After briefly offering a transparent Steam Deck OLED last year, Valve has announced its next limited edition variant featuring a bold new color: "white." It'll cost you $679 when it's available on November 18, and it features the exact same hardware as the 1TB Steam Deck OLED. (Most importantly, it sports that gorgeous 7.4-inch display with HDR and a 90Hz refresh rate).
Let's get this straight up front: The Vive Focus Vision isn't a competitor to the Meta Quest 3, or the recently released Quest 3S. At $999, how could it be? Instead, it's another stab at the high-end VR market for HTC Vive, an audience it's cultivated since the launch of the first Vive headset in 2016.
In this episode, Devindra and producer Ben Ellman recover from the election by discussing our final thoughts on the PlayStation 5 Pro, as well as Apple’s M4 Mac mini (so cute, so powerful!) and new MacBook Pros. The M4 chip is a solid upgrade, but the M4 Pro is shockingly fast (so much so that it outscored every other system we reviewed this year in Geekbench).
Apple's excellent MacBook Pros are faster than ever with its new M4 chips. That's it, that's the review. Their screens are slightly brighter, and the 14-inch model now starts with 16GB of RAM, but otherwise these are the same laptops that have been around since the M1 Pro redesign in 2021. Really, though, it's not as if Apple had much to improve on. The MacBook Pros have been among our favorite premium laptops for years — now they're just better.
"That's a computer?!" My daughter just couldn't believe her eyes when I pulled the new Mac mini out of its box. It measures just five-inches by five-inches across, and it sits a mere two inches tall. The Mac mini is an adorable box that resembles an oversized Apple TV. But what's more impressive is that it's significantly faster than before, thanks to Apple's M4 and M4 Pro chips, and it still starts at $599. Once again, the Mac mini redefines what a desktop can be.
It's pretty easy to tell if the PlayStation 5 Pro is for you. If you have no problems with the PS5's existing performance, if you balk at the $700 price tag, or if you don't have a modern 4K TV, you can just ignore this console entirely. But if you've been annoyed about losing graphical fidelity in 60 fps performance modes, or just want to avoid 30 fps gaming entirely, it could be the console you've been waiting for.
It's been a Mac-heavy week! In this episode, Devindra and producer Ben Ellman dive into all of Apple's new M4 hardware: the new iMac, Mac mini and refreshed Macbook Pros. The Mac mini, in particular, looks like it'll be a huge hit for anyone who needs a simple desktop system. Also, we dive into why Apple is pushing for every Mac to get 16GB of RAM at a minimum. That will benefit all users, even if they don't care about Apple Intelligence.
Not that it's a huge surprise after Apple's week of M4 upgrades — first with the 24-inch iMac, then the adorable new Mac mini — but today the company is also bringing its M4 chips to the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro.
No, Apple isn't stuffing an M4 chip into the MacBook Air lineup just yet, but it is giving the ultraportables a healthy memory bump. Starting today, every M2 and M3-equipped MacBook Air will come with 16GB of RAM by default, making them better equipped for multitasking and memory-hungry Apple Intelligence features.
You can likely trace the start of the small computer trend back to the original Mac mini, which debuted in 2005 with a simple pitch: What if desktop, but tiny?