Month: June 2017

The video game voice actors in the SAG-AFTRA union have been holding a solid line since they started striking last October, demanding limitations to vocally stressful work sessions and bonus payments for work on top-selling games. But as the strike extends into its eighth month, plenty of games are still getting made with unionized vocal talent. That's because even as the strike as a whole continues, the union has been able to peel off a growing number of developers and publishers willing to agree to new contracts that meet their demands.

Rather than bearing down for an all-or-nothing battle against a monolithic and united video game industry, SAG-AFTRA has taken a more targeted approach, signing individual agreements for specific "non-struck" titles that union members are allowed to work on. As of late May, 36 companies representing 73 games have agreed to the union's new contract.

That move has fragmented any collective bargaining position on the part of the game industry writ large, leading to the odd situation where striking workers can still find work in the sector. In some cases, individual publishers and production companies have agreed to the new contract for some projects while holding out on others, seemingly undermining their own position on a game-by-game basis.

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Today at WWDC, we finally got a look at Apple's rumored smart home speaker, which has home-assistant features buried beneath a music-first sales pitch.

"We want to reinvent home music," Tim Cook told the Monday WWDC keynote crowd before Apple's Phil Schiller revealed and named the new Apple Homepod. The product will cost $349 and launch in certain territories, including the US, this December.

Enlarge / The iPhone 5 running iOS 10. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

SAN JOSE, Calif.—When Apple releases the next version of iOS in the fall, it’s going to leave a handful of older iDevices behind. This year, two phones and one tablet are getting the axe: 2012’s iPhone 5 and fourth-generation iPad, and 2013’s iPhone 5C.

These iPhones and iPads are definitely slower than their newer counterparts, but this time around the compatibility cutoff has less to do with things like RAM or raw performance. These three gadgets are the last iDevices to use 32-bit processors (the Apple A6 in the iPhones, the A6X in the iPad); beginning with the iPhone 5S and the iPad Air in 2013, all of Apple’s iPhones, iPads, and iPods since have included 64-bit chips.

iOS 11 will run on:

Enlarge / The ecosystem keeps growing.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Apple's WWDC isn't usually about hardware, but the company used its keynote today to introduce a fairly major new product: a fully redesigned iPad Pro, designed to replace the current 9.7-inch tablet that debuted back in March of 2016.

The new tablet's defining feature is its new slim-bezeled design, which lets Apple fit a 10.5-inch screen into a body that's not all that different from the 9.7-inch tablet's. That larger screen is also used to fit more information: like the big iPad Pro, the 10.5-inch version can fit two "full" iPad apps side-by-side in Split View mode instead of one full app and one narrower, more phone-like app.

The new iPad pro features a bump to a spec we don't often hear much about on iPad screens: the refresh rate. Under the cover of a feature called "Pro Motion," the device's display will use a 120Hz refresh rate instead of the default 60Hz. Apple claims this will result in a better Apple Pencil input experience. The iPad Pro can also dynamically adjust its display refresh rate to fit its native content refresh rate, like with 48Hz movies.