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Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham/Google)
Google announced today that it would enable WebGPU support in its Chrome browser by default starting in version 113, currently in beta. In development since 2017, WebGPU is a next-generation graphics API that aims to bring the benefits of low-overhead APIs like Microsoft's Direct3D 12, Apple's Metal, and Vulkan to web browsers and other apps.
WebGPU support has been available but off by default in Chrome for a while now, because the API wasn't finalized and things could break from update to update. Google says that Mozilla and Apple will eventually support WebGPU in Firefox and Safari, and browsers like Microsoft Edge and Opera that rely on the Chromium browser engine can presumably choose to switch it on just as Google has.
Chrome 113 supports WebGPU on Windows, macOS, and ChromeOS to start, with "support for other platforms" like Linux and Android "coming later this year." This browser version should roll out to all Chrome users sometime in May.
Enlarge / Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4080. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
The video encoding hardware built into GeForce GPUs is getting a small boost, according to a quietly updated Nvidia support page (as spotted by Tom's Hardware). Previously, the NVENC encoder built into GeForce GPUs could encode up to three video streams simultaneously. Now, most GPUs supported by Nvidia's current drivers can encode up to five streams of video simultaneously, unlocking capabilities that had always been present in the hardware but that were software-limited in consumer GPUs.
It's unclear exactly when Nvidia made this change, but archival snapshots on the Internet Wayback Machine show the old three-stream limit as recently as March 18, so you may need to install the most recent drivers to unlock the additional encoding capabilities. Your video quality settings may also limit the number of video streams you can encode simultaneously.
Most GeForce GPUs going back to the 2014-era Maxwell architecture now support the extra simultaneous streams, so you don't need a new or powerful video card to benefit from the change (though there are some models, particularly MX-series GPUs for budget laptops, that still don't have any video encoding capabilities, presumably because they're missing the hardware). Models as old as the GeForce 750 Ti are on the list, as are most GeForce 900, 1000, 2000, 3000, and 4000-series cards. The kinds of video you can encode will still come down to what your GPU's hardware encoder actually supports; that Nvidia support document lists supported codecs, color depths, and other specs for each GPU.
(credit: Sony)
Sales of vinyl records have been on the rise for years, but according to the RIAA's 2022 year-end revenue report for the music industry (PDF), record sales hit a new high last year. For the first time since 1987, unit sales of vinyl albums outpaced those of CDs, vindicating all the people who have spent decades of their lives talking about how vinyl "just sounds better."
Although vinyl unit sales only surpassed CDs last year, revenue from vinyl records has been higher than revenue from CDs for a while now. In 2022, the RIAA says that vinyl albums earned $1.2 billion, compared to $483 million for CDs. The growth in vinyl was more than enough to offset a drop in CD revenue, helping overall physical media revenue climb 4 percent over 2021 (which was already way up over 2020).
Growth in vinyl revenue was more than enough to offset a drop in revenue from CDs. Vinyl unit sales have surpassed CD unit sales for the first time since 1987. (credit: RIAA)
Streaming services still account for the vast majority of all music revenue in the US—84 percent, up from 83 percent in 2021. The RIAA says there was an average of 92 million streaming music subscriptions active in 2022, which, together with digital radio and ad-supported sites like YouTube, generated $13.3 billion. The growth of streaming services and physical media comes at the expense of paid digital downloads, which accounted for a mere 3 percent of all music revenue in 2022.
Enlarge / The current Outlook for Mac email client. (credit: Microsoft)
Update, 4:36pm: Microsoft has updated its post to indicate that the "ground up" redesign coming for the Mac version of Outlook will continue to be a "native Mac app," and not a "Progressive Web App (PWA)" like the one the company is testing in Windows. We've updated the article accordingly. We've also added a reference to the free version of Outlook being ad-supported.
Original story: Microsoft is making the Outlook for Mac app free to use, the company announced this week. Previously available with a Microsoft 365 account or as part of the Office for Mac app suite, the Outlook app is downloadable from the Mac App Store and works with Outlook.com, Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, and plain old IMAP and POP email accounts. The free version of Outlook will look and work mostly the same way as the paid version, but it will be ad supported.
Microsoft already offers a free version of the Outlook client for iOS and Android, and it's currently testing a preview of a redesigned Outlook app that will replace the free built-in Mail and Calendar apps that ship with Windows 11.
Microsoft started its Windows Insider program in 2014 to get public feedback on Windows 10 as it was being developed. Ever since then, the company has continued to provide regularly updated prerelease builds of Windows 10 and Windows 11 to preview and test new features.
Like many public beta programs, Microsoft has maintained different channels for different users, with periodic tweaks to each channel's name and stated purpose. Today, Microsoft is renaming one channel and introducing another one. The one formerly known as the "Dev" channel will now be called the "Canary" channel, and it will be where Microsoft tests its least-stable and most-experimental features (including "major changes to the Windows kernel, new APIs, etc.").
"The builds that will be flighted to the Canary Channel will be “hot off the presses,” flighting very soon after they are built, which means very little validation and documentation will be done before they are offered to Insiders," writes Windows Insider Program Lead Amanda Langowski.
Enlarge (credit: Apple)
Apple is readying a new batch of Macs to launch "between late spring and summer," according to a report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
The most significant of the three would be a 15-inch MacBook Air, but a new Mac Pro refresh would complete the Mac's transition from Intel's CPUs and AMD's GPUs to Apple Silicon, and a new 13-inch MacBook Air could also be in the cards. Apple is also said to be planning a new 24-inch iMac that could be the first of its Macs to use its next-generation M3 chip.
The 15-inch MacBook Air would be a new product category for Apple: a larger-screened laptop that costs less than a MacBook Pro. Apple's consumer-focused laptops—from the old PowerPC iBook to the first Intel MacBooks to the current MacBook Air—have all ranged between 11 and 13 inches. The 15- to 17-inch PowerBook and MacBook Pro models always required a step up in CPU and GPU power that drove the price up; the cheapest MacBook Air starts at $999, while the cheapest 16-inch MacBook Pro costs $2,499.
Enlarge / Windows 11 is mixing things up with an improved volume mixer, among other features. (credit: Microsoft)
Microsoft released a batch of significant updates to Windows 11 earlier this week, adding tabs to the Notepad app, integrating the AI-powered "new Bing" into the taskbar's search box, and previewing iPhone pairing, complete with rudimentary iMessage support. And Microsoft continues to test other features in public via its Windows Insider Program, particularly in the more experimental Dev channel. These builds are likely to form the basis for the operating system's big 23H2 update later this year.
This week's Dev channel build demonstrates a new and improved volume mixer for Windows and its apps directly from the Quick Settings menu at the bottom-right of the taskbar. The new mixer allows you to switch between output devices and control the volume of your output, and it shows per-app volume and mute settings so you can quiet down or silence an individual app. It's an improvement over the current Quick Settings controls, which only offer system-wide volume adjustments and require multiple clicks to change output devices.
This build also expands a feature called "Auto Color Management" (ACM). ACM is hardware-accelerated, system-level color management that ensures colors in apps look the same on different displays with different capabilities, and it's designed as a replacement for older Windows color management technologies like Image Color Management (ICM) and the Windows Color System (WCS).
Enlarge / Jonathan Frakes is my dad. (credit: Paramount+)
Few involved in the making or watching of 2002's Star Trek Nemesis would say that it was a fantastic send-off for the beloved characters of The Next Generation. Over seven seasons, TNG became one of Trek's most nuanced and consistent entries (though still one that was capable of producing terrible, silly, and just plain weird episodes). But Nemesis is a flat action movie defined by thin characterization, a cheesy one-note villain, and distracting plot contrivances, and it did so poorly ($67 million on a $60 million budget, in a time before "maybe it will make a lot of money in China" was a thing) that it foreclosed any possibility of another sequel. The cast and those characters, the thinking generally went, deserved better closure.
Star Trek: Picard has been the TNG continuation you'd get if you wished for a TNG sequel on a monkey's paw. The first two seasons made only intermittent use of any non-Picard characters, and the new characters were either annoying or bland or both. The show's creative staff uses "convoluted twists" as a stand-in for clear and interesting storytelling. It's a show strictly for die-hard Trek completists, and it's easily the worst of the five Trek shows in active production as of this writing.
The show's third and final season has been pitched as a true TNG reunion, and if nothing else, it's nice to see the clear affection these performers still have for one another. But Picard is still Picard, and many of the characters and plot points in the season so far (we've seen the first six episodes of a planned 10, though this piece will only refer to specific events from the season premiere and the trailers) are eerily reminiscent of the ones that made Nemesis so unsatisfying.
Enlarge (credit: Primate Labs)
We review a lot of hardware at Ars, and part of that review process involves running benchmark apps. The exact apps we use may change over time and based on what we're trying to measure, but the purpose is the same: to compare the relative performance of two or more things and to make sure that products perform as well in real life as they do on paper.
One app that has been a consistent part of our test suite for over a decade is Geekbench, a CPU and GPU compute benchmark that is releasing its sixth major version today. Partly because it's small, free, and easy to run; partly because developer Primate Labs maintains a gigantic searchable database spanning millions of test runs across millions of devices; and partly because it will run on just about anything under the sun, Geekbench has become one of the Internet's most-used (and most-argued-about) benchmarking tools.
"I'm really glad that people seem to have latched onto it," Primate Labs founder and Geekbench creator John Poole told Ars of Geekbench's popularity. "I know Gordon Ung at PCWorld basically calls Geekbench the official benchmark of Twitter arguments, which is the fallout from that."
Enlarge / If your PC looks like this, you're probably used to bad software. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
RGB lighting isn't for everyone, but a quick glance at PC-builder Reddit or the legions of glass-sided PC cases suggests it is for some people. If that's you, you're probably used to dealing with sub-par RGB control apps from the company that made your motherboard, keyboard, mouse, and/or fans. Not all of this software is awful, but it usually includes all kinds of features you don't need or want, and it's often difficult to use.
Microsoft may be working on a fix for this in a test build of Windows 11, according to Twitter user @thebookisclosed. They discovered a hidden screen in the Settings app in Windows 11 build 25295 dedicated to basic RGB lighting controls for connected accessories, providing a consistent and unified interface for assigning colors and lighting patterns that doesn't require the installation of third-party software.
The current Windows 11 lighting UI is a simple list of all connected RGB-compatible accessories. [credit: @thebookisclosed/Twitter ]
We don't know if this feature will ship in Windows 11 or what form it will take if it does—Microsoft tests all kinds of features in its Windows Insider builds, and the company doesn't always end up shipping to regular consumers. If the feature ships in anything like its current form, it may have limitations. Third-party apps will probably still offer a wider array of lighting patterns and effects, plus other features like the ability to sync all the RGB accessories in a given room. It's also unclear whether the UI can control RGB accessories connected to a motherboard's 3- or 4-pin RGB header or RAM slots, in addition to things connected to external USB ports or your motherboard's internal USB headers. Those 3- and 4-pin headers are physically and electrically compatible, but programming the lights at a software level is handled slightly differently by each motherboard maker.
Enlarge / The Switch Online Game Boy Advance emulator will look and feel familiar if you've used the NES, SNES, Genesis, or N64 emulators. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Nearly a year after apparently-Nintendo-developed Game Boy and Game Boy Advance emulators for the Switch leaked online, Nintendo has finally made those emulators available to Switch Online subscribers. All subscribers can download the Game Boy emulator, which includes a combination of classic Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. Game Boy Advance emulation, like Nintendo 64 and Sega Genesis emulation, is exclusive to the more expensive "expansion pack" tier of the service.
Nintendo's first-party emulation efforts don't have an amazing reputation, and the N64 emulation, in particular, has suffered from accuracy issues and other bugs in the past (though Nintendo has addressed many of the problems that existed at launch). But the emulators for older and less-taxing-to-emulate 2D systems have generally been pretty good, and both Game Boy emulators fall into that group.
A selection of Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. Game Boy Color games always play in color, even if the original games were playable in the standard Game Boy. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]
The user interfaces for both apps will be familiar to you if you've used any of these other first-party emulation apps on the Switch: a screen full of games (not very full at this point; per usual, the selection is limited at launch and will slowly expand over time) in a customizable grid. Zip over to the menu on the left to switch between single-player and offline and online multiplayer modes. But it's the Settings menu that we're most interested in.
Enlarge / Having a great meeting in Microsoft Teams. (credit: Microsoft)
There is a free Microsoft Teams tier now, and there will continue to be a free Microsoft Teams tier after April 12, 2023. But in a bureaucratic twist, neither product will have anything to do with the other. Current users of Microsoft Teams Free will either need to create new accounts in a new tier called Microsoft Teams (free), losing all their Teams data in the process, or upgrade to a $4-per-user-per-month Microsoft Teams Essentials tier to keep all their stuff.
Microsoft spells out the changes on this support page about the retirement of Microsoft Teams Free, now called Microsoft Teams Free (classic). Files from Microsoft Teams Free (classic) can be downloaded and saved until the service shuts down on April 12, but there's no automated process for importing those files or other user accounts into a Microsoft Teams (free) account.
Microsoft's product page positions the new Microsoft Teams (free) tier as a product for home users and families, but the features it offers are pretty similar to the old classic tier overall. Video calls still top out at 100 participants and a one-hour runtime (one-on-one meetings can run for up to 30 hours). Each Teams (free) user gets 5GB of storage, while Teams Free (classic) users received 2GB each and a 10GB pool of shared storage. Both products offer unlimited chatting and access to shared files, task lists, and polls.
Enlarge / Not the most efficient way to read the news, but at least he's reading...
New episodes of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who has played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episodes, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Kyle: There are at least one or two more plot and/or format curves, even if they just stick to the games. (And that's all the cryptic clues I'm giving.)
Speaking of episode whiplash, I think this was the first episode where we really got a good look at Ellie's constant transitions between young teen goofball and potty-mouthed action-hero sidekick. It was an incredibly effective combination in the games, and so far I think it's working in this new context as well.
Kyle: I was not a dad when I played the first game, and now that I am, I'll just say that the obvious attempts to bring out Joel's paternal instincts work very well.
I was also a little tickled by the show's attempts to mirror the game's constant situations where Ellie is small enough to squeeze through somewhere to safety to unblock a door with a heavy thing in front of it (or climb up to lower a ladder down or something), which we haven't really seen in the show yet.
In the game, these moments really strengthen the player's bond with what could otherwise just be an annoying, quippy escort mission objective. Here, these moments fell a little flatter.
But yes, the jokebook puns are just as effective as ever!
Andrew: By the time she squeezes through her second or third convenient window or hole in the wall, yes, it does start to strain credulity a bit. Absent a gameplay reason to bond with Ellie, the show has to lean harder on the emotional beats, which, thankfully, it does pretty well.
The “dad jokes” running gag is inspired; the “bonding over past and present trauma” bits are more predictable but still serviceable. You can see the turning point of their relationship coming from 10 miles away—Joel will tell Ellie about his daughter, Ellie will share whatever she’s hiding about the first time she had to kill someone, and after that, they will be bonded for life—but it doesn’t mean I’m not eager to see these actors play out that conversation.
In fact, at this point, if I did try to play the game I would probably be frustrated that Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey weren’t in it.
Andrew: So when Joel and Ellie find unfriendly humans instead of a shortcut in Kansas City, I liked the very game-like way the people there had helpfully spray-painted things like “We The People” and “RUN” in 2-foot-high letters on their trucks to tell the audience what to think about them.
The woman leading these people, Kathleen, seems like what you would get if you put "Woman Who Wants to Speak to Your Manager" in charge of your vigilante band. You said that we’re following the emotional arc of the game pretty closely in this one; how close are we to the game’s actual events?
Kyle: I can't say too much, both because there actually is a Henry in the games and because, after episode 3 and the introduction of new characters here, I really don't know if my knowledge of him means much of anything.
That's one thing that I think makes the show work so well: It's committed to the feel of the games but not so committed to the structure that it becomes just dull and predictable if you've played them...
Andrew: And as a non-game-player who does have a pretty firm grasp on narrative tropes, the show has surprised me already, and it seems likely to surprise me again, based on your subtle-ish hints. It does seem like it’s a little more fun at this point to have no idea what happens, though, because I don’t know anything about who named characters are “supposed” to be.
For Kathleen’s part, I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest that ignoring the cordyceps zombies in that basement hole (that's what that was, right?) in favor of chasing down humans seems pretty likely to backfire.
Andrew: Definitely. Since otherwise, I think this is our first (possibly only? who can say!) totally Infected-free episode.
Enlarge / Raft is developed by Redbeet Interactive and published by Axolot Games. (credit: Redbeet Interactive)
My co-op gaming group has logged a few hundred extra hours in Deep Rock Galactic since I wrote about it a year and a half ago, but we're always looking for another game to fall in love with.
We've tried a bunch of things in the last year, guided by a combination of positive reviews and "whatever is on sale in Steam at the time." We've logged time in Back 4 Blood, Payday 2, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, Sea of Thieves, Diablo III, Risk of Rain 2, and Borderlands 3, and each has had its charms. But the one that has stuck with me the most is called Raft, a game about building a raft.
Raft isn't new—it went into Early Access in 2018—but its formal 1.0 release happened this past June. The pitch: You begin the game drifting across an endless ocean on a tiny wooden raft cobbled together from flotsam and jetsam. Armed with only a trusty throwable plastic hook, you must comb the ocean for planks, plastic, and other bits of scrap that you can use to expand your raft and stay alive. And once you're no longer in constant danger of starving to death (and once you can steer your raft instead of just letting it drift), you can begin sailing to the world's remaining islands to figure out what happened to everyone else.
Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)
If your main problem with the Microsoft Store is that you get too many relevant results when you search for apps, good news: Microsoft is officially launching Microsoft Store Ads, a way for developers to pay to get their apps in front of your eyes when you go to the store to look for something else.
Microsoft's landing page for the feature says the apps will appear during searches and in the Apps and Gaming tabs within the app. Developers will be able to track whether and where users see the ads and whether they're downloading and opening the apps once they see the ads.
Microsoft also provided an update on the health of the Microsoft Store, pointing to 2022 as "a record year," with more than 900 million unique users worldwide and "a 122% year-over-year increase in developer submissions of new apps and games." Microsoft has steadily loosened its restrictions on Store apps in the last year or two, allowing in traditional Win32 apps and also leaning on Amazon's Android app store and the Windows Subsystem for Android to expand its selection.
Enlarge / ChromeOS will feature better OneDrive and Microsoft 365 support "later this year." (credit: Google)
Google and Microsoft don't always take pains to make sure their products work great together—Google originally declared Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge browser "not supported" by the Google Drive web apps; Microsoft is always trying to make you use Bing—but it looks like Google's ChromeOS will start working a bit better with the Microsoft 365 service later this year.
Google says ChromeOS will add a "new integration" for Microsoft 365, making it easier to install the app and adding built-in support for OneDrive in ChromeOS' native Files app. This should allow users to search for and access OneDrive files the same way they get to local files, or files stored in their Google Drive account. The integration will be added in "the coming months," and users in ChromeOS' dev and beta channels will be able to access it before it rolls out to all ChromeOS users later this year.
ChromeOS users can currently access OneDrive and other Microsoft 365 services through their web interfaces or Android apps installed via the Google Play Store, but they don't integrate with the built-in ChromeOS Files app the way that Google Drive does. This integration will help close that gap for people who, for example, use Google products at home but Microsoft products at work or vice versa.
Enlarge / The 14- and 16-inch M2 MacBook Pros. (credit: Apple)
In our review of Apple's new M2 MacBook Pros, our testing showed that the laptops' internal storage speeds were higher than those in the M1 MacBook Pros they replaced. But that won't be true for all models—9to5Mac has discovered that for the entry-level models with 512GB of storage, the M2 MacBook Pro's storage is slower than that in the M1 version.
The high-level Blackmagic Disk Speed Test shows the 512GB version of the M1 Pro MacBook Pro with a 4,900 MB/s read speed and 3,951 MB/s write speed, while the M2 Pro version shows a 2,973 MB/s read speed and 3,154.5 MB/s write speed. That's a drop of 40 percent for read speeds and 20 percent for write speeds.
The difference appears to come down to the NAND flash memory chips Apple is using for its SSDs. The old MacBook Pro, per its iFixit teardown, used four 128GB NAND chips in a 512GB SSD, while 9to5Mac's M2 Pro MacBook Pro appears to use a pair of 256GB NAND chips. Fewer chips likely mean lower costs for Apple—but also fewer places for the SSD to read from and write to simultaneously, which reduces overall speeds.
Enlarge / Microsoft's Surface devices have user-replaceable SSDs, but it's difficult to find them in the right (physical) size. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Microsoft's Surface devices had a well-deserved reputation for being impossible to repair in their early years, but Microsoft has sought to change that more recently. Newer Surfaces feature detailed repair manuals and, at least in theory, easily upgradeable SSDs.
I say "in theory" because it hasn't been as simple as going out, buying a drive, and installing it. The Surface's storage slot uses the standard M.2 interface, and most devices make it easy to access, but the PCs use relatively rare 30-mm-long drives that most of the big SSD makers simply don't offer to regular consumers. This has made it harder to do that old tech-savvy money-saving trick: buying a 128GB or 256GB version of a computer and upgrading it with a 512GB or 1TB drive for a fraction of what the company would charge you to do it.
But that's slowly changing. Some of the smaller-but-still-reputable SSD makers like Sabrent and Inland have finally started offering 30 mm-long versions of some of their SSDs complete with retail packaging and standard warranties. Until recently, the best way to get upgrades for these drives was to buy a warranty-less, possibly used white-label drive from the likes of Newegg or eBay. So being able to buy SSDs in full retail packaging with actual warranties is an improvement.
Enlarge / The iPad Air 2 (left) and iPad mini 4 (right) will still get iPadOS 15 updates, but Apple's newer iPads will have to upgrade. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
If you use an iPad that can run iPadOS 16 and you've been sticking with iPadOS 15 for one reason or another, you should get ready to upgrade soon. The iPadOS 15.7.3 update, which provides security-only fixes to the older OS, is only compatible with iPads that can't run iPadOS 16, namely 2014's iPad Air 2 and 2015's 4th-generation iPad mini.
Apple had been supporting all iPads with iPadOS 15 updates, whether they could run iPadOS 16 or not—the last of these updates was iPadOS 15.7.2, released in mid-December. Apple releases these updates for a while so that cautious users can stay protected against vulnerabilities while they wait for major bugs to be resolved in the newest major OS release.
But that grace period usually only lasts for a couple of months. Newer iPhones were pushed to update to iOS 16 in December when the 15.7.2 update dropped support for them. The release of iPadOS 16 came a month after the release of iOS 16 this year, which is why the 15.7.2 update still supported newer iPads.
Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)
Microsoft will stop selling downloadable licenses for Windows 10 on its website on January 31, according to a message on the product pages for Windows 10 Home and Pro. Although Windows 10 will continue to be supported with new security updates until at least October 2025, Microsoft is pushing anyone buying or building a new PC to use the newer Windows 11 instead.
Other retail sites will presumably keep selling physical and digital copies of Windows 10 for at least a little while, but even if all Windows 10 sales went away at the end of the month, people who really wanted it should still be able to get it.
For owners of older Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs who want to upgrade—and you should, since both operating systems received their final regularly scheduled security updates earlier this month—Windows 10 should continue to install and run just fine on those computers at no additional cost. This is an artifact of the years-old Windows 10 upgrade offer. Microsoft officially stopped offering a free upgrade to Windows 10 in 2016, but the company never took any steps to stop the upgrades from working.
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