MacworldAs part of the M4 MacBook Air announcement on Wednesday, Apple also revealed a brand new MacBook color: Sky Blue. But it comes with a price: Gone is the MacBook Airs longstanding Space Gray option, which means that Apple no longer offers any new Mac in Space Gray.Space Gray made its debut on the iPhone 5s in 2013 (which we referred to as something called space gray' when it was introduced). The first Mac in Space Gray was the 12-inch MacBook in 2015, which we described as a serious and sophisticated finishwe also erroneously wrote it as grey and not gray as Apple puts it.While Space Gray had only one name during its tenure, it took on different shades over the years. Sometimes it was lighter and nearly silver, other times it was darker and closer to black. Which was an odd thing for Apple, a company that prides itself in its design consistency. Apple has not commented on the end of Space Gray, and just because its no longer offered on a Mac right now doesnt mean its one forever. Apple could decide to revive it in the future.Apples Mac color choices are bright and colorful (with one darker Midnight option) on the consumer side, metallic shades on the pro side, and silver for the tween-ish Mac mini. If you really want a Space Gray Mac, you have to settle for older models at third-party retailers or in the Apple Certified Refurbished Store. However, Space Gray still lives on the iPad Air and the iPad mini.If you feel like grieving for the loss of Space Gray on the Mac, please enjoy the Space Gray memorial slideshow below. You can even play this song while youre looking at the pictures.

MacworldIf you dont need the power of the new Mac Studio, theres a brand new best price for the new M4 Mac Mini. Amazon is selling the super-small computer with 512GB of storage for $699, a savings of $100, and the best price weve ever seen for this configuration.This tiny Mac will fit in nicely on your desktop, giving you the chance to have the clutter-free office youve always wanted. Its not just the size that sells this computer, of course, but also its awesome features. With a snappy M4 chip, the Mac mini can handle absolutely anything you throw its way. The 16GB memory will definitely help you handle anything you throw at it, and the upgraded 512GB of storage space will be more than enough space for movies, music, photos, and projects.We reviewed the new Mac mini with the M4 Pro and found it tiny and quiet with great performance and a good selection of ports from Thunderbolt port to HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, and plenty of type-C ports. So, dont miss out on the chance to get yourself the new M4 Mac Mini for $699 at Amazon, its best price ever.The new M4 Mac Mini has a new best priceBuy now at Amazon

Apples spring season product launches continues. The company today followed the introduction of its newM4 iPad Airwith two additional releases, a MacBook Air with an M4 chip and the latest super-powered upgrades to its most powerful Mac, the Mac Studio. The new Macs come with faster variants ofApples existing Apple Silicon processors, including the M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips.New high-end Mac desktopsApples Mac Studio is powered by either an M3 Ultra or M4 Max. These are both high-performance chips, but its the M3 Ultra that delivers the highest performance, Apple said. The Mac Studio can run large language models (LLMs) with over 600 billion parameters entirely in memory thanks to the chip, its support for over 512GB unified memory, and advanced GPU architecture. The new Mac Studio is the most powerful Mac weve ever made, said John Ternus, Apples senior vice president of hardware engineering, calling it Aa complete game-changer for pros around the world. The company said the M4 Max is up to 3.5 times faster than a Mac Studio with M1 Max.Whats the deal with the new high-end chips? Apple tells us its new M3 chip architecture delivers up to 2.6x the performance of theM1 Ultrawith support for more than half a terabyte of unified memory, the most ever in a personal computer.Apple built the processor using itsUltraFusion packaging architecture, which effectively links two M3 Max dies over 10,000 high-speed connections; the result is a speedy chunk of processor power with low latency and high bandwidth. The system then treats those two combined chips as a single processor, enabling the performance gains (as you would expect from systems that contain 184 billion transistors).M3 Ultra is the pinnacle of our scalable system-on-a-chip architecture, aimed specifically at users who run the most heavily threaded and bandwidth-intensive applications, said Johny Srouji, senior vice president of hardware technologies.One other new feature: once it is introduced next month, macOS Sequoia 15.4 will make it easier than ever to set up the new Mac Studio with an iPhone. By simply bringing iPhone close to Mac, users can quickly and conveniently sign in to their Apple Account to get their files, photos, messages, passwords, and more on their new Mac Studio, Apple said. This is how iPhones can already be provisioned, and its nice to see this feature make it to the Mac.Mac Studio specification highlightsM4 Max or M3 Ultra chips.Up to 16 cores on the CPU (M4 Max), or 32 cores on the M3 Ultra.Up to 40 cores on the GPU, or up to 80 cores on the M3 Ultra.The neural engine is over 3x faster than the M1 Max.Up to 512GB unified memory with over half a TBps of unified memory bandwidth on M3 Ultra.Up to 128GB unified memory with over half a TBps of unified memory bandwidth on M4 Max.Up to 16TB SSD.Thunderbolt 5.The M3 Ultra can drive up to eight Pro Display XDRs at the full 6K resolution.A 10Gb Ethernet port, HDMI port, SDXC card slot, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.Pricing begins at $1,999.These Macs bring dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and a second-generation ray-tracing engine. The M4 Max features two ProRes accelerators, making it a highly performance machine for video editors.A better MacBook AirThe MacBook Air has justifiably become the worlds most popular laptop, because it combines good performance with a solid set of features at a reasonable $999 starting price. Apple has now upgraded the Mac with an M4 chip, a better 12MP camera, and 18 hours of battery life. Theres an improved display, and the systems are now also available in light blue as well as midnight (charcoal black), starlight (gold), and silver (which is actually silver).There are several additional improvements, including support for up to two external displays beyond the built-in display and 16GB of starting unified memory (required for best results from Apple Intelligence). The M4 chip features a 10-core CPU, up to a 10-core GPU, and support for up to 32GB of unified memory, making it up to 2x faster than the M1 model. The Neural Engine in the M4 chip is up to 3x faster than on MacBook Air with M1.AppleThe end result is performance, and if you use Excel, iMovie, Photoshop, or browse the web, Apples own figures promise that youll see significant speed enhancements, even if upgrading from the relatively recent and still highly performant M1 MacBook Air. Photo editing in Adobe Photoshop is up to twice as fast, for example.All the existing features remain, so that means a durable aluminium unibody, Touch ID, Magic Keyboard, and Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 support. Youll also find MagSafe, two Thunderbolt ports, and a 3.5mm headphone jack, along with a built-in three-mic array for better voice clarity when making calls.What this meansWhat all these updates mean in real terms is that the high-end applications these Macs are designed to support will absolutely fly. Apple says you can expect up to 1.6x faster image processing in Adobe Photoshop on the M4 Max when compared to Mac Studio with M1 Max.But these performance gains are even more impressive on the M3 Ultra system, which delivers nearly twice the performance of the M4 Max and makes the systems dramatically faster than any previous high-end Mac.On the Mac Studio with M3 Ultra you should find 8K video rendering performance in Final Cut Pro to be up to 4x faster when compared to the 16-core Intel-based Mac Pro with Radeon Pro W5700X. These data points should really reinforce the huge leap forward Apple has accomplished with Apple Silicon. Though it is somewhat counter-intuitive to find that the best-performing machine has the processor with the lower number in it. Apple will have to tread carefully not to repeat the processor name recognition chaos other platforms endure. But what it can also claim is that it now offers the best-performing, lowest-energy consuming devices in every class in which it plays and it has, at least in part, itssilicon design teams to thank for that.You can follow me on social media! Join me onBlueSky,LinkedIn,andMastodon.

Every 2025 M4 MacBook Air is discounted thanks to exclusive AppleInsider pricing, making it a great way to save on Apple's newest laptop release.Get exclusive discounts on every M4 MacBook Air - Image credit: AppleTo save on the new M4 MacBook Air line, head over to Apple Premier Partner Expercom using this exclusive pricing link and look for the special AppleInsider price above the Add to Cart button.Save on M4 MacBook Air Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple released the M3 Ultra alongside M4 generation chips but here's why we probably won't see the M4 Ultra.Image credit: AppleOn Wednesday, Apple announced its new Mac Studio. As anticipated, it launched with an M4 chip the M4 Max, specifically.But it also launched with the M3 Ultra. This left many people, including AppleInsider staff, wondering what Apple's reasoning was. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Assassins Creed Shadows creative director Jonathan Dumont has confirmed that Assassins Creed Odyssey protagonist Kassandra is still alive by the time of the upcoming games story. Speaking to GameRant, Dumont said teased that the character was somewhere around the world.Kassandra is very much alive during these times, teased Dumont when asked about her. She is somewhere around the globe, lurking in the shadows.For context, Kassandra was introduced as one of two potential protagonists for Assassins Creed Odyssey. Since then, Ubisoft has confirmed that she is the canonical protagonist for that game. During the course of the game, she gets access to the Staff of Hermes, which ends up giving her a long life.In terms of the overarching story of the Assassins Creed franchise, Kassandra would have been around throughout all of the games, having lived for more than 2,000 years. She also eventually showed up in Assassins Creed Valhalla thanks to a post-launch update.In an update, Assassins Creed Valhalla got a series of free quests called Crossover Stories, which explored the links between protagonist Eivor and Kassandra.It is worth noting that Dumonts statement doesnt really confirm whether Kassandra will be a character we get to meet in Assassins Creed Shadows. It is, however, possible that we might get to see her in some form with a similar Crossover Stories quest like in Valhalla and Odyssey.The March 20 release date for Assassins Creed Shadows is looming over the horizon, and Ubisoft has been in full gear for its marketing for the game. Earlier this week, the company released a video offering us a deep dive into the in-game hideout.During their time with Assassins Creed Shadows, players will get a base of operations in the Izumi province. Players can customise this base quite a bit, with around an acre of land being available to decorate and kit out.Along with cosmetic customisations, the hideout will also have gameplay elements, such as the Stables, which can be used to smuggle materials, and the Forge, which can be used to craft, upgrade, and dismantle equipment.Dumont also revealed earlier this week that Ubisoft might bring a New Game Plus feature to Assassins Creed Shadows in a post-launch update. While not a confirmation that the mode is definitely coming, Dumont said that the studio will be paying attention to player feedback to decide the games updates.What Dumont has confirmed is that the titles main story will take players between 30 and 40 hours to finish. This assumes that the player will be doing nothing but the main story, however. Dumont also said that deciding to do optional activities might push your play time up to around 80 hours.Assassins Creed Shadows is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The title is also getting a collaboration event with Red Bull, where completing a quiz can get you unique Red Bull-branded equipment for the games two protagonists. This equipment offers up minor bonuses like increased affliction buildup on enemies and the ability to heal when you successfully dodge.

A pair of Sonys studios have been seemingly hit by layoffs. Abby LeMaster, formerly a project manager at PlayStation Visual Arts, has revealed through a post on LinkedIn that the studio, along with one of its support studios based out of Malaysia, has seen many people affected by these layoffs.It was tough waking up to messages that many friends and former coworkers from PSVA were laid off this morning, wrote LeMaster. The layoffs today hit hard. PSVA let go of developers with decades of subject matter expertise, talent that will be extraordinarily difficult to recoup. This industry can be unpredictable, but the skill, experience, and passion of the people I worked with at PSVA are undeniable.According to Kotaku, these layoffs are the result of quite a few in-development PlayStation projects having been cancelled. This includes the open world live-service game that was under development at Bend Studio. The report indicates that the layoffs have been quite widespread, however.For context, PlayStation Visual Arts is a support studio that helped other internal projects at PlayStation by working on art assets, as well as offering technical support. The studio has in the past worked with Naughty Dog on its remasters of The Last of Us Part 1 and Part 2.Several projects at PlayStation have been cancelled recently. Along with Bends game, The Last of Us Online, a multiplayer game based on Marvels Spider-Man, and even a reboot of Twisted Metal were some of the cancelled projects.Recently, a rumour indicated that the reboot of Twisted Metal would have been a battle royale game that would feature a mix of the series traditional vehicular combat along with on-foot third-person shooter combat. The game was also seemingly being developed using Unreal Engine 5.Reports have indicated that several of these cancellations came about thanks to the catastrophic failure of multiplayer shooter Concord. The game, released last year, saw its servers shut down in less than a month of its original release.Sony has stated that, while it has been cancelling a few projects, it wont be closing down any of its studios.Bend and Bluepoint are highly accomplished teams who are valued members of the PlayStation Studios family, and we are working closely with each studio to determine what are the next projects, said a Sony spokesperson earlier this year.These recent cancellations and layoffs have run counter to Sonys plans back in 2023, when it intended to release 12 live service games before April 2026. At the time, this included multiplayer games across various Sony franchises, including Horizon and the since-cancelled The Last of Us.Shuhei Yoshida has spoken about this push for live-service games that Sony had after leaving the company earlier this year. In an interview, he spoke about how he would have pushed back against PlayStation going so heavily into live-service games, since the companys success has largely come about thanks to its single-player releases.For context, the most successful live-service game released by Sony in recent times has been Helldivers 2, which has recently been celebrating its first anniversary. Helldivers 2 is available on PC and PS5.

AI agents can forget instructions. Methods to improve memory retention will make agents more powerful and useful.Read More

Universal Foundry, a startup offering cloud infrastructure to Unreal Engine 5 game developers, has announced a grant for small game devs.Read More

Volkswagen is bringing up the lights on the ID. EVERY1 show car that it says will become the promised 20,000 (about $20,800 USD) affordable EV that will hopefully turn around the automakers struggling business. As market leaders like Tesla continue to promise but not deliver the elusive entry-level EV, VW is hoping to shake things up with the unveiling of plans for a whole lineup of mass-market vehicles. The car will also be a crucial competitor as VW hopes to fend off a tidal wave of affordable Chinese EVs. But whether it makes it to North America, with all the uncertainty around EV policy right now, remains unknown. The car will be a crucial competitor as VW hopes to fend off a tidal wave of affordable Chinese EVsThe ID. EVERY1 will slot below the ID. 2all, which was first unveiled in 2023 with the promised price of 25,000. Both vehicles are only slated for Europe for now, with production expected to begin in 2026 for the ID. 2all and 2027 for the ID. EVERY1. (It seems likely those names could change, too, when we actually get closer to production.)The ID. EVERY1 is a small hatchback with new software and some neat tricks like a modular center console characteristics it will share with the ID. 2all. Both models are part of the new Electric Urban Car Family based on front-wheel drive versions of VWs modular electric platform. These new EVs are being developed under the umbrella of the Core brand group within the Volkswagen Group, the company said. In total, the automaker expects to unveil nine new models by 2027.1/4The production versions of the ID. EVERY1 and ID. 2all will be built on the second-generation version of VWs modular MEB platform. The current version of MEB powers the ID.4 crossover SUV, the ID Buzz minivan, and a dozen other vehicles from Audi, Skoda, and others. Of course, for that price, you cant expect much in the realm of performance or range. VW says the concept ID. EVERY1 tops out at 81mph and is powered by a newly developed electric motor with 94 horsepower (70kW). VW didnt disclose the battery size, but based on the estimated 155 miles (250km) of range, we can assume its somewhere around 35kWh. The ID. EVERY1 wont take up much room, at 152.8 inches in length, or around 27 inches shorter than the VW ID.4. Still, the hatchback can fit up to four passengers, with 10.8 cubic feet of storage in the trunk. VW says the production version of the ID. EVERY1 will be the companys first vehicle to feature a new powerful software architecture that promises over-the-air updates. (Software has proven to be a bit of a pain for VW, with bugs and infrequent updates plaguing its ID family of vehicles for years.) 1/6Design-wise, the ID. EVERY1 looks chunky and fairly adorable, with cues from small SUVs as well as VWs discontinued Up and Polo minicars, while also retaining stylings from the ID. Life concept from 2021. VW says the new design language that infuses the ID. EVERY1 and ID. 2all emphasizes minimalism, likability, and a secret sauce like the flying roof concept, in which the roof surface is lower in the middle without restricting headroom on the inside. VW is also bringing some of the modular designs from the ID Buzz to the low-cost segment. The center console can be transferred to the rear of the vehicle, and the dash features a rail on which various accessories can be affixed, including a tablet, shelf, or table. Theres also a small illuminated and removable Bluetooth speaker between the driver and front passenger, reminiscent of Rivians R1 vehicles.EV prices arent the only place Volkswagen is trying to cut costs. Following a labor strike in Germany, it reached a union deal that will mean 35,000 fewer workers and billions per year in cost cutting.Other automakers are increasingly piling into the affordable EV space. As competition from China heats up, Hyundai and Kia are both promising more low-cost models. Tesla swears it will have a lower-priced EV to reveal sometime this year. And even Ford says it plans on releasing its own entry-level EVs just as soon as it figures out how to make them profitable.See More: