• Why I Would Choose a Steam Deck Over a Nintendo Switch 2

    We may earn a commission from links on this page.After spending about a week with the Nintendo Switch 2, I have to admit that it’s a good console. It’s priced fairly for its sleek form factor and the performance it offers, and it sets Nintendo up to stay relevant while gaming graphics only continue to get more complex. And yet, for my own personal tastes, it’s still not my handheld of choice. Instead, I’ll be sticking to Valve’s Steam Deck, the first and still overall best handheld gaming PC, at least going by value for money. And if you don’t necessarily care about Nintendo’s exclusive games, there’s a good chance it might be the better option for you, too.The Steam Deck is cheaper than the Switch 2Out of the gate, the most obvious reason to get a Steam Deck over a Nintendo Switch 2 is price. Starting at for a new model, it’s only modestly cheaper than the Switch 2’s but that’s only part of the story. Valve also runs a certified refurbished program that offers used Decks with only cosmetic blemishes for as low as Restocks are infrequent, since Valve is only able to sell as much as gets sent back to it, but when they do happen, it's a heck of a great deal.That said, there is one catch. The Steam Deck OLED, which offers a bigger, more colorful screen and a larger battery, is more expensive than the Switch 2, starting at However, it’s maybe a bit unfair to compare the two, since the Switch 2 does not use an OLED screen and comes with less storage. If all you care about is the basics, the base Steam Deck is good enough—it’s got the same performance as the more recent one. And that performance, by the way, ended up being about on par with the Switch 2 in my testing, at least in Cyberpunk 2077.The Steam Deck is more comfortable to hold than the Switch 2This one is a bit of a toss-up, depending on your preferences, although I think the Steam Deck takes a slight lead here. While the Nintendo Switch 2 aims for a completely flat and somewhat compact profile, the Steam Deck instead allows itself to stretch out, and even though it’s a little bigger and a little heavier for it, I ultimately think that makes it more comfortable.At 11.73 x 4.60 x 1.93 inches against the Switch 2’s 10.7 x 4.5 x 0.55 inches, and at 1.41 pounds against the Switch 2’s 1.18 pounds, I won’t deny that this will be a non-starter for some. But personally, I still feel like the Steam Deck comes out on top, and that’s thanks to its ergonomics.I’ve never been a big fan of Nintendo’s joy-con controllers, and while the Switch 2’s joy-con 2 controllers improve on the Switch 1’s with bigger buttons and sticks, as well as more room to hold onto them, they still pale in comparison next to the Steam Deck’s controls.

    Steam Deck in profilevs. Switch 2 in profileCredit: Michelle Ehrhardt

    On the Switch 2, there are no grips to wrap your fingers around. On the Steam Deck, there are. The triggers also flare out more, and because the console is wider, your hands can stretch out a bit, rather than choking up on the device. It can get a bit heavy to hold a Steam Deck after a while, but I still prefer this approach overall, and if you have a surface to rest the Steam Deck against, weight is a non-issue.Plus, there are some extra bonuses that come with the additional space. The Steam Deck has large touchpads on either side of the device, plus four grip buttons on the back of it, giving you some extra inputs to play around with. Nice.It’s a bit less portable and a bit heavier, but for my adult hands, the Steam Deck is just better shaped to them.The Steam Deck has a bigger, cheaper library than the Switch 2This is the kicker. While there are cheap games that can run on the Switch 2 courtesy of backwards compatibility and third-party eShop titles, the big system drawscan get as pricey as Not to say the Steam Deck doesn’t have expensive games as well, but on the whole, I think it’s easier to get cheap and free games on the Steam Deck than on the eShop.That’s because, being a handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck can take advantage of the many sales and freebies PC gaming stores love to give out. These happen a bit more frequently on PC than on console, and that’s because there’s more competition on PC. Someone on PC could download games either from Steam or Epic, for instance, while someone on the Switch 2 can only download games from the Nintendo eShop.So, even sticking to just Steam, you’ll get access to regular weekend and mid-week sales, quarterly event sales, and developer or publisher highlight sales. That’s more sales events than you’ll usually find on the Nintendo eShop, and if you’re looking for cheaper first-party games, forget about it. Nintendo’s own games hardly ever go on sale, even years after release.But that’s just the beginning. Despite being named the Steam Deck, the device can actually run games from other stores, too. That’s thanks to an easily installed Linux program called Heroic Launcher, which is free and lets you download and play games from your Epic, GOG, and Amazon Prime Games accounts with just a few clicks.

    Credit: Heroic Games Launcher

    This is a game changer. Epic and Amazon Prime are both underdogs in the PC gaming space, and so to bolster their numbers, they both regularly give away free games. Epic in particular offers one free PC game every week, whereas if you’re a Twitch user, you might notice a decent but more infrequent amount of notifications allowing you to claim free Amazon Prime games. Some of these are big titles, too—it’s how I got Batman: Arkham Knight and Star Wars Battlefront II. With a simple install and a few months of waiting, you could have a Steam Deck filled to the brim with games that you didn’t even pay for. You just can’t do that on Nintendo.And then there’s the elephant in the room: your backlog. If you’re anything like me, you probably already have a Steam library that’s hundreds of games large. It was maybe even like this before the Switch 1 came out—regular sales have a tendency to build up the amount of games you own. By choosing the Steam Deck as your handheld, you’ll be able to play those games on the go, instantly giving you what might as well be a full library with no added cost to you. If you migrate over to the Nintendo Switch 2, you’re going to have to start with a fresh library, or at least a library that’s only as old as the Nintendo Switch 1.Basically, while the Switch 2’s hardware is only more expensive than the Steam Deck, it’ll be easier to fill your Steam Deck up with high quality, inexpensive games than it would be on the Switch 2. If you don’t care about having access to Nintendo exclusive games, that’s a huge draw.TV Play is a mixed bagFinally, I want to acknowledge that the Steam Deck still isn’t necessarily a better option than the Switch 2 for everyone. That’s why I’m writing from a personal perspective here. Like all gaming PCs, it’ll take some fiddling to get some games to run, so the Switch 2 is definitely a smoother experience out of the box. It’s also got less battery life, from my testing. But the big point of departure is TV play.Playing your portable games on a TV on the Switch 2 is as simple as plugging it into its dock. With the Steam Deck, you have to buy a dock separately, and even then, you have to connect your own controller to it and manually find suitable TV graphics settings for each game on its own. It’s not nearly as easy or flexible.And yet, for folks like me, I’m willing to say that even TV play is better. Or, depending on what type of PC gamer you are, monitor play.That’s because you’re not limited to playing your Steam Deck games on the Deck itself, dock or not. Instead, you can play on the Deck when you’re away from your home, and then swap over to your regular gaming PC when you’re back. Your Deck will upload your saves to the cloud automatically, and your PC will seamlessly download them. While not as intuitive as plugging your Switch 2 into its dock, the benefit here is that your non-portable play isn’t limited by the power of your portable device, whereas docked Switch 2 play is still held back by running on portable hardware.The tradeoff is that maintaining a dedicated gaming PC in addition to a Steam Deck is more expensive, but maybe more importantly, requires more tinkering. And I think that’s the key point here. If you want a simple-to-use, pick-up-and-play handheld, the Switch 2 is a great choice for you. But if you’re like me, and you’re not afraid to download some launchers and occasionally dive into compatibility settings or swap between two devices, the Steam Deck might still be the best handheld gaming device for you, even three years later.
    #why #would #choose #steam #deck
    Why I Would Choose a Steam Deck Over a Nintendo Switch 2
    We may earn a commission from links on this page.After spending about a week with the Nintendo Switch 2, I have to admit that it’s a good console. It’s priced fairly for its sleek form factor and the performance it offers, and it sets Nintendo up to stay relevant while gaming graphics only continue to get more complex. And yet, for my own personal tastes, it’s still not my handheld of choice. Instead, I’ll be sticking to Valve’s Steam Deck, the first and still overall best handheld gaming PC, at least going by value for money. And if you don’t necessarily care about Nintendo’s exclusive games, there’s a good chance it might be the better option for you, too.The Steam Deck is cheaper than the Switch 2Out of the gate, the most obvious reason to get a Steam Deck over a Nintendo Switch 2 is price. Starting at for a new model, it’s only modestly cheaper than the Switch 2’s but that’s only part of the story. Valve also runs a certified refurbished program that offers used Decks with only cosmetic blemishes for as low as Restocks are infrequent, since Valve is only able to sell as much as gets sent back to it, but when they do happen, it's a heck of a great deal.That said, there is one catch. The Steam Deck OLED, which offers a bigger, more colorful screen and a larger battery, is more expensive than the Switch 2, starting at However, it’s maybe a bit unfair to compare the two, since the Switch 2 does not use an OLED screen and comes with less storage. If all you care about is the basics, the base Steam Deck is good enough—it’s got the same performance as the more recent one. And that performance, by the way, ended up being about on par with the Switch 2 in my testing, at least in Cyberpunk 2077.The Steam Deck is more comfortable to hold than the Switch 2This one is a bit of a toss-up, depending on your preferences, although I think the Steam Deck takes a slight lead here. While the Nintendo Switch 2 aims for a completely flat and somewhat compact profile, the Steam Deck instead allows itself to stretch out, and even though it’s a little bigger and a little heavier for it, I ultimately think that makes it more comfortable.At 11.73 x 4.60 x 1.93 inches against the Switch 2’s 10.7 x 4.5 x 0.55 inches, and at 1.41 pounds against the Switch 2’s 1.18 pounds, I won’t deny that this will be a non-starter for some. But personally, I still feel like the Steam Deck comes out on top, and that’s thanks to its ergonomics.I’ve never been a big fan of Nintendo’s joy-con controllers, and while the Switch 2’s joy-con 2 controllers improve on the Switch 1’s with bigger buttons and sticks, as well as more room to hold onto them, they still pale in comparison next to the Steam Deck’s controls. Steam Deck in profilevs. Switch 2 in profileCredit: Michelle Ehrhardt On the Switch 2, there are no grips to wrap your fingers around. On the Steam Deck, there are. The triggers also flare out more, and because the console is wider, your hands can stretch out a bit, rather than choking up on the device. It can get a bit heavy to hold a Steam Deck after a while, but I still prefer this approach overall, and if you have a surface to rest the Steam Deck against, weight is a non-issue.Plus, there are some extra bonuses that come with the additional space. The Steam Deck has large touchpads on either side of the device, plus four grip buttons on the back of it, giving you some extra inputs to play around with. Nice.It’s a bit less portable and a bit heavier, but for my adult hands, the Steam Deck is just better shaped to them.The Steam Deck has a bigger, cheaper library than the Switch 2This is the kicker. While there are cheap games that can run on the Switch 2 courtesy of backwards compatibility and third-party eShop titles, the big system drawscan get as pricey as Not to say the Steam Deck doesn’t have expensive games as well, but on the whole, I think it’s easier to get cheap and free games on the Steam Deck than on the eShop.That’s because, being a handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck can take advantage of the many sales and freebies PC gaming stores love to give out. These happen a bit more frequently on PC than on console, and that’s because there’s more competition on PC. Someone on PC could download games either from Steam or Epic, for instance, while someone on the Switch 2 can only download games from the Nintendo eShop.So, even sticking to just Steam, you’ll get access to regular weekend and mid-week sales, quarterly event sales, and developer or publisher highlight sales. That’s more sales events than you’ll usually find on the Nintendo eShop, and if you’re looking for cheaper first-party games, forget about it. Nintendo’s own games hardly ever go on sale, even years after release.But that’s just the beginning. Despite being named the Steam Deck, the device can actually run games from other stores, too. That’s thanks to an easily installed Linux program called Heroic Launcher, which is free and lets you download and play games from your Epic, GOG, and Amazon Prime Games accounts with just a few clicks. Credit: Heroic Games Launcher This is a game changer. Epic and Amazon Prime are both underdogs in the PC gaming space, and so to bolster their numbers, they both regularly give away free games. Epic in particular offers one free PC game every week, whereas if you’re a Twitch user, you might notice a decent but more infrequent amount of notifications allowing you to claim free Amazon Prime games. Some of these are big titles, too—it’s how I got Batman: Arkham Knight and Star Wars Battlefront II. With a simple install and a few months of waiting, you could have a Steam Deck filled to the brim with games that you didn’t even pay for. You just can’t do that on Nintendo.And then there’s the elephant in the room: your backlog. If you’re anything like me, you probably already have a Steam library that’s hundreds of games large. It was maybe even like this before the Switch 1 came out—regular sales have a tendency to build up the amount of games you own. By choosing the Steam Deck as your handheld, you’ll be able to play those games on the go, instantly giving you what might as well be a full library with no added cost to you. If you migrate over to the Nintendo Switch 2, you’re going to have to start with a fresh library, or at least a library that’s only as old as the Nintendo Switch 1.Basically, while the Switch 2’s hardware is only more expensive than the Steam Deck, it’ll be easier to fill your Steam Deck up with high quality, inexpensive games than it would be on the Switch 2. If you don’t care about having access to Nintendo exclusive games, that’s a huge draw.TV Play is a mixed bagFinally, I want to acknowledge that the Steam Deck still isn’t necessarily a better option than the Switch 2 for everyone. That’s why I’m writing from a personal perspective here. Like all gaming PCs, it’ll take some fiddling to get some games to run, so the Switch 2 is definitely a smoother experience out of the box. It’s also got less battery life, from my testing. But the big point of departure is TV play.Playing your portable games on a TV on the Switch 2 is as simple as plugging it into its dock. With the Steam Deck, you have to buy a dock separately, and even then, you have to connect your own controller to it and manually find suitable TV graphics settings for each game on its own. It’s not nearly as easy or flexible.And yet, for folks like me, I’m willing to say that even TV play is better. Or, depending on what type of PC gamer you are, monitor play.That’s because you’re not limited to playing your Steam Deck games on the Deck itself, dock or not. Instead, you can play on the Deck when you’re away from your home, and then swap over to your regular gaming PC when you’re back. Your Deck will upload your saves to the cloud automatically, and your PC will seamlessly download them. While not as intuitive as plugging your Switch 2 into its dock, the benefit here is that your non-portable play isn’t limited by the power of your portable device, whereas docked Switch 2 play is still held back by running on portable hardware.The tradeoff is that maintaining a dedicated gaming PC in addition to a Steam Deck is more expensive, but maybe more importantly, requires more tinkering. And I think that’s the key point here. If you want a simple-to-use, pick-up-and-play handheld, the Switch 2 is a great choice for you. But if you’re like me, and you’re not afraid to download some launchers and occasionally dive into compatibility settings or swap between two devices, the Steam Deck might still be the best handheld gaming device for you, even three years later. #why #would #choose #steam #deck
    LIFEHACKER.COM
    Why I Would Choose a Steam Deck Over a Nintendo Switch 2
    We may earn a commission from links on this page.After spending about a week with the Nintendo Switch 2, I have to admit that it’s a good console. It’s priced fairly for its sleek form factor and the performance it offers, and it sets Nintendo up to stay relevant while gaming graphics only continue to get more complex. And yet, for my own personal tastes, it’s still not my handheld of choice. Instead, I’ll be sticking to Valve’s Steam Deck, the first and still overall best handheld gaming PC, at least going by value for money. And if you don’t necessarily care about Nintendo’s exclusive games, there’s a good chance it might be the better option for you, too.The Steam Deck is cheaper than the Switch 2Out of the gate, the most obvious reason to get a Steam Deck over a Nintendo Switch 2 is price. Starting at $400 for a new model, it’s only modestly cheaper than the Switch 2’s $450, but that’s only part of the story. Valve also runs a certified refurbished program that offers used Decks with only cosmetic blemishes for as low as $279. Restocks are infrequent, since Valve is only able to sell as much as gets sent back to it, but when they do happen, it's a heck of a great deal.That said, there is one catch. The Steam Deck OLED, which offers a bigger, more colorful screen and a larger battery, is more expensive than the Switch 2, starting at $549. However, it’s maybe a bit unfair to compare the two, since the Switch 2 does not use an OLED screen and comes with less storage. If all you care about is the basics (I’m perfectly happy with my LCD model), the base Steam Deck is good enough—it’s got the same performance as the more recent one. And that performance, by the way, ended up being about on par with the Switch 2 in my testing, at least in Cyberpunk 2077 (one of my go-to benchmark games).The Steam Deck is more comfortable to hold than the Switch 2This one is a bit of a toss-up, depending on your preferences, although I think the Steam Deck takes a slight lead here. While the Nintendo Switch 2 aims for a completely flat and somewhat compact profile, the Steam Deck instead allows itself to stretch out, and even though it’s a little bigger and a little heavier for it, I ultimately think that makes it more comfortable.At 11.73 x 4.60 x 1.93 inches against the Switch 2’s 10.7 x 4.5 x 0.55 inches, and at 1.41 pounds against the Switch 2’s 1.18 pounds, I won’t deny that this will be a non-starter for some. But personally, I still feel like the Steam Deck comes out on top, and that’s thanks to its ergonomics.I’ve never been a big fan of Nintendo’s joy-con controllers, and while the Switch 2’s joy-con 2 controllers improve on the Switch 1’s with bigger buttons and sticks, as well as more room to hold onto them, they still pale in comparison next to the Steam Deck’s controls. Steam Deck in profile (above) vs. Switch 2 in profile (below) Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt On the Switch 2, there are no grips to wrap your fingers around. On the Steam Deck, there are. The triggers also flare out more, and because the console is wider, your hands can stretch out a bit, rather than choking up on the device. It can get a bit heavy to hold a Steam Deck after a while, but I still prefer this approach overall, and if you have a surface to rest the Steam Deck against (like an airplane tray table), weight is a non-issue.Plus, there are some extra bonuses that come with the additional space. The Steam Deck has large touchpads on either side of the device, plus four grip buttons on the back of it, giving you some extra inputs to play around with. Nice.It’s a bit less portable and a bit heavier, but for my adult hands, the Steam Deck is just better shaped to them.The Steam Deck has a bigger, cheaper library than the Switch 2This is the kicker. While there are cheap games that can run on the Switch 2 courtesy of backwards compatibility and third-party eShop titles, the big system draws (Nintendo-developed titles like Mario Kart World, for example) can get as pricey as $80. Not to say the Steam Deck doesn’t have expensive games as well, but on the whole, I think it’s easier to get cheap and free games on the Steam Deck than on the eShop.That’s because, being a handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck can take advantage of the many sales and freebies PC gaming stores love to give out. These happen a bit more frequently on PC than on console, and that’s because there’s more competition on PC. Someone on PC could download games either from Steam or Epic, for instance, while someone on the Switch 2 can only download games from the Nintendo eShop.So, even sticking to just Steam, you’ll get access to regular weekend and mid-week sales, quarterly event sales, and developer or publisher highlight sales. That’s more sales events than you’ll usually find on the Nintendo eShop, and if you’re looking for cheaper first-party games, forget about it. Nintendo’s own games hardly ever go on sale, even years after release.But that’s just the beginning. Despite being named the Steam Deck, the device can actually run games from other stores, too. That’s thanks to an easily installed Linux program called Heroic Launcher, which is free and lets you download and play games from your Epic, GOG, and Amazon Prime Games accounts with just a few clicks. Credit: Heroic Games Launcher This is a game changer. Epic and Amazon Prime are both underdogs in the PC gaming space, and so to bolster their numbers, they both regularly give away free games. Epic in particular offers one free PC game every week, whereas if you’re a Twitch user, you might notice a decent but more infrequent amount of notifications allowing you to claim free Amazon Prime games. Some of these are big titles, too—it’s how I got Batman: Arkham Knight and Star Wars Battlefront II. With a simple install and a few months of waiting, you could have a Steam Deck filled to the brim with games that you didn’t even pay for. You just can’t do that on Nintendo.And then there’s the elephant in the room: your backlog. If you’re anything like me, you probably already have a Steam library that’s hundreds of games large. It was maybe even like this before the Switch 1 came out—regular sales have a tendency to build up the amount of games you own. By choosing the Steam Deck as your handheld, you’ll be able to play those games on the go, instantly giving you what might as well be a full library with no added cost to you. If you migrate over to the Nintendo Switch 2, you’re going to have to start with a fresh library, or at least a library that’s only as old as the Nintendo Switch 1.Basically, while the Switch 2’s hardware is only $50 more expensive than the Steam Deck, it’ll be easier to fill your Steam Deck up with high quality, inexpensive games than it would be on the Switch 2. If you don’t care about having access to Nintendo exclusive games, that’s a huge draw.TV Play is a mixed bagFinally, I want to acknowledge that the Steam Deck still isn’t necessarily a better option than the Switch 2 for everyone. That’s why I’m writing from a personal perspective here. Like all gaming PCs, it’ll take some fiddling to get some games to run, so the Switch 2 is definitely a smoother experience out of the box. It’s also got less battery life, from my testing. But the big point of departure is TV play.Playing your portable games on a TV on the Switch 2 is as simple as plugging it into its dock. With the Steam Deck, you have to buy a dock separately (the official one is $79), and even then, you have to connect your own controller to it and manually find suitable TV graphics settings for each game on its own. It’s not nearly as easy or flexible.And yet, for folks like me, I’m willing to say that even TV play is better. Or, depending on what type of PC gamer you are, monitor play.That’s because you’re not limited to playing your Steam Deck games on the Deck itself, dock or not. Instead, you can play on the Deck when you’re away from your home, and then swap over to your regular gaming PC when you’re back. Your Deck will upload your saves to the cloud automatically, and your PC will seamlessly download them. While not as intuitive as plugging your Switch 2 into its dock, the benefit here is that your non-portable play isn’t limited by the power of your portable device, whereas docked Switch 2 play is still held back by running on portable hardware.The tradeoff is that maintaining a dedicated gaming PC in addition to a Steam Deck is more expensive, but maybe more importantly, requires more tinkering (there are ways to build a cheap gaming PC, after all). And I think that’s the key point here. If you want a simple-to-use, pick-up-and-play handheld, the Switch 2 is a great choice for you. But if you’re like me, and you’re not afraid to download some launchers and occasionally dive into compatibility settings or swap between two devices, the Steam Deck might still be the best handheld gaming device for you, even three years later.
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  • Death Stranding 2: On the Beach Includes Shotguns and Grenade Launchers, Two Traits Revealed

    Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is less than four weeks out from launch, with Kojima Productions hosting a Game Premiere Event on June 8th. Of course, the development team has already revealed several details, like how it redesigned the gameplay loop to accommodate different playstyles.
    The title’s official PlayStation page provides a few more details, including how Sam Porter Bridges can use “long-ranged gear” alongside the previously confirmed “decoy holograms”and silent takedowns. We’ve seen weapons like assault rifles and bolas launchers, but players will also utilize machine guns, shotguns, and grenade launchers.
    Of course, with the Automated Porter Assistant System, you can improve Traits in four different categories. According to the page, these include reduced movement speed for stealth and enhanced fire rates for weapons. You’ll need to consume Memories for the same, and they’re limited.
    Death Stranding 2: On the Beach launches on June 26th for PS5. Head here for some extensive gameplay showcasing the new B.T.s and tactics.
    #death #stranding #beach #includes #shotguns
    Death Stranding 2: On the Beach Includes Shotguns and Grenade Launchers, Two Traits Revealed
    Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is less than four weeks out from launch, with Kojima Productions hosting a Game Premiere Event on June 8th. Of course, the development team has already revealed several details, like how it redesigned the gameplay loop to accommodate different playstyles. The title’s official PlayStation page provides a few more details, including how Sam Porter Bridges can use “long-ranged gear” alongside the previously confirmed “decoy holograms”and silent takedowns. We’ve seen weapons like assault rifles and bolas launchers, but players will also utilize machine guns, shotguns, and grenade launchers. Of course, with the Automated Porter Assistant System, you can improve Traits in four different categories. According to the page, these include reduced movement speed for stealth and enhanced fire rates for weapons. You’ll need to consume Memories for the same, and they’re limited. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach launches on June 26th for PS5. Head here for some extensive gameplay showcasing the new B.T.s and tactics. #death #stranding #beach #includes #shotguns
    GAMINGBOLT.COM
    Death Stranding 2: On the Beach Includes Shotguns and Grenade Launchers, Two Traits Revealed
    Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is less than four weeks out from launch, with Kojima Productions hosting a Game Premiere Event on June 8th. Of course, the development team has already revealed several details, like how it redesigned the gameplay loop to accommodate different playstyles. The title’s official PlayStation page provides a few more details, including how Sam Porter Bridges can use “long-ranged gear” alongside the previously confirmed “decoy holograms” (potentially referencing the B.T. hologram grenades) and silent takedowns. We’ve seen weapons like assault rifles and bolas launchers, but players will also utilize machine guns, shotguns, and grenade launchers. Of course, with the Automated Porter Assistant System, you can improve Traits in four different categories. According to the page, these include reduced movement speed for stealth and enhanced fire rates for weapons. You’ll need to consume Memories for the same, and they’re limited. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach launches on June 26th for PS5. Head here for some extensive gameplay showcasing the new B.T.s and tactics.
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  • This giant microwave may change the future of war

    Imagine: China deploys hundreds of thousands of autonomous drones in the air, on the sea, and under the water—all armed with explosive warheads or small missiles. These machines descend in a swarm toward military installations on Taiwan and nearby US bases, and over the course of a few hours, a single robotic blitzkrieg overwhelms the US Pacific force before it can even begin to fight back. 

    Maybe it sounds like a new Michael Bay movie, but it’s the scenario that keeps the chief technology officer of the US Army up at night.

    “I’m hesitant to say it out loud so I don’t manifest it,” says Alex Miller, a longtime Army intelligence official who became the CTO to the Army’s chief of staff in 2023.

    Even if World War III doesn’t break out in the South China Sea, every US military installation around the world is vulnerable to the same tactics—as are the militaries of every other country around the world. The proliferation of cheap drones means just about any group with the wherewithal to assemble and launch a swarm could wreak havoc, no expensive jets or massive missile installations required. 

    While the US has precision missiles that can shoot these drones down, they don’t always succeed: A drone attack killed three US soldiers and injured dozens more at a base in the Jordanian desert last year. And each American missile costs orders of magnitude more than its targets, which limits their supply; countering thousand-dollar drones with missiles that cost hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars per shot can only work for so long, even with a defense budget that could reach a trillion dollars next year.

    The US armed forces are now hunting for a solution—and they want it fast. Every branch of the service and a host of defense tech startups are testing out new weapons that promise to disable drones en masse. There are drones that slam into other drones like battering rams; drones that shoot out nets to ensnare quadcopter propellers; precision-guided Gatling guns that simply shoot drones out of the sky; electronic approaches, like GPS jammers and direct hacking tools; and lasers that melt holes clear through a target’s side.

    Then there are the microwaves: high-powered electronic devices that push out kilowatts of power to zap the circuits of a drone as if it were the tinfoil you forgot to take off your leftovers when you heated them up. 

    That’s where Epirus comes in. 

    When I went to visit the HQ of this 185-person startup in Torrance, California, earlier this year, I got a behind-the-scenes look at its massive microwave, called Leonidas, which the US Army is already betting on as a cutting-edge anti-drone weapon. The Army awarded Epirus a million contract in early 2023, topped that up with another million last fall, and is currently deploying a handful of the systems for testing with US troops in the Middle East and the Pacific. 

    Up close, the Leonidas that Epirus built for the Army looks like a two-foot-thick slab of metal the size of a garage door stuck on a swivel mount. Pop the back cover, and you can see that the slab is filled with dozens of individual microwave amplifier units in a grid. Each is about the size of a safe-deposit box and built around a chip made of gallium nitride, a semiconductor that can survive much higher voltages and temperatures than the typical silicon. 

    Leonidas sits on top of a trailer that a standard-issue Army truck can tow, and when it is powered on, the company’s software tells the grid of amps and antennas to shape the electromagnetic waves they’re blasting out with a phased array, precisely overlapping the microwave signals to mold the energy into a focused beam. Instead of needing to physically point a gun or parabolic dish at each of a thousand incoming drones, the Leonidas can flick between them at the speed of software.

    The Leonidas contains dozens of microwave amplifier units and can pivot to direct waves at incoming swarms of drones.EPIRUS

    Of course, this isn’t magic—there are practical limits on how much damage one array can do, and at what range—but the total effect could be described as an electromagnetic pulse emitter, a death ray for electronics, or a force field that could set up a protective barrier around military installations and drop drones the way a bug zapper fizzles a mob of mosquitoes.

    I walked through the nonclassified sections of the Leonidas factory floor, where a cluster of engineers working on weaponeering—the military term for figuring out exactly how much of a weapon, be it high explosive or microwave beam, is necessary to achieve a desired effect—ran tests in a warren of smaller anechoic rooms. Inside, they shot individual microwave units at a broad range of commercial and military drones, cycling through waveforms and power levels to try to find the signal that could fry each one with maximum efficiency. 

    On a live video feed from inside one of these foam-padded rooms, I watched a quadcopter drone spin its propellers and then, once the microwave emitter turned on, instantly stop short—first the propeller on the front left and then the rest. A drone hit with a Leonidas beam doesn’t explode—it just falls.

    Compared with the blast of a missile or the sizzle of a laser, it doesn’t look like much. But it could force enemies to come up with costlier ways of attacking that reduce the advantage of the drone swarm, and it could get around the inherent limitations of purely electronic or strictly physical defense systems. It could save lives.

    Epirus CEO Andy Lowery, a tall guy with sparkplug energy and a rapid-fire southern Illinois twang, doesn’t shy away from talking big about his product. As he told me during my visit, Leonidas is intended to lead a last stand, like the Spartan from whom the microwave takes its name—in this case, against hordes of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. While the actual range of the Leonidas system is kept secret, Lowery says the Army is looking for a solution that can reliably stop drones within a few kilometers. He told me, “They would like our system to be the owner of that final layer—to get any squeakers, any leakers, anything like that.”

    Now that they’ve told the world they “invented a force field,” Lowery added, the focus is on manufacturing at scale—before the drone swarms really start to descend or a nation with a major military decides to launch a new war. Before, in other words, Miller’s nightmare scenario becomes reality. 

    Why zap?

    Miller remembers well when the danger of small weaponized drones first appeared on his radar. Reports of Islamic State fighters strapping grenades to the bottom of commercial DJI Phantom quadcopters first emerged in late 2016 during the Battle of Mosul. “I went, ‘Oh, this is going to be bad,’ because basically it’s an airborne IED at that point,” he says.

    He’s tracked the danger as it’s built steadily since then, with advances in machine vision, AI coordination software, and suicide drone tactics only accelerating. 

    Then the war in Ukraine showed the world that cheap technology has fundamentally changed how warfare happens. We have watched in high-definition video how a cheap, off-the-shelf drone modified to carry a small bomb can be piloted directly into a faraway truck, tank, or group of troops to devastating effect. And larger suicide drones, also known as “loitering munitions,” can be produced for just tens of thousands of dollars and launched in massive salvos to hit soft targets or overwhelm more advanced military defenses through sheer numbers. 

    As a result, Miller, along with large swaths of the Pentagon and DC policy circles, believes that the current US arsenal for defending against these weapons is just too expensive and the tools in too short supply to truly match the threat.

    Just look at Yemen, a poor country where the Houthi military group has been under constant attack for the past decade. Armed with this new low-tech arsenal, in the past 18 months the rebel group has been able to bomb cargo ships and effectively disrupt global shipping in the Red Sea—part of an effort to apply pressure on Israel to stop its war in Gaza. The Houthis have also used missiles, suicide drones, and even drone boats to launch powerful attacks on US Navy ships sent to stop them.

    The most successful defense tech firm selling anti-drone weapons to the US military right now is Anduril, the company started by Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus VR headset, and a crew of cofounders from Oculus and defense data giant Palantir. In just the past few months, the Marines have chosen Anduril for counter-drone contracts that could be worth nearly million over the next decade, and the company has been working with Special Operations Command since 2022 on a counter-drone contract that could be worth nearly a billion dollars over a similar time frame. It’s unclear from the contracts what, exactly, Anduril is selling to each organization, but its weapons include electronic warfare jammers, jet-powered drone bombs, and propeller-driven Anvil drones designed to simply smash into enemy drones.

    In this arsenal, the cheapest way to stop a swarm of drones is electronic warfare: jamming the GPS or radio signals used to pilot the machines. But the intense drone battles in Ukraine have advanced the art of jamming and counter-jamming close to the point of stalemate. As a result, a new state of the art is emerging: unjammable drones that operate autonomously by using onboard processors to navigate via internal maps and computer vision, or even drones connected with 20-kilometer-long filaments of fiber-optic cable for tethered control.

    But unjammable doesn’t mean unzappable. Instead of using the scrambling method of a jammer, which employs an antenna to block the drone’s connection to a pilot or remote guidance system, the Leonidas microwave beam hits a drone body broadside. The energy finds its way into something electrical, whether the central flight controller or a tiny wire controlling a flap on a wing, to short-circuit whatever’s available.Tyler Miller, a senior systems engineer on Epirus’s weaponeering team, told me that they never know exactly which part of the target drone is going to go down first, but they’ve reliably seen the microwave signal get in somewhere to overload a circuit. “Based on the geometry and the way the wires are laid out,” he said, one of those wires is going to be the best path in. “Sometimes if we rotate the drone 90 degrees, you have a different motor go down first,” he added.

    The team has even tried wrapping target drones in copper tape, which would theoretically provide shielding, only to find that the microwave still finds a way in through moving propeller shafts or antennas that need to remain exposed for the drone to fly. 

    EPIRUS

    Leonidas also has an edge when it comes to downing a mass of drones at once. Physically hitting a drone out of the sky or lighting it up with a laser can be effective in situations where electronic warfare fails, but anti-drone drones can only take out one at a time, and lasers need to precisely aim and shoot. Epirus’s microwaves can damage everything in a roughly 60-degree arc from the Leonidas emitter simultaneously and keep on zapping and zapping; directed energy systems like this one never run out of ammo.

    As for cost, each Army Leonidas unit currently runs in the “low eight figures,” Lowery told me. Defense contract pricing can be opaque, but Epirus delivered four units for its million initial contract, giving a back-of-napkin price around million each. For comparison, Stinger missiles from Raytheon, which soldiers shoot at enemy aircraft or drones from a shoulder-mounted launcher, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop, meaning the Leonidas could start costing lessafter it downs the first wave of a swarm.

    Raytheon’s radar, reversed

    Epirus is part of a new wave of venture-capital-backed defense companies trying to change the way weapons are created—and the way the Pentagon buys them. The largest defense companies, firms like Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin, typically develop new weapons in response to research grants and cost-plus contracts, in which the US Department of Defense guarantees a certain profit margin to firms building products that match their laundry list of technical specifications. These programs have kept the military supplied with cutting-edge weapons for decades, but the results may be exquisite pieces of military machinery delivered years late and billions of dollars over budget.

    Rather than building to minutely detailed specs, the new crop of military contractors aim to produce products on a quick time frame to solve a problem and then fine-tune them as they pitch to the military. The model, pioneered by Palantir and SpaceX, has since propelled companies like Anduril, Shield AI, and dozens of other smaller startups into the business of war as venture capital piles tens of billions of dollars into defense.

    Like Anduril, Epirus has direct Palantir roots; it was cofounded by Joe Lonsdale, who also cofounded Palantir, and John Tenet, Lonsdale’s colleague at the time at his venture fund, 8VC. 

    While Epirus is doing business in the new mode, its roots are in the old—specifically in Raytheon, a pioneer in the field of microwave technology. Cofounded by MIT professor Vannevar Bush in 1922, it manufactured vacuum tubes, like those found in old radios. But the company became synonymous with electronic defense during World War II, when Bush spun up a lab to develop early microwave radar technology invented by the British into a workable product, and Raytheon then began mass-producing microwave tubes—known as magnetrons—for the US war effort. By the end of the war in 1945, Raytheon was making 80% of the magnetrons powering Allied radar across the world.

    From padded foam chambers at the Epirus HQ, Leonidas devices can be safely tested on drones.EPIRUS

    Large tubes remained the best way to emit high-power microwaves for more than half a century, handily outperforming silicon-based solid-state amplifiers. They’re still around—the microwave on your kitchen counter runs on a vacuum tube magnetron. But tubes have downsides: They’re hot, they’re big, and they require upkeep.By the 2000s, new methods of building solid-state amplifiers out of materials like gallium nitride started to mature and were able to handle more power than silicon without melting or shorting out. The US Navy spent hundreds of millions of dollars on cutting-edge microwave contracts, one for a project at Raytheon called Next Generation Jammer—geared specifically toward designing a new way to make high-powered microwaves that work at extremely long distances.

    Lowery, the Epirus CEO, began his career working on nuclear reactors on Navy aircraft carriers before he became the chief engineer for Next Generation Jammer at Raytheon in 2010. There, he and his team worked on a system that relied on many of the same fundamentals that now power the Leonidas—using the same type of amplifier material and antenna setup to fry the electronics of a small target at much closer range rather than disrupting the radar of a target hundreds of miles away. 

    The similarity is not a coincidence: Two engineers from Next Generation Jammer helped launch Epirus in 2018. Lowery—who by then was working at the augmented-reality startup RealWear, which makes industrial smart glasses—joined Epirus in 2021 to run product development and was asked to take the top spot as CEO in 2023, as Leonidas became a fully formed machine. Much of the founding team has since departed for other projects, but Raytheon still runs through the company’s collective CV: ex-Raytheon radar engineer Matt Markel started in January as the new CTO, and Epirus’s chief engineer for defense, its VP of engineering, its VP of operations, and a number of employees all have Raytheon roots as well.

    Markel tells me that the Epirus way of working wouldn’t have flown at one of the big defense contractors: “They never would have tried spinning off the technology into a new application without a contract lined up.” The Epirus engineers saw the use case, raised money to start building Leonidas, and already had prototypes in the works before any military branch started awarding money to work on the project.

    Waiting for the starting gun

    On the wall of Lowery’s office are two mementos from testing days at an Army proving ground: a trophy wing from a larger drone, signed by the whole testing team, and a framed photo documenting the Leonidas’s carnage—a stack of dozens of inoperative drones piled up in a heap. 

    Despite what seems to have been an impressive test show, it’s still impossible from the outside to determine whether Epirus’s tech is ready to fully deliver if the swarms descend. 

    The Army would not comment specifically on the efficacy of any new weapons in testing or early deployment, including the Leonidas system. A spokesperson for the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, or RCCTO, which is the subsection responsible for contracting with Epirus to date, would only say in a statement that it is “committed to developing and fielding innovative Directed Energy solutions to address evolving threats.” 

    But various high-ranking officers appear to be giving Epirus a public vote of confidence. The three-star general who runs RCCTO and oversaw the Leonidas testing last summer told Breaking Defense that “the system actually worked very well,” even if there was work to be done on “how the weapon system fits into the larger kill chain.”

    And when former secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth, then the service’s highest-ranking civilian, gave a parting interview this past January, she mentioned Epirus in all but name, citing “one company” that is “using high-powered microwaves to basically be able to kill swarms of drones.” She called that kind of capability “critical for the Army.” 

    The Army isn’t the only branch interested in the microwave weapon. On Epirus’s factory floor when I visited, alongside the big beige Leonidases commissioned by the Army, engineers were building a smaller expeditionary version for the Marines, painted green, which it delivered in late April. Videos show that when it put some of its microwave emitters on a dock and tested them out for the Navy last summer, the microwaves left their targets dead in the water—successfully frying the circuits of outboard motors like the ones propelling Houthi drone boats. 

    Epirus is also currently working on an even smaller version of the Leonidas that can mount on top of the Army’s Stryker combat vehicles, and it’s testing out attaching a single microwave unit to a small airborne drone, which could work as a highly focused zapper to disable cars, data centers, or single enemy drones. 

    Epirus’s microwave technology is also being tested in devices smaller than the traditional Leonidas. EPIRUS

    While neither the Army nor the Navy has yet to announce a contract to start buying Epirus’s systems at scale, the company and its investors are actively preparing for the big orders to start rolling in. It raised million in a funding round in early March to get ready to make as many Leonidases as possible in the coming years, adding to the more than million it’s raised since opening its doors in 2018.

    “If you invent a force field that works,” Lowery boasts, “you really get a lot of attention.”

    The task for Epirus now, assuming that its main customers pull the trigger and start buying more Leonidases, is ramping up production while advancing the tech in its systems. Then there are the more prosaic problems of staffing, assembly, and testing at scale. For future generations, Lowery told me, the goal is refining the antenna design and integrating higher-powered microwave amplifiers to push the output into the tens of kilowatts, allowing for increased range and efficacy. 

    While this could be made harder by Trump’s global trade war, Lowery says he’s not worried about their supply chain; while China produces 98% of the world’s gallium, according to the US Geological Survey, and has choked off exports to the US, Epirus’s chip supplier uses recycled gallium from Japan. 

    The other outside challenge may be that Epirus isn’t the only company building a drone zapper. One of China’s state-owned defense companies has been working on its own anti-drone high-powered microwave weapon called the Hurricane, which it displayed at a major military show in late 2024. 

    It may be a sign that anti-electronics force fields will become common among the world’s militaries—and if so, the future of war is unlikely to go back to the status quo ante, and it might zag in a different direction yet again. But military planners believe it’s crucial for the US not to be left behind. So if it works as promised, Epirus could very well change the way that war will play out in the coming decade. 

    While Miller, the Army CTO, can’t speak directly to Epirus or any specific system, he will say that he believes anti-drone measures are going to have to become ubiquitous for US soldiers. “Counter-UASunfortunately is going to be like counter-IED,” he says. “It’s going to be every soldier’s job to think about UAS threats the same way it was to think about IEDs.” 

    And, he adds, it’s his job and his colleagues’ to make sure that tech so effective it works like “almost magic” is in the hands of the average rifleman. To that end, Lowery told me, Epirus is designing the Leonidas control system to work simply for troops, allowing them to identify a cluster of targets and start zapping with just a click of a button—but only extensive use in the field can prove that out.

    Epirus CEO Andy Lowery sees the Leonidas as providing a last line of defense against UAVs.EPIRUS

    In the not-too-distant future, Lowery says, this could mean setting up along the US-Mexico border. But the grandest vision for Epirus’s tech that he says he’s heard is for a city-scale Leonidas along the lines of a ballistic missile defense radar system called PAVE PAWS, which takes up an entire 105-foot-tall building and can detect distant nuclear missile launches. The US set up four in the 1980s, and Taiwan currently has one up on a mountain south of Taipei. Fill a similar-size building full of microwave emitters, and the beam could reach out “10 or 15 miles,” Lowery told me, with one sitting sentinel over Taipei in the north and another over Kaohsiung in the south of Taiwan.

    Riffing in Greek mythological mode, Lowery said of drones, “I call all these mischief makers. Whether they’re doing drugs or guns across the border or they’re flying over Langleythey’re spying on F-35s, they’re all like Icarus. You remember Icarus, with his wax wings? Flying all around—‘Nobody’s going to touch me, nobody’s going to ever hurt me.’”

    “We built one hell of a wax-wing melter.” 

    Sam Dean is a reporter focusing on business, tech, and defense. He is writing a book about the recent history of Silicon Valley returning to work with the Pentagon for Viking Press and covering the defense tech industry for a number of publications. Previously, he was a business reporter at the Los Angeles Times.

    This piece has been updated to clarify that Alex Miller is a civilian intelligence official. 
    #this #giant #microwave #change #future
    This giant microwave may change the future of war
    Imagine: China deploys hundreds of thousands of autonomous drones in the air, on the sea, and under the water—all armed with explosive warheads or small missiles. These machines descend in a swarm toward military installations on Taiwan and nearby US bases, and over the course of a few hours, a single robotic blitzkrieg overwhelms the US Pacific force before it can even begin to fight back.  Maybe it sounds like a new Michael Bay movie, but it’s the scenario that keeps the chief technology officer of the US Army up at night. “I’m hesitant to say it out loud so I don’t manifest it,” says Alex Miller, a longtime Army intelligence official who became the CTO to the Army’s chief of staff in 2023. Even if World War III doesn’t break out in the South China Sea, every US military installation around the world is vulnerable to the same tactics—as are the militaries of every other country around the world. The proliferation of cheap drones means just about any group with the wherewithal to assemble and launch a swarm could wreak havoc, no expensive jets or massive missile installations required.  While the US has precision missiles that can shoot these drones down, they don’t always succeed: A drone attack killed three US soldiers and injured dozens more at a base in the Jordanian desert last year. And each American missile costs orders of magnitude more than its targets, which limits their supply; countering thousand-dollar drones with missiles that cost hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars per shot can only work for so long, even with a defense budget that could reach a trillion dollars next year. The US armed forces are now hunting for a solution—and they want it fast. Every branch of the service and a host of defense tech startups are testing out new weapons that promise to disable drones en masse. There are drones that slam into other drones like battering rams; drones that shoot out nets to ensnare quadcopter propellers; precision-guided Gatling guns that simply shoot drones out of the sky; electronic approaches, like GPS jammers and direct hacking tools; and lasers that melt holes clear through a target’s side. Then there are the microwaves: high-powered electronic devices that push out kilowatts of power to zap the circuits of a drone as if it were the tinfoil you forgot to take off your leftovers when you heated them up.  That’s where Epirus comes in.  When I went to visit the HQ of this 185-person startup in Torrance, California, earlier this year, I got a behind-the-scenes look at its massive microwave, called Leonidas, which the US Army is already betting on as a cutting-edge anti-drone weapon. The Army awarded Epirus a million contract in early 2023, topped that up with another million last fall, and is currently deploying a handful of the systems for testing with US troops in the Middle East and the Pacific.  Up close, the Leonidas that Epirus built for the Army looks like a two-foot-thick slab of metal the size of a garage door stuck on a swivel mount. Pop the back cover, and you can see that the slab is filled with dozens of individual microwave amplifier units in a grid. Each is about the size of a safe-deposit box and built around a chip made of gallium nitride, a semiconductor that can survive much higher voltages and temperatures than the typical silicon.  Leonidas sits on top of a trailer that a standard-issue Army truck can tow, and when it is powered on, the company’s software tells the grid of amps and antennas to shape the electromagnetic waves they’re blasting out with a phased array, precisely overlapping the microwave signals to mold the energy into a focused beam. Instead of needing to physically point a gun or parabolic dish at each of a thousand incoming drones, the Leonidas can flick between them at the speed of software. The Leonidas contains dozens of microwave amplifier units and can pivot to direct waves at incoming swarms of drones.EPIRUS Of course, this isn’t magic—there are practical limits on how much damage one array can do, and at what range—but the total effect could be described as an electromagnetic pulse emitter, a death ray for electronics, or a force field that could set up a protective barrier around military installations and drop drones the way a bug zapper fizzles a mob of mosquitoes. I walked through the nonclassified sections of the Leonidas factory floor, where a cluster of engineers working on weaponeering—the military term for figuring out exactly how much of a weapon, be it high explosive or microwave beam, is necessary to achieve a desired effect—ran tests in a warren of smaller anechoic rooms. Inside, they shot individual microwave units at a broad range of commercial and military drones, cycling through waveforms and power levels to try to find the signal that could fry each one with maximum efficiency.  On a live video feed from inside one of these foam-padded rooms, I watched a quadcopter drone spin its propellers and then, once the microwave emitter turned on, instantly stop short—first the propeller on the front left and then the rest. A drone hit with a Leonidas beam doesn’t explode—it just falls. Compared with the blast of a missile or the sizzle of a laser, it doesn’t look like much. But it could force enemies to come up with costlier ways of attacking that reduce the advantage of the drone swarm, and it could get around the inherent limitations of purely electronic or strictly physical defense systems. It could save lives. Epirus CEO Andy Lowery, a tall guy with sparkplug energy and a rapid-fire southern Illinois twang, doesn’t shy away from talking big about his product. As he told me during my visit, Leonidas is intended to lead a last stand, like the Spartan from whom the microwave takes its name—in this case, against hordes of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. While the actual range of the Leonidas system is kept secret, Lowery says the Army is looking for a solution that can reliably stop drones within a few kilometers. He told me, “They would like our system to be the owner of that final layer—to get any squeakers, any leakers, anything like that.” Now that they’ve told the world they “invented a force field,” Lowery added, the focus is on manufacturing at scale—before the drone swarms really start to descend or a nation with a major military decides to launch a new war. Before, in other words, Miller’s nightmare scenario becomes reality.  Why zap? Miller remembers well when the danger of small weaponized drones first appeared on his radar. Reports of Islamic State fighters strapping grenades to the bottom of commercial DJI Phantom quadcopters first emerged in late 2016 during the Battle of Mosul. “I went, ‘Oh, this is going to be bad,’ because basically it’s an airborne IED at that point,” he says. He’s tracked the danger as it’s built steadily since then, with advances in machine vision, AI coordination software, and suicide drone tactics only accelerating.  Then the war in Ukraine showed the world that cheap technology has fundamentally changed how warfare happens. We have watched in high-definition video how a cheap, off-the-shelf drone modified to carry a small bomb can be piloted directly into a faraway truck, tank, or group of troops to devastating effect. And larger suicide drones, also known as “loitering munitions,” can be produced for just tens of thousands of dollars and launched in massive salvos to hit soft targets or overwhelm more advanced military defenses through sheer numbers.  As a result, Miller, along with large swaths of the Pentagon and DC policy circles, believes that the current US arsenal for defending against these weapons is just too expensive and the tools in too short supply to truly match the threat. Just look at Yemen, a poor country where the Houthi military group has been under constant attack for the past decade. Armed with this new low-tech arsenal, in the past 18 months the rebel group has been able to bomb cargo ships and effectively disrupt global shipping in the Red Sea—part of an effort to apply pressure on Israel to stop its war in Gaza. The Houthis have also used missiles, suicide drones, and even drone boats to launch powerful attacks on US Navy ships sent to stop them. The most successful defense tech firm selling anti-drone weapons to the US military right now is Anduril, the company started by Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus VR headset, and a crew of cofounders from Oculus and defense data giant Palantir. In just the past few months, the Marines have chosen Anduril for counter-drone contracts that could be worth nearly million over the next decade, and the company has been working with Special Operations Command since 2022 on a counter-drone contract that could be worth nearly a billion dollars over a similar time frame. It’s unclear from the contracts what, exactly, Anduril is selling to each organization, but its weapons include electronic warfare jammers, jet-powered drone bombs, and propeller-driven Anvil drones designed to simply smash into enemy drones. In this arsenal, the cheapest way to stop a swarm of drones is electronic warfare: jamming the GPS or radio signals used to pilot the machines. But the intense drone battles in Ukraine have advanced the art of jamming and counter-jamming close to the point of stalemate. As a result, a new state of the art is emerging: unjammable drones that operate autonomously by using onboard processors to navigate via internal maps and computer vision, or even drones connected with 20-kilometer-long filaments of fiber-optic cable for tethered control. But unjammable doesn’t mean unzappable. Instead of using the scrambling method of a jammer, which employs an antenna to block the drone’s connection to a pilot or remote guidance system, the Leonidas microwave beam hits a drone body broadside. The energy finds its way into something electrical, whether the central flight controller or a tiny wire controlling a flap on a wing, to short-circuit whatever’s available.Tyler Miller, a senior systems engineer on Epirus’s weaponeering team, told me that they never know exactly which part of the target drone is going to go down first, but they’ve reliably seen the microwave signal get in somewhere to overload a circuit. “Based on the geometry and the way the wires are laid out,” he said, one of those wires is going to be the best path in. “Sometimes if we rotate the drone 90 degrees, you have a different motor go down first,” he added. The team has even tried wrapping target drones in copper tape, which would theoretically provide shielding, only to find that the microwave still finds a way in through moving propeller shafts or antennas that need to remain exposed for the drone to fly.  EPIRUS Leonidas also has an edge when it comes to downing a mass of drones at once. Physically hitting a drone out of the sky or lighting it up with a laser can be effective in situations where electronic warfare fails, but anti-drone drones can only take out one at a time, and lasers need to precisely aim and shoot. Epirus’s microwaves can damage everything in a roughly 60-degree arc from the Leonidas emitter simultaneously and keep on zapping and zapping; directed energy systems like this one never run out of ammo. As for cost, each Army Leonidas unit currently runs in the “low eight figures,” Lowery told me. Defense contract pricing can be opaque, but Epirus delivered four units for its million initial contract, giving a back-of-napkin price around million each. For comparison, Stinger missiles from Raytheon, which soldiers shoot at enemy aircraft or drones from a shoulder-mounted launcher, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop, meaning the Leonidas could start costing lessafter it downs the first wave of a swarm. Raytheon’s radar, reversed Epirus is part of a new wave of venture-capital-backed defense companies trying to change the way weapons are created—and the way the Pentagon buys them. The largest defense companies, firms like Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin, typically develop new weapons in response to research grants and cost-plus contracts, in which the US Department of Defense guarantees a certain profit margin to firms building products that match their laundry list of technical specifications. These programs have kept the military supplied with cutting-edge weapons for decades, but the results may be exquisite pieces of military machinery delivered years late and billions of dollars over budget. Rather than building to minutely detailed specs, the new crop of military contractors aim to produce products on a quick time frame to solve a problem and then fine-tune them as they pitch to the military. The model, pioneered by Palantir and SpaceX, has since propelled companies like Anduril, Shield AI, and dozens of other smaller startups into the business of war as venture capital piles tens of billions of dollars into defense. Like Anduril, Epirus has direct Palantir roots; it was cofounded by Joe Lonsdale, who also cofounded Palantir, and John Tenet, Lonsdale’s colleague at the time at his venture fund, 8VC.  While Epirus is doing business in the new mode, its roots are in the old—specifically in Raytheon, a pioneer in the field of microwave technology. Cofounded by MIT professor Vannevar Bush in 1922, it manufactured vacuum tubes, like those found in old radios. But the company became synonymous with electronic defense during World War II, when Bush spun up a lab to develop early microwave radar technology invented by the British into a workable product, and Raytheon then began mass-producing microwave tubes—known as magnetrons—for the US war effort. By the end of the war in 1945, Raytheon was making 80% of the magnetrons powering Allied radar across the world. From padded foam chambers at the Epirus HQ, Leonidas devices can be safely tested on drones.EPIRUS Large tubes remained the best way to emit high-power microwaves for more than half a century, handily outperforming silicon-based solid-state amplifiers. They’re still around—the microwave on your kitchen counter runs on a vacuum tube magnetron. But tubes have downsides: They’re hot, they’re big, and they require upkeep.By the 2000s, new methods of building solid-state amplifiers out of materials like gallium nitride started to mature and were able to handle more power than silicon without melting or shorting out. The US Navy spent hundreds of millions of dollars on cutting-edge microwave contracts, one for a project at Raytheon called Next Generation Jammer—geared specifically toward designing a new way to make high-powered microwaves that work at extremely long distances. Lowery, the Epirus CEO, began his career working on nuclear reactors on Navy aircraft carriers before he became the chief engineer for Next Generation Jammer at Raytheon in 2010. There, he and his team worked on a system that relied on many of the same fundamentals that now power the Leonidas—using the same type of amplifier material and antenna setup to fry the electronics of a small target at much closer range rather than disrupting the radar of a target hundreds of miles away.  The similarity is not a coincidence: Two engineers from Next Generation Jammer helped launch Epirus in 2018. Lowery—who by then was working at the augmented-reality startup RealWear, which makes industrial smart glasses—joined Epirus in 2021 to run product development and was asked to take the top spot as CEO in 2023, as Leonidas became a fully formed machine. Much of the founding team has since departed for other projects, but Raytheon still runs through the company’s collective CV: ex-Raytheon radar engineer Matt Markel started in January as the new CTO, and Epirus’s chief engineer for defense, its VP of engineering, its VP of operations, and a number of employees all have Raytheon roots as well. Markel tells me that the Epirus way of working wouldn’t have flown at one of the big defense contractors: “They never would have tried spinning off the technology into a new application without a contract lined up.” The Epirus engineers saw the use case, raised money to start building Leonidas, and already had prototypes in the works before any military branch started awarding money to work on the project. Waiting for the starting gun On the wall of Lowery’s office are two mementos from testing days at an Army proving ground: a trophy wing from a larger drone, signed by the whole testing team, and a framed photo documenting the Leonidas’s carnage—a stack of dozens of inoperative drones piled up in a heap.  Despite what seems to have been an impressive test show, it’s still impossible from the outside to determine whether Epirus’s tech is ready to fully deliver if the swarms descend.  The Army would not comment specifically on the efficacy of any new weapons in testing or early deployment, including the Leonidas system. A spokesperson for the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, or RCCTO, which is the subsection responsible for contracting with Epirus to date, would only say in a statement that it is “committed to developing and fielding innovative Directed Energy solutions to address evolving threats.”  But various high-ranking officers appear to be giving Epirus a public vote of confidence. The three-star general who runs RCCTO and oversaw the Leonidas testing last summer told Breaking Defense that “the system actually worked very well,” even if there was work to be done on “how the weapon system fits into the larger kill chain.” And when former secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth, then the service’s highest-ranking civilian, gave a parting interview this past January, she mentioned Epirus in all but name, citing “one company” that is “using high-powered microwaves to basically be able to kill swarms of drones.” She called that kind of capability “critical for the Army.”  The Army isn’t the only branch interested in the microwave weapon. On Epirus’s factory floor when I visited, alongside the big beige Leonidases commissioned by the Army, engineers were building a smaller expeditionary version for the Marines, painted green, which it delivered in late April. Videos show that when it put some of its microwave emitters on a dock and tested them out for the Navy last summer, the microwaves left their targets dead in the water—successfully frying the circuits of outboard motors like the ones propelling Houthi drone boats.  Epirus is also currently working on an even smaller version of the Leonidas that can mount on top of the Army’s Stryker combat vehicles, and it’s testing out attaching a single microwave unit to a small airborne drone, which could work as a highly focused zapper to disable cars, data centers, or single enemy drones.  Epirus’s microwave technology is also being tested in devices smaller than the traditional Leonidas. EPIRUS While neither the Army nor the Navy has yet to announce a contract to start buying Epirus’s systems at scale, the company and its investors are actively preparing for the big orders to start rolling in. It raised million in a funding round in early March to get ready to make as many Leonidases as possible in the coming years, adding to the more than million it’s raised since opening its doors in 2018. “If you invent a force field that works,” Lowery boasts, “you really get a lot of attention.” The task for Epirus now, assuming that its main customers pull the trigger and start buying more Leonidases, is ramping up production while advancing the tech in its systems. Then there are the more prosaic problems of staffing, assembly, and testing at scale. For future generations, Lowery told me, the goal is refining the antenna design and integrating higher-powered microwave amplifiers to push the output into the tens of kilowatts, allowing for increased range and efficacy.  While this could be made harder by Trump’s global trade war, Lowery says he’s not worried about their supply chain; while China produces 98% of the world’s gallium, according to the US Geological Survey, and has choked off exports to the US, Epirus’s chip supplier uses recycled gallium from Japan.  The other outside challenge may be that Epirus isn’t the only company building a drone zapper. One of China’s state-owned defense companies has been working on its own anti-drone high-powered microwave weapon called the Hurricane, which it displayed at a major military show in late 2024.  It may be a sign that anti-electronics force fields will become common among the world’s militaries—and if so, the future of war is unlikely to go back to the status quo ante, and it might zag in a different direction yet again. But military planners believe it’s crucial for the US not to be left behind. So if it works as promised, Epirus could very well change the way that war will play out in the coming decade.  While Miller, the Army CTO, can’t speak directly to Epirus or any specific system, he will say that he believes anti-drone measures are going to have to become ubiquitous for US soldiers. “Counter-UASunfortunately is going to be like counter-IED,” he says. “It’s going to be every soldier’s job to think about UAS threats the same way it was to think about IEDs.”  And, he adds, it’s his job and his colleagues’ to make sure that tech so effective it works like “almost magic” is in the hands of the average rifleman. To that end, Lowery told me, Epirus is designing the Leonidas control system to work simply for troops, allowing them to identify a cluster of targets and start zapping with just a click of a button—but only extensive use in the field can prove that out. Epirus CEO Andy Lowery sees the Leonidas as providing a last line of defense against UAVs.EPIRUS In the not-too-distant future, Lowery says, this could mean setting up along the US-Mexico border. But the grandest vision for Epirus’s tech that he says he’s heard is for a city-scale Leonidas along the lines of a ballistic missile defense radar system called PAVE PAWS, which takes up an entire 105-foot-tall building and can detect distant nuclear missile launches. The US set up four in the 1980s, and Taiwan currently has one up on a mountain south of Taipei. Fill a similar-size building full of microwave emitters, and the beam could reach out “10 or 15 miles,” Lowery told me, with one sitting sentinel over Taipei in the north and another over Kaohsiung in the south of Taiwan. Riffing in Greek mythological mode, Lowery said of drones, “I call all these mischief makers. Whether they’re doing drugs or guns across the border or they’re flying over Langleythey’re spying on F-35s, they’re all like Icarus. You remember Icarus, with his wax wings? Flying all around—‘Nobody’s going to touch me, nobody’s going to ever hurt me.’” “We built one hell of a wax-wing melter.”  Sam Dean is a reporter focusing on business, tech, and defense. He is writing a book about the recent history of Silicon Valley returning to work with the Pentagon for Viking Press and covering the defense tech industry for a number of publications. Previously, he was a business reporter at the Los Angeles Times. This piece has been updated to clarify that Alex Miller is a civilian intelligence official.  #this #giant #microwave #change #future
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    This giant microwave may change the future of war
    Imagine: China deploys hundreds of thousands of autonomous drones in the air, on the sea, and under the water—all armed with explosive warheads or small missiles. These machines descend in a swarm toward military installations on Taiwan and nearby US bases, and over the course of a few hours, a single robotic blitzkrieg overwhelms the US Pacific force before it can even begin to fight back.  Maybe it sounds like a new Michael Bay movie, but it’s the scenario that keeps the chief technology officer of the US Army up at night. “I’m hesitant to say it out loud so I don’t manifest it,” says Alex Miller, a longtime Army intelligence official who became the CTO to the Army’s chief of staff in 2023. Even if World War III doesn’t break out in the South China Sea, every US military installation around the world is vulnerable to the same tactics—as are the militaries of every other country around the world. The proliferation of cheap drones means just about any group with the wherewithal to assemble and launch a swarm could wreak havoc, no expensive jets or massive missile installations required.  While the US has precision missiles that can shoot these drones down, they don’t always succeed: A drone attack killed three US soldiers and injured dozens more at a base in the Jordanian desert last year. And each American missile costs orders of magnitude more than its targets, which limits their supply; countering thousand-dollar drones with missiles that cost hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars per shot can only work for so long, even with a defense budget that could reach a trillion dollars next year. The US armed forces are now hunting for a solution—and they want it fast. Every branch of the service and a host of defense tech startups are testing out new weapons that promise to disable drones en masse. There are drones that slam into other drones like battering rams; drones that shoot out nets to ensnare quadcopter propellers; precision-guided Gatling guns that simply shoot drones out of the sky; electronic approaches, like GPS jammers and direct hacking tools; and lasers that melt holes clear through a target’s side. Then there are the microwaves: high-powered electronic devices that push out kilowatts of power to zap the circuits of a drone as if it were the tinfoil you forgot to take off your leftovers when you heated them up.  That’s where Epirus comes in.  When I went to visit the HQ of this 185-person startup in Torrance, California, earlier this year, I got a behind-the-scenes look at its massive microwave, called Leonidas, which the US Army is already betting on as a cutting-edge anti-drone weapon. The Army awarded Epirus a $66 million contract in early 2023, topped that up with another $17 million last fall, and is currently deploying a handful of the systems for testing with US troops in the Middle East and the Pacific. (The Army won’t get into specifics on the location of the weapons in the Middle East but published a report of a live-fire test in the Philippines in early May.)  Up close, the Leonidas that Epirus built for the Army looks like a two-foot-thick slab of metal the size of a garage door stuck on a swivel mount. Pop the back cover, and you can see that the slab is filled with dozens of individual microwave amplifier units in a grid. Each is about the size of a safe-deposit box and built around a chip made of gallium nitride, a semiconductor that can survive much higher voltages and temperatures than the typical silicon.  Leonidas sits on top of a trailer that a standard-issue Army truck can tow, and when it is powered on, the company’s software tells the grid of amps and antennas to shape the electromagnetic waves they’re blasting out with a phased array, precisely overlapping the microwave signals to mold the energy into a focused beam. Instead of needing to physically point a gun or parabolic dish at each of a thousand incoming drones, the Leonidas can flick between them at the speed of software. The Leonidas contains dozens of microwave amplifier units and can pivot to direct waves at incoming swarms of drones.EPIRUS Of course, this isn’t magic—there are practical limits on how much damage one array can do, and at what range—but the total effect could be described as an electromagnetic pulse emitter, a death ray for electronics, or a force field that could set up a protective barrier around military installations and drop drones the way a bug zapper fizzles a mob of mosquitoes. I walked through the nonclassified sections of the Leonidas factory floor, where a cluster of engineers working on weaponeering—the military term for figuring out exactly how much of a weapon, be it high explosive or microwave beam, is necessary to achieve a desired effect—ran tests in a warren of smaller anechoic rooms. Inside, they shot individual microwave units at a broad range of commercial and military drones, cycling through waveforms and power levels to try to find the signal that could fry each one with maximum efficiency.  On a live video feed from inside one of these foam-padded rooms, I watched a quadcopter drone spin its propellers and then, once the microwave emitter turned on, instantly stop short—first the propeller on the front left and then the rest. A drone hit with a Leonidas beam doesn’t explode—it just falls. Compared with the blast of a missile or the sizzle of a laser, it doesn’t look like much. But it could force enemies to come up with costlier ways of attacking that reduce the advantage of the drone swarm, and it could get around the inherent limitations of purely electronic or strictly physical defense systems. It could save lives. Epirus CEO Andy Lowery, a tall guy with sparkplug energy and a rapid-fire southern Illinois twang, doesn’t shy away from talking big about his product. As he told me during my visit, Leonidas is intended to lead a last stand, like the Spartan from whom the microwave takes its name—in this case, against hordes of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. While the actual range of the Leonidas system is kept secret, Lowery says the Army is looking for a solution that can reliably stop drones within a few kilometers. He told me, “They would like our system to be the owner of that final layer—to get any squeakers, any leakers, anything like that.” Now that they’ve told the world they “invented a force field,” Lowery added, the focus is on manufacturing at scale—before the drone swarms really start to descend or a nation with a major military decides to launch a new war. Before, in other words, Miller’s nightmare scenario becomes reality.  Why zap? Miller remembers well when the danger of small weaponized drones first appeared on his radar. Reports of Islamic State fighters strapping grenades to the bottom of commercial DJI Phantom quadcopters first emerged in late 2016 during the Battle of Mosul. “I went, ‘Oh, this is going to be bad,’ because basically it’s an airborne IED at that point,” he says. He’s tracked the danger as it’s built steadily since then, with advances in machine vision, AI coordination software, and suicide drone tactics only accelerating.  Then the war in Ukraine showed the world that cheap technology has fundamentally changed how warfare happens. We have watched in high-definition video how a cheap, off-the-shelf drone modified to carry a small bomb can be piloted directly into a faraway truck, tank, or group of troops to devastating effect. And larger suicide drones, also known as “loitering munitions,” can be produced for just tens of thousands of dollars and launched in massive salvos to hit soft targets or overwhelm more advanced military defenses through sheer numbers.  As a result, Miller, along with large swaths of the Pentagon and DC policy circles, believes that the current US arsenal for defending against these weapons is just too expensive and the tools in too short supply to truly match the threat. Just look at Yemen, a poor country where the Houthi military group has been under constant attack for the past decade. Armed with this new low-tech arsenal, in the past 18 months the rebel group has been able to bomb cargo ships and effectively disrupt global shipping in the Red Sea—part of an effort to apply pressure on Israel to stop its war in Gaza. The Houthis have also used missiles, suicide drones, and even drone boats to launch powerful attacks on US Navy ships sent to stop them. The most successful defense tech firm selling anti-drone weapons to the US military right now is Anduril, the company started by Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus VR headset, and a crew of cofounders from Oculus and defense data giant Palantir. In just the past few months, the Marines have chosen Anduril for counter-drone contracts that could be worth nearly $850 million over the next decade, and the company has been working with Special Operations Command since 2022 on a counter-drone contract that could be worth nearly a billion dollars over a similar time frame. It’s unclear from the contracts what, exactly, Anduril is selling to each organization, but its weapons include electronic warfare jammers, jet-powered drone bombs, and propeller-driven Anvil drones designed to simply smash into enemy drones. In this arsenal, the cheapest way to stop a swarm of drones is electronic warfare: jamming the GPS or radio signals used to pilot the machines. But the intense drone battles in Ukraine have advanced the art of jamming and counter-jamming close to the point of stalemate. As a result, a new state of the art is emerging: unjammable drones that operate autonomously by using onboard processors to navigate via internal maps and computer vision, or even drones connected with 20-kilometer-long filaments of fiber-optic cable for tethered control. But unjammable doesn’t mean unzappable. Instead of using the scrambling method of a jammer, which employs an antenna to block the drone’s connection to a pilot or remote guidance system, the Leonidas microwave beam hits a drone body broadside. The energy finds its way into something electrical, whether the central flight controller or a tiny wire controlling a flap on a wing, to short-circuit whatever’s available. (The company also says that this targeted hit of energy allows birds and other wildlife to continue to move safely.) Tyler Miller, a senior systems engineer on Epirus’s weaponeering team, told me that they never know exactly which part of the target drone is going to go down first, but they’ve reliably seen the microwave signal get in somewhere to overload a circuit. “Based on the geometry and the way the wires are laid out,” he said, one of those wires is going to be the best path in. “Sometimes if we rotate the drone 90 degrees, you have a different motor go down first,” he added. The team has even tried wrapping target drones in copper tape, which would theoretically provide shielding, only to find that the microwave still finds a way in through moving propeller shafts or antennas that need to remain exposed for the drone to fly.  EPIRUS Leonidas also has an edge when it comes to downing a mass of drones at once. Physically hitting a drone out of the sky or lighting it up with a laser can be effective in situations where electronic warfare fails, but anti-drone drones can only take out one at a time, and lasers need to precisely aim and shoot. Epirus’s microwaves can damage everything in a roughly 60-degree arc from the Leonidas emitter simultaneously and keep on zapping and zapping; directed energy systems like this one never run out of ammo. As for cost, each Army Leonidas unit currently runs in the “low eight figures,” Lowery told me. Defense contract pricing can be opaque, but Epirus delivered four units for its $66 million initial contract, giving a back-of-napkin price around $16.5 million each. For comparison, Stinger missiles from Raytheon, which soldiers shoot at enemy aircraft or drones from a shoulder-mounted launcher, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop, meaning the Leonidas could start costing less (and keep shooting) after it downs the first wave of a swarm. Raytheon’s radar, reversed Epirus is part of a new wave of venture-capital-backed defense companies trying to change the way weapons are created—and the way the Pentagon buys them. The largest defense companies, firms like Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin, typically develop new weapons in response to research grants and cost-plus contracts, in which the US Department of Defense guarantees a certain profit margin to firms building products that match their laundry list of technical specifications. These programs have kept the military supplied with cutting-edge weapons for decades, but the results may be exquisite pieces of military machinery delivered years late and billions of dollars over budget. Rather than building to minutely detailed specs, the new crop of military contractors aim to produce products on a quick time frame to solve a problem and then fine-tune them as they pitch to the military. The model, pioneered by Palantir and SpaceX, has since propelled companies like Anduril, Shield AI, and dozens of other smaller startups into the business of war as venture capital piles tens of billions of dollars into defense. Like Anduril, Epirus has direct Palantir roots; it was cofounded by Joe Lonsdale, who also cofounded Palantir, and John Tenet, Lonsdale’s colleague at the time at his venture fund, 8VC. (Tenet, the son of former CIA director George Tenet, may have inspired the company’s name—the elder Tenet’s parents were born in the Epirus region in the northwest of Greece. But the company more often says it’s a reference to the pseudo-mythological Epirus Bow from the 2011 fantasy action movie Immortals, which never runs out of arrows.)  While Epirus is doing business in the new mode, its roots are in the old—specifically in Raytheon, a pioneer in the field of microwave technology. Cofounded by MIT professor Vannevar Bush in 1922, it manufactured vacuum tubes, like those found in old radios. But the company became synonymous with electronic defense during World War II, when Bush spun up a lab to develop early microwave radar technology invented by the British into a workable product, and Raytheon then began mass-producing microwave tubes—known as magnetrons—for the US war effort. By the end of the war in 1945, Raytheon was making 80% of the magnetrons powering Allied radar across the world. From padded foam chambers at the Epirus HQ, Leonidas devices can be safely tested on drones.EPIRUS Large tubes remained the best way to emit high-power microwaves for more than half a century, handily outperforming silicon-based solid-state amplifiers. They’re still around—the microwave on your kitchen counter runs on a vacuum tube magnetron. But tubes have downsides: They’re hot, they’re big, and they require upkeep. (In fact, the other microwave drone zapper currently in the Pentagon pipeline, the Tactical High-power Operational Responder, or THOR, still relies on a physical vacuum tube. It’s reported to be effective at downing drones in tests but takes up a whole shipping container and needs a dish antenna to zap its targets.) By the 2000s, new methods of building solid-state amplifiers out of materials like gallium nitride started to mature and were able to handle more power than silicon without melting or shorting out. The US Navy spent hundreds of millions of dollars on cutting-edge microwave contracts, one for a project at Raytheon called Next Generation Jammer—geared specifically toward designing a new way to make high-powered microwaves that work at extremely long distances. Lowery, the Epirus CEO, began his career working on nuclear reactors on Navy aircraft carriers before he became the chief engineer for Next Generation Jammer at Raytheon in 2010. There, he and his team worked on a system that relied on many of the same fundamentals that now power the Leonidas—using the same type of amplifier material and antenna setup to fry the electronics of a small target at much closer range rather than disrupting the radar of a target hundreds of miles away.  The similarity is not a coincidence: Two engineers from Next Generation Jammer helped launch Epirus in 2018. Lowery—who by then was working at the augmented-reality startup RealWear, which makes industrial smart glasses—joined Epirus in 2021 to run product development and was asked to take the top spot as CEO in 2023, as Leonidas became a fully formed machine. Much of the founding team has since departed for other projects, but Raytheon still runs through the company’s collective CV: ex-Raytheon radar engineer Matt Markel started in January as the new CTO, and Epirus’s chief engineer for defense, its VP of engineering, its VP of operations, and a number of employees all have Raytheon roots as well. Markel tells me that the Epirus way of working wouldn’t have flown at one of the big defense contractors: “They never would have tried spinning off the technology into a new application without a contract lined up.” The Epirus engineers saw the use case, raised money to start building Leonidas, and already had prototypes in the works before any military branch started awarding money to work on the project. Waiting for the starting gun On the wall of Lowery’s office are two mementos from testing days at an Army proving ground: a trophy wing from a larger drone, signed by the whole testing team, and a framed photo documenting the Leonidas’s carnage—a stack of dozens of inoperative drones piled up in a heap.  Despite what seems to have been an impressive test show, it’s still impossible from the outside to determine whether Epirus’s tech is ready to fully deliver if the swarms descend.  The Army would not comment specifically on the efficacy of any new weapons in testing or early deployment, including the Leonidas system. A spokesperson for the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, or RCCTO, which is the subsection responsible for contracting with Epirus to date, would only say in a statement that it is “committed to developing and fielding innovative Directed Energy solutions to address evolving threats.”  But various high-ranking officers appear to be giving Epirus a public vote of confidence. The three-star general who runs RCCTO and oversaw the Leonidas testing last summer told Breaking Defense that “the system actually worked very well,” even if there was work to be done on “how the weapon system fits into the larger kill chain.” And when former secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth, then the service’s highest-ranking civilian, gave a parting interview this past January, she mentioned Epirus in all but name, citing “one company” that is “using high-powered microwaves to basically be able to kill swarms of drones.” She called that kind of capability “critical for the Army.”  The Army isn’t the only branch interested in the microwave weapon. On Epirus’s factory floor when I visited, alongside the big beige Leonidases commissioned by the Army, engineers were building a smaller expeditionary version for the Marines, painted green, which it delivered in late April. Videos show that when it put some of its microwave emitters on a dock and tested them out for the Navy last summer, the microwaves left their targets dead in the water—successfully frying the circuits of outboard motors like the ones propelling Houthi drone boats.  Epirus is also currently working on an even smaller version of the Leonidas that can mount on top of the Army’s Stryker combat vehicles, and it’s testing out attaching a single microwave unit to a small airborne drone, which could work as a highly focused zapper to disable cars, data centers, or single enemy drones.  Epirus’s microwave technology is also being tested in devices smaller than the traditional Leonidas. EPIRUS While neither the Army nor the Navy has yet to announce a contract to start buying Epirus’s systems at scale, the company and its investors are actively preparing for the big orders to start rolling in. It raised $250 million in a funding round in early March to get ready to make as many Leonidases as possible in the coming years, adding to the more than $300 million it’s raised since opening its doors in 2018. “If you invent a force field that works,” Lowery boasts, “you really get a lot of attention.” The task for Epirus now, assuming that its main customers pull the trigger and start buying more Leonidases, is ramping up production while advancing the tech in its systems. Then there are the more prosaic problems of staffing, assembly, and testing at scale. For future generations, Lowery told me, the goal is refining the antenna design and integrating higher-powered microwave amplifiers to push the output into the tens of kilowatts, allowing for increased range and efficacy.  While this could be made harder by Trump’s global trade war, Lowery says he’s not worried about their supply chain; while China produces 98% of the world’s gallium, according to the US Geological Survey, and has choked off exports to the US, Epirus’s chip supplier uses recycled gallium from Japan.  The other outside challenge may be that Epirus isn’t the only company building a drone zapper. One of China’s state-owned defense companies has been working on its own anti-drone high-powered microwave weapon called the Hurricane, which it displayed at a major military show in late 2024.  It may be a sign that anti-electronics force fields will become common among the world’s militaries—and if so, the future of war is unlikely to go back to the status quo ante, and it might zag in a different direction yet again. But military planners believe it’s crucial for the US not to be left behind. So if it works as promised, Epirus could very well change the way that war will play out in the coming decade.  While Miller, the Army CTO, can’t speak directly to Epirus or any specific system, he will say that he believes anti-drone measures are going to have to become ubiquitous for US soldiers. “Counter-UAS [Unmanned Aircraft System] unfortunately is going to be like counter-IED,” he says. “It’s going to be every soldier’s job to think about UAS threats the same way it was to think about IEDs.”  And, he adds, it’s his job and his colleagues’ to make sure that tech so effective it works like “almost magic” is in the hands of the average rifleman. To that end, Lowery told me, Epirus is designing the Leonidas control system to work simply for troops, allowing them to identify a cluster of targets and start zapping with just a click of a button—but only extensive use in the field can prove that out. Epirus CEO Andy Lowery sees the Leonidas as providing a last line of defense against UAVs.EPIRUS In the not-too-distant future, Lowery says, this could mean setting up along the US-Mexico border. But the grandest vision for Epirus’s tech that he says he’s heard is for a city-scale Leonidas along the lines of a ballistic missile defense radar system called PAVE PAWS, which takes up an entire 105-foot-tall building and can detect distant nuclear missile launches. The US set up four in the 1980s, and Taiwan currently has one up on a mountain south of Taipei. Fill a similar-size building full of microwave emitters, and the beam could reach out “10 or 15 miles,” Lowery told me, with one sitting sentinel over Taipei in the north and another over Kaohsiung in the south of Taiwan. Riffing in Greek mythological mode, Lowery said of drones, “I call all these mischief makers. Whether they’re doing drugs or guns across the border or they’re flying over Langley [or] they’re spying on F-35s, they’re all like Icarus. You remember Icarus, with his wax wings? Flying all around—‘Nobody’s going to touch me, nobody’s going to ever hurt me.’” “We built one hell of a wax-wing melter.”  Sam Dean is a reporter focusing on business, tech, and defense. He is writing a book about the recent history of Silicon Valley returning to work with the Pentagon for Viking Press and covering the defense tech industry for a number of publications. Previously, he was a business reporter at the Los Angeles Times. This piece has been updated to clarify that Alex Miller is a civilian intelligence official. 
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  • Apple prepares to cry wolf over gaming again | Opinion

    Apple prepares to cry wolf over gaming again | Opinion
    Gaming on Apple platforms is set to be a WWDC focus once again – but with the company increasingly pushed to open up its app ecosystem, maybe this time the wolf is real

    Feature

    by Rob Fahey
    Contributing Editor

    Published on May 30, 2025

    Apple's developer-focused annual WWDC event kicks off in a little over a week, which means that it's time once again for one of the industry's most well-established games of farce; in which Apple, the GM, tries to convince us all that this time, no this time, it's really truly serious about gaming, and we, the players, all try to keep our faces straight and our eyes unrolled.
    It's a ritual that often skips a year or two but always comes back with a vengeance – Apple cites some impressive numbers about hours or dollars spent on games on their platforms, wheels out a famous developer to wax lyrical about the power of the hardware and demonstrate a build of their game, and announces some new iOS features related to gaming.
    With love-bombing of the games industry complete for another few years, they promptly delete us from their contacts and pretend not to know us when they walk past us in the supermarket.
    The reason we all still pay attention to this merry-go-round, though, is because just as it's hard to take seriously any of Apple's claims of yet another Damascene conversion to gaming religion, it's also impossible not to take seriously the importance of the platforms the company controls.
    There are 2.35 billion active Apple computing devices in the world right now. The company doesn't break down those stats into Macs, iPhones, and iPads, but we know there are well over a billion iPhones in those numbers. Most of those devices are perfectly good gaming devices, at least in terms of what their hardware is capable of.
    The existing mobile gaming market – while a large market by any measure – is still only scratching at the surface of the potential growth for the gaming market that could be reached through that installed base. Having one of Apple's boy-who-cried-wolf moments actually turn into a genuine commitment to gaming would be a major step towards realising that – which makes them very hard to ignore, even if we're pretty sure we know all the steps to this dance by now.
    So what's this year's love-bombing going to consist of? We don't know which development luminary they'll bring on stage, but it does seem pretty certain that there's a shiny new gaming-centric app that's going to be built into the next release of iOS, replacing the rather clunky Game Centre with a more streamlined game launcherand providing various editorial and social features.

    Image credit: Apple

    It's not clear whether this is just a new app, or if it actually represents an overhaul of the services layer of Apple's gaming offerings – for example, whether it's going to have things like chat, matchmaking, teams and so on implemented in a way that centres on the app but also available in games via an overlay or direct integration through an API.
    That sounds fine and dandy, though of course the Game Centre app this will replace is a reminder of one of the previous iterations of the "Apple is serious about games this time" dance.
    What's perhaps more interesting, though we don't yet know if it'll get an on-stage mention at WWDC, is that this is coming just as Apple wraps up the acquisition of its first ever game studio – RAC7, the studio best known for creating Sneaky Sasquatch, which has been a very steadily performing hit on the Apple Arcade service since its launch.
    Now, there's a very obvious caveat here before we start speculating about Apple trying to build out a game development studio system: RAC7 is a micro-studio consisting of just two people, so while it's apparently going to continue operating more or less autonomously as a wholly-owned studio, there's still a bit of a whiff of an acquihire about the situation.
    It makes sense for Apple to bring a studio that's been pretty solidly committed to Arcade, and successful on the platform, into the fold in this way even if it's only so that they can be used as consultants and testers for upcoming changes to the service offering.
    The core concept of the Apple Arcade offering – a ton of well-vetted games that are guaranteed not to be packed with microtransactions and ads – remains very compelling, especially for parents
    While that may be a bit of a letdown to people who got excited at the prospect that Apple would follow its efforts at building up movie and TV production studios with a similar move into gaming, this acquisition does still send a cautiously positive signal.
    Apple acquires small companies all the time, but it's never done so with a games studio before, so the willingness to do this suggests that it is tacitly aware of a lack of internal know-how and skills related to this market segment, and moreover, that it remains quite committed to Apple Arcade.

    That second part is important, because honestly, it's quite easy to forget that Apple Arcade exists sometimes. It's a bit of a cypher to a lot of the industry, I think; it was launched with much fanfare but it now essentially just sits there occupying zero mindshare for most of the gaming sector and its consumers.
    However, there have been some hints that it's actually quite successful commercially – a tricky thing to measure given that its primary commercial target is driving subscription numbers and retention metrics for the all-encompassing Apple One service, but at the very least there's never been a suggestion from Apple that it's unhappy with how it's performing in that regard.
    The core concept of the offering – a ton of well-vetted games that are guaranteed not to be packed with microtransactions and ads – remains very compelling, especially for parents, and it seems reasonable to posit that it's quietly doing a very solid amount of business off in demographic sectors that rarely engage with the traditional games industry.
    This, to some extent, might explain why Apple has ghosted the industry after its most recent bouts of love-bombing; Apple Arcade and the infrastructure that supports it isn't terribly meaningful to the traditional games industry, but actually accomplishes quite a lot of Apple's own internal goals with regard to gaming.
    That leads us to another crucially important piece of context to bear in mind when watching what the company unveils at WWDC this year – that this may be a series of strategic moves that are less about enticing the games industry to focus on Apple platforms, and more about preparing the ground for the possibility of major parts of the games business simply turning up on Apple's turf unannounced and uninvited.
    That spectre has been raised by various different legislative and legal moves in major markets over the past few years, all of which seem to be pointing in a similar direction – that Apple is going to be forced to open up its platform to third-party app stores, or at the very least streaming apps. The company is still fighting its corner in the courts in a lot of places, but I suspect it knows that the clock is ticking, especially in some of its most lucrative global markets.
    While the commercial threat posed by actual app stores is probably minimal, the threat from game storefronts is very real.
    Epic, Steam, and Xbox are all potentially going to have functional storefronts on iOS in one form or another in the coming years – which means an end to Apple's era of taking for granted that games will just keep churning out giant stacks of App Store cash despite being largely held at arm's length by the company.
    Rethinking its gaming app software and buying a small studio are far from sufficient to win a war on this new front if it opens up – but if they indicate some actual momentum building up, they might not be a bad start.
    #apple #prepares #cry #wolf #over
    Apple prepares to cry wolf over gaming again | Opinion
    Apple prepares to cry wolf over gaming again | Opinion Gaming on Apple platforms is set to be a WWDC focus once again – but with the company increasingly pushed to open up its app ecosystem, maybe this time the wolf is real Feature by Rob Fahey Contributing Editor Published on May 30, 2025 Apple's developer-focused annual WWDC event kicks off in a little over a week, which means that it's time once again for one of the industry's most well-established games of farce; in which Apple, the GM, tries to convince us all that this time, no this time, it's really truly serious about gaming, and we, the players, all try to keep our faces straight and our eyes unrolled. It's a ritual that often skips a year or two but always comes back with a vengeance – Apple cites some impressive numbers about hours or dollars spent on games on their platforms, wheels out a famous developer to wax lyrical about the power of the hardware and demonstrate a build of their game, and announces some new iOS features related to gaming. With love-bombing of the games industry complete for another few years, they promptly delete us from their contacts and pretend not to know us when they walk past us in the supermarket. The reason we all still pay attention to this merry-go-round, though, is because just as it's hard to take seriously any of Apple's claims of yet another Damascene conversion to gaming religion, it's also impossible not to take seriously the importance of the platforms the company controls. There are 2.35 billion active Apple computing devices in the world right now. The company doesn't break down those stats into Macs, iPhones, and iPads, but we know there are well over a billion iPhones in those numbers. Most of those devices are perfectly good gaming devices, at least in terms of what their hardware is capable of. The existing mobile gaming market – while a large market by any measure – is still only scratching at the surface of the potential growth for the gaming market that could be reached through that installed base. Having one of Apple's boy-who-cried-wolf moments actually turn into a genuine commitment to gaming would be a major step towards realising that – which makes them very hard to ignore, even if we're pretty sure we know all the steps to this dance by now. So what's this year's love-bombing going to consist of? We don't know which development luminary they'll bring on stage, but it does seem pretty certain that there's a shiny new gaming-centric app that's going to be built into the next release of iOS, replacing the rather clunky Game Centre with a more streamlined game launcherand providing various editorial and social features. Image credit: Apple It's not clear whether this is just a new app, or if it actually represents an overhaul of the services layer of Apple's gaming offerings – for example, whether it's going to have things like chat, matchmaking, teams and so on implemented in a way that centres on the app but also available in games via an overlay or direct integration through an API. That sounds fine and dandy, though of course the Game Centre app this will replace is a reminder of one of the previous iterations of the "Apple is serious about games this time" dance. What's perhaps more interesting, though we don't yet know if it'll get an on-stage mention at WWDC, is that this is coming just as Apple wraps up the acquisition of its first ever game studio – RAC7, the studio best known for creating Sneaky Sasquatch, which has been a very steadily performing hit on the Apple Arcade service since its launch. Now, there's a very obvious caveat here before we start speculating about Apple trying to build out a game development studio system: RAC7 is a micro-studio consisting of just two people, so while it's apparently going to continue operating more or less autonomously as a wholly-owned studio, there's still a bit of a whiff of an acquihire about the situation. It makes sense for Apple to bring a studio that's been pretty solidly committed to Arcade, and successful on the platform, into the fold in this way even if it's only so that they can be used as consultants and testers for upcoming changes to the service offering. The core concept of the Apple Arcade offering – a ton of well-vetted games that are guaranteed not to be packed with microtransactions and ads – remains very compelling, especially for parents While that may be a bit of a letdown to people who got excited at the prospect that Apple would follow its efforts at building up movie and TV production studios with a similar move into gaming, this acquisition does still send a cautiously positive signal. Apple acquires small companies all the time, but it's never done so with a games studio before, so the willingness to do this suggests that it is tacitly aware of a lack of internal know-how and skills related to this market segment, and moreover, that it remains quite committed to Apple Arcade. That second part is important, because honestly, it's quite easy to forget that Apple Arcade exists sometimes. It's a bit of a cypher to a lot of the industry, I think; it was launched with much fanfare but it now essentially just sits there occupying zero mindshare for most of the gaming sector and its consumers. However, there have been some hints that it's actually quite successful commercially – a tricky thing to measure given that its primary commercial target is driving subscription numbers and retention metrics for the all-encompassing Apple One service, but at the very least there's never been a suggestion from Apple that it's unhappy with how it's performing in that regard. The core concept of the offering – a ton of well-vetted games that are guaranteed not to be packed with microtransactions and ads – remains very compelling, especially for parents, and it seems reasonable to posit that it's quietly doing a very solid amount of business off in demographic sectors that rarely engage with the traditional games industry. This, to some extent, might explain why Apple has ghosted the industry after its most recent bouts of love-bombing; Apple Arcade and the infrastructure that supports it isn't terribly meaningful to the traditional games industry, but actually accomplishes quite a lot of Apple's own internal goals with regard to gaming. That leads us to another crucially important piece of context to bear in mind when watching what the company unveils at WWDC this year – that this may be a series of strategic moves that are less about enticing the games industry to focus on Apple platforms, and more about preparing the ground for the possibility of major parts of the games business simply turning up on Apple's turf unannounced and uninvited. That spectre has been raised by various different legislative and legal moves in major markets over the past few years, all of which seem to be pointing in a similar direction – that Apple is going to be forced to open up its platform to third-party app stores, or at the very least streaming apps. The company is still fighting its corner in the courts in a lot of places, but I suspect it knows that the clock is ticking, especially in some of its most lucrative global markets. While the commercial threat posed by actual app stores is probably minimal, the threat from game storefronts is very real. Epic, Steam, and Xbox are all potentially going to have functional storefronts on iOS in one form or another in the coming years – which means an end to Apple's era of taking for granted that games will just keep churning out giant stacks of App Store cash despite being largely held at arm's length by the company. Rethinking its gaming app software and buying a small studio are far from sufficient to win a war on this new front if it opens up – but if they indicate some actual momentum building up, they might not be a bad start. #apple #prepares #cry #wolf #over
    WWW.GAMESINDUSTRY.BIZ
    Apple prepares to cry wolf over gaming again | Opinion
    Apple prepares to cry wolf over gaming again | Opinion Gaming on Apple platforms is set to be a WWDC focus once again – but with the company increasingly pushed to open up its app ecosystem, maybe this time the wolf is real Feature by Rob Fahey Contributing Editor Published on May 30, 2025 Apple's developer-focused annual WWDC event kicks off in a little over a week, which means that it's time once again for one of the industry's most well-established games of farce; in which Apple, the GM, tries to convince us all that this time, no this time, it's really truly serious about gaming, and we, the players, all try to keep our faces straight and our eyes unrolled. It's a ritual that often skips a year or two but always comes back with a vengeance – Apple cites some impressive numbers about hours or dollars spent on games on their platforms, wheels out a famous developer to wax lyrical about the power of the hardware and demonstrate a build of their game, and announces some new iOS features related to gaming. With love-bombing of the games industry complete for another few years, they promptly delete us from their contacts and pretend not to know us when they walk past us in the supermarket. The reason we all still pay attention to this merry-go-round, though, is because just as it's hard to take seriously any of Apple's claims of yet another Damascene conversion to gaming religion, it's also impossible not to take seriously the importance of the platforms the company controls. There are 2.35 billion active Apple computing devices in the world right now. The company doesn't break down those stats into Macs, iPhones, and iPads, but we know there are well over a billion iPhones in those numbers. Most of those devices are perfectly good gaming devices, at least in terms of what their hardware is capable of. The existing mobile gaming market – while a large market by any measure – is still only scratching at the surface of the potential growth for the gaming market that could be reached through that installed base. Having one of Apple's boy-who-cried-wolf moments actually turn into a genuine commitment to gaming would be a major step towards realising that – which makes them very hard to ignore, even if we're pretty sure we know all the steps to this dance by now. So what's this year's love-bombing going to consist of? We don't know which development luminary they'll bring on stage, but it does seem pretty certain that there's a shiny new gaming-centric app that's going to be built into the next release of iOS, replacing the rather clunky Game Centre with a more streamlined game launcher (which may encompass games bought on other stores on macOS, a bit like how the Apple TV app shows the next shows in your watchlists on Netflix and other streaming services) and providing various editorial and social features. Image credit: Apple It's not clear whether this is just a new app, or if it actually represents an overhaul of the services layer of Apple's gaming offerings – for example, whether it's going to have things like chat, matchmaking, teams and so on implemented in a way that centres on the app but also available in games via an overlay or direct integration through an API. That sounds fine and dandy, though of course the Game Centre app this will replace is a reminder of one of the previous iterations of the "Apple is serious about games this time" dance. What's perhaps more interesting, though we don't yet know if it'll get an on-stage mention at WWDC, is that this is coming just as Apple wraps up the acquisition of its first ever game studio – RAC7, the studio best known for creating Sneaky Sasquatch, which has been a very steadily performing hit on the Apple Arcade service since its launch. Now, there's a very obvious caveat here before we start speculating about Apple trying to build out a game development studio system: RAC7 is a micro-studio consisting of just two people, so while it's apparently going to continue operating more or less autonomously as a wholly-owned studio, there's still a bit of a whiff of an acquihire about the situation. It makes sense for Apple to bring a studio that's been pretty solidly committed to Arcade, and successful on the platform, into the fold in this way even if it's only so that they can be used as consultants and testers for upcoming changes to the service offering. The core concept of the Apple Arcade offering – a ton of well-vetted games that are guaranteed not to be packed with microtransactions and ads – remains very compelling, especially for parents While that may be a bit of a letdown to people who got excited at the prospect that Apple would follow its efforts at building up movie and TV production studios with a similar move into gaming, this acquisition does still send a cautiously positive signal. Apple acquires small companies all the time, but it's never done so with a games studio before, so the willingness to do this suggests that it is tacitly aware of a lack of internal know-how and skills related to this market segment, and moreover, that it remains quite committed to Apple Arcade. That second part is important, because honestly, it's quite easy to forget that Apple Arcade exists sometimes. It's a bit of a cypher to a lot of the industry, I think; it was launched with much fanfare but it now essentially just sits there occupying zero mindshare for most of the gaming sector and its consumers. However, there have been some hints that it's actually quite successful commercially – a tricky thing to measure given that its primary commercial target is driving subscription numbers and retention metrics for the all-encompassing Apple One service, but at the very least there's never been a suggestion from Apple that it's unhappy with how it's performing in that regard. The core concept of the offering – a ton of well-vetted games that are guaranteed not to be packed with microtransactions and ads – remains very compelling, especially for parents, and it seems reasonable to posit that it's quietly doing a very solid amount of business off in demographic sectors that rarely engage with the traditional games industry. This, to some extent, might explain why Apple has ghosted the industry after its most recent bouts of love-bombing; Apple Arcade and the infrastructure that supports it isn't terribly meaningful to the traditional games industry, but actually accomplishes quite a lot of Apple's own internal goals with regard to gaming. That leads us to another crucially important piece of context to bear in mind when watching what the company unveils at WWDC this year – that this may be a series of strategic moves that are less about enticing the games industry to focus on Apple platforms, and more about preparing the ground for the possibility of major parts of the games business simply turning up on Apple's turf unannounced and uninvited. That spectre has been raised by various different legislative and legal moves in major markets over the past few years, all of which seem to be pointing in a similar direction – that Apple is going to be forced to open up its platform to third-party app stores, or at the very least streaming apps. The company is still fighting its corner in the courts in a lot of places, but I suspect it knows that the clock is ticking, especially in some of its most lucrative global markets. While the commercial threat posed by actual app stores is probably minimal (most people just aren't going to install a whole other app management ecosystem when the path of least resistance works fine), the threat from game storefronts is very real. Epic, Steam, and Xbox are all potentially going to have functional storefronts on iOS in one form or another in the coming years – which means an end to Apple's era of taking for granted that games will just keep churning out giant stacks of App Store cash despite being largely held at arm's length by the company. Rethinking its gaming app software and buying a small studio are far from sufficient to win a war on this new front if it opens up – but if they indicate some actual momentum building up, they might not be a bad start.
    0 Commenti 0 condivisioni
  • Apple’s new ‘Games’ app: Three features coming to your iPhone later this year

    Last fall 9to5Mac exclusively reported that Apple had a new, dedicated ‘Games’ app in the works for iPhone and more. Then this week, Bloomberg corroborated that report and outlined the timing: the new ‘Games’ app is coming this year in iOS 26 and more. Here are three features to expect.

    #1: Hub for accessing all your games

    One tentpole feature of the Games app is that it will serve as a launcher into all of your games.
    Similar to how Apple’s TV app aggregates movies and TV shows in one place, so the Games app will be a one-stop hub for all things gaming.
    So whether you’ve downloaded an app from the App Store, Apple Arcade, or even outside the App Store on your Mac, you’ll be able to open the Games app to find every title and launch directly into them.
    #2: Editorial content

    Similar to the App Store, the new Games app will feature editorial content from Apple’s team.
    The types of content will include:

    newly launched titles
    upcoming game releases
    in-game event promotions
    featured collections and highlighted games

    It sounds very much like the same types of content found in the Games and Arcade tabs of the App Store app will find their way into the new Games app.
    Could this mean games are removed entirely from the App Store app? I doubt it. More likely, Apple will find a way to repackage its editorial content in a way that feels unique inside the Games app.

    Game Center has long existed on Apple’s platforms as a way to participate in leaderboards, track in-game achievements, and see what your friends are up to.
    Back in Game Center’s early days, it existed as a dedicated app on the iPhone. Then starting with iOS 10, the features became integrated systemwide and the standalone app disappeared.
    But with this new Games app, Apple will integrate the existing Game Center features and add even more functionality.
    Gurman says the new app will “centralize in-game achievements, leaderboards, communications and other activity.” We don’t have a lot of details yet, but I’d expect a more feature-rich offering than what Game Center currently provides.
    Apple’s Games app: release timing and platform support
    Apple reportedly plans to pre-install its new Games app across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV 4K as part of its upcoming software releases. There’s been no mention of a visionOS version, but that might happen too.
    So when iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, and tvOS 26 all launch this fall, they’ll provide instant access to the new app.
    Are you interested in using this new Games app? Let us know in the comments.
    Best iPhone accessories

    Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed. 

    FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel
    #apples #new #games #app #three
    Apple’s new ‘Games’ app: Three features coming to your iPhone later this year
    Last fall 9to5Mac exclusively reported that Apple had a new, dedicated ‘Games’ app in the works for iPhone and more. Then this week, Bloomberg corroborated that report and outlined the timing: the new ‘Games’ app is coming this year in iOS 26 and more. Here are three features to expect. #1: Hub for accessing all your games One tentpole feature of the Games app is that it will serve as a launcher into all of your games. Similar to how Apple’s TV app aggregates movies and TV shows in one place, so the Games app will be a one-stop hub for all things gaming. So whether you’ve downloaded an app from the App Store, Apple Arcade, or even outside the App Store on your Mac, you’ll be able to open the Games app to find every title and launch directly into them. #2: Editorial content Similar to the App Store, the new Games app will feature editorial content from Apple’s team. The types of content will include: newly launched titles upcoming game releases in-game event promotions featured collections and highlighted games It sounds very much like the same types of content found in the Games and Arcade tabs of the App Store app will find their way into the new Games app. Could this mean games are removed entirely from the App Store app? I doubt it. More likely, Apple will find a way to repackage its editorial content in a way that feels unique inside the Games app. Game Center has long existed on Apple’s platforms as a way to participate in leaderboards, track in-game achievements, and see what your friends are up to. Back in Game Center’s early days, it existed as a dedicated app on the iPhone. Then starting with iOS 10, the features became integrated systemwide and the standalone app disappeared. But with this new Games app, Apple will integrate the existing Game Center features and add even more functionality. Gurman says the new app will “centralize in-game achievements, leaderboards, communications and other activity.” We don’t have a lot of details yet, but I’d expect a more feature-rich offering than what Game Center currently provides. Apple’s Games app: release timing and platform support Apple reportedly plans to pre-install its new Games app across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV 4K as part of its upcoming software releases. There’s been no mention of a visionOS version, but that might happen too. So when iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, and tvOS 26 all launch this fall, they’ll provide instant access to the new app. Are you interested in using this new Games app? Let us know in the comments. Best iPhone accessories Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed.  FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel #apples #new #games #app #three
    9TO5MAC.COM
    Apple’s new ‘Games’ app: Three features coming to your iPhone later this year
    Last fall 9to5Mac exclusively reported that Apple had a new, dedicated ‘Games’ app in the works for iPhone and more. Then this week, Bloomberg corroborated that report and outlined the timing: the new ‘Games’ app is coming this year in iOS 26 and more. Here are three features to expect. #1: Hub for accessing all your games One tentpole feature of the Games app is that it will serve as a launcher into all of your games. Similar to how Apple’s TV app aggregates movies and TV shows in one place, so the Games app will be a one-stop hub for all things gaming. So whether you’ve downloaded an app from the App Store, Apple Arcade, or even outside the App Store on your Mac, you’ll be able to open the Games app to find every title and launch directly into them. #2: Editorial content Similar to the App Store, the new Games app will feature editorial content from Apple’s team. The types of content will include: newly launched titles upcoming game releases in-game event promotions featured collections and highlighted games It sounds very much like the same types of content found in the Games and Arcade tabs of the App Store app will find their way into the new Games app. Could this mean games are removed entirely from the App Store app? I doubt it. More likely, Apple will find a way to repackage its editorial content in a way that feels unique inside the Games app. Game Center has long existed on Apple’s platforms as a way to participate in leaderboards, track in-game achievements, and see what your friends are up to. Back in Game Center’s early days, it existed as a dedicated app on the iPhone. Then starting with iOS 10, the features became integrated systemwide and the standalone app disappeared. But with this new Games app, Apple will integrate the existing Game Center features and add even more functionality. Gurman says the new app will “centralize in-game achievements, leaderboards, communications and other activity.” We don’t have a lot of details yet, but I’d expect a more feature-rich offering than what Game Center currently provides. Apple’s Games app: release timing and platform support Apple reportedly plans to pre-install its new Games app across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV 4K as part of its upcoming software releases. There’s been no mention of a visionOS version, but that might happen too. So when iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, and tvOS 26 all launch this fall, they’ll provide instant access to the new app. Are you interested in using this new Games app? Let us know in the comments. Best iPhone accessories Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed.  FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel
    0 Commenti 0 condivisioni
  • Screw the Windows Search Bar, and Use Command Palette Instead

    Mac users are spoiled when it comes to searching their computers. Macs have Spotlight search built-in, which they can use to open apps, search for files, perform calculations, and search the web. Windows has the Search Bar, but when you compare what they can do, it's not exactly the same. Now, though, there's a new tool called Command Palette, and it's a keyboard launcher designed specifically for developers and power users alike. It replaces a similar feature called PowerToys Run, and offers way more features, including the ability to run commands, search the web, search for files, and add custom bookmarks and global keyboard shortcuts.How to install and enable Command PaletteCommand Palette is part of PowerToys, which is a suite of powerful apps and utilities created by Microsoft itself. These are open source and are updated much faster than any built-in Windows feature. You can download and install PowerToys from the GitHub page, the Microsoft Store, or using Windows Package Manager.Once PowerToys is installed, open the app and find the Command Palette option from the sidebar. If you don't see the app window, right-click the PowerToys utility in the Windows taskbar and click Settings.

    Credit: Khamosh Pathak

    From the Command Palette screen, make sure the extension is enabled. Here, you'll see the default keyboard shortcut for Command Palette, which is Windows + Alt + Space, but you are free to change it to anything you want.Customizing the Command Palette shortcut and other settingsFirst, open Command Palette using the keyboard shortcut, and then click the Settings button in the bottom-right corner. From here, you can use the Activation key option to remap the keyboard shortcut to something simpler, like Alt + Space.

    Credit: Khamosh Pathak

    While you're here, you can also customize the behavior of Command Palette. The features I find most useful is the ability to use Backspace to go back, but your mileage may vary.Now, let's see everything Command Palette can do.System settings and file search

    Credit: Khamosh Pathak

    Open the Command Palette and start typing. Everything you'd want from a basic keyboard launcher is here. You can use Command Palette to open apps, and to search for files and folders.You can start searching for apps directly. But when it comes to files and folders, it's better to first choose the File search option. Just type "file", choose the option, and then start searching. Similarly, if you use the "=" key, you'll enter calculator mode.Switch between open windows

    Credit: Khamosh Pathak

    Command Palette has a built-in window switcher, and it can show all windows across different desktops and monitors. Open the Command Palette and type the less-than symboland you'll see a list of all open windows and apps. You can scroll or search through this, or you can just enter the name of a specific app or window to highlight it, then press Enter to quickly switch to it.Use Bookmarks to open any folder or website

    Credit: Khamosh Pathak

    Bookmarks might be the best feature in Command Palette. The file search is definitely useful, but most often, you find yourself opening the same folders and files over and over again throughout the day. For me, it's the Screenshots folder and the Downloads folder. Now, I can use Command Palette to make these easier to open.Namely, I can create a bookmark that opens the Downloads folder with just a couple of letters, or using a global keyboard shortcut. This works for any Folder or File path, and even a website URL.First, navigate to the folder you want to assign a shortcut to, right-click on the folder at the top, and choose Copy Address to copy the file path. In Command Palette, use the Add Bookmark option. Here, paste in the file path and give it a name.

    Credit: Khamosh Pathak

    Now, you can give it a unique alias and a global shortcut. Go to Command Palette Settings, and from the sidebar, choose Extensions > Bookmarks. You'll see your newly created bookmark here.

    Credit: Khamosh Pathak

    Click on it, and you can now record a unique global hotkey, or give it an alias that makes it faster to find in Command Palette.Search the web

    Credit: Khamosh Pathak

    Command Palette has a quick way to search the web that opens directly in your default browser. Enter "??" and then type out your query. Press Enter, and that's it.Run any Terminal command

    Credit: Khamosh Pathak

    If you use the greater-than signbefore you start typing in Command Palette, you'll enter Terminal mode. From here, you can enter any command, and it will open in the Terminal app, where it will execute the command for you.Install apps using WinGetWe've already talked about WinGet, the hidden package manager inside Windows that lets you install any package or an app using a single command. Well, now you don't even need to open Terminal for this. Once you have WinGet set up, you can simply enter the "winget" command in Command Palette, followed by the package you want to install. Command Palette will search for and start installing the package for you.Use extensions to add even more featuresLastly, you can use third-party extensions to add even more functionality to Command Palette. As the feature is new, the collection is quite limited, but here's hoping that developers add new extensions in the future. To see your extensions, open the Command Palette and search for Extensions. You can find extensions on WinGet, or on the Microsoft Store.
    #screw #windows #search #bar #use
    Screw the Windows Search Bar, and Use Command Palette Instead
    Mac users are spoiled when it comes to searching their computers. Macs have Spotlight search built-in, which they can use to open apps, search for files, perform calculations, and search the web. Windows has the Search Bar, but when you compare what they can do, it's not exactly the same. Now, though, there's a new tool called Command Palette, and it's a keyboard launcher designed specifically for developers and power users alike. It replaces a similar feature called PowerToys Run, and offers way more features, including the ability to run commands, search the web, search for files, and add custom bookmarks and global keyboard shortcuts.How to install and enable Command PaletteCommand Palette is part of PowerToys, which is a suite of powerful apps and utilities created by Microsoft itself. These are open source and are updated much faster than any built-in Windows feature. You can download and install PowerToys from the GitHub page, the Microsoft Store, or using Windows Package Manager.Once PowerToys is installed, open the app and find the Command Palette option from the sidebar. If you don't see the app window, right-click the PowerToys utility in the Windows taskbar and click Settings. Credit: Khamosh Pathak From the Command Palette screen, make sure the extension is enabled. Here, you'll see the default keyboard shortcut for Command Palette, which is Windows + Alt + Space, but you are free to change it to anything you want.Customizing the Command Palette shortcut and other settingsFirst, open Command Palette using the keyboard shortcut, and then click the Settings button in the bottom-right corner. From here, you can use the Activation key option to remap the keyboard shortcut to something simpler, like Alt + Space. Credit: Khamosh Pathak While you're here, you can also customize the behavior of Command Palette. The features I find most useful is the ability to use Backspace to go back, but your mileage may vary.Now, let's see everything Command Palette can do.System settings and file search Credit: Khamosh Pathak Open the Command Palette and start typing. Everything you'd want from a basic keyboard launcher is here. You can use Command Palette to open apps, and to search for files and folders.You can start searching for apps directly. But when it comes to files and folders, it's better to first choose the File search option. Just type "file", choose the option, and then start searching. Similarly, if you use the "=" key, you'll enter calculator mode.Switch between open windows Credit: Khamosh Pathak Command Palette has a built-in window switcher, and it can show all windows across different desktops and monitors. Open the Command Palette and type the less-than symboland you'll see a list of all open windows and apps. You can scroll or search through this, or you can just enter the name of a specific app or window to highlight it, then press Enter to quickly switch to it.Use Bookmarks to open any folder or website Credit: Khamosh Pathak Bookmarks might be the best feature in Command Palette. The file search is definitely useful, but most often, you find yourself opening the same folders and files over and over again throughout the day. For me, it's the Screenshots folder and the Downloads folder. Now, I can use Command Palette to make these easier to open.Namely, I can create a bookmark that opens the Downloads folder with just a couple of letters, or using a global keyboard shortcut. This works for any Folder or File path, and even a website URL.First, navigate to the folder you want to assign a shortcut to, right-click on the folder at the top, and choose Copy Address to copy the file path. In Command Palette, use the Add Bookmark option. Here, paste in the file path and give it a name. Credit: Khamosh Pathak Now, you can give it a unique alias and a global shortcut. Go to Command Palette Settings, and from the sidebar, choose Extensions > Bookmarks. You'll see your newly created bookmark here. Credit: Khamosh Pathak Click on it, and you can now record a unique global hotkey, or give it an alias that makes it faster to find in Command Palette.Search the web Credit: Khamosh Pathak Command Palette has a quick way to search the web that opens directly in your default browser. Enter "??" and then type out your query. Press Enter, and that's it.Run any Terminal command Credit: Khamosh Pathak If you use the greater-than signbefore you start typing in Command Palette, you'll enter Terminal mode. From here, you can enter any command, and it will open in the Terminal app, where it will execute the command for you.Install apps using WinGetWe've already talked about WinGet, the hidden package manager inside Windows that lets you install any package or an app using a single command. Well, now you don't even need to open Terminal for this. Once you have WinGet set up, you can simply enter the "winget" command in Command Palette, followed by the package you want to install. Command Palette will search for and start installing the package for you.Use extensions to add even more featuresLastly, you can use third-party extensions to add even more functionality to Command Palette. As the feature is new, the collection is quite limited, but here's hoping that developers add new extensions in the future. To see your extensions, open the Command Palette and search for Extensions. You can find extensions on WinGet, or on the Microsoft Store. #screw #windows #search #bar #use
    LIFEHACKER.COM
    Screw the Windows Search Bar, and Use Command Palette Instead
    Mac users are spoiled when it comes to searching their computers. Macs have Spotlight search built-in, which they can use to open apps, search for files, perform calculations, and search the web. Windows has the Search Bar, but when you compare what they can do, it's not exactly the same. Now, though, there's a new tool called Command Palette, and it's a keyboard launcher designed specifically for developers and power users alike. It replaces a similar feature called PowerToys Run, and offers way more features, including the ability to run commands, search the web, search for files, and add custom bookmarks and global keyboard shortcuts.How to install and enable Command PaletteCommand Palette is part of PowerToys, which is a suite of powerful apps and utilities created by Microsoft itself. These are open source and are updated much faster than any built-in Windows feature. You can download and install PowerToys from the GitHub page, the Microsoft Store, or using Windows Package Manager.Once PowerToys is installed (or updated to the version 0.9 or higher), open the app and find the Command Palette option from the sidebar. If you don't see the app window, right-click the PowerToys utility in the Windows taskbar and click Settings. Credit: Khamosh Pathak From the Command Palette screen, make sure the extension is enabled. Here, you'll see the default keyboard shortcut for Command Palette, which is Windows + Alt + Space, but you are free to change it to anything you want.Customizing the Command Palette shortcut and other settingsFirst, open Command Palette using the keyboard shortcut, and then click the Settings button in the bottom-right corner. From here, you can use the Activation key option to remap the keyboard shortcut to something simpler, like Alt + Space. Credit: Khamosh Pathak While you're here, you can also customize the behavior of Command Palette. The features I find most useful is the ability to use Backspace to go back, but your mileage may vary.Now, let's see everything Command Palette can do.System settings and file search Credit: Khamosh Pathak Open the Command Palette and start typing. Everything you'd want from a basic keyboard launcher is here. You can use Command Palette to open apps, and to search for files and folders.You can start searching for apps directly. But when it comes to files and folders, it's better to first choose the File search option. Just type "file", choose the option, and then start searching. Similarly, if you use the "=" key, you'll enter calculator mode.Switch between open windows Credit: Khamosh Pathak Command Palette has a built-in window switcher, and it can show all windows across different desktops and monitors. Open the Command Palette and type the less-than symbol () and you'll see a list of all open windows and apps. You can scroll or search through this, or you can just enter the name of a specific app or window to highlight it, then press Enter to quickly switch to it.Use Bookmarks to open any folder or website Credit: Khamosh Pathak Bookmarks might be the best feature in Command Palette. The file search is definitely useful, but most often, you find yourself opening the same folders and files over and over again throughout the day. For me, it's the Screenshots folder and the Downloads folder. Now, I can use Command Palette to make these easier to open.Namely, I can create a bookmark that opens the Downloads folder with just a couple of letters, or using a global keyboard shortcut. This works for any Folder or File path, and even a website URL.First, navigate to the folder you want to assign a shortcut to, right-click on the folder at the top, and choose Copy Address to copy the file path. In Command Palette, use the Add Bookmark option. Here, paste in the file path and give it a name. Credit: Khamosh Pathak Now, you can give it a unique alias and a global shortcut. Go to Command Palette Settings, and from the sidebar, choose Extensions > Bookmarks. You'll see your newly created bookmark here. Credit: Khamosh Pathak Click on it, and you can now record a unique global hotkey, or give it an alias that makes it faster to find in Command Palette.Search the web Credit: Khamosh Pathak Command Palette has a quick way to search the web that opens directly in your default browser. Enter "??" and then type out your query. Press Enter, and that's it.Run any Terminal command Credit: Khamosh Pathak If you use the greater-than sign (>) before you start typing in Command Palette, you'll enter Terminal mode. From here, you can enter any command, and it will open in the Terminal app, where it will execute the command for you.Install apps using WinGetWe've already talked about WinGet, the hidden package manager inside Windows that lets you install any package or an app using a single command. Well, now you don't even need to open Terminal for this. Once you have WinGet set up, you can simply enter the "winget" command in Command Palette, followed by the package you want to install. Command Palette will search for and start installing the package for you.Use extensions to add even more featuresLastly, you can use third-party extensions to add even more functionality to Command Palette. As the feature is new, the collection is quite limited, but here's hoping that developers add new extensions in the future. To see your extensions, open the Command Palette and search for Extensions. You can find extensions on WinGet, or on the Microsoft Store.
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  • ROG Ally: Triple AAA Gaming Windows handheld

    Slayven
    Never read a comic in his life
    Moderator

    Oct 25, 2017

    102,422

    View:

    The Asus ROG Ally handheld gaming PC is real, not an April Fools’ joke

    No fooling — but no specs or price, either.

    www.theverge.com

    The ROG Ally has a seven-inch 16:9 display with 1920 x 1080 resolution, 500 nits of brightness, and a 120HZ refresh rate, compared to the Steam Deck specs, which are listed as a seven-inch 16:10 display at 1280 x 800 resolution, 400 nits of brightness, and a 60Hz refresh rate.

    Click to expand...
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    I want more of these, but they need to think about adding alternative control interfaces built into the system. Maybenot a whole touch pad but maybe a nipple and some back buttons. Plus it is is ROG, you know it will cost 2 souls and a leg

    Dave2d Handheld

    View:  

    Deleted member 93062
    Account closed at user request
    Banned

    Mar 4, 2021

    24,767

    Seems like it'll be pricey as hell but I do like that it has a 16:9 display, Windows with good looking dashboard for all your launchers, and how quiet it is. I just want that eGPU connector, or something similar to it, on the next Steam Deck.
     

    nsilvias
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    30,169

    >1080p

    rip battery life 

    Dangerman1337
    Member

    Jul 2, 2021

    3,187

    United Kingdom, The Wirral, Hoylake

    Sullivan said:

    Seems like it'll be pricey as hell but I do like that it has a 16:9 display, Windows with good looking dashboard for all your launchers, and how quiet it is. I just want that eGPU connector, or something similar to it, on the next Steam Deck.

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Dave2D says it's apparently very appealing price point.

    However my biggest question is the release date because we keep seeing these handhelds with no release dates and being kept shown at performance expos all the time. Sick and tired of that nonsense. 

    Deleted member 93062
    Account closed at user request
    Banned

    Mar 4, 2021

    24,767

    nsilvias said:

    >1080p

    rip battery life
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    >1080p

    >120hz
    >500nits 

    OP

    OP

    Slayven
    Never read a comic in his life
    Moderator

    Oct 25, 2017

    102,422

    nsilvias said:

    >1080p

    rip battery life
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    80s kids know

     

    Deleted member 93062
    Account closed at user request
    Banned

    Mar 4, 2021

    24,767

    Dangerman1337 said:

    Dave2D says it's apparently very appealing price point.

    However my biggest question is the release date because we keep seeing these handhelds with no release dates and being kept shown at performance expos all the time. Sick and tired of that nonsense.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Dave doesn't know the price point. He's just assuming because they said it would be available at Best Buy and that they don't do low volume products so ASUS expects it to sell well, which means it likely has an appealing price point. I don't know though...
     

    jack.
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    1,357

    I'd rather have 720p and that d-pad looks like ass but otherwise, this thing seems like it could be pretty good.
     

    OP

    OP

    Slayven
    Never read a comic in his life
    Moderator

    Oct 25, 2017

    102,422

    Dangerman1337 said:

    Dave2D says it's apparently very appealing price point.

    However my biggest question is the release date because we keep seeing these handhelds with no release dates and being kept shown at performance expos all the time. Sick and tired of that nonsense.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    In the time you you typed this post 3 more models of the Aya neo has been announced
     

    AuthenticM
    Son Altesse Sérénissime
    The Fallen

    Oct 25, 2017

    35,186

    I didn't know that ROG was an initialism. I've always pronounced it like an acronym.

    So I can install my GOG games on this? 

    Dangerman1337
    Member

    Jul 2, 2021

    3,187

    United Kingdom, The Wirral, Hoylake

    Sullivan said:

    Dave doesn't know the price point. He's just assuming because they said it would be available at Best Buy and that they don't do low volume products so ASUS expects it to sell well, which means it likely has an appealing price point. I don't know though...

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Asus apparently told Dave it.

    Slayven said:

    In the time you you typed this post 3 more models of the Aya neo has been announced

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Heh :p.
     

    Koukalaka
    Member

    Oct 28, 2017

    10,405

    Scotland

    1080p and 120Hz just don't make sense on a gaming-focused handheld.
     

    Biosnake
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    14,335

    show me more
     

    Radogol
    Member

    Nov 9, 2017

    384

    So that's nine As?
     

    OP

    OP

    Slayven
    Never read a comic in his life
    Moderator

    Oct 25, 2017

    102,422

    Koukalaka said:

    1080p and 120Hz just don't make sense on a gaming-focused handheld.

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Sounds like the stats for a endurance battery tester
     

    Dinjoralo
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    11,729

    Windows, ick. I've used Armoury Crate enough on my PC to know that the software side of things, at least what's pre-installed on the device, is going to be ass.

    I don't get why everyone seems to hate the Deck having an 800p screen. That's turned out to be a lifesaver for me in some games with weird resolutions that can't scale to 720p or 1080p well, like Rainworld. 

    Busaiku
    Teyvat Traveler
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    17,947

    Ya, nothing matters until we know about battery and price.
     

    neoak
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    16,877

    However, in our experience, they've relied on an AMD 6800U chipset instead of a custom design and generally lack the right combination of horsepower and efficiency that we want to see from handheld gaming machines.

    Click to expand...
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    I swear the Verge reporter doesn't understand how crippled is the Steam Deck CPU for having 4 cores only when CPU matters a ton more in low resolutions.

    AMD doesn't do custom unless you are going to buy millions, but then again, it's the iVerge. 

    neoak
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    16,877

    Koukalaka said:

    1080p and 120Hz just don't make sense on a gaming-focused handheld.

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    I'd argue not in phones either but ¯\__/¯

    And you are right, it's hard to get more than 60fps in recent titles even on 6800U with 45W TDP 

    Haloid1177
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    4,847

    Dinjoralo said:

    Windows, ick. I've used Armoury Crate enough on my PC to know that the software side of things, at least what's pre-installed on the device, is going to be ass.

    I don't get why everyone seems to hate the Deck having an 800p screen. That's turned out to be a lifesaver for me in some games with weird resolutions that can't scale to 720p or 1080p well, like Rainworld.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Armoury Crate is a mess of a software but I will give it credit that it causes me way less issues than iCUE or the Lian Li fan/RGB controller. 

    OP

    OP

    Slayven
    Never read a comic in his life
    Moderator

    Oct 25, 2017

    102,422

    Dinjoralo said:

    Windows, ick. I've used Armoury Crate enough on my PC to know that the software side of things, at least what's pre-installed on the device, is going to be ass.

    I don't get why everyone seems to hate the Deck having an 800p screen. That's turned out to be a lifesaver for me in some games with weird resolutions that can't scale to 720p or 1080p well, like Rainworld.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    You also squeeze out a bit more performance by turning down bigger games
     

    Biosnake
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    14,335

    Keyser S
    The Fallen

    Oct 26, 2017

    8,480

    Do I pronounce this like Broccoli
     

    neoak
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    16,877

    Keyser S said:

    Do I pronounce this like Broccoli

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    ROG is supposed to be spelled R.O.G.
     

    cgpartlow
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    3,476

    Seattle, WA

    I prefer asymmetrical sticks on my controllers, but on handhelds where the sides are vertical straight up and down, they should not be offset due to where your thumbs land. The switch cramps my hand having to contort my thumb and rotate my hand to hit the sticks. It is better with and ergonomic attachment but it is not the most convenient.
     

    bbg_g
    Member

    Jun 21, 2020

    835

    Looks interesting and I might bite depending on battery life and price. I'm a bit lukewarm on the steamdeck and still waiting to see what comes next.
     

    Neoxon
    Spotlighting Black Excellence - Diversity Analyst
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    93,547

    Houston, TX

    Does this have a gyroscope like the Deck?
     

    Mashing
    Member

    Oct 28, 2017

    3,411

    Haloid1177 said:

    Armoury Crate is a mess of a software but I will give it credit that it causes me way less issues than iCUE or the Lian Li fan/RGB controller.

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    I had to disable iCUE as it kept waking up my PC from power saving. I never really used it anyway so no big loss. 

    neoak
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    16,877

    ROG XG Mobile eGPU? That's interesting, seeing as Oculink on the Win Max 2 allows you to have only a 10% performance penalty vs a full desktop for external using PCIe Gen4 x4.

    This will make it interesting. Unfortunately Destiny 2 sucks ass on anything less than 10" >.< 

    Atolm
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    6,154

    120hz is actually great for games like Hollow Knight or Fight N Rage
     

    BennyWhatever
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    5,504

    US

    Happy to eat crow on this, but I'd be very surprised if the starter model of this is < Most of these handheld Windows devices are k+.
     

    Cats_Schrodinger
    Member

    Oct 29, 2017

    4,050

    If the 120Hz display is VRR , that's a gamechanger. Framerates lower than 60 will benefit immensely. The Deck needs this too.
     

    neoak
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    16,877

    Atolm said:

    120hz is actually great for games like Hollow Knight or Fight N Rage

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Actually, hadn't considered that. Very valid point.
     

    Qwark
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    10,263

    I'm always down for more high-performance handhelds, that d-pad looks squishy as hell though.

    Lmao at the actor casually pulling the handheld out of his jacket pocket, those are some big pockets. 

    AmFreak
    Member

    Oct 26, 2017

    3,220

    It's like all these companies that are big enough to somewhat compete saw the Deck success and then made hand held. Logitech launches a cloud one, Razer launches a ARM one a year after the Deck and now Asus seems to think they have to one up the Deck everywhereand will result in pricing themselves out of the market.
     

    Charpunk
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    12,555

    Performance and cost will be interesting. Lack of touchpads is a bummer as that has been a great feature for the deck for me.
     

    SaberVS7
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    6,750

    Everyone's minds when they're playing AAAAAAAAA games on the handheld of the future

     

    neoak
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    16,877

    Qwark said:

    I'm always down for more high-performance handhelds, that d-pad looks squishy as hell though.

    Lmao at the actor casually pulling the handheld out of his jacket pocket, those are some big pockets.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    They had to one up this

    View:
     

    topplehat
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    1,083

    Austin, TX

    These feel like a bunch of specs thrown at a wall - a screen like that will chew up battery in no time, and the hardware won't be there to back it up.

    This is what I really appreciated about the Steam Deck - it seemed thought out and that all the hardware was designed for a certain performance level. 

    Jon of the Wired
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    397

    It's good to see more products in this space, but I'm just never going to buy a PC handheld that doesn't have touchpads. It's frustrating that only Valve is making a handheld that can actually play the games I want to play.
     

    Kline
    AVALANCHE
    Member

    Sep 15, 2022

    524

    Will come down to price of course. There's countless Windows handhelds around these days - many objectively better than the Deck, but none that can match it's price point.

    On that note, yes the 1080p screen is appealing for a handheld. I have a Deck, but I expressly use my Ayn Odin Lite for things like Game Pass, GFN, or even watching anime, because it can push double the pixels with ease. Then again, it's Android so it has battery for days. 

    Remeran
    Member

    Nov 27, 2018

    4,129

    Oh windows based, that mean native gamepass gaming? Hmm that might be interesting.
     

    Pocky4Th3Win
    Member

    Oct 31, 2017

    5,425

    Minnesota

    I hope they support Steam OS as an alternative to Windows 11.
     

    Deleted member 93062
    Account closed at user request
    Banned

    Mar 4, 2021

    24,767

    Pocky4Th3Win said:

    I hope they support Steam OS as an alternative to Windows 11.

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    You could install SteamOS on it if you wanted I imagine.
     

    DjDeathCool
    Member

    Oct 28, 2017

    2,869

    Bismarck, ND

    Koukalaka said:

    1080p and 120Hz just don't make sense on a gaming-focused handheld.

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    I always want 120hz on any device that is capable of streaming gameplay. Moonlight at 120hz is *chef's kiss*

    neoak said:

    I'd argue not in phones either but ¯\__/¯

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    General usageon a 120hz display feels much much nicer. It's one of those things you get used to and don't realize how nice it is until it's gone. It's not about gameplay. Lol.
     

    Ada
    Member

    Nov 28, 2017

    4,164

    bad ergonomics - shallow grip, menu buttons out of reach. Single USB port!
    rocker dpad - why copy the 360s terrible dpad
    dual fans plus higher refresh/resolution/brightness screen - huge battery drain
    Windows instead of SteamOS - no suspend + license fee
    DOA
     

    neoak
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    16,877

    DjDeathCool said:

    General usageon a 120hz display feels much much nicer. It's one of those things you get used to and don't realize how nice it is until it's gone. It's not about gameplay. Lol.

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    It's about battery life man. Never said it wasn't nice.
     

    Tsunami561
    Member

    Mar 7, 2023

    5,383

    This sounds like one of those other handhelds that are on paper way more powerfull than the deck but then is twice the price and the user experience sucks
     

    toy_brain
    Member

    Nov 1, 2017

    2,598

    Looks interesting, and I'm always happy to see new entrants into this space, as it gives people more options. Specifically, if they are selling this in B&M retail stores, it'll open the market to people who aren't comfortable ordering a Steam Deck, or getting a Chinese/HK manufactured device of unknown quality.The resolution and refresh rates sound "ambitious", but if it's anything like the GPD I have, you'll be able to knock the refresh rate down to 40hz, and do the usual FSR resolution scaling to save on performance. I'd be surprised if a demanding game lasted more than 2 hours on a single charge though - that just seems to be the norm with the current tech, but its enough for a commute, or a long train journey if you are happy playing 2D stuff.

    As for it using windows, ehhh, It's the easiest way forward right now. Yes it takes a while to boot or come out of standby compared to SteamOS, and the UI kinda sucks on a small screen, but it has zero compatibility issues and allows every current launcher straight out of the box, so you get every advantage of a full PC with only a couple minor downsides.

    My only negative with what I've seen so far, is the size. It's only a shave smaller than the Steam Deck, which is already a chunky bugger. I'd have liked it to be more like the GPD Win 4. Oh well. 

    DjDeathCool
    Member

    Oct 28, 2017

    2,869

    Bismarck, ND

    neoak said:

    It's about battery life man. Never said it wasn't nice.

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Adaptive refresh rate solves that issue and you can cap it if you don't like the energy cost. At least on mobiles, and assumedly for this device as well since you can do the same on Deck.
     
    #rog #ally #triple #aaa #gaming
    ROG Ally: Triple AAA Gaming Windows handheld
    Slayven Never read a comic in his life Moderator Oct 25, 2017 102,422 View: The Asus ROG Ally handheld gaming PC is real, not an April Fools’ joke No fooling — but no specs or price, either. www.theverge.com The ROG Ally has a seven-inch 16:9 display with 1920 x 1080 resolution, 500 nits of brightness, and a 120HZ refresh rate, compared to the Steam Deck specs, which are listed as a seven-inch 16:10 display at 1280 x 800 resolution, 400 nits of brightness, and a 60Hz refresh rate. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I want more of these, but they need to think about adding alternative control interfaces built into the system. Maybenot a whole touch pad but maybe a nipple and some back buttons. Plus it is is ROG, you know it will cost 2 souls and a leg Dave2d Handheld View:   Deleted member 93062 Account closed at user request Banned Mar 4, 2021 24,767 Seems like it'll be pricey as hell but I do like that it has a 16:9 display, Windows with good looking dashboard for all your launchers, and how quiet it is. I just want that eGPU connector, or something similar to it, on the next Steam Deck.   nsilvias Member Oct 25, 2017 30,169 >1080p rip battery life  Dangerman1337 Member Jul 2, 2021 3,187 United Kingdom, The Wirral, Hoylake Sullivan said: Seems like it'll be pricey as hell but I do like that it has a 16:9 display, Windows with good looking dashboard for all your launchers, and how quiet it is. I just want that eGPU connector, or something similar to it, on the next Steam Deck. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Dave2D says it's apparently very appealing price point. However my biggest question is the release date because we keep seeing these handhelds with no release dates and being kept shown at performance expos all the time. Sick and tired of that nonsense.  Deleted member 93062 Account closed at user request Banned Mar 4, 2021 24,767 nsilvias said: >1080p rip battery life Click to expand... Click to shrink... >1080p >120hz >500nits  OP OP Slayven Never read a comic in his life Moderator Oct 25, 2017 102,422 nsilvias said: >1080p rip battery life Click to expand... Click to shrink... 80s kids know   Deleted member 93062 Account closed at user request Banned Mar 4, 2021 24,767 Dangerman1337 said: Dave2D says it's apparently very appealing price point. However my biggest question is the release date because we keep seeing these handhelds with no release dates and being kept shown at performance expos all the time. Sick and tired of that nonsense. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Dave doesn't know the price point. He's just assuming because they said it would be available at Best Buy and that they don't do low volume products so ASUS expects it to sell well, which means it likely has an appealing price point. I don't know though...   jack. Member Oct 27, 2017 1,357 I'd rather have 720p and that d-pad looks like ass but otherwise, this thing seems like it could be pretty good.   OP OP Slayven Never read a comic in his life Moderator Oct 25, 2017 102,422 Dangerman1337 said: Dave2D says it's apparently very appealing price point. However my biggest question is the release date because we keep seeing these handhelds with no release dates and being kept shown at performance expos all the time. Sick and tired of that nonsense. Click to expand... Click to shrink... In the time you you typed this post 3 more models of the Aya neo has been announced   AuthenticM Son Altesse Sérénissime The Fallen Oct 25, 2017 35,186 I didn't know that ROG was an initialism. I've always pronounced it like an acronym. So I can install my GOG games on this?  Dangerman1337 Member Jul 2, 2021 3,187 United Kingdom, The Wirral, Hoylake Sullivan said: Dave doesn't know the price point. He's just assuming because they said it would be available at Best Buy and that they don't do low volume products so ASUS expects it to sell well, which means it likely has an appealing price point. I don't know though... Click to expand... Click to shrink... Asus apparently told Dave it. Slayven said: In the time you you typed this post 3 more models of the Aya neo has been announced Click to expand... Click to shrink... Heh :p.   Koukalaka Member Oct 28, 2017 10,405 Scotland 1080p and 120Hz just don't make sense on a gaming-focused handheld.   Biosnake Member Oct 25, 2017 14,335 show me more   Radogol Member Nov 9, 2017 384 So that's nine As?   OP OP Slayven Never read a comic in his life Moderator Oct 25, 2017 102,422 Koukalaka said: 1080p and 120Hz just don't make sense on a gaming-focused handheld. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Sounds like the stats for a endurance battery tester   Dinjoralo Member Oct 25, 2017 11,729 Windows, ick. I've used Armoury Crate enough on my PC to know that the software side of things, at least what's pre-installed on the device, is going to be ass. I don't get why everyone seems to hate the Deck having an 800p screen. That's turned out to be a lifesaver for me in some games with weird resolutions that can't scale to 720p or 1080p well, like Rainworld.  Busaiku Teyvat Traveler Member Oct 25, 2017 17,947 Ya, nothing matters until we know about battery and price.   neoak Member Oct 25, 2017 16,877 However, in our experience, they've relied on an AMD 6800U chipset instead of a custom design and generally lack the right combination of horsepower and efficiency that we want to see from handheld gaming machines. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I swear the Verge reporter doesn't understand how crippled is the Steam Deck CPU for having 4 cores only when CPU matters a ton more in low resolutions. AMD doesn't do custom unless you are going to buy millions, but then again, it's the iVerge.  neoak Member Oct 25, 2017 16,877 Koukalaka said: 1080p and 120Hz just don't make sense on a gaming-focused handheld. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I'd argue not in phones either but ¯\__/¯ And you are right, it's hard to get more than 60fps in recent titles even on 6800U with 45W TDP  Haloid1177 Member Oct 25, 2017 4,847 Dinjoralo said: Windows, ick. I've used Armoury Crate enough on my PC to know that the software side of things, at least what's pre-installed on the device, is going to be ass. I don't get why everyone seems to hate the Deck having an 800p screen. That's turned out to be a lifesaver for me in some games with weird resolutions that can't scale to 720p or 1080p well, like Rainworld. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Armoury Crate is a mess of a software but I will give it credit that it causes me way less issues than iCUE or the Lian Li fan/RGB controller.  OP OP Slayven Never read a comic in his life Moderator Oct 25, 2017 102,422 Dinjoralo said: Windows, ick. I've used Armoury Crate enough on my PC to know that the software side of things, at least what's pre-installed on the device, is going to be ass. I don't get why everyone seems to hate the Deck having an 800p screen. That's turned out to be a lifesaver for me in some games with weird resolutions that can't scale to 720p or 1080p well, like Rainworld. Click to expand... Click to shrink... You also squeeze out a bit more performance by turning down bigger games   Biosnake Member Oct 25, 2017 14,335 Keyser S The Fallen Oct 26, 2017 8,480 Do I pronounce this like Broccoli   neoak Member Oct 25, 2017 16,877 Keyser S said: Do I pronounce this like Broccoli Click to expand... Click to shrink... ROG is supposed to be spelled R.O.G.   cgpartlow Member Oct 27, 2017 3,476 Seattle, WA I prefer asymmetrical sticks on my controllers, but on handhelds where the sides are vertical straight up and down, they should not be offset due to where your thumbs land. The switch cramps my hand having to contort my thumb and rotate my hand to hit the sticks. It is better with and ergonomic attachment but it is not the most convenient.   bbg_g Member Jun 21, 2020 835 Looks interesting and I might bite depending on battery life and price. I'm a bit lukewarm on the steamdeck and still waiting to see what comes next.   Neoxon Spotlighting Black Excellence - Diversity Analyst Member Oct 25, 2017 93,547 Houston, TX Does this have a gyroscope like the Deck?   Mashing Member Oct 28, 2017 3,411 Haloid1177 said: Armoury Crate is a mess of a software but I will give it credit that it causes me way less issues than iCUE or the Lian Li fan/RGB controller. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I had to disable iCUE as it kept waking up my PC from power saving. I never really used it anyway so no big loss.  neoak Member Oct 25, 2017 16,877 ROG XG Mobile eGPU? That's interesting, seeing as Oculink on the Win Max 2 allows you to have only a 10% performance penalty vs a full desktop for external using PCIe Gen4 x4. This will make it interesting. Unfortunately Destiny 2 sucks ass on anything less than 10" >.<  Atolm Member Oct 25, 2017 6,154 120hz is actually great for games like Hollow Knight or Fight N Rage   BennyWhatever Member Oct 27, 2017 5,504 US Happy to eat crow on this, but I'd be very surprised if the starter model of this is < Most of these handheld Windows devices are k+.   Cats_Schrodinger Member Oct 29, 2017 4,050 If the 120Hz display is VRR , that's a gamechanger. Framerates lower than 60 will benefit immensely. The Deck needs this too.   neoak Member Oct 25, 2017 16,877 Atolm said: 120hz is actually great for games like Hollow Knight or Fight N Rage Click to expand... Click to shrink... Actually, hadn't considered that. Very valid point.   Qwark Member Oct 27, 2017 10,263 I'm always down for more high-performance handhelds, that d-pad looks squishy as hell though. Lmao at the actor casually pulling the handheld out of his jacket pocket, those are some big pockets.  AmFreak Member Oct 26, 2017 3,220 It's like all these companies that are big enough to somewhat compete saw the Deck success and then made hand held. Logitech launches a cloud one, Razer launches a ARM one a year after the Deck and now Asus seems to think they have to one up the Deck everywhereand will result in pricing themselves out of the market.   Charpunk Member Oct 25, 2017 12,555 Performance and cost will be interesting. Lack of touchpads is a bummer as that has been a great feature for the deck for me.   SaberVS7 Member Oct 25, 2017 6,750 Everyone's minds when they're playing AAAAAAAAA games on the handheld of the future   neoak Member Oct 25, 2017 16,877 Qwark said: I'm always down for more high-performance handhelds, that d-pad looks squishy as hell though. Lmao at the actor casually pulling the handheld out of his jacket pocket, those are some big pockets. Click to expand... Click to shrink... They had to one up this View:   topplehat Member Oct 27, 2017 1,083 Austin, TX These feel like a bunch of specs thrown at a wall - a screen like that will chew up battery in no time, and the hardware won't be there to back it up. This is what I really appreciated about the Steam Deck - it seemed thought out and that all the hardware was designed for a certain performance level.  Jon of the Wired Member Oct 25, 2017 397 It's good to see more products in this space, but I'm just never going to buy a PC handheld that doesn't have touchpads. It's frustrating that only Valve is making a handheld that can actually play the games I want to play.   Kline AVALANCHE Member Sep 15, 2022 524 Will come down to price of course. There's countless Windows handhelds around these days - many objectively better than the Deck, but none that can match it's price point. On that note, yes the 1080p screen is appealing for a handheld. I have a Deck, but I expressly use my Ayn Odin Lite for things like Game Pass, GFN, or even watching anime, because it can push double the pixels with ease. Then again, it's Android so it has battery for days.  Remeran Member Nov 27, 2018 4,129 Oh windows based, that mean native gamepass gaming? Hmm that might be interesting.   Pocky4Th3Win Member Oct 31, 2017 5,425 Minnesota I hope they support Steam OS as an alternative to Windows 11.   Deleted member 93062 Account closed at user request Banned Mar 4, 2021 24,767 Pocky4Th3Win said: I hope they support Steam OS as an alternative to Windows 11. Click to expand... Click to shrink... You could install SteamOS on it if you wanted I imagine.   DjDeathCool Member Oct 28, 2017 2,869 Bismarck, ND Koukalaka said: 1080p and 120Hz just don't make sense on a gaming-focused handheld. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I always want 120hz on any device that is capable of streaming gameplay. Moonlight at 120hz is *chef's kiss* neoak said: I'd argue not in phones either but ¯\__/¯ Click to expand... Click to shrink... General usageon a 120hz display feels much much nicer. It's one of those things you get used to and don't realize how nice it is until it's gone. It's not about gameplay. Lol.   Ada Member Nov 28, 2017 4,164 bad ergonomics - shallow grip, menu buttons out of reach. Single USB port! rocker dpad - why copy the 360s terrible dpad dual fans plus higher refresh/resolution/brightness screen - huge battery drain Windows instead of SteamOS - no suspend + license fee DOA   neoak Member Oct 25, 2017 16,877 DjDeathCool said: General usageon a 120hz display feels much much nicer. It's one of those things you get used to and don't realize how nice it is until it's gone. It's not about gameplay. Lol. Click to expand... Click to shrink... It's about battery life man. Never said it wasn't nice.   Tsunami561 Member Mar 7, 2023 5,383 This sounds like one of those other handhelds that are on paper way more powerfull than the deck but then is twice the price and the user experience sucks   toy_brain Member Nov 1, 2017 2,598 Looks interesting, and I'm always happy to see new entrants into this space, as it gives people more options. Specifically, if they are selling this in B&M retail stores, it'll open the market to people who aren't comfortable ordering a Steam Deck, or getting a Chinese/HK manufactured device of unknown quality.The resolution and refresh rates sound "ambitious", but if it's anything like the GPD I have, you'll be able to knock the refresh rate down to 40hz, and do the usual FSR resolution scaling to save on performance. I'd be surprised if a demanding game lasted more than 2 hours on a single charge though - that just seems to be the norm with the current tech, but its enough for a commute, or a long train journey if you are happy playing 2D stuff. As for it using windows, ehhh, It's the easiest way forward right now. Yes it takes a while to boot or come out of standby compared to SteamOS, and the UI kinda sucks on a small screen, but it has zero compatibility issues and allows every current launcher straight out of the box, so you get every advantage of a full PC with only a couple minor downsides. My only negative with what I've seen so far, is the size. It's only a shave smaller than the Steam Deck, which is already a chunky bugger. I'd have liked it to be more like the GPD Win 4. Oh well.  DjDeathCool Member Oct 28, 2017 2,869 Bismarck, ND neoak said: It's about battery life man. Never said it wasn't nice. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Adaptive refresh rate solves that issue and you can cap it if you don't like the energy cost. At least on mobiles, and assumedly for this device as well since you can do the same on Deck.   #rog #ally #triple #aaa #gaming
    WWW.RESETERA.COM
    ROG Ally: Triple AAA Gaming Windows handheld
    Slayven Never read a comic in his life Moderator Oct 25, 2017 102,422 View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5lq4Q7YAjE The Asus ROG Ally handheld gaming PC is real, not an April Fools’ joke No fooling — but no specs or price, either. www.theverge.com The ROG Ally has a seven-inch 16:9 display with 1920 x 1080 resolution, 500 nits of brightness, and a 120HZ refresh rate, compared to the Steam Deck specs, which are listed as a seven-inch 16:10 display at 1280 x 800 resolution, 400 nits of brightness, and a 60Hz refresh rate. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I want more of these, but they need to think about adding alternative control interfaces built into the system. Maybenot a whole touch pad but maybe a nipple and some back buttons. Plus it is is ROG, you know it will cost 2 souls and a leg Dave2d Handheld View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drLZxyv79Oo  Deleted member 93062 Account closed at user request Banned Mar 4, 2021 24,767 Seems like it'll be pricey as hell but I do like that it has a 16:9 display, Windows with good looking dashboard for all your launchers, and how quiet it is. I just want that eGPU connector, or something similar to it, on the next Steam Deck.   nsilvias Member Oct 25, 2017 30,169 >1080p rip battery life  Dangerman1337 Member Jul 2, 2021 3,187 United Kingdom, The Wirral, Hoylake Sullivan said: Seems like it'll be pricey as hell but I do like that it has a 16:9 display, Windows with good looking dashboard for all your launchers, and how quiet it is. I just want that eGPU connector, or something similar to it, on the next Steam Deck. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Dave2D says it's apparently very appealing price point. However my biggest question is the release date because we keep seeing these handhelds with no release dates and being kept shown at performance expos all the time. Sick and tired of that nonsense.  Deleted member 93062 Account closed at user request Banned Mar 4, 2021 24,767 nsilvias said: >1080p rip battery life Click to expand... Click to shrink... >1080p >120hz >500nits  OP OP Slayven Never read a comic in his life Moderator Oct 25, 2017 102,422 nsilvias said: >1080p rip battery life Click to expand... Click to shrink... 80s kids know   Deleted member 93062 Account closed at user request Banned Mar 4, 2021 24,767 Dangerman1337 said: Dave2D says it's apparently very appealing price point. However my biggest question is the release date because we keep seeing these handhelds with no release dates and being kept shown at performance expos all the time. Sick and tired of that nonsense. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Dave doesn't know the price point. He's just assuming because they said it would be available at Best Buy and that they don't do low volume products so ASUS expects it to sell well, which means it likely has an appealing price point. I don't know though...   jack. Member Oct 27, 2017 1,357 I'd rather have 720p and that d-pad looks like ass but otherwise, this thing seems like it could be pretty good.   OP OP Slayven Never read a comic in his life Moderator Oct 25, 2017 102,422 Dangerman1337 said: Dave2D says it's apparently very appealing price point. However my biggest question is the release date because we keep seeing these handhelds with no release dates and being kept shown at performance expos all the time. Sick and tired of that nonsense. Click to expand... Click to shrink... In the time you you typed this post 3 more models of the Aya neo has been announced   AuthenticM Son Altesse Sérénissime The Fallen Oct 25, 2017 35,186 I didn't know that ROG was an initialism. I've always pronounced it like an acronym. So I can install my GOG games on this?  Dangerman1337 Member Jul 2, 2021 3,187 United Kingdom, The Wirral, Hoylake Sullivan said: Dave doesn't know the price point. He's just assuming because they said it would be available at Best Buy and that they don't do low volume products so ASUS expects it to sell well, which means it likely has an appealing price point. I don't know though... Click to expand... Click to shrink... Asus apparently told Dave it. Slayven said: In the time you you typed this post 3 more models of the Aya neo has been announced Click to expand... Click to shrink... Heh :p.   Koukalaka Member Oct 28, 2017 10,405 Scotland 1080p and 120Hz just don't make sense on a gaming-focused handheld.   Biosnake Member Oct 25, 2017 14,335 show me more   Radogol Member Nov 9, 2017 384 So that's nine As?   OP OP Slayven Never read a comic in his life Moderator Oct 25, 2017 102,422 Koukalaka said: 1080p and 120Hz just don't make sense on a gaming-focused handheld. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Sounds like the stats for a endurance battery tester   Dinjoralo Member Oct 25, 2017 11,729 Windows, ick. I've used Armoury Crate enough on my PC to know that the software side of things, at least what's pre-installed on the device, is going to be ass. I don't get why everyone seems to hate the Deck having an 800p screen. That's turned out to be a lifesaver for me in some games with weird resolutions that can't scale to 720p or 1080p well, like Rainworld.  Busaiku Teyvat Traveler Member Oct 25, 2017 17,947 Ya, nothing matters until we know about battery and price.   neoak Member Oct 25, 2017 16,877 However, in our experience, they've relied on an AMD 6800U chipset instead of a custom design and generally lack the right combination of horsepower and efficiency that we want to see from handheld gaming machines. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I swear the Verge reporter doesn't understand how crippled is the Steam Deck CPU for having 4 cores only when CPU matters a ton more in low resolutions. AMD doesn't do custom unless you are going to buy millions, but then again, it's the iVerge.  neoak Member Oct 25, 2017 16,877 Koukalaka said: 1080p and 120Hz just don't make sense on a gaming-focused handheld. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I'd argue not in phones either but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And you are right, it's hard to get more than 60fps in recent titles even on 6800U with 45W TDP  Haloid1177 Member Oct 25, 2017 4,847 Dinjoralo said: Windows, ick. I've used Armoury Crate enough on my PC to know that the software side of things, at least what's pre-installed on the device, is going to be ass. I don't get why everyone seems to hate the Deck having an 800p screen. That's turned out to be a lifesaver for me in some games with weird resolutions that can't scale to 720p or 1080p well, like Rainworld. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Armoury Crate is a mess of a software but I will give it credit that it causes me way less issues than iCUE or the Lian Li fan/RGB controller.  OP OP Slayven Never read a comic in his life Moderator Oct 25, 2017 102,422 Dinjoralo said: Windows, ick. I've used Armoury Crate enough on my PC to know that the software side of things, at least what's pre-installed on the device, is going to be ass. I don't get why everyone seems to hate the Deck having an 800p screen. That's turned out to be a lifesaver for me in some games with weird resolutions that can't scale to 720p or 1080p well, like Rainworld. Click to expand... Click to shrink... You also squeeze out a bit more performance by turning down bigger games   Biosnake Member Oct 25, 2017 14,335 Keyser S The Fallen Oct 26, 2017 8,480 Do I pronounce this like Broccoli   neoak Member Oct 25, 2017 16,877 Keyser S said: Do I pronounce this like Broccoli Click to expand... Click to shrink... ROG is supposed to be spelled R.O.G.   cgpartlow Member Oct 27, 2017 3,476 Seattle, WA I prefer asymmetrical sticks on my controllers, but on handhelds where the sides are vertical straight up and down, they should not be offset due to where your thumbs land. The switch cramps my hand having to contort my thumb and rotate my hand to hit the sticks. It is better with and ergonomic attachment but it is not the most convenient.   bbg_g Member Jun 21, 2020 835 Looks interesting and I might bite depending on battery life and price. I'm a bit lukewarm on the steamdeck and still waiting to see what comes next.   Neoxon Spotlighting Black Excellence - Diversity Analyst Member Oct 25, 2017 93,547 Houston, TX Does this have a gyroscope like the Deck?   Mashing Member Oct 28, 2017 3,411 Haloid1177 said: Armoury Crate is a mess of a software but I will give it credit that it causes me way less issues than iCUE or the Lian Li fan/RGB controller. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I had to disable iCUE as it kept waking up my PC from power saving. I never really used it anyway so no big loss.  neoak Member Oct 25, 2017 16,877 ROG XG Mobile eGPU? That's interesting, seeing as Oculink on the Win Max 2 allows you to have only a 10% performance penalty vs a full desktop for external using PCIe Gen4 x4. This will make it interesting. Unfortunately Destiny 2 sucks ass on anything less than 10" >.<  Atolm Member Oct 25, 2017 6,154 120hz is actually great for games like Hollow Knight or Fight N Rage   BennyWhatever Member Oct 27, 2017 5,504 US Happy to eat crow on this, but I'd be very surprised if the starter model of this is < $800. Most of these handheld Windows devices are $1k+.   Cats_Schrodinger Member Oct 29, 2017 4,050 If the 120Hz display is VRR , that's a gamechanger. Framerates lower than 60 will benefit immensely. The Deck needs this too.   neoak Member Oct 25, 2017 16,877 Atolm said: 120hz is actually great for games like Hollow Knight or Fight N Rage Click to expand... Click to shrink... Actually, hadn't considered that. Very valid point.   Qwark Member Oct 27, 2017 10,263 I'm always down for more high-performance handhelds, that d-pad looks squishy as hell though. Lmao at the actor casually pulling the handheld out of his jacket pocket, those are some big pockets.  AmFreak Member Oct 26, 2017 3,220 It's like all these companies that are big enough to somewhat compete saw the Deck success and then made hand held. Logitech launches a $350 cloud one, Razer launches a $400 ARM one a year after the Deck and now Asus seems to think they have to one up the Deck everywhere (power, resolution, screen, OS) and will result in pricing themselves out of the market.   Charpunk Member Oct 25, 2017 12,555 Performance and cost will be interesting. Lack of touchpads is a bummer as that has been a great feature for the deck for me.   SaberVS7 Member Oct 25, 2017 6,750 Everyone's minds when they're playing AAAAAAAAA games on the handheld of the future   neoak Member Oct 25, 2017 16,877 Qwark said: I'm always down for more high-performance handhelds, that d-pad looks squishy as hell though. Lmao at the actor casually pulling the handheld out of his jacket pocket, those are some big pockets. Click to expand... Click to shrink... They had to one up this View: https://twitter.com/softwincn/status/1636605890429337600   topplehat Member Oct 27, 2017 1,083 Austin, TX These feel like a bunch of specs thrown at a wall - a screen like that will chew up battery in no time, and the hardware won't be there to back it up. This is what I really appreciated about the Steam Deck - it seemed thought out and that all the hardware was designed for a certain performance level.  Jon of the Wired Member Oct 25, 2017 397 It's good to see more products in this space, but I'm just never going to buy a PC handheld that doesn't have touchpads. It's frustrating that only Valve is making a handheld that can actually play the games I want to play.   Kline AVALANCHE Member Sep 15, 2022 524 Will come down to price of course. There's countless Windows handhelds around these days - many objectively better than the Deck, but none that can match it's price point. On that note, yes the 1080p screen is appealing for a handheld. I have a Deck, but I expressly use my Ayn Odin Lite for things like Game Pass, GFN, or even watching anime, because it can push double the pixels with ease. Then again, it's Android so it has battery for days.  Remeran Member Nov 27, 2018 4,129 Oh windows based, that mean native gamepass gaming? Hmm that might be interesting.   Pocky4Th3Win Member Oct 31, 2017 5,425 Minnesota I hope they support Steam OS as an alternative to Windows 11.   Deleted member 93062 Account closed at user request Banned Mar 4, 2021 24,767 Pocky4Th3Win said: I hope they support Steam OS as an alternative to Windows 11. Click to expand... Click to shrink... You could install SteamOS on it if you wanted I imagine.   DjDeathCool Member Oct 28, 2017 2,869 Bismarck, ND Koukalaka said: 1080p and 120Hz just don't make sense on a gaming-focused handheld. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I always want 120hz on any device that is capable of streaming gameplay. Moonlight at 120hz is *chef's kiss* neoak said: I'd argue not in phones either but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Click to expand... Click to shrink... General usage (scrolling) on a 120hz display feels much much nicer. It's one of those things you get used to and don't realize how nice it is until it's gone. It's not about gameplay. Lol.   Ada Member Nov 28, 2017 4,164 bad ergonomics - shallow grip, menu buttons out of reach. Single USB port! rocker dpad - why copy the 360s terrible dpad dual fans plus higher refresh/resolution/brightness screen - huge battery drain Windows instead of SteamOS - no suspend + license fee DOA   neoak Member Oct 25, 2017 16,877 DjDeathCool said: General usage (scrolling) on a 120hz display feels much much nicer. It's one of those things you get used to and don't realize how nice it is until it's gone. It's not about gameplay. Lol. Click to expand... Click to shrink... It's about battery life man. Never said it wasn't nice.   Tsunami561 Member Mar 7, 2023 5,383 This sounds like one of those other handhelds that are on paper way more powerfull than the deck but then is twice the price and the user experience sucks   toy_brain Member Nov 1, 2017 2,598 Looks interesting, and I'm always happy to see new entrants into this space, as it gives people more options. Specifically, if they are selling this in B&M retail stores, it'll open the market to people who aren't comfortable ordering a Steam Deck (for whatever reason), or getting a Chinese/HK manufactured device of unknown quality. (I have a GPD device and think its awesome) The resolution and refresh rates sound "ambitious", but if it's anything like the GPD I have, you'll be able to knock the refresh rate down to 40hz, and do the usual FSR resolution scaling to save on performance. I'd be surprised if a demanding game lasted more than 2 hours on a single charge though - that just seems to be the norm with the current tech, but its enough for a commute, or a long train journey if you are happy playing 2D stuff. As for it using windows, ehhh, It's the easiest way forward right now. Yes it takes a while to boot or come out of standby compared to SteamOS, and the UI kinda sucks on a small screen, but it has zero compatibility issues and allows every current launcher straight out of the box, so you get every advantage of a full PC with only a couple minor downsides. My only negative with what I've seen so far, is the size. It's only a shave smaller than the Steam Deck, which is already a chunky bugger. I'd have liked it to be more like the GPD Win 4. Oh well.  DjDeathCool Member Oct 28, 2017 2,869 Bismarck, ND neoak said: It's about battery life man. Never said it wasn't nice. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Adaptive refresh rate solves that issue and you can cap it if you don't like the energy cost. At least on mobiles, and assumedly for this device as well since you can do the same on Deck.  
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