Star Trek’s idyllic utopia might try to move past it, but it is defined by conflict. From the long moral question of whether or not Starfleet is a military or scientific organization at its core, to the deadly wars that have pushed it to defend its greatest ideals, Star Trek as we know it cannot exist without battle—an…
Apple’s much-anticipated mixed reality headset, the Vision Pro, is now available for pre-order in the US through the company’s website and all its stores across the country. Interested buyers may want to take note that they have to scan their face with an iPhone or iPad using Face ID when they pre-order to make sure they’re getting a precise band fit. The company designed the Vision Pro with a modular system so that users can customize it to fit them perfectly — it will, after all, set them back at least $3,499 for the version with 256GB of storage. If you need more space (and who doesn’t?), it’ll cost $3,699 with 512GB of storage and $3,899 with 1TB.
People who need vision correction also have the option to add Zeiss optical inserts when they pre-order so that they won’t need to wear their glasses inside the headset anymore. They can get reader inserts for $99 and prescription inserts for $149, though they have to provide an updated official prescription with their order to be able to purchase them.
Be ready to shell out even more for accessories: The travel case, additional battery packs, and extra light seals will each run you $199. Belkin’s battery holder will also let you clip that device onto your pants, or wear it with a cross-body strap.
The company’s mixed reality headset is powered by visionOS, which users can control via gestures with their eyes and hands or with voice commands through Siri. Apple placed a lot of emphasis on its entertainment features when it officially introduced the device and said that it will support more than a million apps from the iOS and iPadOS ecosystems, along with apps especially made for its platform.
Some popular services like Netflix, YouTube and Spotify won’t be available for download at launch, but early adopters will still have access to a number of entertainment apps, including Disney+, Max, Amazon Prime Video and Paramount+. Users will be able to place their apps anywhere in a 3D environment and, in Disney+’s case, be able to watch shows against a special immersive background like the Avengers Tower. They’ll also be able to access their Mac on the headset, so they can work or do what they usually do on a laptop on a mixed reality device instead. The Apple Vision Pro will start shipping on February 2.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-vision-pro-pre-orders-are-now-open-130056024.html?src=rss
I have had two consistent complaints about most Roland gear: a lack of hands-on controls and an unnecessary amount of diving through incomprehensible menus. But, earlier this year the company shipped the Aira Compact S-1 Tweak Synth. Its menu sent me into a rage spiral, but it did offer a fair number of hands-on controls. Then, not long after, Roland debuted the SH-4D which not only had plenty of knobs, buttons and faders, but a streamlined menu and a screen that didn’t predate home computers. My biggest issue was the form factor; I just really wanted it to be a dedicated synthesizer with a keyboard, but it was more of a pseudo groovebox.
So, when Roland announced the Gaia 2 — a long overdue update to its 13-year-old virtual analog synth — I was cautiously optimistic. The S-1 and SH-4D were signs the company was heading in the right direction interface-wise, and they both sounded great. At first glance the Gaia 2 seemed to be everything I’ve been looking for in a Roland synth: plenty of hands-on controls, a decent screen, a simplified menu and a full-size 37-key keybed. And yet, at the risk of seeming impossible to please, I walked away from the Gaia 2 a little unsatisfied.
All sounds, except for the drums, come straight from the Gaia 2. The only additional processing being some EQ and compression.
The most immediately underwhelming thing is the build. Now, to be clear, the Gaia 2 doesn’t feel cheap, but I expected slightly more from a $900 synth. The top panel is metal, but the rest is plastic. The keyboard is excellent, but lacks aftertouch. The knobs are mostly fine, but there are a few encoders that feel loose and have a good amount of wiggle. The detents on some are weak too, making it easy to miss your mark. Plus the pitch and mod wheels are bizarrely small. All of these things would be easily forgiven on a $600 synthesizer, but at this price I felt a little let down.
The Korg Minilogue XD, for instance, only costs $650 and generally feels more rugged, even if the keybed isn’t as good. And Elektron’s Digitakt and Digitone lack a keyboard but feel damn-near indestructible at $949 (and for only $50 more).
The controls are extensive, though. Roland hasn’t solved all of its menu-diving problems, but the Gaia 2 gets pretty close. There are more knobs and buttons than I care to count. Everything is organized logically and, while there are some shift functions, many of the controls are single purpose, leaving you free to tweak almost anything with one hand while you play. This is getting harder and harder to come by as customers expect more powerful synth engines with more modulation options, while also wanting instruments to be compact.
The Gaia 2 isn’t exactly small. At roughly 26 inches wide and 13 inches deep, it does command a decent amount of desk space, but it’s hardly onerous. And it makes the most of its front panel, cramming it full of controls and a decent sized screen.
It’s inevitable that your eyes will be drawn to the “Motional” touchpad directly below that. It’s one of the highlights of the synth, with my one complaint being its placement. It’s dead center, which makes sense if you’re using it to navigate the menus with a cursor. But, it’s much faster to just use the knobs. The touchpad just doesn’t feel natural for navigating the interface, and it would be much less cumbersome for performance on the left side — there’s certainly room for it alongside the toy-sized pitch and mod wheels.
The Motional Pad is great, the terrible name aside. It seems like a bit of a gimmick at first — a large X/Y touchpad, not unlike the Korg Kaoss Pad, dedicated to modulation. But once you get past the initial strangeness (and Roland’s factory patches that lean hard into its gimmicky side), it’s hard not to see the value. It’s used to control the waveshaping and phase modulation of oscillator one, but you can also assign almost any parameter you want to the X and Y axis and change them by simply dragging your finger around.
What’s more, you can record that motion, essentially giving you a third, complex LFO. It records not just the shape of your finger movements, but the timing too. So you could draw small circles slowly working your way from the bottom left to the top right, to open up the filter and increase the resonance before quickly zigzagging your way back to the start. Many of the factory presets treat this animated modulation sequence as a novelty, sketching out small people, leaves and, of course, the Roland logo.
This clearly isn’t a deal breaker, but it does speak to a broader issue I have with the Gaia 2: many of the presets feel like tech demos and I don’t find them particularly usable. Now, I can already hear people getting up in arms. “Well, a real musician would be designing all their own patches from scratch anyway!” you might be saying. I’m here to tell you to go kick rocks. There’s no shame in playing presets, especially if you’re making music as a hobby. Additionally, the factory presets should be a showcase of what a synth is capable of, not just technically, but musically. And judging by that, the Gaia 2 is firmly stuck in the early aughts.
This is ultimately what left me feeling cold about the Gaia 2: It sounds dated. The original Gaia was a strictly virtual analog affair. Its successor kept the same three oscillator structure, but swapped in a wavetable engine for one of them (the other two remain virtual analog). There are plenty of great, modern-sounding synthesizers out there that use wavetables, but Gaia 2 specializes in a particular brand of Roland cheese. It’s perfect for scoring a turn of the century cyber thriller, and while some people will love it, others won’t.
The two virtual analog oscillators sound clinical and lack oomph in the lower registers. The filter is extremely versatile with three different slope options (-12dB/Oct, -18dB/Oct or -24dB/Oct) for each of its three modes (lowpass, bandpass and highpass) and a drive option. It can sound a touch thin, but it’s serviceable.
I wish I could say I was more enamored with the sound engine, because otherwise this is probably the most enjoyable modern Roland synth I’ve used. The Gaia 2 strikes a near-perfect balance between complexity and approachability. The three oscillators, multimode filter, dual LFOs, Motional Pad and rich effects section offer quite a bit of depth, but are incredibly easy to dial in. Everything is labeled clearly and all of the most essential parameters have direct hands-on controls. Even most things that require shift functions or some menu diving are all pretty intuitive. It’s legitimately fun to program. The Gaia 2 would make an excellent instrument to learn synthesis on if it wasn’t so expensive.
Applying the LFO to any parameter is as simple as holding a button and turning the knob of whatever you want to modulate. And there’s even a step mode where you can design a 16-step custom wave. The Motional Pad and excellent sequencer are a cinch to use. And having faders instead of knobs for the two envelopes (amp and filter) is a nice touch. There’s no modulation matrix and you can’t reroute the envelopes, but I didn’t mind much. I rarely ran into a situation where I really wanted to do something when designing a patch, but couldn’t. It’s a straightforward synth with enough depth to keep even experienced players twiddling knobs for hours.
Once you grow bored of the main Gaia engine, you can load Model Expansions to add emulations of classic Roland synths like the Jupiter-8 or Juno-106. It even comes with an SH-101 emulation pre-installed. Honestly, that sounds better than the default virtual analog engine.
Of course, the model expansions aren’t cheap at $149. And loading them on the Gaia is, let’s say, aggravating. You have two options: You can buy an optional $100 wireless USB adapter and send them from your phone. Or, you can copy files to a USB key and then load them manually from there. (You know, just like it’s 2001.) This is one of the few places where Roland remains stubbornly archaic. Even though the Gaia 2 has a USB-C port capable of transmitting both audio and MIDI (and power), it can’t connect to the Roland Cloud manager app to load Model Expansions.
The bright spot in the sound engine, though, is definitely the effects. There are seven reverb and delay options, three types of excellent sounding chorus, and 53 other effects including compressors, bit crushers, lo-fi and scatter. The new shimmer reverb algorithm, in particular, is gorgeous. There’s almost as much room for sound design in the FX section alone as there is in the rest of the synth. This is also your best bet for adding some character to the often cold-sounding main oscillators.
Ultimately, what makes the Gaia disappointing is that it gets so much right, but can’t quite stick the landing. It’s extremely fun to program patches on, but I just didn’t click with the results. It expertly blends approachability with depth, but it’s too expensive to recommend to a beginner. And it finally delivers the hands-on controls people have been begging for, but the quality of the encoders, pots and buttons leave something to be desired. I wanted to like the Gaia 2, and I’m sure there’s plenty of people out there who will, but it’s just not for me.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/roland-gaia-2-review-roland-finally-delivers-the-hands-on-synthesizer-weve-been-begging-for-150058035.html?src=rss
No, NVIDIA’s mid-range RTX 40-series GPUs aren’t getting any cheaper, but at least the new RTX 4070 Super packs in a lot more performance for $599. We called the original RTX 4070 the “1,440p gaming leader,” and that still holds for the Super. It’s so much faster, especially when it comes to ray tracing, that it edges close to the $799 RTX 4070 Ti (due to be replaced by its own Super variant, as well). And together with the power of DLSS3 upscaling, the 4070 Super is a far more capable 4K gaming card.
So what makes the RTX 4070 Super so special? Raw power, basically. It features 7,168 CUDA cores, compared to 5,888 on the 4070 and 7,680 on the 4070 Ti. Its base clock speed is a bit higher than before (1.98GHz compared to the 4070’s 1.92GHz), but it has the same 2.48GHz boost clock and 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM as the original.
The difference between the RTX 4070 Super and the plain model was immediately obvious. On my desktop, powered by a Ryzen 9 7900X with 32GB of RAM, I was able to run Cyberpunk 2077 in 4K with Ultra graphics and DLSS at an average of 78fps. The RTX 4070 sometimes struggled to stay above 60fps at those settings. NVIDIA’s new GPU showed its limits in Cyberpunk’s RT Overdrive mode (which enables intensive real-time path tracing), where I only saw 51fps on average while using DLSS and frame generation. (CD Projekt says that mode is meant for the RTX 4070 Ti and up, or on the 3090 at 1080p/30fps).
While the original RTX 4070 was a card that could occasionally let you game in 4K, the 4070 Super makes that a possibility far more often (so long as you can use DLSS). Of course, you’ll need to have reasonable expectations (you’re not getting 4K/120fps) and ideally a G-Sync monitor to smooth out performance.
None | 3DMark TimeSpy Extreme | Port Royal (Ray Tracing) | Cyberpunk | Blender |
NVIDIA RTX 4070 Super | 9,830 | 12,938/60fps | 1440p RT Overdrive DLSS: 157 | GPU 6,177 |
NVIDIA RTX 4070 | 8,610 | 11,195/52 fps | 1440p RT DLSS: 120 fps | 6,020 |
NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti | 10,624 | 14,163/66 fps | 1440p RT DLSS: 135 fps | 7,247 |
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT | 11,688 | 13,247/61 fps | 1440p FSRT RT: 114 fps | 3,516 |
When it comes to 1,440p gaming, the RTX 4070 Super is truly a superstar. In Cyberpunk’s Overdrive ray tracing mode with Ultra graphics settings, I saw an average of 157fps — almost enough to satisfy the demands of a 165hz 1,440p monitor. To my eye, the whole experience looked far smoother than the 4K Overdrive results and, as usual, I found it hard to tell the difference between 4K and 1,440p textures during actual gameplay.
Similarly, I’d rather keep the 160fps/1,440p average I saw in Halo Infinite with maxed out graphics, than the 83fps I reached in 4K. That game doesn’t get an assist from DLSS, either, so there’s no upscaling magic going on in those numbers.
Across most of our benchmarks, the RTX 4070 Super landed smack dab between the 4070 and 4070 Ti. In 3DMark Timespy Extreme, for example, the new GPU scored 9,830 points, compared to 8,610 on the 4070 and 10,624 on the 4070 Ti. In some cases, like the Port Royal ray tracing benchmark, it leaned far closer to the 4070 Ti (which also bodes well for the 4070 Super’s overclocking potential). NVIDIA’s advanced cooling setup on its “Founders Edition” cards also continues to work wonders: The 4070 Super idled at around 40 Celsius and typically maxed out at 66C under heavy load.
The RTX 4070 Super is clearly a big step forward from the original card, and a far better value for $599. It’s a solid upgrade if you’re running a 20-series NVIDIA GPU and even some of the lower-end 30-series options. The value should hopefully trickle downhill, as well: The original 4070 now sells for $550 on NVIDIA’s website and used models are on eBay for well below that.
While we’ll continue to long for the days when “mid-range” described a $300 GPU, NVIDIA is giving gamers more of a reason to shell out for the $599 RTX 4070 Super. It’ll satisfy all of your 1,440p gaming needs — and it’s ready to deliver decent 4K performance, as well.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nvidia-rtx-4070-super-review-a-1440p-powerhouse-for-599-160025855.html?src=rss
The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, came down onto the lunar surface at around 12:20 a.m. Tokyo time (1520 GMT).
Another year, another round of inscrutable price increases for many prescription drugs. Over 700 medicines are seeing their list prices shoot up this January, according to an analysis by the organization 46brooklyn Research. The average price increase is slightly below the trend of recent years, but includes popular…
Many PC owners wonder when it might be the best time to upgrade parts of their setup that are perhaps getting a little long in the tooth. The answer to that is relatively simple: whenever there’s a good sale. A bunch of Samsung monitors are currently up to 33 percent off over at Amazon. Among them is the 27-inch Samsung Smart Monitor M8, which has dropped to a record low of $480. That’s 26 percent off the regular price.
The M8 can double as a 4K streaming TV, since it has native support for apps including Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+. Through Samsung TV Plus, you can access a selection of free live and on-demand programming. In addition, you’ll be able to stream games from the likes of Xbox Cloud Gaming and NVIDIA GeForce Now. They should run fairly smoothly too, thanks to the 60Hz refresh rate.
Of course, you can use the Smart Monitor M8 for productivity too. For tasks such as web browsing and document editing, you won’t even need to hook up a PC. The M8 offers options to connect to another PC remotely, access the Microsoft Office 365 suite and even use the desktop mode of Samsung mobile devices thanks to the DeX feature. There’s a built-in camera for video calls too. Moreover, you can use the M8 to control various smart home devices.
In case you don’t need all those bells and whistles and you’re just looking for a solid monitor that can get the job done on a tighter budget, a 22-inch 1080p model may do the trick. A T350 Series monitor has dropped by a third to $100, which is almost a record low for that model.
It has a decent 75Hz refresh rate and an IPS panel that Samsung claims will support a wide variety of viewing angles. FreeSync will help reduce screen tearing if you have a compatible AMD CPU, while the response time of 5ms isn’t too bad for gaming.
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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-27-inch-samsung-smart-monitor-m8-is-cheaper-than-ever-right-now-153331058.html?src=rss
Matt Friend impersonated the former president “s**tting on other Trump impressions” by Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and Alec Baldwin.
The long-running dispute between the European Commission and Apple over the use of its payment technology could soon come to an end. The Commission has officially announced Apple’s plan to open up its Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology, used for tap-and-go payments, to third-party mobile wallet providers. Rumors of Apple’s proposal first surfaced in December 2023.
The Commission opened an investigation into Apple in 2020 over potentially restricting rival mobile wallet pay developers’ access to necessary technology, thus eliminating Apple Pay’s competition. Two years later, it announced charges against Apple for allegedly violating the European Union’s antitrust laws, which, if proven, could leave Apple with a massive bill.
Apple’s proposal compromises on its previous assertions that third parties could negatively impact security. If approved, Apple would, among other things, allow third parties to APIs with NFC functionality — no fee or use of Apple Pay or wallet required. This shift would include access to technology that keeps payment information secure. Apple would apply this to any developers and iOS users registered in the European Economic Area (EEA). However, people outside the EEA might still be able to use third-party apps. Apple also claims it will call upon an independent reviewer in disputed instances where the company denied NFC access. All suggested changes and prior press releases on the case are available here.
As expected, the European Commission has not rushed to accept Apple’s proposed commitments. Instead, it has laid them out and requested feedback from Apple’s rivals (and any other interested entities) on whether the laid-out changes are acceptable.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-offers-to-open-up-nfc-payments-to-rival-companies-in-eu-antitrust-case-130528339.html?src=rss
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
