Tuesday, 13 June 2023

The Morning After: Is the 15-inch MacBook Air any good?

In a world where every Apple laptop is thin and light, do we still need to market some of them based on that alone? In many ways, a 15-inch MacBook Air makes you wish Apple would bring back the suffix-free MacBook name for its mainstream machines. But, silly branding aside, is the biggest, newest Air worth the money? Your friend and mine, Nathan Ingraham, has spent the last week running the rule over the new hardware to see what’s good.

On paper, the 15-inch Air (nope, still sounds weird) is just a bigger version of its 13-inch sibling. You’ll get the same design language, port selection and chip options carried over, but that’s no bad thing. After all, the M2 MacBook Air marked a quantum leap in Apple’s hardware design, building a gorgeous and speedy machine into such a slender body. The only real downside is the Air’s focus on affordability means you’ll get a 60Hz display rather than the 120Hz on the new Pros.

– Dan Cooper

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The biggest stories you might have missed

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Reddit sees more than 6,000 communities go dark in protest over API changes

The protests caused the site to temporarily break.

If Reddit CEO Steve Huffman’s AMA late last week was meant to defuse tensions between the company’s leadership and its users, it wasn’t very successful. More than 6,000 subreddits have now gone dark in protest of the service’s API changes that have boxed out several third-party apps. This includes several of its biggest communities, with all of which going dark at once being enough to temporarily topple the site.

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Apple Mac Studio review (M2 Ultra, 2023): A better Mac for pros

Who needs a Mac Pro now?

Image of the Apple Mac Studio (2023) on a table with an Apple monitor in the background.
Devindra Hardawar / Engadget

Reading Devindra Hardawar’s review of the M2 Mac Studio left me wondering why the Mac Pro still exists. Sure, expandable RAM and having free PCI-E slots are still valuable for some use cases, but for everything else? This tiny machine has the raw grunt, if you spec it up enough, to make even the most powerful pro computers weep into their cereal. Read on to learn how jaw-droppingly swift this thing is, and if it’s worth the investment.

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Watch the first 'Star Wars Outlaws' gameplay trailer

Ten minutes of scoundrel wish fulfillment.

Promotional image from 'Star Wars Outlaws' showing two characters in front of a collage of sci-fi backgrounds.
Massive Entertainment / Ubisoft

Waiting on an open-world Star Wars game? You won’t have to wait much longer, thankfully. Star Wars Outlaws has broken cover entirely. At its Ubisoft Forward event on Monday, the game publisher shared 10 minutes of gameplay footage that touched on exploration, stealth and good ole-fashioned gunplay. You’ll be able to traverse the game's world on a speeder bike and even take to the skies and space with a starship, with seemingly no loading between game elements. (I think I’ve heard of that before…) Star Wars Outlaws will be available next year on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.

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'Alan Wake II' stands out in a sea of sequels

More of the same, but better?

Promotional image for Alan Wake II
Remedy Entertainment

Engadget’s Jessica Conditt watched a 30-minute hands-off preview of Alan Wake II at Summer Game Fest, and she liked what she saw. The original Alan Wake came out in 2010, so the timeline in the sequel has also progressed by that same period. In it, writer Alan Wake has been missing for 13 years, while FBI agent Saga Anderson is hunting the ghost of FBI agent Robert Nightingale, who was killed off at the end of the first title. The big innovation in Alan Wake II is the ability to swap between Saga and Alan, playing as both characters throughout the game. Chapter one begins with Saga in the driver’s seat, and after that, players can choose to play as her or Alan at the beginning of each new section. Intrigued? Read on for more first impressions.

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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/r6M9aGm

from Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics https://ift.tt/r6M9aGm

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