Sony makes the “difficult decision” to raise PlayStation 5 prices in the US

Sony will join Microsoft and Nintendo in raising US prices across its entire game console lineup, the company announced today. Pricing for all current versions of the PlayStation 5 console will increase by $50 starting tomorrow. The price of the PS5 Digital Edition will increase from $450 to $500; the standard PS5 will increase from $500 to $550; and the PS5 Pro will increase from $700 to $750. If you’ve…

August 20, 2025
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Raspberry Pi intros new 5-inch $40 touchscreen for your next weird project

The folks at Raspberry Pi have announced a new touchscreen component for people using boards to create miniature touchscreen appliances: The 5-inch Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 is a 720p IPS multi-touch screen that’s natively supported by the Raspberry Pi OS and includes mounting holes on the back to make it easy to build integrated all-in-one devices. The new screen will cost $40 and is available starting today from Pi…

August 18, 2025
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Ars Technica System Guide: Five sample PC builds, from $500 to $5,000

Sometimes I go longer than I intend without writing an updated version of our PC building guide. And while I could just claim to be too busy to spend hours on Newegg or Amazon or other sites digging through dozens of near-identical parts, the lack of updates usually correlates with “times when building a desktop PC is actually a pain in the ass.” Through most of 2025, fluctuating and inflated graphics card…

August 18, 2025
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Tiny, removable “mini SSD” could eventually be a big deal for gaming handhelds

Earlier this year, Nintendo helped popularize the microSD Express standard by requiring it for the new Switch 2 console. Created in 2019, the specification had languished in relative obscurity for years because the cheap, plentiful non-Express microSD cards were generally fast enough for the things that people were using them for, and because most hardware didn’t support microSD Express cards in the first place. However, Nintendo’s console needed performance closer…

August 15, 2025
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Apple Watch gets reformulated, non-patent-infringing blood oxygen monitoring

In early 2024, Apple removed a blood oxygen monitoring feature from its then-current Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 watches, following a ruling that the feature violated light-based pulse oximetry patents from a California-based company called Masimo. Removing the feature allowed Apple to circumvent an import ban and continue selling the Series 9 and Ultra 2 (and, later, the Series 10) in the US. Today, Apple announced that it’s…

August 14, 2025
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Report: Apple’s smart home ambitions include “tabletop robot,” cameras, and more

Rumors about a touchscreen-equipped smart home device from Apple have been circulating for years, periodically bolstered by leaked references in Apple’s software updates. But a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman indicates that Apple’s ambitions might extend beyond HomePods with screens attached. Gurman claims that Apple is working on a “tabletop robot” that “resembles an iPad mounted on a movable limb that can swivel and reposition itself to follow users in…

August 13, 2025
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Is AI really trying to escape human control and blackmail people?

In June, headlines read like science fiction: AI models “blackmailing” engineers and “sabotaging” shutdown commands. Simulations of these events did occur in highly contrived testing scenarios designed to elicit these responses—OpenAI’s o3 model edited shutdown scripts to stay online, and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 “threatened” to expose an engineer’s affair. But the sensational framing obscures what’s really happening: design flaws dressed up as intentional guile. And still, AI doesn’t have…

August 13, 2025
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Google Gemini will now learn from your chats—unless you tell it not to

As Gemini is increasingly woven into the fabric of Google, the way the chatbot accesses and interacts with your data is in a constant state of flux. Today, Google is announcing several big changes to how its AI adapts to you, giving it the ability to remember more details about your chats for improved answers. If that’s a concern, Google also has a new temporary chat option that won’t affect…

August 13, 2025
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OpenAI brings back GPT-4o after user revolt

On Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that GPT-4o has returned to ChatGPT following intense user backlash over its removal during last week’s GPT-5 launch. The AI model now appears in the model picker for all paid ChatGPT users by default (including ChatGPT Plus accounts), marking a swift reversal after thousands of users complained about losing access to their preferred models. The return of GPT-4o comes after what Altman described…

August 13, 2025
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High-severity WinRAR 0-day exploited for weeks by 2 groups

A high-severity zero-day in the widely used WinRAR file compressor is under active exploitation by two Russian cybercrime groups. The attacks backdoor computers that open malicious archives attached to phishing messages, some of which are personalized. Security firm ESET said Monday that it first detected the attacks on July 18, when its telemetry spotted a file in an unusual directory path. By July 24, ESET determined that the behavior was…

August 13, 2025
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