It’s pretty easy to tell if the PlayStation 5 Pro is for you. If you have no problems with the PS5’s existing performance, if you balk at the $700 price tag, or if you don’t have a modern 4K TV, you can just ignore this console entirely. But if you’ve been annoyed about losing graphical fidelity in 60 fps performance modes, or just want to avoid 30 fps gaming entirely, it could be the console you’ve been waiting for.
There’s no doubt that the PS5 Pro is a niche product, not an upgrade targeted at all PS5 owners. It’s meant for the Sony devotees who want the absolute best PlayStation experience, and who will never upgrade to a gaming PC. After all, those rigs typically run well over $1,000 for similar graphics performance, and they also involve all the complexity of Windows PCs, like driver issues, OS instability and juggling multiple game storefronts.
So sure, if you’re eager to see what Spider-Man 2 looks like in 60 fps with extra graphical flourishes, it may be worth stepping up to the PS5 Pro. And if you haven’t jumped on the PS5 bandwagon yet, it’s a solid option if you just want a no-compromise experience. To echo our preview, you might not need it, but you’ll want it.
While the PS5 Pro certainly lives up to the hype, at least based on my week of testing, it’s also a bittersweet product. When the PS5 debuted in 2020, Sony touted it as a powerful console that could finally give players a taste of PC gaming with features like ray tracing, while also delivering 4K playback. The reality was far more complicated: While some games ran at 4K, they were typically limited to 30 fps in fidelity modes. If you wanted smoother 60 fps gaming, you typically had to give up ray tracing and/or graphical quality for the performance mode.
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But of course, the same was true for the Xbox Series X. Both Sony and Microsoft were limited by hardware constraints and the economics of console gaming. But now, Sony is finally able to deliver on the initial promise of the PS5 by swapping in a more modern GPU and pushing for a higher price. The PS5 Pro is certainly great news for anyone who desires more performance, but I wouldn’t blame some PS5 owners for being a bit miffed.
Engadget / Sony
The PlayStation 5 Pro is the most powerful console ever made, but you’ll pay dearly for its performance. Thanks to a faster GPU, it finally delivers 4K and 60 fps performance for PlayStation gamers, with a dash of new ray tracing features.
The PS5 Pro’s new features: A faster GPU and AI upscaling
So what do you get for a $700 gaming console? Sony threw in a new GPU with 67 percent more compute units, alongside 28 percent faster memory. That leads to 45 percent faster rendering performance, according to Sony, and up to triple the ray tracing power of the launch PS5. All of that new hardware is assisted by PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), an AI upscaling technology that can make lower-resolution graphics appear as if they’re natively 4K.
We’ve already seen similar AI upscaling in action with NVIDIA’s DLSS, which has been around since the RTX 20-series cards debuted in 2018. While DLSS wasn’t always perfect early on, NVIDIA steadily improved on it to the point where I prefer it to natively rendering a game in 4K. True 4K gaming is far too resource-demanding for a minor visual upgrade (in my eyes, at least) over 1440p. I’d typically rather play a game that’s upscaled from a lower resolution if it leads to smoother gameplay.
Engadget
The PS5 and Xbox Series consoles already support AMD’s FSR upscaling, but in my experience on PCs, it’s not as effective as DLSS. FSR upscaling places dead last in comparisons among PC upscalers, and a recent Digital Foundry deep dive had PSSR (which I just love to pronounce phonetically) beating out FSR, since it delivers a more stable and detailed image with better anti-aliasing around edges. When using the PS5 Pro, PSSR essentially replaces FSR upscaling, making it yet another selling point for fidelity obsessives.
The two other big upgrades are 2TB of storage — 1.86TB is available out of the box, though you can claw some back by deleting Astro’s Playroom — and Wi-Fi 7 support. While your best bet will always be a direct, wired connection to your router, Wi-Fi 7 is a meaningful upgrade for those who can’t or don’t want to use a network cable. We didn’t have a Wi-Fi 7 router on hand, but the Pro was slightly faster than a launch edition PS5 when connected to a Wi-Fi 6 Nighthawk router. The standard PS5 had max download speeds of 401 Mbps and upload speeds of 53 Mbps. The Pro (in the same location and time of day), clocked 484 Mbps down and 53 Mbps up.
What you don’t get with the PS5 Pro, oddly enough, is a disc drive. You’ll have to pay $80 to add on Sony’s disc drive, which was released alongside the PS5 Slim last year, or just rely entirely on digital downloads. With its 2TB SSD, plus room for an additional drive, the PS5 Pro certainly has enough room to hold a decent library of games.
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But why give up on the disc drive? Sony is likely just reading the tea leaves: A report by the gaming analytics firm NewZoo (via Destructoid) noted that 72 percent of console title sales in 2022 were digital. Still, it’s odd to see what’s ostensibly the ultimate PS5 missing a feature that was included in the launch model four years ago. Without a bundled disc drive, players will have to pay extra to take advantage of cheaper used games and watch 4K Blu-ray titles.
Engadget
The PS5 Pro in action: The most powerful gaming console yet
The PlayStation 5 Pro is a beast, simply put. Sony makes that clear the moment you power it on, when you’re welcomed by a bombastic opening sequence that’ll give your surround sound speakers a workout. (Remember when The Simpson’s Milhouse played Bonestorm for the first time? It’s basically that.) It’s a minor thing, but it’s one way to impress someone who just spent $700 on a console.
I jumped right into Spider-Man 2‘s Performance Pro mode, and I was knocked out by how clear and smooth the game looked. It brings over all of the features from the game’s standard Fidelity mode, including ray-traced reflections across windows and water, but it also delivers 60 fps with higher-res textures, thanks to PSSR. It was as if I were playing Spider-Man 2 on a gaming PC. Swinging around the city was silky smooth and the reflections on buildings were simply stunning. I found myself just wandering around the streets of NYC or hanging out on rooftops just to drink in the additional detail.
Spider-Man 2‘sPerformance Pro mode basically delivers everything I wanted from the game on the original PS5, where you had to choose between a less graphically intense, 60 fps Performance mode, or the 30 fps Fidelity setting with ray tracing. But, as if to constantly rub compromise in our face, there’s also a new Fidelity Pro mode that once again brings the frame rate down to 30 fps to make room for new graphical features, including ray-traced ambient occlusion, key light shadows, and enhanced reflections and interiors.
Much like a gaming PC, you can tweak the levels of those new ray tracing settings to your liking. The Fidelity Pro mode looked fine when there wasn’t much action on the screen, but swinging around NYC was far less thrilling at a sluggish 30 fps. It also made me feel a bit dissatisfied with the graphics of the Performance Pro mode. While some console gamers probably won’t mind, I can’t see myself playing a modern title at 30 fps when I know the same hardware can deliver a more fulfilling 60 fps experience.
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In The Last of Us Part 2, the new 4K/60 fps Pro mode is a striking upgrade over when I originally played it on the PS4. It also looks noticeably more fluid and realistic than the previous PS5 revamp. While the game is being rendered at 1440p and relies on PSSR to hit 4K, textures and skin tones appear sharp, and characters’ hair is far more natural. I wasn’t the biggest fan of The Last Of Us Part 2 when it debuted (the revenge narrative felt a bit simplistic), but the visual leap on the PS5 Pro is enough to make me want to replay the entire campaign.
Sony
Demon’s Souls, a game that already looked great on PS5, also gets an impressive update. The new Pro mode looks sharper than the old Performance option, it still runs at 60 fps and it features a more lifelike contact shadow system. While it’s arguably a game that didn’t need a huge graphical bump, the improvements are still welcome. Once again, it feels reminiscent of playing Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring on my gaming PC.
I spent most of this review playing the PS5 Pro on my Formovie UST 4K projector, which was outputting to a 120-inch screen around eight feet away from my seat. So, as you can imagine, I had a pretty close look at graphical details. It’s often annoying to play console games on such a large screen, where every imperfection is magnified to an obscene degree. But the PS5 Pro felt similar to projecting from my RTX 4090 gaming PC: Gameplay looked wonderful at 60 fps and it was all delivered in scrumptious detail.
The author of our PS5 Pro preview, Jessica Conditt, tested out the new console on a 55-inch LG OLED C2. Her impressions are as follows:
After playing a bunch of games on the PS5 Pro at Sony’s office last month, I really just wanted to take the console home, boot up one of my favorite titles, and see how it felt from the comfort of my own couch. So, that’s exactly what I did. I played Alan Wake 2’s The Lake House DLC on the Pro, swapping between Quality and Performance modes, and generally ooh-ing and aah-ing between the jump scares. Quality mode on the Pro keeps Alan Wake 2’s framerate at 30 fps and enables ray-traced reflections, a feature that doesn’t exist in the standard PS5 version. Performance mode is essentially the launch version’s highest-res Quality mode, which outputs at 2160p, but it runs at 60 fps. Both modes utilize PSSR upscaling.
Alan Wake 2 performs beautifully in either setting on the Pro, but ray tracing makes the most noticeable impact. Accurate, responsive reflections help ground the game’s environments, adding realistic depth and movement to the concrete hallways and metal elevators in The Lake House. In Quality mode, details like whiteboard scribbles and scattered documents render crisply, preserving tension and immersion. Alan Wake 2 isn’t really an action game at its core — as I’ve previously argued — so the 30 fps limit in Quality mode isn’t a huge bother. Truly, it only stands out when you play in performance mode and then swap back.
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That said, Alan Wake 2 feels fantastic at 60 fps. Performance mode removes the sense of sluggishness and visual nausea that sometimes accompanies 30 fps play, and the game still looks like a dream — rather, a beautiful nightmare. Alan Wake 2’s Performance setting on PS5 Pro is the solution for anyone who couldn’t decide between the game’s two modes at launch: Now you can have high res and 60 fps at the same time.
Similar to Devindra’s complaints about Fidelity Pro in Spider-Man 2, the fact that some upgraded PS5 Pro games include the option to play at 60 fps or with ray tracing only highlights how much I want to play with both features enabled. I realize this could be viewed as a bratty take, but it’s born out of pure excitement — games on the PS5 Pro look and feel so fantastic that I can’t help imagining how much better it can actually get from here. There are already a handful of PS5 Pro titles that offer 60 fps and ray tracing at once, including Spider-Man 2, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and EA Sports F1 24, and this is an excellent sign for the future, considering it’s early days and developers are still testing the limits of Sony’s new hardware. The PS5 Pro is laying the foundation for the next generation of console gaming and, damn, things are looking good.
Alan Wake 2‘s Quality mode vs. its Performance setting. (Remedy Entertainment)
PSSR certainly isn’t without fault, though. Sometimes while playing Spider-Man 2, objects like spinning fans or signs with fine text would get distorted. Some textures would start shimmering for no reason. I remember coming across similar issues in the early days of DLSS, and I still frequently see these issues while using AMD’s FSR technology on PS5 and PC titles. There’s still room for Sony to improve PSSR down the line, so hopefully obvious problems will get ironed out soon.
The PS5 Pro can enhance the quality of PS4 titles, similar to the PS4 Pro’s boost mode. Bloodborne was the only older game I was eager to try out, and I can confirm that it looks a bit more detailed, particularly when it comes to the intricacies of your wardrobe. But while the facelift is nice to see, and it’s the best we’ll get until Sony listens to fan demands and remakes Bloodborne, it’s still not running at 60 fps.
Should you buy the PlayStation 5 Pro?
A $700 game console isn’t for everyone — that much is obvious. Most players would be better off with the $450 all-digital PS5, or the standard $500 model if you need disc support. Given how long the console has been around, you can also often find used or refurbished PS5s for $400 or less.
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The PS5 Pro clearly isn’t meant for anyone who is prioritizing value — unless, of course, you’re comparing it to a full-fledged gaming PC. If you want 4K-like graphics with ray tracing at 60 fps, the PS5 Pro is simply your best choice under $1,000.
If you thought you needed to wait until Black Friday to score a steep discount on the new Google Pixel Watch 3, we’ve got some good news: right now, Wellbots is giving readers of The Verge an exclusive $75 discount, dropping the wearable down to a new all-time low price until November 12th. The 41mm, Wi-Fi-enabled configuration starts at $274 ($75 off) from Wellbots when you apply code VERGEBF75, while the same code drops the price of the 45mm Pixel Watch 3 with Wi-Fi down to $324 ($75 off).
Google managed to pack an impressive number of noteworthy features into its latest wearable, which is why it’s our favorite fitness smartwatch for Android users. It’s an even better fitness and health tracker than before, with custom running workouts, AI-generated workout suggestions, and a Cardio Load metric that takes into consideration how hard your heart is working during a training session. European users can even take advantage of a new Loss of Pulse Detection feature, which connects you emergency services if a lack of pulse is detected. Sadly, though, the feature has yet to receive FDA clearance in the U.S.
Along with offering even more advanced fitness features, the Pixel Watch 3 is also an even more capable smartwatch with offline Google Maps and better integration with other Google services. It can even now double as Google TV remote, while you also now view your Nest Doorbell or Camera feed straight from your smartwatch. As if that’s not impressive enough, the wearable also now sports an ultra wideband chip that enables remote unlocking for Pixel devices and even some BMWs.
The new generation of advanced bots is now on everyone’s radar. The rise of high-quality IPs and generative AI has led to the emergence of today’s ‘super bots’. These bots can forge fingerprints, enact distributed attacks at scale, mimic human behavior using machine learning, and fool traditional CAPTCHAs up to 100% of the time.
There’s a lot of discussion about how organizations’ cybersecurity strategies must now rapidly evolve to keep up with these increasingly advanced bots. But beneath this narrative lies another truth: most organizations still haven’t even nailed down simple bot protection yet.
Recent research, which tested over 14,000 of the largest websites worldwide, discovered a staggering 2 in 3 (65.2%) have no protection against even simple bots. The research also revealed the rate of bot protection is struggling to keep pace with the rapid growth of digital businesses: only 8.44% of websites are fully protected against all bots, a drop from last year’s 10.2%. Not only are bots becoming more advanced, but organizations’ defenses against them are becoming weaker.
Benjamin Barrier
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Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at DataDome.
How even simple bots can have a catastrophic impact
What’s in a name? Simple bots might sound like they don’t have the potential to cause a great deal of damage – but in fact the opposite is true. Simple bots, like curls or fake Googlebots, can carry out a number of malicious tasks and cause significant financial and reputational damage for businesses. Simple bots are also often used to test out a website or app’s defenses to help cybercriminals fine tune their attacks – in much the same way as a burglar might ‘scope out’ a house before breaking in.
Simple bots can perform credential stuffing, taking a list of usernames and passwords (usually purchased from other malicious actors) and plugging them into a website to gain access and take over accounts.
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Similarly, fraudsters can use simple bots for carding and card cracking. A cybercriminal might only have a credit card number and expiration date they need to carry out a transaction, but not have access to the security code. They can use a simple bot to try out all possible combinations until the correct value is found.
‘Worst offender’ industries
While media and gambling are leading the pack as the most protected industries (with 46.30% and 40.48% full bot protection respectively), others are falling behind. Our research uncovered that e-commerce and health are the two worst-protected industries worldwide – despite arguably being the two most in need of robust protection.
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For the e-commerce sector, this is particularly damning. 69.29% of e-commerce pure players – businesses without any brick & mortar retail locations – have no bot protection whatsoever. A shocking statistic for organizations who make all of their revenue via online sales.
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E-commerce businesses simply can’t afford the reputational risk that comes with bot activity on their websites, particularly as we approach the holiday season, when e-commerce sites will host more frequent and higher value transactions. Last year, e-commerce spending over the holiday season amounted to $1.17 trillion. The stakes are high – both for cybercriminals and the retailers they are targeting.
The health industry was another top offender, with 70.44% health domains completely unprotected against simple or advanced bot attacks. The health industry holds a huge amount of confidential and sensitive information, which, without adequate bot protection, is wide open to data breaches. Cyber attacks put organizations’ reputations at risk, reduce patient trust, and make organizations vulnerable to regulatory penalties.
Shrinking barriers to bot entry
The rise of Bots-as-a-Service means bots are now more accessible than ever, even for fraudsters with little technical expertise. It’s never been easier or cheaper to craft sophisticated attacks. In the past, hackers needed coding skills to develop and execute cyberattacks. Now, cyber criminals can buy or lease bots-as-a-service on the black market. A simple bot can be purchased online for less than $50.
Generative AI’s emergence into the mainstream has also lowered the barriers to bot entry. Cybercriminals with some technical understanding can leverage AI to create bots that are easier to scale and harder to detect. For instance, AI can generate bots that mimic human behavior more convincingly. This is particularly useful in the case of phishing attacks, where AI bots can mimic human tone and use NLP to generate personalized phishing messages.
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Nailing the basics first
While many organizations are asking how they can best protect themselves from the bots of tomorrow, they can start by assessing if they even have the basics in place. Most organizations will need to start from the ground up, making sure they’ve protected themselves and their customers against simple bots.
There are some essential techniques every organisation needs in their bot protection toolkit. One is honey trapping – which allows bots to operate as usual, but feeds them with fake content/ data to waste its resources. There’s also throttling and rate-limiting, which allows bots to access your site, but slows down their bandwidth allocation to make them operate less efficiently – leading fraudsters to give up. There are some attack vectors where blocking bot activity altogether is the best approach, for instance if bots are obviously spreading malware or performing a DDoS attack.
Once organizations have got the basics down with solid bot protection, they can start to bolster their defenses for tomorrow’s increasingly advanced bots.
This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro’s Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro
Donald Trump’s return to the White House might also prove to be a win for one of his most visible supporters: Elon Musk.
The world’s richest man spent election night in Florida with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort as returns came in.
“The people of America gave @realDonaldTrump a crystal clear mandate for change tonight,” Mr Musk wrote on the social media platform X as Trump’s victory began to appear all but certain.
And at his victory speech at the Palm Beach Convention Center, Trump spent several minutes praising Mr Musk and recounting the successful landing of a rocket manufactured by one of Mr Musk’s companies, SpaceX.
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Mr Musk threw his support behind the Republican almost immediately after the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvaniain July.
As one of the president-elect’s most important backers, the tech billionaire donated more than $119m (£92m) to fund a Super PAC aimed at re-electing Trump.
He also spent the last weeks before election day running a get-out-the-vote effort in the battleground states, which included a daily giveaway of $1m to voters in those states. The giveaway became the subject of a legal challenge, though a judge later ruled they could go ahead.
After throwing his name, money, and platform behind Trump, Mr Musk has plenty to gain from Trump’s re-election.
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The president-elect has said that in a second term, he would invite Mr Musk into his administration to eliminate government waste.
Mr Musk has referred to the potential effort as the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, the name of a meme and cryptocurrency that he has popularised.
The businessman could also benefit from Trump’s presidency through his ownership of SpaceX, which already dominates the business of sending government satellites to space.
With a close ally in the White House, Mr Musk could seek to further capitalise on those government ties.
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Mr Musk has criticised rivals including Boeing for the structure of their government contracts, which he says disincentive finishing projects on budget and on time.
SpaceX has also moved into building spy satellites just as the Pentagon and American spy agencies appear poised to invest billions of dollars into them.
Mr Musk’s electric vehicle maker Tesla could meanwhile reap gains from an administration that Trump has said would be defined by “the lowest regulatory burden.”
Mr Musk has also come under fire for allegedly seeking to block Tesla workers from unionising. The United Auto Workers filed unfair labour practice charges against both Trump and Musk after the two talked about Musk supposedly firing striking workers during a conversation on X.
Trump has also pledged to lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
That’s another promise Mr Musk is likely hoping he will keep.
The fast-paced real-time strategy (RTS) game Battle Aces was inspired by an idea that game director David Kim had while working on StarCraft 2 at Blizzard Entertainment.
“Why can’t there be an RTS game that gets rid of all these tedious clicks and focuses on the fun factors?” Kim recalled thinking. “There was a point during Legacy of the Void’s development where we seriously considered cleaning up all of those things and made an RTS game that’s really focused on the fun. But the conclusion was that we should not switch up what StarCraft 2 is on the last expansion of the game.”
Legacy of the Void was very faithful to the core tenets of StarCraft 2 and is beloved because of that, but Kim hoped to return to that idea for a future Blizzard RTS game. Kim says he prototyped a new RTS game at Blizzard for about six months after Legacy of the Void, but that it was canceled “due to company goals,” joining a myriad of canceled Blizzard Entertainment projects.
Strategic Gameplay Overview | Battle Aces
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Kim has always wanted to return to the RTS space to answer his lingering question about the RTS genre, so he eventually left Blizzard, like many other developers. Now, Kim is leading the development of Battle Aces at Uncapped Games. Revealed at Summer Game Fest earlier this year, it boils down the core concepts of competitive RTS into 10-minute, bite-sized matches. And without all that Blizzard-related baggage and association with the StarCraft IP restraining them, Battle Aces could be one of the most approachable RTS games ever.
As my Summer Game Fest preview of Battle Aces pointed out, this RTS does a great job of stripping the RTS formula back to its basics. The game clearly lays out every option available to players, making building and commanding units snappy and quick. While Kim says StarCraft 2 is still his favorite game, he admits that parts of the traditional RTS formula likely aren’t anyone’s favorite aspect of the genre and could be removed to create a more fun experience.
Upon closer investigation, Kim believes that people don’t love playing RTS games because they have to constantly remember to manage supply depots, click a build worker button, or manage their amount of production buildings in order to not fall behind and lose. Kim calls those kinds of things “tedious clicks” and stripped them out of Battle Aces. In Battle Aces, players don’t have to worry about building workers, production buildings, or supply depots. They have to keep an eye on the resources they are automatically generating and spend them properly on units they can then be offensive with.
Uncapped Games
Kim says the ultimate goal of Battle Aces is to create the “most fun RTS” that’s available. This means Battle Aces isn’t as hardcore as something like StarCraft 2 or Stormgate, but that gives it a pick-up-and-play nature that I don’t usually see from RTS games. If you’ve never played an RTS before, Battle Aces will be a good on-ramp as a free-to-play, simplified title in the space.
While Battle Aces removes some complexities of the RTS genre, Kim did want to stress that Uncapped Games worked hard to retain what worked so well in games like StarCraft 2. Kim wants to meet the bar StarCraft 2 set on things like combat feel, which is why Battle Aces is so snappy and responsive and still keeps a bit of multitasking in terms of how players must decide where to send their units or what kind of units to use.
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In Battle Aces, players have to build a deck of units to bring into the battle. These units are now separated into four different types that all have advantages over one another. Anti-Big units counter Big units, Big units have an advantage over Splash units, Splash units can beat Small units, and Small units are effective against Anti-Big units. That square of unit counters is a core part of Battle Aces’ strategy, as an effective unit deck build and commanding the right kind of unit at the right time are keys to victory. Battle Aces might not be as complex as StarCraft 2, but it’s not as simple as Warcraft Rumble.
Kim has had an idea for an RTS game like this for over a decade, and it shows. Many live service games have touted themselves as the long-awaited approachable entry point to the genre. None of those efforts have panned out, but Battle Aces could because of how aggressively it focuses on stripping away any aspect of RTS gameplay that isn’t fun. It would have been interesting to see that effort pan out with Legacy of the Void, but now is better than never.
The next closed beta for Battle Aces begins for PC on November 7.
Samsung stepped into the wearable industry with its first smartwatch over a decade ago. However, this year the South Korean tech giant stepped up a little bit more with the launch of its first smart ring, the Galaxy Ring (Review), which had a great reception from the public. That’s not all, Samsung is already working on the Galaxy Ring 2, which reportedly could come early next year with several improvements.
Tipster claims the Galaxy Ring 2 is coming earlier than originally planned
Late last month, a leaked Samsung patent hinted that the Galaxy Ring 2 could have a resizing structure. Now, a Korean tipster, Lanzuk (@yeux1122), has spilled some details about the upcoming Galaxy Ring 2 on Naver.
According to the tipster’s post, Samsung could launch the Galaxy Ring 2 a bit earlier than originally planned. However, the Korean blogger hasn’t mentioned any launch window yet. Samsung announced the original Galaxy Ring in January before it launched at the July Unpacked event. Given the claim, we can expect Samsung to launch the next iteration in the first half of 2025.
Apart from the early launch, the tipster adds that the Galaxy Ring 2 might come with a bunch of improvements. According to him, the next Galaxy Ring could feature a thinner design, longer battery life, and more unspecified features. It’s worth noting that the Korean tipster has a good track record with Samsung-related leaks. Still, we want you to take these details with a grain of salt.
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Claims about Apple Ring still in development
Besides the next Galaxy Ring, the tipster has made some claims related to some wearable devices Apple is working on. He adds that Apple is still working on a device that he calls a “ring-type wearable” in his blog post. There are claims made about “band-type” and “smart glass-type” wearables in the works.
We can’t confirm whether these details are accurate because the popular Apple insider, Mark Gurman, had previously hinted that Apple has no plans to launch a smart ring. Time will tell if we’ll see a smart ring from Apple. But, one thing is sure, the Galaxy Ring 2 is definitely coming.
US-based glass manufacturer is the company behind Gorilla Glass, a break-resistant glass used to protect screens that’s used on essentially all of the most popular smartphones. Today, the European Commission Corning for anti-competitive practices, alleging that the glassmaker is preventing competition through exclusive supply agreements.
According to the press release, Corning requires mobile phone manufacturers to source all or nearly all of their alkali-AS glass from it, and it also grants rebates to these companies if they do so. Additionally, these phone makers must tell Corning if they receive competitive offers from other glass manufacturers. They aren’t allowed to accept these offers unless Corning cannot match or beat the price.
Similarly, Corning has agreements with companies that process raw glass, forcing them to get all or most of their alkali-AS glass from Corning. They also aren’t allowed to challenge Corning patents.
These charges reinforce how aggressive Corning is in defending its dominant position in the smartphone glass screen market. The latest Apple and Android devices, like the , usually have Gorilla Glass screens, as they’re scratch-resistant and prevent cracking or breaking. While not indestructible, the glass does hold up well against damage. However, Corning’s market dominance coupled with these practices are enough to get the EU’s attention.
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