Month: June 2020

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  The 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

This morning, Apple quietly added a third discrete GPU configuration option to the 16-inch MacBook Pro available in its store: the new AMD Radeon Pro 5600M. It's a pricy upgrade, but Apple and GPU-maker AMD claim it offers substantially improved performance over the existing options.

The 7nm GPU is designed for video editing, color grading, and game and app development, according to Apple and AMD. Apple claims this 5600M GPU will deliver up to 75-percent faster performance than the Radeon Pro 5500M with 4GB of GDDR6. (There is also a 5500M configuration with 8GB of memory.)

Upgrading to the Radeon Pro 5600M adds $700 to the 16-inch MacBook Pro’s purchase price over the default 5500M configuration with 4GB of memory, or $800 more than the lower-end 5300M. It’s $600 more than the 5500M with 8GB. That means the bare minimum to purchase a MacBook Pro with this GPU is about $3,200.

Enlarge / This probably won't shape up like a battle between the GDI and Brotherhood of Nod, but if you want to suggest an ion cannon-caliber question, go for it, readers. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

The 25th anniversary of real-time strategy game Command & Conquer landed earlier this month with a nuclear-sized explosion of content. C&C Remastered Collection was pretty much everything we'd hoped for: faithful in mechanics, massive in scope, tasteful in redesign, and broken wide open for the community to mod and update.

But how exactly did the new collection's developers, including a contingent of original Westwood Studios devs, bring two classic RTS games (C&C: Tiberian Dawn, C&C: Red Alert) back to life? What complications arose while rebuilding the originals, even before the coronavirus altered the final months of development? How did the team's solicitation of fan input change the project's scope? And what is that wacky supreme leader Kane really like behind closed doors?

EA, the series' handlers, has been kind enough to throw lead producer Jim Vessella into our own veritable Temple of Nod for a video Q&A tomorrow—Tuesday, June 16, at 1pm ET—to be livestreamed right here on Ars Technica. I'll begin the conversation with my own questions, based on my experience with the Remastered Collection, before shifting to hand-selected questions as chosen from the below comments section. Once the interview goes live, we'll also keep an eye on Twitter users who reply to @arstechnica with interesting questions containing the hashtag #arslive.

Enlarge / When seated in a Flying Legend Tucano—a kit-built ¾-scale replica of an Embraer Tucano military trainer—a good day is imminent. (credit: Lee H. Goldberg)

“OK, just walk along the wing root until you get to the back seat.”

I wasn’t about to ignore the pilot’s instructions. I edged up the wing to the cockpit and carefully grabbed the roll bar that sat above the aft instrument panel. After swinging one leg at a time into the narrow cockpit, I eased myself down into the co-pilot’s seat of this compact but menacing looking aircraft. My pilot for this fall 2019 flight, Jeff Frank, co-founder of Flying Legend USA, helped me secure the four-point military style safety harness around my waist and shoulders before sliding down into the front seat and preparing to show me what this Flying Legend Tucano—a kit-built ¾-scale replica of an Embraer Tucano military trainer—could do.

For the uninitiated, the Tucano 312 and 314 are Brazilian-built, turboprop-powered, two-place military trainer aircraft used by many of the world’s air forces to teach basic air combat skills to their aspiring fighter pilots. Once retired from military service, some older Tucanos have begun to find their way into the hands of well-heeled civilians. Their raw power, aggressive handling, ability to execute high-G maneuvers, and relatively affordable prices have made them sought-after toys for warbird aficionados wishing to scratch their Walter Mitty-esque itches. In this case, "affordable" is a relative term: older, well-maintained planes retired from military duty can be bought for as “little” as $750,000, with operating costs (fuel and routine maintenance) typically running $400-$600/hour.

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  Using the disc drives and USB ports as reference, we can get this side-by-side size estimate of various consoles. [credit: Reddit / GREB07 ]

Last week, Sony finally gave us our first look at the unique design of the PlayStation 5 hardware, leading to plenty of Internet mockery (the company also showed some PS5 games, I guess). For all the ethereal coolness of hardware shots shown on an amorphous white background, though, Sony's promo images didn't provide much external context for judging the actual size of the PlayStation 5 box (and Sony hasn't provided official measurements yet, either).

That hasn't stopped Internet sleuths from figuring out their best estimates of the PS5's size, though. Reddit user GREB07 was among the first to judge the dimensions by using the standard sizes of the disc drive and USB ports as reference. Users on ResetEra did a similar analysis, using the size of the d-pad on the PS5 DualSense controller (which is presumably the same size as on the PS4 controller) as additional context. Twitter user EvilBoris and the folks over at IGN added their own estimates using similar methodologies.

The precise results vary a bit depending on the source—and based on precisely where you start and end the measurements on the PS5's wavy design. That said, the consensus estimate puts the PS5 at anywhere from 15 inches to 16 inches wide (all measurements in this piece assume a horizontal orientation for the console, for simplicity). That's easily the largest single dimension for a video game system on record, outpacing the 12.8-inch width of the PS3 or the 12.6-inch width of the original Xbox.