"Security researchers are blasting Apple for a feature in the latest Big Sur release of macOS that allows some Apple apps to bypass content filters and VPNs..." reports Threatpost. "While users assumed Apple would fix the flaw before the OS emerged from beta into full release, this doesn't appear to have happened."

"Beginning with macOS Catalina released last year, Apple added a list of 50 Apple-specific apps and processes that were to be exempted from firewalls like Little Snitch and Lulu," explains Ars Technica: The undocumented exemption, which didn't take effect until firewalls were rewritten to implement changes in Big Sur, first came to light in October. Patrick Wardle, a security researcher at Mac and iOS enterprise developer Jamf, further documented the new behavior over the weekend. To demonstrate the risks that come with this move, Wardle — a former hacker for the NSA — demonstrated how malware developers could exploit the change to make an end-run around a tried-and-true security measure...

Wardle tweeted a portion of a bug report he submitted to Apple during the Big Sur beta phase. It specifically warns that "essential security tools such as firewalls are ineffective" under the change.

Apple has yet to explain the reason behind the change.

According to Chrome product manager Mark Chang, Google's version of Chrome that support ARM Macs is now available to download. The Verge reports: In theory, a native version of the notoriously resource-hungry browser might run more efficiently on Apple's Arm-based computers. In our reviews of the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini equipped with the new M1 chip, though, we found that the version of Chrome built for Intel chips already runs well on Apple's new Macs, so hopefully this native version runs even better. You'll be able to pick which version of Chrome to download from the browser's website.

Google began rolling out a new version of Chrome on Tuesday, touting the "the largest gain in Chrome performance in years" thanks to some under-the-hood changes. The company's blog about the new release didn't mention anything about a version optimized for Apple's Arm-based Macs.

Reviews are starting to pour in of Apple's MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Mini featuring the new M1 ARM-based processor -- and they're overwhelmingly positive. "As with the Air, the Pro's performance exceeds expectations," writes Nilay Patel via The Verge.

"Apple's next chapter offers strong performance gains, great battery and starts at $999," says Brian Heater via TechCrunch.

"When Apple said it would start producing Macs with its own system-on-chip processors, custom CPU and GPU silicon (and a bunch of other stuff) to replace parts from Intel and AMD, we figured it would be good. I never expected it would be this good," says Jason Cross in his review of the MacBook Air M1.

"The M1 is a serious, serious contender for one of the all-time most efficient and highest-performing architectures we've ever seen deploy," says ExtremeTech's Joel Hruska.

"Spending a few days with the 2020 Mac mini has shown me that it's a barnburner of a miniature desktop PC," writes Chris Welch via The Verge. "It outperforms most Intel Macs in several benchmarks, runs apps reliably, and offers a fantastic day-to-day experience whether you're using it for web browsing and email or for creative editing and professional work. That potential will only grow when Apple inevitably raises the RAM ceiling and (hopefully) brings back those missing USB ports..."

"Quibbling about massively parallel workloads -- which the M1 wasn't designed for -- aside, Apple has clearly broken the ice on high-performance ARM desktop and laptop designs," writes Jim Salter via Ars Technica. "Yes, you can build an ARM system that competes strongly with x86, even at very high performance levels."

"The M1-equipped MacBook Air now packs far better performance than its predecessors, rivaling at times the M1-based MacBook Pro. At $999, it's the best value among macOS laptops," concludes PCMag.

"For developers, the Apple Silicon Macs also represent the very first full-fledged Arm machines on the market that have few-to-no compromises. This is a massive boost not just for Apple, but for the larger Arm ecosystem and the growing Arm cloud-computing business," writes Andrei Frumusanu via AnandTech. "Overall, Apple hit it out of the park with the M1."

Google has released today version 87 of its Chrome browser, a release that comes with a security fix for the NAT Slipstream attack technique and a broader deprecation of the FTP protocol. From a report: Todays' release is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and iOS. Users can update to the new version via Chrome's built-in update utility. While in previous versions, Google has shipped some changes to Chrome settings and UI elements, almost all the major new Chrome 87 features are aimed at web developers. In Chrome 87, we have new APIs and updates to Chrome's built-in Developer Tools, such as: Support for the new Cookie Store API; new features to allow easier modification of web fonts via CSS; a new feature to let websites enumerate all the locally installed fonts; support for pan, tilt, and zoom controls on webcam streams; and, support for debugging WebAuthn operations via the Chrome DevTools.

Mozilla today launched Firefox 83 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. An anonymous reader shares a report: Firefox 83's highlight feature is HTTPS-Only Mode, in which the browser attempts to establish fully secure connections to every website (just like the EFF's HTTPS Everywhere). If it can't, Firefox asks for your permission before connecting to a website that doesn't support secure connections. To enable HTTPS-Only Mode, click on Firefox's menu button, hit Preferences, then Privacy & Security, scroll down to HTTPS-Only Mode, and choose "Enable HTTPS-Only Mode in all windows." [...] Firefox 83 also brings performance improvements (improved page load performance by up to 15%, page responsiveness by up to 12%, and reduced memory usage by up to 8%). Firefox 83 is also the penultimate version of the web browser that will run Flash software; Firefox 85 will completely disable it when it arrives on Jan. 12, 2021.

Last week, Apple released macOS Big Sur and the rollout was anything but smooth. The mass upgrade caused the Apple servers responsible for checking if a user opens an app not downloaded from the App Store to slow to a crawl. Apple eventually fixed the problem, "but concerns about paralyzed Macs were soon replaced by an even bigger worry -- the vast amount of personal data Apple, and possibly others, can glean from Macs performing certificate checks each time a user opens an app that didn't come from the App Store," writes Dan Goodin via Ars Technica. From the report: Before Apple allows an app into the App Store, it must first pass a review that vets its security. Users can configure the macOS feature known as Gatekeeper to allow only these approved apps, or they can choose a setting that also allows the installation of third-party apps, as long as these apps are signed with a developer certificate issued by Apple. To make sure the certificate hasn't been revoked, macOS uses OCSP -- short for the industry standard Online Certificate Status Protocol -- to check its validity. [...] Somehow, the mass number of people upgrading to Big Sur on Thursday seems to have caused the servers at ocsp.apple.com to become overloaded but not fall over completely. The server couldn't provide the all clear, but it also didn't return an error that would trigger the soft fail. The result was huge numbers of Mac users left in limbo.

The post Your Computer Isn't Yours was one of the catalysts for the mass concern. It noted that the simple HTML get-requests performed by OCSP were unencrypted. That meant that not only was Apple able to build profiles based on our minute-by-minute Mac usage, but so could ISPs or anyone else who could view traffic passing over the network. (To prevent falling into an infinite authentication loop, virtually all OCSP traffic is unencrypted, although responses are digitally signed.) Fortunately, less alarmist posts like this one provided more helpful background. The hashes being transmitted weren't unique to the app itself but rather the Apple-issued developer certificate. That still allowed people to infer when an app such as Tor, Signal, Firefox, or Thunderbird was being used, but it was still less granular than many people first assumed. The larger point was that, in most respects, the data collection by ocsp.apple.com wasn't much different from the information that already gets transmitted in real time through OCSP every time we visit a website. [...] In short, though, the takeaway was the same: the potential loss of privacy from OCSP is a trade-off we make in an effort to check the validity of the certificate authenticating a website we want to visit or a piece of software we want to install.

In an attempt to further assure Mac users, Apple on Monday published this post. It explains what the company does and doesn't do with the information collected through Gatekeeper and a separate feature known as notarization, which checks the security even of non-App Store apps. The post went on to say that in the next year, Apple will provide a new protocol to check if developer certificates have been revoked, provide "strong protections against server failure," and present a new OS setting for users who want to opt out of all of this. [...] People who don't trust OCSP checks for Mac apps can turn them off by editing the Mac hosts file. Everyone else can move along.

Apple has updated a documentation page detailing the company's next steps to prevent last week's Gatekeeper bug from happening again. The company plans to implement the fixes over the next year. From a report: Apple had a difficult launch day last week. The company released macOS Big Sur, a major update for macOS. Apple then suffered from server-side issues. Third-party apps failed to launch as your Mac couldn't check the developer certificate of the app. That feature, called Gatekeeper, makes sure that you didn't download a malware app that disguises itself as a legit app. If the certificate doesn't match, macOS prevents the app launch. Many have been concerned about the privacy implications of the security feature. Does Apple log every app you launch on your Mac to gain competitive insights on app usage? It turns out it's easy to answer that question as the server doesn't mandate encryption. Jacopo Jannone intercepted an unencrypted network request and found out that Apple is not secretly spying on you. Gatekeeper really does what it says it does. "We have never combined data from these checks with information about Apple users or their devices. We do not use data from these checks to learn what individual users are launching or running on their devices," the company wrote.

Engadget writes: According to MacRumors, users on Apple's forums and Reddit are stuck with a black screen when trying to update their late 2013 or mid 2014 13-inch MacBook Pro models to Big Sur... An engineer investigating one customer's problems appeared to have resolved the issue after removing an IC chip for the HDMI port, but it's not certain that's the cause.
Citing user reports, MacRumors writes ominously that "Key reset combinations, including NVRAM, SMC, safe mode, and internet recovery, are all reportedly inaccessible after attempting to install the update, leaving no way to bypass the static black screen."

"Earlier this week Apple announced their new, ARM-based 'Apple Silicon' machines to the world in a slick marketing event that had many of us reaching for our credit cards," writes Mike Croucher, technical evangelist at The Numerical Algorithms Group.

"Simultaneously, The Numerical Algorithms Group announced that they had ported their Fortran Compiler to the new platform. At the time of writing this is the only Fortran compiler publicly available for Apple Silicon although that will likely change soon as open source Fortran compilers get updated."

An anonymous Slashdot reader offers this analysis: Apple Silicon currently has no open source Fortran compiler and Apple themselves are one of the few silicon manufacturers who don't have their own Fortran compiler. You could be forgiven for thinking that this doesn't matter to most users... if it wasn't for the fact that sizeable percentages of foundational data science platforms such as R and SciPy are written in Fortran.
Croucher argues that "More modern systems, such as R, make direct use of a lot of this code because it is highly performant and, perhaps more importantly, has been battle tested in production for decades. Numerical computing is hard (even when all of your instincts suggest otherwise) and when someone demonstrably does it right, it makes good sense to reuse rather than reinvent..."

"The community needs and will demand open source (or at least free) Fortran compilers if data scientists are ever going to realise the full potential of Apple's new hardware and I have no doubt that these are on the way. Other major silicon providers (e.g. Intel, AMD, NEC and NVIDIA/PGI) have their own Fortran compiler that co-exist with the open ones. Perhaps Apple should join the club..."

Yesterday, Apple released the latest version of macOS: macOS Big Sur (also known as macOS 11.0) and the rollout was anything but smooth. Many users have complained about Apple services such as iMessage, or even Apple Pay, not working for them. Personally, my 5K iMac (2013), which isn't even compatible with Big Sur, ground to a halt yesterday, as I was unable to open up Google Chrome or any of my Adobe Creative Cloud apps. Even navigating my system preferences was painfully slow.

According to developer Jeff Johnson, the reason apps were failing to launch was because a process called "trustd" failed to attempt to connect to Apple's Online Certificate Status Protocol website (oscp.apple.com). "[D]enying the connection between "trustd" and oscp.apple.com fixes the issue, as does disabling a Mac's connection to the internet," notes Apple Insider. Slashdot reader shanen shares their experience: The story is about different problems, so I'll just start with my own anecdote. The 12GB download was amazingly slow. I'm being charitable and willing to attribute that to high demand. Eventually it did finish. The installation process didn't seem to be too bad. Then I did something with the Mac and it immediately wanted another upgrade. Turned out to be a double upgrade of two slightly different versions of some tools, but another (slow) GB bites the dust. Meanwhile, it decided to do that double-upgrade again? One of those two must have succeeded, because the third attempt failed with the appropriate notice that it had succeeded.

Bottom line? Not reassuring, but it seems to be okay now. I should have made a note about what triggered the extra GB, but I don't think I did anything unusual that should have required an OS-level extension of the system. Ergo, whatever was going on, I think it belonged in the original 12 GB download... Disclaimer needed: I just had an extremely negative interaction with Apple about the battery swelling problem in the course of attempting to consider whether or not I should upgrade my old MacBook Pro. It started on the Apple website, which was amazingly unhelpful even after it dangled a trade-in offer of some kind. Then it continued with a long phone call to a very kind and friendly person who seemed to know not so much, though he eventually led me to the search that revealed "Optimized Battery Charging" as an option that my old Mac cannot use. By the way, new iPhones apparently have it, too. So right now I think Apple finally figured out how to stop the battery swelling, but I am still screwed. I regard the Mac as a sunk cost, and the second rule of sunk cost is to NOT throw good money after bad. The first rule is that no one wants to talk about their mistakes, eh?

So did your upgrade to Big Sur go better than mine? I really hope so. Why share the misery? We have plenty of that with "He whose name need not be mentioned" anymore.

Security researcher Jeffrey Paul, writes in a blog post: On modern versions of macOS, you simply can't power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored. It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it. Lots of people didn't realize this, because it's silent and invisible and it fails instantly and gracefully when you're offline, but today the server got really slow and it didn't hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone's apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet. Because it does this using the internet, the server sees your IP, of course, and knows what time the request came in. An IP address allows for coarse, city-level and ISP-level geolocation, and allows for a table that has the following headings: Date, Time, Computer, ISP, City, State, Application Hash; Apple (or anyone else) can, of course, calculate these hashes for common programs: everything in the App Store, the Creative Cloud, Tor Browser, cracking or reverse engineering tools, whatever.

This means that Apple knows when you're at home. When you're at work. What apps you open there, and how often. They know when you open Premiere over at a friend's house on their Wi-Fi, and they know when you open Tor Browser in a hotel on a trip to another city. "Who cares?" I hear you asking. Well, it's not just Apple. This information doesn't stay with them: These OCSP requests are transmitted unencrypted. Everyone who can see the network can see these, including your ISP and anyone who has tapped their cables. These requests go to a third-party CDN run by another company, Akamai. Since October of 2012, Apple is a partner in the US military intelligence community's PRISM spying program, which grants the US federal police and military unfettered access to this data without a warrant, any time they ask for it. In the first half of 2019 they did this over 18,000 times, and another 17,500+ times in the second half of 2019.

This data amounts to a tremendous trove of data about your life and habits, and allows someone possessing all of it to identify your movement and activity patterns. For some people, this can even pose a physical danger to them. Now, it's been possible up until today to block this sort of stuff on your Mac using a program called Little Snitch (really, the only thing keeping me using macOS at this point). In the default configuration, it blanket allows all of this computer-to-Apple communication, but you can disable those default rules and go on to approve or deny each of these connections, and your computer will continue to work fine without snitching on you to Apple. The version of macOS that was released today, 11.0, also known as Big Sur, has new APIs that prevent Little Snitch from working the same way. The new APIs don't permit Little Snitch to inspect or block any OS level processes. Additionally, the new rules in macOS 11 even hobble VPNs so that Apple apps will simply bypass them.

The first benchmark of Apple's M1 chip shows that the multi-core performance of the new MacBook Air with 8GB RAM beats out all of the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro models, including the 10th-generation high-end 2.4GHz Intel Core i9 model. "That high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro earned a single-core score of 1096 and a multi-core score of 6870," reports MacRumors. The MacBook Air with M1 chip and 8GB RAM features a single-core score of 1687 and a multi-core score of 7433. From the report: Though the M1 chip is outperforming the 16-inch MacBook Pro models when it comes to raw CPU benchmarks, the 16-inch MacBook Pro likely offers better performance in other areas such as the GPU as those models have high-power discrete GPUs. It's worth noting that there are likely to be some performance differences between the MacBook Pro and the "MacBook Air" even though they're using the same M1 chip because the "MacBook Air" has a fanless design and the MacBook Pro has an new Apple-designed cooling system. There's also a benchmark for the Mac mini, though, and it has about the same scores. The "Mac mini" with M1 chip that was benchmarked earned a single-core score of 1682 and a multi-core score of 7067.

There's also a benchmark for the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 chip and 16GB RAM that has a single-core score of 1714 and a multi-core score of 6802. Like the "MacBook Air," it has a 3.2GHz base frequency. A few other "MacBook Air" benchmarks have surfaced too with similar scores, and the full list is available on Geekbench. [...] When compared to existing devices, the M1 chip in the "MacBook Air" outperforms all iOS devices. For comparison's sake, the iPhone 12 Pro earned a single-core score of 1584 and a multi-core score of 3898, while the highest ranked iOS device on Geekbench's charts, the A14 iPad Air, earned a single-core score of 1585 and a multi-core score of 4647.

Apple on Thursday released the latest version of macOS: macOS Big Sur (also known as macOS 11.0), which is available to download now -- assuming you have a compatible Mac. From a report: Big Sur is one of the biggest updates to Apple's laptop and desktop software in years, featuring a top-to-bottom redesign of the interface, icons, and menu bar, a new control center UI borrowed from iOS, widgets (also borrowed from iOS), and a variety of other improvements (see here for the full list). It's such a big change that Apple is actually moving on from the OS X / OS 10 branding that it's been using for Macs for almost 20 years. Apple's also adding some new privacy-focused features, including better tracking information in Safari and new privacy data in the Mac App Store for any apps you download. ArsTechnica has published a comprehensive review of the new operating system. An excerpt from their conclusion: The Good
The bright, fresh visual style mostly looks pretty good.
The Control Center (and other changes to the upper-right section of the Menu Bar) are genuinely useful additions.
The Messages app finally catches up to its iOS/iPadOS counterpart, thanks to Catalyst.
The APFS version of Time Machine seems like an improvement, though we'll need to wait to see what its long-term reliability is like.
Aside from the old AFP file-sharing protocol and the Network Utility, Big Sur doesn't remove too many things or add many new security settings that will break apps. There may be some visual issues, but my experience has actually been that Apple breaks a lot fewer apps moving from Catalina to Big Sur than it did moving from Mojave to Catalina.

The Bad
A general reduction in contrast makes it harder to discern the difference between many buttons and controls at a glance.
If you want to fix any of these contrast issues in the Accessibility settings, it should be possible to increase contrast or reduce transparency in certain places without making it an all-or-nothing setting. Some of the new buttons and icons are nice. Some of them are less nice.
Big Sur on Apple Silicon Macs will give up the ability to run Windows in a virtual machine or on a separate partition, though Intel Macs can still do both things.

The Ugly
As usual, Apple is just a year or two more aggressive about dropping support for old Macs than I think they really need to be.

Gordon Mah Ung, writing at PC World: Let me just say it outloud, OK? Apple is full of it. I'm referring to Apple's claim that its fanless, Arm-based MacBook Air is "faster than 98 percent of PC laptops." Yes, you read that correctly: Apple officials literally claimed that the new MacBook Air using Apple's custom M1 chip is faster than 98 percent of all PC laptops sold this year. Typically, when a company makes such a claim, it publishes a benchmark, a performance test or actual details on what it's basing that marketing claim on. This to prevent lawyers from launching out of missile silos across the world. Apple's website restates the claim by stating: "M1 is faster than the chips in 98 percent of PC laptops sold in the past year." The site also includes a detail note that states: "Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip and 16GB of RAM. Performance measured using select industry-standard benchmarks. PC configurations from publicly available sales data over the last 12 months. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect approximate performance of MacBook Pro."

So, not only does Apple not say what tests it's basing its claims on, it doesn't even say where it sources the comparable laptops. Does that mean the new fanless MacBook Air is faster than, say, Asus' stupidly fast Ryzen 4000 based, GeForce RTX 2060-based Zephyrus G14? Does it mean the MacBook Air is faster than Alienware's updated Area 51M? The answer, I'm going to guess is "no." Not at all. Is it faster than the miniLED-based MSI Creator 17? Probably not, either. And what is that "performance" claim hinged on? CPU performance? GPU performance? Performance running Windows? Is it using the same application running on both platforms? Is it experiential? Is this running Red Dead Redemption II or Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War? Is it running CyberLink's PowerDirector? Is it running Fortnite? While I have absolutely no idea what Apple is basing its claims on, I can tell you that I am 98 percent sure that any of the above laptops listed will wreck the MacBook Air doing any of the tasks I just named.

When Apple makes its claims, my guess is they are comparing the new M1 to Intel-based processors ranging from Atom to Celeron N to Core i3 and up, all with integrated graphics. But by not defining the word "performance," all this becomes just pure marketing spin. And is it really fair to compare a $999 MacBook to one that costs $150? Because $150 PCs are included in the 98 percent of laptops sold. Maybe Apple should compare its own $150 MacBook Air against a $150 Chromebook or Windows-based laptop. Of course, that would mean Apple would have to sell a product that most people can afford. I have no doubt the M1 will be impressive, but do I think it's going to compare to 8-cores of Ryzen 4000 performance or a GeForce RTX 2060? No.

Today, Apple showed off the first Macs powered by its new M1 CPU, delivering impressive performance and excellent battery life, however they won't come without any compromises. According to Engadget, citing Paul Gerhardt's tweet, "tech spec pages for the new machines reveal that none of them are compatible with external GPUs that connect via Thunderbolt." From the report: Only some people would require add-on oomph in any case, but Apple's support for external graphics cards gave it some extra gaming cachet and informed creative professionals their needs would continue to be met. Now, they'll have to wait and see if things change for higher-end models as Apple Silicon spreads throughout the company's PC lineup.

There's also been some focus on the fact that the 13-inch MacBook Pro M1 models only include two USB-C ports onboard instead of four, but whether or not you think that's enough ports, it's consistent with the cheaper Intel models it replaces. A more striking limitation is the one we've already noted, that the MBP is limited to 16GB of RAM -- if you think you'll need 32GB then you'll have to opt for an Intel-powered model.

At the end of Apple's big event today, where it launched three new Macs powered by the company's new M1 chip, the company had a surprise guest star: actor John Hodgman reprising his role as the PC guy from Apple's "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC" commercials that ran in the mid-2000s. The Verge reports: In the short video, Hodgman's put-upon PC reacts to the announcement of Apple's new M1-powered Macs, complaining about the improved performance and battery life that the new chip purportedly offers on the updated Macs, compared to what PCs can do. (Absent is Justin Long's Mac character, who made up the other half of the ad spots.)

The original ads -- launched in 2006, just after Apple began its last major architecture transition to Intel chips -- echoed a similar style, with Long's character extolling the virtues of the Mac while the hapless PC character would argue that the Windows side of things was just as good. It's not clear whether Apple will be resurrecting the ad campaign for the new line of M1 Macs, but it was a cute way to end the announcement as the company sets off on its next era of laptops and desktops. You can watch the clip featuring PC guy here.

Apple announced three Macs today that are powered by the company's new M1 chip. They are: MacBook Air: The first Mac that will be powered by the M1 chip is the MacBook Air. According to Apple, the new Air is 3.5x faster with up to 5x graphics performance than the previous generation thanks to the M1 processor. The new MacBook Air doesn't have a fan, so it'll be completely quiet at all times. It has up to 18 hours of total battery life when watching videos or 15 hours when browsing the web. You can get it with up to 2TB of storage and 16GB of memory, with the price still starting at $999.

Mac Mini: Additionally, Apple will release an Apple Silicon-powered Mac Mini. It's the same design Apple used for the DTK, but with the M1 processor. The new Mac Mini starts at $699, a drop in the price of $100, and supports up to a 6K display via USB-C Thunderbolt ports with USB-4 support.

MacBook Pro: Lastly, Apple is updating the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 chip. Again, Apple touted performance gains in the MacBook Pro with 2.8x CPU gains and 5x GPU gains thanks to the M1 in the MacBook Pro. It keeps its cooling system but now gets 17 hours of battery life when browsing the web, or 20 hours when watching video. Apple kept the price of the MacBook Pro at $1,299 starting price.

Sony confirmed today that the existing PS4 will soon let you access your other PlayStation consoles remotely, including the PS5: "We're updating PS4's Remote Play feature. Now, in addition to being able to access your PS4 from a PC or a mobile device, your PS4 can access other consoles via Remote Play too, right on your TV. This includes the ability to connect to your PS5 and stream a PS5 game to your PS4 so you can play it there." The Verge reports: VGC and Eurogamer reported today that a "PS5 Remote Play" app has already popped up on the PS4, offering up to a 1080p stream from your new console to your existing one. Perhaps you'll hook up your PS4 to the bedroom TV -- or the living room if you keep your primary console in the den? You don't necessarily need a PS4 to stream a PS5 to another room of your house, though, since the PS Remote Play app is getting updated on other platforms as well. The Windows version not only adds PS5 support at 1080p but also HDR. Sony's PS Remote Play apps for Android and iOS have been updated for the PS5, and we'd be surprised if the Mac version wasn't ready as well.

The chip expected to be at the core of the first Apple Silicon Mac -- the "A14X" -- may have been benchmarked just days before the next Apple event. From a report: The alleged CPU benchmarks for the "A14X" show a 1.80GHz processor capable of turbo-boosting to 3.10GHz marking this the first custom Apple Silicon to ever clock above 3GHz. It is an 8-core processor with big-little arrangement. The GPU results show 8GB of RAM will be included with the processor. The single-core benchmark for the "A14X" scored 1634 vs the A12Z at 1118. The A14 scored 1,583 points for single-core tests, which is expected as single-core results shouldn't change much between the regular and "X" models. The multi-core benchmark for the "A14X" scored 7220 vs the A12Z at 4657. The A14 scored 4198 for multi-core, which means the "A14X" delivers a marked increase in performance in the sorts of environments that the GeekBench test suite focuses on. The additional RAM and graphics capabilities boost this result much higher than the standard iPhone processor. For comparison, a 16-inch MacBook Pro with the Intel Core-i9 processor scores 1096 for single and 6869 for multi-core tests. This means the alleged "A14X" outperforms the existing MacBook Pro lineup by a notable margin.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mac Rumors: Earlier this week, Japanese publication Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun reported that Sony will supply Apple with OLED microdisplays for its widely rumored AR/VR glasses, as spotted by Mac Otakara. The report has since been corroborated by display industry analyst Ross Young, who said multiple sources have informed him that Apple is indeed planning to use Sony's microdisplay technology for its head-mounted accessory. According to FRAMOS, a supplier of embedded vision technologies, Sony's OLED microdisplays are small, cutting-edge displays with an ultra-fast response rate, ultra-high contrast, a wide color gamut for precise color reproduction, high luminance, low reflectance, and other benefits that would be ideal for Apple's glasses. Sony's microdisplays also have integrated drivers for a thin and light design, and power-saving modes are available for longer battery life.

Young said the glasses will use a 0.5-inch display with a 1,280x960 resolution, and these specs appear to correspond with Sony's ECX337A component. According to Sony's website, this microdisplay in particular has a max brightness of 1,000 nits, an ultra-high contrast of 100,000:1, and an ultra-fast response rate of 0.01 ms or less. The high contrast provided by Sony's microdisplays allows an additional information layer to appear seamlessly, and not as an overlay. "This information is simply added to the background for a 'real AR' experience," according to FRAMOS. According to the Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun, Apple plans to release its AR/VR glasses in 2021, but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo does not expect a release until 2022 at the earliest. Young also believes that the glasses will be introduced in the first half of 2022.