Enlarge / Apple's M2 Ultra Mac Studio. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

The original Mac Studio, despite the absence of "Pro" in the name, was Apple's most compelling professional desktop release in years. Though it was more like a supercharged Mac mini than a downsized Mac Pro, its M1 Max and M1 Ultra processors were fantastic performers, and they were much more energy-efficient than the one in the most recent Intel Mac Pro, too.

Apple is releasing the M2 version of the Mac Studio this week, and even though it's being launched alongside a brand-new Mac Pro, it still might be Apple's most compelling professional desktop. That's partly because the new Studio is even faster than the old one—Apple sent us a fully enabled M2 Ultra model with 128GB of RAM—and partly because Apple Silicon Macs are designed in ways that make Mac Pro-style expandability and modularity impossible.

There is probably still a tiny audience for the redesigned Mac Pro, people who still use macOS and still use internal PCI Express expansion cards that aren't GPUs; it should also be relatively easy to add gobs of cheap, fast internal storage, a kind of upgrade the Mac Studio is still frustratingly incapable of. There's also a bit of awkward pricing overlap with the high-end M2 Pro Mac mini that didn't exist last year.

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Enlarge / Apple's 15-inch M2 MacBook Air. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

It's a credit to Apple's chips that when I'm using my 13-inch MacBook Air, I feel much more constrained by the screen size than I do by the performance.

That wasn't always the case. The Intel MacBook Airs of years past were perfectly fine for basic computing, but you could feel the difference between an Air and an iMac or MacBook Pro as soon as you tried to edit something in Photoshop or Lightroom or export something with iMovie. The M1 and M2 Macs also feel slower than their Pro, Max, and Ultra counterparts, but for the kinds of light-to-medium-duty work that I spend most of my time doing, I rarely find myself waiting around for things to happen.

That's why I've been looking forward to the 15-inch MacBook Air, which has been rumored for at least a year and is being released to the public this week. Before now, getting a larger Mac laptop meant paying at least $2,000 for the privilege—$2,500 for the 16-inch MacBook Pro—because getting that bigger screen also came with extra ports, more powerful chips, and fancier screen technology.

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Enlarge / A high-res rendered hill inspired by Windows XP's familiar "Bliss" wallpaper (visit Microsoft's site to get it at full resolution.) (credit: Microsoft)

Did you read the news about the Windows XP activation algorithm getting cracked and suddenly get nostalgic for the blue skies and bluer taskbar of that old Windows release? Or maybe you just like attractive, high-resolution desktop wallpapers and you want to make a change? It turns out that Microsoft's design team has rendered an updated 4K version of the default Windows XP wallpaper—you might know it by its name, "Bliss."

It's one of several retro-themed wallpapers on this Microsoft Design site, including photorealistic renderings of Solitaire, Paint, and (of course) Clippy. The site has been around for a while and hasn't been updated since December 2022, but Windows engineer Jennifer Gentleman tweeted about it yesterday—it's new to me and maybe to you, too. The most recent wallpapers appear to be products of Microsoft's Design Week event.

Among others, the Microsoft Design site also hosts the default wallpapers that have come with several Surface PCs, quite a few Pride Month-themed wallpaper designs, and several images focused on the company's recent emoji redesigns and the icons for the Microsoft 365 apps.

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Enlarge (credit: Apple)

Usually when Apple announces big new operating system updates at WWDC, it releases early, work-in-progress developer betas for app developers who have paid for an Apple Developer account. A few weeks later, once the betas have been updated a couple of times, it has released somewhat more-stable public beta versions for general consumption.

That has changing this year. Anyone who signs in to Apple's developer site with their Apple ID will have access to the developer beta builds of iOS 17, macOS Sonoma, and Apple's other operating systems for free. Actually submitting apps to Apple for App Store distribution (or, on the Mac, signing them so that you can distribute them outside the App Store without setting off macOS' many unsigned app warning messages) will still cost $99 per year. But enthusiasts and testers who use developer accounts to get early beta access will no longer need to pay to do it.

Apple will still release public beta builds of all its operating systems through its public beta program sometime in July.

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Enlarge / CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA - JUNE 05: Apple CEO Tim Cook stands next to the new Apple Vision Pro headset that is displayed during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on June 05, 2023 in Cupertino, California. Apple CEO Tim Cook kicked off the annual WWDC23 developer conference with the announcement of the new Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

A few hours after Apple's long-awaited Vision Pro reveal yesterday, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman (who managed to report on most of the device's major features months before it launched) noticed something odd: none of Apple's promotional videos or any of the footage from the show floor actually showed Apple CEO Tim Cook or any other Apple executive wearing the new product they had just announced.

The entire presentation encapsulated everything that has changed about Apple product events since the Steve Jobs era—a shift away from onstage speeches to pre-recorded videos, a shift that began earlier in the Cook era and was accelerated by the pandemic. We're way past the iPod in the pocket, or the MacBook Air in the manila envelope—the closest we got was this shot of Cook smiling next to a slick-looking demo unit on a stand, taken after the presentation was over.

But I've noticed something else in the last 24 hours, as initial hands-on impressions have been published by various outlets (ours is here). There are, as far as I can find, no actual photos or videos of any writer or YouTuber wearing the thing they are writing or YouTubing about. (This was a precondition for getting hands-on time with the headset.)

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Enlarge / Apple's Vision Pro headset. (credit: Apple)

Apple's pitch for its new Vision Pro headset announced yesterday leaned heavily on third-party apps and content—Apple's app ecosystems are a big competitive advantage for the iPhone and iPad, and the company clearly wants to extend that to its AR headset.

A page on Apple's developer site outlines what Apple will do between now and Vision Pro's launch to help developers get their apps ready. Most notably, the company will offer a Vision Pro developer kit, which will be hardware that will "provide the ability to quickly build, iterate, and test on Apple Vision Pro so your app or game will be ready to deliver amazing experiences." The kits will be available by application only.

Apple typically only offers these kinds of developer kits at major inflection points for its hardware lineup, where there's a big gap between a product's announcement and release and where the company wants to make sure that developers can get software done ahead of time. Most recently, this happened during the Apple Silicon transition, where developers could pay $500 to grab a prototype Mac mini with the guts of an iPad Pro inside of it.

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Enlarge / macOS Sonoma runs on Intel Macs, but the list is getting awfully short. (credit: Apple)

With the introduction of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro, Apple has finally completed the Apple Silicon transition and booted all Intel Macs from its current lineup. But software support for Intel Macs isn't quite done, at least not yet. The macOS Sonoma update will still run on a couple generations of Intel Macs, but in general, if you're using anything made before 2018 or anything without an Apple T2 chip in it, you won't be able to run the new OS.

Sonoma drops support for all versions of the 12-inch MacBook, the 2017 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air updates, and the 2017 iMac. Macs made after 2017 all generally integrated Apple's T2 chip, which handled some Touch Bar functionality on some MacBook Pro models, but provided additional security and video encoding features to all Macs that included it. It's essentially an A10 coprocessor included along with the main Intel CPU, a bridge between the Intel era and the M1 and M2 Macs that would follow.

There is one 2017 Mac that's still supported: the one and only iMac Pro, released in December of 2017, which was the first Mac to include the T2. There's also one exception—the 2019 iMac, which doesn't have a T2 on board but does run the same firmware as the other T2 Macs.

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Enlarge / StandBy and other iOS 17 features won't be coming to some older iPhones. (credit: Apple)

Apple sometimes releases new operating systems without changing the system requirements—but this year isn't one of those years. The iOS 17 update will drop support for several older phones that can currently run iOS 16: 2017's iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, and the original iPhone X.

Apple's system requirements list the "iPhone XS and newer," which should encompass the iPhone XR and all subsequent iPhone X-style notched iPhones, plus the 2nd- and 3rd-generation iPhone SE.

The iPadOS 17 update also drops support for most of the pre-2018 devices that iPadOS 16 still supported, including the 5th-gen $329 iPad and the very first 12.9- and 9.7-inch iPad Pros from 2015 and 2016. All other iPad Pros, the third-generation iPad Air and later, and the 5th-generation iPad mini and later will all run iPadOS 17, though the older a device is, the more likely it is to miss out on a handful of newer features (like Stage Manager).

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Enlarge (credit: Apple)

CUPERTINO, Calif.—Apple has unveiled the next major release of macOS, dubbed macOS Sonoma. It adds many of the features from iOS 17, plus a handful of Mac-specific enhancements over macOS Ventura.

For anyone who mourned the loss of the old Dashboard feature a few releases ago, Sonoma brings back a redesigned widgets experience that lets you drag widgets out of the Notification Center and onto your desktop. When you have another app open, these widgets will fade into the background to get out of your way. iPhone widgets can also be displayed on your Mac, as long as your iPhone is within close range of your Mac or on the same Wi-Fi network.

Apple is also continuing its quest to make gaming on macOS happen with a new "Game Mode" that gives games CPU and GPU priority while they're running, not unlike the identically named feature in Windows. Like the Windows version, Game Mode isn't going to make your CPU or GPU hardware more powerful than it is, but it should help improve the smoothness and consistency of game frame rates by keeping other running apps from spiking in usage while you're trying to play something.

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Enlarge (credit: Apple)

CUPERTINO, Calif.—As has long been tradition, Apple publicly announced the key features and other details of the next update to the iPhone's operating system at its WWDC conference. Apple's Craig Federighi said the new operating system would focus on "communication, sharing, intelligent input, and new experiences."

As a follow-up to iOS 16's customizable lock screens, iPhone users can now customize their own "contact poster" that appears on other phones when a call comes in. Posters will appear not just for calls placed via cellular or FaceTime but also with third-party VOIP services like Zoom or Skype.

Apple is also adding features for people who like to leave voicemails—live transcription can render text on your phone as the other person is speaking, so you can decide whether to pick up even if you can't hear or aren't listening to what the person on the other end is saying. And FaceTime callers will be able to leave video messages, too.

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Enlarge / This Diablo II Resurrected screenshot looks pretty unremarkable until you zoom into the top-right and see that it's running on an Apple M2. (credit: CodeWeavers)

Apple has made a tiny bit of progress in the last year when it comes to getting games running on Macs—titles like Resident Evil Village and a recent No Man's Sky port don't exactly make the Mac a gaming destination, but they're bigger releases than Mac users are normally accustomed to.

For getting the vast majority of PC gaming titles running, though, the most promising solution would be a Steam Deck-esque software layer that translates Microsoft's DirectX 12 API into something compatible with Apple's proprietary Metal API. Preliminary support for that kind of translation will be coming to CodeWeavers' CrossOver software this summer, the company announced in a blog post late last week.

CrossOver is a software package that promises to run Windows apps and games under macOS and Linux without requiring a full virtualized (or emulated) Windows installation. Its developers announced that they were working on DirectX 12 support in late 2021, and now they have a sample screenshot of Diablo II Resurrected running on an Apple M2 chip. This early DirectX12 support will ship with CrossOver version 23 "later this summer."

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  The "TinyTendo" project, which fits a real NES into a Game Boy-sized enclosure, isn't for the faint of heart. [credit: Redherring32/Twitter ]

If you want a portable console that can play old Nintendo Entertainment System games, the easiest option is software emulation, whether you're using Nintendo's official Switch app, a portable PC, or some cheap knockoff emulator handheld. For those who want better accuracy than software emulation can provide, there's always the Analogue Pocket, which can (with current firmware) re-create the NES in hardware using its FPGA chip.

But some purists are unsatisfied with anything other than original hardware—that's the only possible explanation for projects like the TinyTendo, which goes to extraordinary lengths to squeeze an entire NES into a portable package roughly the size and weight of the old gray monochrome Game Boy. The project is the creation of hardware modder Redherring32, who eventually plans to open-source the project.

For miniaturization projects like this, you often see chopped-up or fully custom-printed circuit boards used with the original chips to contort the hardware into a new shape. This landscape orientation mod for the original Game Boy or the original Analogue NT are both good examples. But more drastic measures were needed to squeeze an entire NES into a handheld console, most notably the removal of bulky pins and ceramic that the original chips all use.

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Enlarge / Paint's long-promised dark mode is now available to Windows Insiders. (credit: Microsoft)

In the summer of 2021, Microsoft’s efforts to redesign its software for the Windows 11 era were just kicking into high gear. The company announced an overhaul for the venerable MS Paint that promised, among other things, dark mode support, but the version of the app that appeared along with Windows 11 in October 2021 was missing the feature.

Now, Windows Insiders in the Dev and Canary channels can finally begin testing a darker version of the Paint app. The update, announced on the Windows Insider blog yesterday, also introduces more granular zoom settings and a zoom slider in the lower-right corner of the app, a new Settings page, new keyboard shortcuts, and “many accessibility and usability improvements to dialogs throughout the app.”

Features rolled out to the Windows Insider channels don’t always make it into the regular builds of Windows 11 that most people use, but these kinds of app updates generally make it out to everyone within a few weeks or months.

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Enlarge / Apple's Mac Studio desktop. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

As Apple rumors go, the long-rumored 15-inch MacBook Air sounds almost certain to be announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference next week. But as Apple’s plans take shape, it also seems possible that we’ll see new Mac desktops featuring high-end M2 Max and M2 Ultra chips.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman believes that these new chips are most likely to power an updated range of Mac Studio desktops, a little over a year after the first Studios were initially introduced. As recently as a few months ago, Gurman speculated that the M2 generation would skip over the Mac Studio entirely and that Apple would instead opt to use the newer chips as a selling point for a new Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

But that version of reality may not come to pass. Gurman says these new Mac models have Mac14,3 and Mac14,4 model identifiers, while the Mac Pro that Apple is testing internally is identified as Mac14,8. (We initially thought these no-adjective model identifiers were a throwback to the PowerPC days, but the reality is more boring; Apple just isn’t using unique Mac names in model identifiers anymore, possibly to combat leaks and the speculation that arises when new IDs break cover.)

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Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Buried among the AI announcements and minor Windows 11 feature tweaks that Microsoft announced yesterday was an addition that will solve a minor but longstanding headache for Windows users: The operating system is finally moving beyond .zip archive support and will soon be gaining the ability to work with RAR, 7-zip, .tar, and many other kinds of archives.

Built-in support for these different archive types will be especially relevant for developers and people who use the Windows Subsystem for Linux, both instances where non-zip compressed archives are more commonly used.

Microsoft told The Verge that the feature would be added "later this week" to a "work-in-progress" build; it may or may not be exclusive to Windows Insider preview builds before rolling out to the general public.

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Enlarge / AMD's Radeon RX 7600. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Earlier this month, AMD briefed the press on its first mainstream RX 7000-series card, the RX 7600. A mostly incremental upgrade over the original RX 6600 but with many of the new features from the RX 7900 XTX and XT, it would come with a price cut, from the RX 6600's $329 to $299. Nvidia then briefed the press on its new mainstream RTX 4060 series. The prices for the higher-end 8GB and 16GB RTX 4060 Ti were already set at $399 and $499. The price for the lower-end RTX 4060 was left undisclosed.

A few days later, presumably having caught wind of AMD's pricing plan for the RX 7600, Nvidia announced the price for the RTX 4060: also a surprisingly low $299. (This entire time, review embargoes and briefings have been shifting by a few days here and there as the companies maneuver around each other.) Then, around 36 hours before this article was published, a new update came from AMD: The RX 7600 would now be launching for $269, $30 less than the RTX 4060 and $60 less than the old RX 6600.

This is what competition in the midrange GPU market looks like after a years-long cryptocurrency-and-scalper-fueled shortage and many more months of Nvidia and AMD focusing on their pricey flagships. These are new, modern cards with modern features available at a price that can at least be called "literally affordable" even if they aren't quite "budget."

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Enlarge / Windows Copilot is an AI-assisted feature coming to Windows 11 preview builds starting in June. (credit: Microsoft)

A couple of months ago, Microsoft added generative AI features to Windows 11 in the form of a taskbar-mounted version of the Bing chatbot. Starting this summer, the company will be going even further, adding a new ChatGPT-driven Copilot feature that can be used alongside your other Windows apps. The company announced the change at its Build developer conference alongside another new batch of Windows 11 updates due later this year. Windows Copilot will be available to Windows Insiders starting in June.

Like the Microsoft 365 Copilot, Windows Copilot is a separate window that opens up along the right side of your screen and assists with various tasks based on what you ask it to do. A Microsoft demo video shows Copilot changing Windows settings, rearranging windows with Snap Layouts, summarizing and rewriting documents that were dragged into it, and opening apps like Spotify, Adobe Express, and Teams. Copilot is launched with a dedicated button on the taskbar.

"Once open, the Windows Copilot side bar stays consistent across your apps, programs and windows, always available to act as your personal assistant. It makes every user a power user, helping you take action, customize your settings, and seamlessly connect across your favorite apps," wrote Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay.

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Enlarge / The RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Nvidia's announcement of the GeForce RTX 4060 series last week broke the pricing trend set by every other RTX 4000-series card released so far: The 4060 Ti is launching at the same price as its predecessor, and the 4060 is actually getting a small price cut.

But these cards also continued a trend that we noted in our RTX 4070 review—compared to past generations, the performance upgrade just isn't as impressive. The $400 RTX 3060 Ti could match or beat a $700 RTX 2080 Super from the previous generation. The 4060 Ti... well, it can definitely beat a 3060 Ti.

It's a very capable mid-range graphics card that's great at 1080p and can often stretch to 1440p. It gives you more performance and lower power consumption at the same price you'd pay for a 3060 Ti yesterday. And it does all of the Ada Lovelace architecture's special tricks, like DLSS Frame Generation and hardware-accelerated AV1 video encoding. But it doesn't bring last generation's high-end performance down to a more reasonable price the way older Nvidia cards have.

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  Lego's 2,561-piece Pac-Man arcade cabinet. [credit: Lego ]

Lego's video game-themed sets for adults have focused mostly on home consoles and the Super Mario universe, but its newest set is turning its eyes to the arcade era. A new 2,561-piece Lego Icons set re-creates the original Pac-Man arcade cabinet, complete with a hand crank on the side that makes Pac-Man, Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde move (along pre-determined paths) on its "screen."

The set will launch on June 4 for $270.

The Pac-Man set isn't a full re-creation of the 1980 original—it looks more like a half-height bartop arcade cabinet rather than one that goes all the way to the floor—but the marquee, the controls, and the decals on the sides are all dead ringers for the old bright-yellow cabinet.

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  The "Book 8088" laptop is a modern clamshell system that attempts to recreate the magic of the original IBM PC from 1981. [credit: Xinrui Technology ]

All modern Intel and AMD PCs can trace their roots to a single system: the IBM Personal Computer. Originally released in August 1981, this computer became so popular and long-lived that competitors reverse-engineered its BIOS so that their computers could use the same software and peripherals, a practice that eventually resulted in a de facto standard whose descendants we still use today.

If you want to experience what using an old IBM PC was like, you could drop a few hundred dollars on a used one on eBay. Or you could roll the dice on this new oddball laptop on AliExpress. The "Book 8088" laptop PC combines modern components with an Intel 8088 processor and 640KB (yes, that's kilobytes) of memory. A few more modern amenities make it nicer to use than a 40-year-old desktop, like a 640×200 16-color LCD screen, and built-in interfaces that allow USB accessories and CompactFlash cards to interface with the ancient components (a 512MB CompactFlash card serves as the system's hard drive).

Intel's 8088 was a cut-down version of the original 8086 with an 8-bit data bus; in the Book 8088 and the IBM PC, it runs at a clock speed of 4.77 MHz. That slow speed and low memory limit means it's best suited to MS-DOS, with its text-based interface and general lack of multitasking support. You can run very early Windows versions on it, up to version 3.0 but, according to retro-tech YouTube, it seems like a bad time.

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