Month: September 2016

Before I go off to try out the new HDR and 4K gaming capabilities of the just-announced PlayStation 4 Pro, we at Ars thought you might want to see the hardware itself that is being shown off here at the PlayStation Theater. Here's a quick gallery of the new box that will be sitting underneath many of your entertainment centers this November—if you're willing to shell out $400, that is.

Click through for a good look at the width and height of the new hardware compared to other systems, along with a surprise refresh of the PlayStation Camera, which is now more cylindrical and less like Short Circuit's Jonny 5.

Enlarge / A livestream representation isn't a good way to show off HDR, but Sony's Mark Cerny attempts to show it off. (credit: PlayStation)

Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro event on Wednesday loudly trumpeted the benefits of HDR (high dynamic range) rendering as one reason to buy the new system, but in a surprise move, PlayStation's Andrew House announced that every PlayStation 4 owner can expect HDR compatibility—and as soon as next week.

"With the proper display, all 40 million PlayStation 4 owners can join the HDR revolution," House told the crowd after confirming that a firmware update will go out to all users next week (though an exact date wasn't specified). However, House didn't confirm whether that HDR spec will be locked to the Dolby Vision standard or to HDR-10.

This somewhat leaves Xbox One gamers in the HDR dust, as that system's HDR compatibility only works for owners of the brand-new Xbox One S hardware revision. That system works only with the HDR-10 spec, which is slightly more limited than Dolby Vision in terms of color and brightness spectrum.

(Re)Introducing the PlayStation 4 Slim. (video link)

Unlike Microsoft's compact console offering, the Xbox One S, the new smaller, slimmer, less glossy PlayStation 4 doesn't support 4K (UHD) resolution. It doesn't have a 4K Blu-ray player, nor does it feature slightly faster graphics processing than its bigger brother. Instead, the new PS4 (which replaces the old one) is much like the PS3 Slim: a leaner version of an existing console.

That's no bad thing. When it goes on sale on September 15 the 500GB version of the new PS4 will retail for £259/$299. That price means the new PS4 costs largely the same as the old one, and some features have been cut despite the lack of price reduction. That said, they're not ones most players will miss. In fact, after a week playing around with the new PS4, I'd even say some of those cuts have made it more attractive.

Sony announced a successor to the PlayStation 4 today, but it's not intended to replace the console launched back in 2013. Instead, the PlayStation 4 Pro is an upgraded tier of console that is designed to play the same games as the existing PS4 at a higher fidelity—meaning, with 4K resolutions and HDR (high dynamic range).

PS4 Slim and PS4 Pro price/release details.

Confirming rumors first reported back in March, the Pro sports an improved CPU, GPU, and greater memory bandwidth than its predecessors, and it will ship on November 10, priced at $399. Sony's Mark Cerny confirmed a 1TB hard drive will ship in all PS4 Pro consoles, which looks much like the existing, slight-angle, all-black PS4 model, only with a "third-wedge" addition to its width. Other technical specs were not announced at the press conference.

Cerny introduced 4K footage of PS4 Pro-compatible games launching in the future, including Ubisoft's For Honor and Insomniac's upcoming Spider-Man game, along with previously released games like last month's Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. During these demonstrations, Cerny made clear that models and textures were the "exact same ones that were created for the PS4," with the newer Pro system pulling the rendering weight to boost to something that works on a 4K display. He stressed that the system pulled the brunt of the work, as opposed to game developers, so that "smaller teams can bring their titles to PS4 Pro and the new world of higher resolution displays."

Enlarge / The macOS Sierra beta running on a MacBook Pro. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

SAN FRANCISCO—Apple will release the final version of macOS 10.12 Sierra to the public on September 20th. The company made the announcement on its web site during its September product event today.

Aside from being called "macOS" now, Sierra brings a handful of big new features and a longer list of minor tweaks. We covered most of that ground in our preview of the developer build of the software (and we'll cover it all again in more depth in our full review), but the short list includes Siri, proximity-based Apple Watch unlocking, Apple Pay on the web, and more.

Sierra runs on many current Macs, but for the first time since OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion launched in 2012 Apple is leaving some older hardware behind. The affected hardware is mostly from 2007, 2008, and 2009, so if you've bought something since the turn of the decade you should generally be safe. The full supported list is below: