to play this."

Intel won't make any more NUCs (Next Unit of Computing devices), so wave goodbye to those compact boxes of components.

The small form factor PCs have been around for a long time, but the axe has been brought down on NUCs, as VideoCardz spotted, and Andreas Schilling, editor of a German tech site, confirmed.

Schilling provided details of an emailed Intel statement, in which Team Blue said: "We have decided to stop direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) Business and pivot our strategy to enable our ecosystem partners to continue NUC innovation and growth."

In a big win for the Xbox games division, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley has denied the FTC's request for a preliminary injunction.

Judge Corley today published a redacted 53-page opinion document that denied the FTC's preliminary injunction request. This effectively means that Microsoft may commence its $68.7 billion merger with Activision and close the deal even during the FTC's pending administrative case.

Judge Corley writes:

NVIDIA's RTX 4060 Ti graphics card with 16GB of VRAM is supposedly launching next week - if the rumors are correct - but word is that reviews will be thin on the ground.

Hardware Unboxed tweeted to let us know that there is no official review program for this 16GB spin on the RTX 4060 Ti, and even outside of NVIDIA - which isn't producing a Founders Edition - the company's graphics card making partners "really don't want to know about it [the 4060 Ti]."

Hardware Unboxed further notes that every NVIDIA partner says they won't be providing any review samples, and they aren't even certain of the launch date (rumored to be July 18).

Reports indicate that Foxconn has exited a multi-billion project that was expected to ramp up microchip manufacturing in India.

CNN reports that Foxconn has pulled out of a $19.4 billion project that plans on constructing one of India's first microchip manufacturing plants, which is part of the country's widespread effort to make India one of the world's leading country's chip manufacturing.

A spokesperson for Foxconn, one of the world's leading electronics manufacturers, spoke to CNN and said that the decision to terminate the partnership between Foxconn and Vedanta, an Indian metals and energy conglomerate, was a "mutual agreement" and enables "explore more diverse development opportunities." Notably, the project is now being completely controlled by Vedanta, and according to Foxconn, the construction of fabrication plans in a "new geography is a challenge".

The launch of Meta's new text-based app under its subsidiary company Instagram has shaken the social media landscape as the new app has attracted more than 100 million sign-ups.

Threads was launched last Wednesday, and since then, it has seen a significant increase in the number of users. The launch of Threads was quickly met with criticism from direct competitor Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, the world's second-largest social media platform, who said that Threads was simply Instagram without the "thirst pics". Threads was described as the "Twitter killer", given that it's fully integrated with the standalone Instagram app that has more than a billion users.

Furthermore, Musk's lawyers have already sent a heated letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claiming that Threads was developed by former Twitter staff that unlawfully revealed Twitter IP and trade secrets that significantly sped up the apps release timeline. Now, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has taken to his personal Twitter account to share a chart that reveals that Twitter's domain ranking significantly dropping over the weekend, an indication that the website is losing traffic.