Early Sony PlayStations doubled as high-quality CD players, but the PS4 and PS5 removed the feature. Yet the PS5 can technically play MP3s off discs if they pretend to be USB flash drives! Will It Work?, a fantastic concept for a YouTube channel, walks you through it:
[YouTube]
How two Chinese tool brands are becoming household names.
Who knows if any of this will make it into the final game early next year? These bits intrigue, though:
It’s not going to be a sort of subsidized device, like Valve is not going into this thinking we’re going to eat a big loss on this so that we can group market share or category or anything like that, correct?
Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais:
No, it’s more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market. Obviously our goal is for it to be a good deal at that level of performance, and then you have features that are really hard to build if you are making your own gaming PC from parts.
And with RAM prices soaring... it might be a console, but not priced like one.
CNBC, in a story titled “Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it’s costing the economy,” seems to be calling people “device hoarders” if they can’t afford a new phone or computer. Here’s just one selection:
While squeezing as much life out of your device as possible may save money in the short run, especially amid widespread fears about the strength of the consumer and job market, it might cost the economy in the long run, especially when device hoarding occurs at the level of corporations.
Maybe they could afford them if the economy was doing better?
Valve’s big hardware push: you asked, we answered.
Antonio says the heat issue is fixed!
The old Ryzen 9 7940HS averaged 58 degrees Celsius and reached a piping hot 93C; the new AMD Ryzen 7 AI 350 CPU averaged an internal temperature of 50C and peaked at 64C.
Unfortunately, it seems the 2nd-gen Laptop 16 still needs work. More in his full review:
Valve hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat won’t promise anything, but he told us “that is something we are really interested in supporting” during our big Valve trip. It’s not as simple as it sounds, he says: What if users pull it off the dock mid-update?
It could fail and you’d be stuck in that state forever, right? Or you lose Wi-Fi connection and be in a weird state. There’s all kinds of situations where we want to be able to have acceptable behavior if that happens.
Valve’s marketing video for Steam Frame is a bit misleading — its monochrome cameras mean you’d see the world around the screen in shades of grey, not color. But I’m hoping that means affordable. Valve’s Jeremy Selan told us:
While this is a premium headset, we did want to be cost considerate because we’re really trying to make this accessible to as many people as we can.
