PS4 vs PS4 Slim vs PS4 Pro: Which should you buy?
Which PlayStation 4 should I buy?
By the time family members roll into stores to buy their loved ones a PlayStation 4 this holiday season, there will be three options that look very similar. You’ve got the original PlayStation 4, the new slimmer PlayStation 4 with the exact same branding on the box, and the soon to be released PlayStation 4 Pro. It’s confusing by anyone’s standards, so your best bet is to know what you need before you head into the store.
What’s the difference?
Sony has a history of releasing a “slim” version of the PlayStation a couple of years after its initial release. In the past, those consoles have been labeled a little differently at launch to make it easier to tell the new version apart from the old one. These slimmer versions typically offer more a physical difference than a functionality difference, and this year is no different. The significant feature and performance difference comes with the PlayStation 4 Pro, and even then the difference isn’t huge.
| Price | $349 | $299 | $399 |
| Dimensions | 10.83in x 12.01in x 2.08in | 10.43in x 11.34in x 1.54in | 11.61in x 12.87in x 2.17in |
| CPU | AMD Jaguar 8-core (x86-64) | AMD Jaguar 8-core (x86-64) | AMD Jaguar 8-core (x86-64) |
| GPU | AMD Radeon (1.84 TFLOP) | AMD Radeon (1.84 TFLOP) | AMD Radeon (4.2 TFLOP) |
| Storage | 500GB / 1TB | 500GB / 1TB | 1TB |
| Optical out | Yes | No | Yes |
| AV out | AV/HDMI 1.4 | HDMI 1.4 | HDMI 2.0 |
| Power consumption | 250w max | 165w max | 310w max |
| 4K Streaming | No | No | Yes |
| USB | USB 3.0 (x2) | USB 3.0 (x2 ) | USB 3.0 (x3) |
| PSVR support | Yes | Yes | Yes (Enhanced) |
The biggest functional difference between the original PS4 and the new slimmer PS4 is power consumption. Sony claims the new PS4 has a max power draw of 165 watts, which sounds impressive next to the original 250w max of the first PS4 until you see most benchmarks. The original PlayStation 4 had an average power draw of 150w during its heaviest gameplay sessions, and never pushed anywhere near that 250w max. It is slightly smaller though, so there’s that.
As you can see, Sony is using the same CPU and a GPU that’s a little more than twice the performance in the new PlayStation 4 Pro. There’s also an updated version of the HDMI standard in the PS4 Pro, but there’s no immediate difference in performance out of the box for video output. PlayStation 4 Pro exists to offer 4K video streaming and enhanced graphics on supported titles. Game developers will have the option to offer higher quality graphics to PlayStation 4 Pro gamers, but it’s not yet clear how many will take advantage of this or how significant those differences will be.
Bundles and sales
The default pricing for these consoles can and frequently are augmented by sales and bundles. Each of the PlayStation 4 consoles comes with a single game, usually marked with a giant photo on the packaging, so you have everything you need to get started. Many retailers have already placed the original PlayStation 4 on sale, so it’s just under the $299 slim PlayStation 4 in order to help get rid of the older stock. The $399 PlayStation 4 Pro will of course also come with a game.
Is the PlayStation 4 Pro $100 better than the PlayStation 4 or its slimmer brother? Only if you have a 4K television or are planning to purchase one soon. If you’re happy with your existing television and have no plans to upgrade, you aren’t going to see any significant difference between the PlayStations 4.
Many retailers like to create their own bundles as we get closer to the holiday season, combining extra gamepads or recently discounted games to the package to help you feel like you’re buying everything you need. A big part of this year’s offering will no doubt include PlayStation VR. There are plenty of people who already own a PlayStation 4, but if you’re looking to go all in for the first time and get everything you need, expect those same retail stores to have everything you need to get going.
Which should I buy?
Now that you know everything you need to know about the differences between these consoles, lets break it down!
- PlayStation 4 — This is the PS4 most likely to be included in some kind of extra bundle with more accessories and games. This is also the only PlayStation 4 that comes in white right now. If you’re looking for a PS4 and price is a big point of concern, you probably want to stick with the original.
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- Slim PlayStation 4 — This is the PS4 you will see the most of on shelves this year, and it’s the nicer looking of the three. If you care about that sort of thing, or you’re just rushing in to grab a PS4 and nothing else, this is the version you want.
See on Amazon
- PlayStation 4 Pro — If you own a 4K television, or you plan to own one before long, this is the PlayStation 4 you want. It’ll last the longest, and be able to offer the most over time.
See on Amazon
Nike and EA bring back 1994 with 16-bit soccer shoes
Every year since 1994, EA Sports has added a new game to its FIFA video game line-up. Next week marks the release of FIFA 17, its 24th instalment, and to celebrate, the company has teamed up with Nike to create a limited edition Mercurial Superfly cleat (or boot if you speak the Queen’s English). According to Nike, these slick soccer shoes chart the advancements of the game over the past two decades — nerdy they are not.
The EA Sports x Nike Mercurial boots are bright orange and feature graphics that transition from a pixelated 16-bit design on one side to a high-definition pattern on the other. There’s an EA Sports logo on the sock, lace and heel, and the Nike swoosh has been given the pixelation treatment too. To complete the look, the bottom plate has been given an iridescent golden finish.
The good news is that you’ll be able to grab the new EA Sports x Nike Mercurial Superflys in one of two ways. The first is a virtual unlock, which requires you to reach level seven in the EA Sports Football Club Catalog offered inside FIFA 17. The company will also make 1,500 pairs available via the Nike Football App and Nike website on September 26th.
Source: Nike
Instagram’s ‘Save Draft’ feature is now available for everyone
Unlike Snapchat’s unpolished zaniness, Instagram’s tools and tone skewed users to share more curated photos. But since it didn’t save your photos midway through adding the right filters or effects, folks must either entirely edit and share a photo or lose all their changes. No longer. Six years after it launched and a month after testing it with select users, Instagram just gave everyone the “save draft” feature. It’s now live on Android and iOS without requiring a new update.
Trying to create a post that’s just right? With the latest update, you can save as a draft & come back to it later. https://t.co/7lZ0eyNtBC
— Instagram (@instagram) September 20, 2016
As its new help section explains, all you have to do is add an effect, filter, caption or location to a photo, then go back to the edit step and hit the back arrow to prompt the “Save Draft” function. Any indecisive Instagrammer will find it useful, but the biggest benefit might go to social media managers that can now queue up plenty of posts in drafts. If it isn’t live on your device just yet, give it time: Like the feature’s test phase in August, Instagram is likely rolling out to groups of users at a time.
Source: Instagram
WatchESPN’s live and on-demand streaming arrives on PS4
Rejoice, sports and console gaming fans: ESPN’s self-titled streaming app WatchESPN is now available on the PlayStation 4. According to the network, subscribers can now access ESPN’s live and on-demand content on every major streaming device, and non-subscribers can use the app to browse short-form clips and highlights. So now you can switch between a heated game of Call of Duty and the drone racing championships without putting down your DualShock 4.
“Gaming consoles have historically attracted significant engagement in minutes consumed for WatchESPN,” ESPN/Disney Senio VP Sean Breen said in a statement, “and with today’s launch, the app increases its distribution footprint to reach fans on the most widely adopted platforms.”
Unfortunately for cord-cutters, users will still need a cable subscription to access the majority of ESPN’s streaming content, but those with an authenticated subscription will have access to all of ESPN’s subsidiaries including ESPNEWS, ESPN Deportes, SEC Network, ESPN Goal Line and more.
While WatchESPN is also available for computers, smartphones and tablets, users on older PlayStaion consoles will have to wait a bit longer for a PS3 version of the app. That said, ESPN promises it will arrive “in time for the remainder of the college football season.”
Source: ESPN
Google brings natural language search to Drive
Starting today, Google Drive features Natural Language Processing to make it even easier to find that buried spreadsheet or long-lost docs. Taking a page from its Google Assistant playbook, the search box in Drive now allows for easy, human-oriented search queries like “find my budget spreadsheet from last December” or “show me presentations from Anissa.”
In typical Google style, the search bar will translate the query to a more robot-like string (as in: “budget Type:Spreadsheet” in that first example) and present you with autocomplete suggestions before presenting the results. According to Google Drive Product Manager Josh Smith, the natural language processing in Drive will get smarter the more you search.
Finally, the Drive team added a couple more often-requested features to the product today, including: autocorrect for misspelled search terms, the ability to split documents into multiple columns and an auto-save feature that creates a copy whenever importing and converting non-Google formats.
The new features are live now, although they will be rolling out gradually to all users.
Source: Google Blog
Lenovo’s sketch-ready Yoga Book ships on October 17th
When we first got our hands on Lenovo’s Yoga Book tablet, we found it to be more than just a Microsoft Surface imitator. The freeform touch field might make typing a bit to get used to, but it’s the ease of drawing on stylus or pen that makes it unique. As pre-orders open today for all models to ship out on October 17th, it remains unclear whether the novelty will be enough for the device to distinguish itself in a tanking tablet market.
The Yoga Book certainly has things going for it: At $500 for its Android version and $550 for Windows, it’s cheaper than the baseline iPad Pro and the Surface 3. Having a scribing tablet directly integrated will likely appeal to an artistic demographic more comfortable drawing on a Wacom-style pad than directly on the screen with an Apple Pencil. It even records your stylus sketches when the tablet is asleep, which should boost battery life at the expense of, well, not seeing what you’re writing or drawing.
But at the end of the day, the Yoga Book doesn’t have a keyboard. Despite haptic feedback in the pad and autocorrect in the Android version, our reviewer struggled to type accurately, and doubted Lenovo’s claim that it would take about two hours to adapt. If a user’s work depends on quickly and accurately getting words on a page, this might not be the tablet for them. Lenovo is betting big that the physical process of pen-to-pad has secretly been what many tablet users have secretly been missing. We’ll see whether it’s enough to carve market share away from Apple and Microsoft.
Source: 9to5 Google
Dark Sky’s hyperlocal weather app is now available on the web
Four-year-old mobile weather app Dark Sky is mostly known for two things: its beautifully rendered radar maps and startlingly accurate hyperlocal weather predictions. The latter was Dark Sky’s killer feature by far, and used your smartphone’s GPS to let you know exactly when and how long you’d get rained on. With notifications like “Heavy rain starting in 12 min.” it can be a lifesaver in rainy regions or places prone to sudden thunderstorms. Now those same features, along with a suite of new maps and visualizations, are available on your desktop via DarkSky.net.
Dark Sky’s co-Founder Adam Grossman admits to Wired that the new site is a bit of a promotional effort for Dark Sky’s mobile app, which will set you back $4 on iOS or $3 per year on Android. But the web version adds some powerful new extra features you won’t find in the mobile app, like an optimized layout and the ability to zoom in and explore Dark Sky’s trademark map and globe visualizations in even finer detail. An experimental new feature even allows users to explore microclimate effects so you can check the weather at altitude in the Himalayas or the temperature different at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Naturally, everything is embeddable and there’s an API for third-party developers to play around with.
Because the site itself is supported by app sales, it is also blissfully free of advertisements and sensational WEATHER-MAGEDDON headlines. A trip to the homepage presents you with all the current weather data front and center, plus an eight-day forecast that drills down into hour-by-hour temperature and precipitation data.
Finally, the web launch follows an updated version of the Dark Sky app for iOS 10, which brings even richer notifications, a lock screen widget and new Apple Watch improvements.
Via: Wired
Source: DarkSky.net
Paid streaming services provide a big boost to the music industry
Streaming continues to play a bigger role in music industry revenue and now it’s starting to provide some real help offsetting declining album sales in the US. In its mid-year report, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) reports that the industry saw its biggest growth in the first half of 2016 since the 1990s, up 8.1 percent year-over-year to $3.4 billion. In terms of music streaming as a whole, revenue from those services was up 57 percent during the first half of the year and it now makes up 47 percent of the music industry’s total revenue. That’s up from 32 percent of the total revenue this time last year.
Streaming was already the biggest money maker for the music industry in the US and now it’s starting to make a real difference in offsetting the decline of album sales. First half revenue from streaming subscriptions hit $1 billion for the first time, showing 112 percent growth. Both physical and digital downloads continue to slide (down 17 percent and 14 percent, respectively), so the streaming boon will need to continue to add customers to make up the difference.
RIAA chairman and CEO Cary Sherman took to Medium to explain that while the music industry saw some growth for the first time in more than a decade, the compensation rates from streaming services are still lower than they should be. “Despite the massive consumer demand for music, the damning reality remains that music is fundamentally undervalued,” Sherman said. “Many services rake in billions of dollars for themselves on the backs of music’s popularity but pay only relative pennies for artists and labels.”
Sherman also called on Google to do a better job taking down unauthorized material that’s posted to YouTube. The RIAA CEO said that with all or the things that have been achieved in Mountain View, surely the company can do a better job of policing unlicensed songs. Sherman noted that Congressional reform won’t be the only answer to make up the revenue gap. He explained that cooperation between the industry and the companies running streaming services could go a long way to ensure everyone is fairly compensated. The music industry needs to make the most it can out of streaming as album sales continue their decline, so fair compensation will be a hot topic for the foreseeable future.
Via: Bloomberg
Source: RIAA (PDF), RIAA (Medium)
Hillary Clinton email operator may have asked Reddit for help
When you’re involved with a highly sensitive (and possibly illegal) IT operation, it’s generally a bad idea to post on social networks about it… and one man is learning that the hard way. Reddit users on a pro-Donald Trump subreddit have discovered evidence suggesting that Paul Combetta, a Platte River staffer involved in managing Hillary Clinton’s private email server, might have asked Reddit for help with sanitizing and deleting older messages. The connections are circumstantial, as US News says, but there are too many to simply dismiss out of hand.
To start, a user named Stonetear (a nickname linked to Combetta online) asked Reddit how to strip out a “very VIP” person’s email address from archived messages on July 24th, 2014 in a bid to prevent them from being “exposed to anyone.” Conveniently, that’s the day after a House committee on Benghazi reached a deal with the State Department on handing over records (as documented in the FBI’s report on Clinton’s server). On December 10th of that year, Stonetear asked about a customer who wanted a standard 60-day data retention policy for some email users — around the same time as Clinton aide Cheryl Mills asked for a 60-day window, defying government retention rules. Given that Combetta is known to have belatedly followed such an order in March 2015, when news of the server broke, it’s hard not to raise an eyebrow.
Stonetear hasn’t helped allay suspicions, either. The user deleted the Reddit posts in question just hours after the alleged Clinton connections surfaced, and they’re surviving only thanks to quick-thinking online archivists.
A Republican heading the House Science Committee, Lamar Smith, is calling for interviews with Combetta and fellow Platte River employee Bill Thornton in the wake of the discoveries. He’s concerned that the FBI didn’t know about these facts before declaring that Clinton hadn’t violated the law, and has threatened to subpoena the staffers if there isn’t a scheduled interview by the 23rd.
Whether or not Smith and Reddit’s Trump supporters get what they want is another matter. Combetta has already invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination while testifying, and the US Attorney General has already said her office won’t bring charges against Clinton. Even if there’s smoking gun evidence linking Combetta to shady email server activity, it may be a case of too little, too late for those hoping to bring Clinton to trial.
Via: US News, The Hill
Source: Reddit, Archive.is (1), (2)
Firefox adds a ‘Narrate’ mode to take your eyes off the screen
Mozilla’s latest Firefox adds a couple new and refined features intended to improve the time you spend reading online. While Firefox released an ad-stripping, layout-simplifying Reader Mode way back in 2012, the newest release brings a new “Narrate” feature and additional tweaks for a better reading (or listening) experience.
Mozilla might be a little late to the game compared to Apple’s robotic VoiceOver, but Firefox’s new text-to-speech feature helpfully narrates articles so you can step away from the screen or swap to another tab and listen at your leisure. Reader mode is also getting some additional customization options that allow users to tweak the text, font size or reader voice, as well as new light and dark themes for daylight or nighttime reading that’s easier on the eyes.
If you’re on an Android device, Firefox now helpfully stores some previously viewed pages and data so you can interact with pages you’ve already visited, even if you hop on a plane or your data connection drops out. Finally, the latest update also brings better multiprocess support, which should translate to a much more responsive and much less crash-y web experience. Mozilla says it has improved overall responsiveness by a whopping 400% for users who forego browser add-ons, and the plan is to add support for compatible add-ons by 2017. At that point, Firefox will also flip the switch on Flash, which should do wonders for browser responsiveness.
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