2026-07-02 21:00:00
Sony had a double-whammy of press releases yesterday. First, they announced that they were ditching physical game discs in 2028:
As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028.
And they also announced that they will be closing the PS3 and Vita digital storefronts over the next year:
As the PlayStation Store continues to evolve to support modern commerce systems, including updated payment processing standards, PS3 and PS Vita are no longer able to support these updates at the level required. As a result, we will need to close PlayStation Store on these devices in the timeframes as follows:
As you might expect, people are not thrilled about these announcements. As Andrew Webster wrote on The Verge, this is not good for game preservation, as once these stores go away, there is no way for new players to get these older games. In the case of the PS3 and Vita, there were physical games released for those platforms, so even after these stores close, people will be able to find and buy these games used on places like eBay. However, in an all-digital world, that goes away.
I'm personally not super upset about this, although I also wouldn't argue this is good news either. So let me just rattle through my thoughts on this.
I can't help but wonder how many physical games the people who are vocally upset about this today actually buy. I know there are still people who buy physical games, but the numbers are pretty astronomical that the vast majority of people buy digital games and have been doing so for a decade.
A fundamental reality of storefronts is that they need to get updated with things like security updates. The PS3 launched 20 years ago, and the standards for payment security have leveled up considerably since then. This is actually a problem you run into on old computers that haven't been updated to modern TLS standards. As an example, I have an old iMac from around the same era that's really cool and can run local apps just fine, but when you open the web browser, most websites won't load because the browser is so out of date it can't support modern security standards.
It's worth noting that Sony is not removing the ability to download games you've previously purchased on a PS3 or Vita, so if you want to go back to those games, you can still do that. Presumably that will go away eventually one day as well, though.
The game preservation angle comes up quite a bit, and I get it to an extent. Although I have to wonder if we had all the data, would we see that more people played PS3 and Vita games for the first time over the last year by buying them from PS3 and Vita devices, or by emulating them on PCs? I think there's a very good chance that it's the latter, and I think there's a very good chance it's by several orders of magnitude. I'm all for game preservation and making sure people have easy access to old games, but I'm not sure that closing 20 year old stores and going fully digital kills this.
I've previously written about my joy I felt by taking old video game cartridges, popping them in new hardware, and having them just work. We've kind of lost that at a fundamental level with console video games for quite a while now. And a move to all digital just makes this even more at the default state.
One of the things that's hurt when abandoning physical games is affordability. I'm not even talking about those moments when the physical copy can be gotten for cheaper than the digital one. I'm talking about things like sharing a game with friends, something that's especially common amongst younger people. There's also the ability to resell a game, which completely disappears when going digital. I'm lucky enough to be able to buy the games I want to play without worrying too much about this, but that's not the case for everyone, and losing that ability to offset your gaming costs is a real concern for many people and I don't want to discount it.
The timing of this announcement isn't ideal, considering just a few days previous Sony announced that they were actually removing hundreds of movies from the libraries of people who had previously bought them. This is actually worse than what Sony's doing with the game stores, and I think this is the fear people have will happen for games they've previously purchased digitally. One day they just won't be able to play them anymore because they didn't technically own them, they just had licenses that could be revoked at any point for any reason.
At the end of the day, Sony is taking something away that consumers used to have, and there's no way to spin that in a way that will make people happy. Nor should they be, to be clear! I'm certainly not cheering this news, but at the same time, in a world full of things to be outraged about, I feel like this deserves about a 4 on the outrage scale. If anything, it furthers my belief in the power and importance of emulation and why it's such a core piece of art preservation in this medium.
2026-07-02 19:00:06
Federico Viticci: Headless Macs and Hamstrung iPads
In a funny twist of fate, Apple spent years trying to make iPadOS catch up to macOS on the surface, only for macOS’ underlying nature to unlock a new generation of apps that are rewriting the rules of modern software. No amount of windowing and menu bars can change the fact that neither Claude Cowork nor Codex will ever be possible on the current version of iPadOS.
For the last couple of years, I have made the point that pretty much every meaningful update to iPadOS feels like a collection of features designed to make it behave more like a Mac. Yet, despite these efforts, those who love the Mac, including myself, a lapsed iPad-only user, still are not making the switch to the tablet. The feeling I have had for a while now is that, try as it might, the iPad is stuck in an asymptotic update flow. It gets ever closer to the Mac with each software release, but it will never actually get there.
I think it's reasonable to say that fifteen years ago, the iPad was where more software innovation was happening compared to the Mac. Today, however, we've moved onto a new era. As Federico points out, it feels like iPadOS has recently been playing catch-up with the macOS of a few years ago. Meanwhile, there has been considerable innovation and change in software on the Mac, widening the gap between the two platforms once again for a lot of people.
The critical thing to recognize is that this wave of innovation on the Mac did not happen because Apple released some big macOS update and told developers they were finally allowed to do these things. The fundamental nature of macOS enabled these new use cases without Apple needing to do anything at all. Not everyone is interested in this kind of cutting-edge software, and that is fine. But if you are someone who is interested in what the frontier of software is doing today, you can get all of it on the Mac right now.
Put another way, if you want something to change about macOS, you look for someone who's changed it already, or you build it yourself. If you want something in iPadOS to change, you make a wish list for next year's WWDC.
Earlier this year, I stirred the pot a bit when I suggested that Apple should just call the operating systems on the iPhone and iPad the exact same thing. When you combine this with Apple's own move towards calling their platform updates, "our OS 27 updates", along with the fundamental nature of how iPadOS works, I feel even more confident in that suggestion. Despite all the aesthetic shifts, which I do genuinely think are good on the whole, the iPad is kinda back to what it was when it first released back in 2010: a blown-up iPhone.
Don't take this the wrong way, some people want that experience. As iPad fans will quickly point out, Macs and Windows computers have more going on and there are people who never got on with those computers that click with iPads, and that's great. What I'm saying is that the iPad is very much like an iPhone in that innovation is controlled by what Apple allows to exist. That's how the iPhone works, it's not how the Mac works.
2026-06-30 08:05:45
METR: We are Changing our Developer Productivity Experiment Design
Based on conversations with study participants, we believe it is likely that developers are more sped up from AI tools now — in early 2026 — compared to our estimates from early 2025. However, because of the selection effects in our experiment, our data is only very weak evidence for the size of this increase.
Remember that study last year that showed that developers who used AI tools were 20% slower than those who didn’t? Of course you do, it was all over the place!
This update from back in February that I just found today is about how they had to change their methodologies for testing because so much had changed. Additionally, while they don’t have conclusive results, their early findings seem to indicate that the uptick in productivity is actually pretty significant now.
For some context, if you haven’t followed this closely, their original study was of developers using Claude Sonnet 3.5 through cursor while this new study would’ve been using Claude Code with Opus 4.5 anyone who’s worked with this tooling at all knows that that is night and day.
2026-06-29 07:48:05
2026-06-27 11:45:46
Mat Piscatella: Hardware - PlayStation hardware unit sales fell to…
PlayStation hardware unit sales fell to their lowest May total since May 2000, while Xbox hardware unit sales were the lowest ever recorded for a May month.
The data goes back to 1995, and May was the worst month for hardware unit sales for Sony in 26 years, and Microsoft ever.
Meanwhile, Nintendo had a solid month, closing out selling 6 million Switch 2 consoles in its first year on the market. Thats that most for any home console ever, or second most if you consider it a handheld (falling behind the GBA’s 6.5 million back in 2001).
It’s a good thing Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming out this November to juice PS5 and Xbox Series sales, otherwise these consoles would be positively cooked.
2026-06-27 06:07:00
Joe Skrebels on XBOX Wire, Micirosft's official Xbox (ahem…XBOX) blog (emphasis mine): Updated XBOX Console Prices
Last October, we increased XBOX console price by $20-$70 in the U.S. We hoped another price increase would not be necessary, and we have spent the last several months working with suppliers on options. Unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027. The entire consumer electronics industry is struggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are particularly hard on consoles. Unlike phones, computers, speakers, and other consumer devices, consoles are typically not sold at a profit, but instead for less than they cost to make.
The optimistic take is that this indicates they have raised the prices enough to weather next year's doubling of costs. The pessimistic take is that we're in for another round of price hikes next year as well.
Their post also mentions how they're working to get more refurbished models available, and that you can pay over time with BNPL and financing options. I'm just saying we're not in a good place when console makers are actually encouraging people to buy refurbished devices.
As it turns out, the best time to buy an Xbox Series console was in 2020, and the next best time is now. oof.
In 2020, the 1TB Xbox Series X cost $499. In 2026 that exact same console costs $799. Lord knows what it will cost next year.