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YouTube is bringing premium streaming services into its main app with a new feature called Primetime Channels. You’ll see TV shows, movies and sports the likes of Showtime, Starz, Paramount+ and AMC+ alongside videos from your favorite creators.

Folks in the US can sign up for Primetime Channels starting today through the Movies and TV section. There are more than 30 services you can subscribe to at the jump, with more on the way. NBA League Pass is among those that will be available soon.

Primetime Channels homepages will include trailers, cast interviews and behind-the-scenes footage alongside episodes and movies. You’ll be able to search for films and shows from channels through the main YouTube search panel. As The Verge notes, if a movie or show is available on a service you’re signed up to, you’ll see a green “watch now” icon. Otherwise, the icon will read “pay to watch.”

Your YouTube recommendations will include films and shows from Primetime Channels as well. So, if you search for a trailer for something you’re interested in, and the series or movie is available on a channel you’re subscribed to, it might pop up in your recommendations to help you start watching it right away. You’ll be able to like or dislike a movie or episode and leave comments, but content from Primetime Channels won’t have view counts.

There are some catches, according to The Verge. If you already have a subscription to Paramount+, Shudder or one of the other Primetime Channels, you can’t simply link your accounts. You’ll need to cancel your membership and sign up through YouTube. However, services you’ve signed up to through YouTube TV will carry over. However you slice it, that seems overly convoluted.

YouTube is clearly attempting to become the hub for all your streaming needs to help it better compete with the likes of Netflix, Hulu and HBO Max. It aims to bring more things for you to watch to Primetime Channels, along with more features. The platform is also planning an international rollout of the feature.

One thing that Primetime Channels doesn’t seem to offer, at least for the time being, is live TV. You may still need to go to YouTube TV for that. Given that YouTube TV has a fraction of the number of subscribers Netflix has (albeit more than Hulu’s live TV option), it seems smart to try another tactic as the battle for consumers’ attention and dollars rages on.

 

The former New York Post employee who hijacked the outlet’s content management system and Twitter account to post a series of racist and sexist headlines last week has apologized for his actions. “I deserved to get fired for a very volatile, irresponsible, and disgusting action and an utmost betrayal of the New York Post,” Miguel Gonzalez told the Daily Beast, revealing his identity to the outlet and public.

The 25-year-old claims he went on his publishing spree after suffering an “emotional tantrum,” further claiming his actions weren’t politically motivated. Among the things Gonzalez posted on October 27th were fake headlines calling for the murder of President Joe Biden and House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I let my own stupidity get the best of me,” he told the outlet.

Gonzalez began working for The Post in 2019. It was his first job out of journalism school. When the incident first occured, The Post said it was the victim of a hacking attack, before later sharing that an employee had been the one to gain access to its systems. As a digital producer at the outlet, Gonzalez used his credentials to access The Post’s publishing tools with “relative ease,” and did so from his home in New Jersey. Gonzalez says he hopes to stay in journalism and he has started applying for jobs at outlets like Gothamist.

 

Life on Earth would not exist as we know it, if not for the protein molecules that enable critical processes from photosynthesis and enzymatic degradation to sight and our immune system. And like most facets of the natural world, humanity has only just begun to discover the multitudes of protein types that actually exist. But rather scour the most inhospitable parts of the planet in search of novel microorganisms that might have a new flavor of organic molecule, Meta researchers have developed a first-of-its-kind metagenomic database, the ESM Metagenomic Atlas, that could accelerate existing protein-folding AI performance by 60x.

Metagenomics is just coincidentally named. It is a relatively new, but very real, scientific discipline that studies “the structure and function of entire nucleotide sequences isolated and analyzed from all the organisms (typically microbes) in a bulk sample.” Often used to identify the bacterial communities living on our skin or in the soil, these techniques are similar in function to gas chromatography, wherein you’re trying to identify what’s present in a given sample system.

Similar databases have been launched by the NCBI, the European Bioinformatics Institute, and Joint Genome Institute, and have already cataloged billions of newly uncovered protein shapes. What Meta is bringing to the table is “a new protein-folding approach that harnesses large language models to create the first comprehensive view of the structures of proteins in a metagenomics database at the scale of hundreds of millions of proteins,” according to a TK release from the company. The problem is that, while advances of genomics have revealed the sequences for slews of novel proteins, just knowing what those sequences are doesn’t actually tell us how they fit together into a functioning molecule and going figuring it out experimentally takes anywhere from a few months to a few years. Per molecule. Ain’t nobody got time for that.  

“The ESM Metagenomic Atlas will enable scientists to search and analyze the structures of metagenomic proteins at the scale of hundreds of millions of proteins,” the Meta research team wrote on TK. “This can help researchers to identify structures that have not been characterized before, search for distant evolutionary relationships, and discover new proteins that can be useful in medicine and other applications.”

Like languages, proteins are made up of their constituent atoms (think, words) which can all be smashed together as you wish but will only make a functional molecule (ie a coherent thought) if assembled in a specific order (a molecular sentence). Meta’s system drastically accelerates our capabilities to uncover organic chemistry’s syntax and grammar, however the analogy isn’t perfect. “A protein sequence describes the chemical structure of a molecule, which folds into a complex three-dimensional shape according to the laws of physics,” the team explained. “Protein sequences contain statistical patterns that convey information about the folded structure of the protein.”

Specifically, Meta’s Evolutionary Scale Modeling AI treats gene sequences like a Mad Libs for O-Chem using a self-supervised learning called masked language modeling. “We trained a language model on the sequences of millions of natural proteins,” the research team wrote. “With this approach, the model must correctly fill in the blanks in a passage of text, such as ‘To __ or not to __, that is the ________.’ We trained a language model to fill in the blanks in a protein sequence, like ‘GL_KKE_AHY_G’ across millions of diverse proteins.” 

The resulting “protein language model” is named ESM-2 and operates across 15 billion parameters, making it the largest model of its kind to date. The “new structure prediction capability enabled us to predict sequences for the more than 600 million metagenomic proteins in the atlas in just two weeks on a cluster of approximately 2,000 GPUs.” So much for months and years.

 

It seems that those of us clamoring to see HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us won’t have to wait too much longer to start watching the series. According to the show’s page on HBO Max, it will debut on January 15th. For those keeping count, that’s 75 days away.

With The Last of Us slated to arrive in early 2023 and the brilliant Succession not returning until the spring, the January timing makes sense. Even though the supposed release date appeared on an official HBO platform, it’s worth taking with a grain of salt until there’s a splashier formal announcement.

In any case, the first season of The Last of Us will run for 10 episodes. It’s an adaptation of Naughty Dog’s all-time great game of the same name, which the studio recently remade for PlayStation 5.

The Last of Usstars Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian) as Joel and Bella Ramsey (Game of Thrones) as Ellie, with Gabriel Luna, Anna Torv and Nick Offerman also featuring. Ashley Johnson and Troy Baker, who played the main characters in the game, will appear as well. HBO released the first trailer in September and, from everything we’ve seen so far, the show is staying very faithful to the original game’s story and visuals.

 

Frictions exerted during atmospheric reentry are enough to rend spacecraft into comets of glowing slag if not properly mitigated — that’s a good thing, when intentional, but otherwise nearly always very bad. The Space Shuttle, when it was still in service, was designed to hit the outermost edges of Earth’s atmosphere traveling at around Mach 25 (~17,000 MPH), then ride a wave of superheated plasma — generated because frictional forces are so great that they literally tear the surrounding air apart at the molecular level — down into the atmosphere until aerodynamic surfaces regain their effectiveness.

“Utilizing atmospheric drag is the most mass-efficient method to slow down a spacecraft,” NASA notes. To survive those intense 3000-degree F temperatures, the Shuttle relied on layers of ablative heat shielding tiles that would melt and slough off, carrying extra heat away with them, but for tomorrow’s reusable spacecraft, NASA has something better in mind, something inflatable.

NASA has scheduled a launch window beginning November 9th for the LOFTID mission. It will fly out of Vandenberg Space Force Base aboard a ULA Atlas rocket, alongside a new NOAA “polar weather satellite.” After the satellite separates from the Atlas rocket’s upper stage, the LOFTID will unfurl and inflate in low earth orbit ahead of its reentry.

“One of the biggest differences is before we were doing suborbital tests, coming in at roughly 5,600 miles per hour or 2.5 kilometers per second, which is already difficult,” Steve Hughes, LOFTID aeroshell lead at NASA’s Langley Research Center said in a press release. “But with LOFTID, we’ll be coming in at nearly 18,000 miles per hour, or 8 kilometers per second. That is about three times as fast, but that means nine times more energy.”

The LOFTID heatshield offers four layers of protection against all that energy. The outermost layer is made from ceramic and silicon carbide yarn woven into cloth on the same sorts of industrial weavers that make denim. The second and third layers are two kinds of insulation, they’re there to protect the fourth layer — the actual inflatable bits. Everything is stacked into a series of concentric rings — themselves constructed from a woven polymer ten times stronger than steel by weight — that will help guide the shield’s expansion.

NASA has been developing Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (HIAD) technology for more than a decade. LOFTID (Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator) is the latest iteration of that tech, a new kind of heat shield that potentially avoids many of the issues NASA has with the current generation of rigid aeroshells. These hard shields have a hard limit on their size, dictated by the diameter of the rocket’s shroud. Soft aeroshells don’t face that limitation and can be extended far past the shroud’s edge, enabling NASA to protect larger and heavier payloads as they enter atmo.

This is especially important to our future solar system exploration plans, because the other issue with current heat shields is that they only work in Earth’s atmosphere. You try to set something the size of the Space Shuttle down on the surface of Mars and that exercise is going to end with your spacecraft a very long streak smeared across the Red Planet — or one very short crater if you’re especially unlucky. Mars’ atmosphere simply isn’t thick enough to generate sufficient friction against modern-sized heat shields to safely slow the Shuttle’s descent. So, NASA is testing out an inflatable one that is.

When it begins its descent, LOFTID will be traveling at more than 25 times the speed of sound. NASA hopes that by the end, LOFTID will be crawling along at a relatively pokey 609 MPH. Throughout its flight, the test shield’s onboard data recorder will transmit the most pertinent sensor and video data while storing as much as possible onboard in an ejectable recorder. Should everything go according to plan, the LOFTID shield will slow sufficiently to deploy a landing chute before setting down in the Pacific Ocean ahead of retrieval by the ULA.

 

Now’s a great time to stock up microSD cards for your phone or console, or new portable drives for all of your most important files. A new sale at Amazon has knocked up to 67 percent off Samsung storage gadgets, including some of our favorites. The latest model in the company’s T7 drive series, the T7 Shield, has dropped to a new record low of $90 for the 1TB model, plus you can get Samsung 980 Pro SSD in 1TB for only $120 or a 256GB EVO Select memory-card-plus-adapter set for only $24.

Shop Samsung storage deals at AmazonBuy T7 Shield (1TB) at Amazon – $90Buy 980 Pro SSD (1TB) at Amazon – $120Buy EVO Select microSD (256GB) at Amazon – $24

Samsung’s T7 family of portable SSDs has been one of our favorites for some time thanks to its generally fast read/write speeds and its pocket-friendly design. All of the T7 drives can easily fit into your back pocket or a stuffed travel bag, making them one of the better options for professionals who travel often and need extra space to store important documents and files. The T7 Shield is the newest addition to the series and, along with being IP65 water- and dust-resistant, it has a more rugged exterior that helps it survive nearly 10-foot drops. When it comes to performance, it supports 1,050/1,000 MB/s read/write speeds and its Dynamic Thermal Guard controls heat to help maintain performance even when you’re pushing the drive to its limits.

If you’re finally getting around to expanding the storage available on your PS5, Samsung’s 980 Pro internal drive is a good option, particularly at this sale price. It supports read speeds up to 7,000 MB/s and it uses a nickel coating to control heat levels for improved efficiency. You will need a heatsink in order to use this drive with the PS5, though, and if you want to keep things simple, you could spring for the $150 bundle that includes one with Samsung’s drive.

Any of the microSD cards included in this sale will work well with the Nintendo Switch, smartphones and tablets, cameras and more. We like the 256GB EVO Select model on sale because the discount is pretty solid (it’s only $4 more than it was during the Prime Early Access Sale last month) and it comes with a full-sized adapter.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

 

Apple just released two new iPads. One of them, the basic 10th-generation iPad, was rebuilt from the ground up. The new iPad Pro, on the other hand, is a much simpler update. The company took last year’s model, swapped the M1 chip for the M2, made a few other small tweaks, and called it a day. The iPad Pro is still ludicrously fast, and it’s still extremely expensive, starting at $799 for the 11-inch model and $1,099 for the 12.9-inch.

I can’t really fault Apple for this approach, though. Even though the basic design of the iPad Pro was first introduced in 2018, it’s still a marvelously engineered piece of hardware. It features one of the best screens Apple has ever made, and it continues to surprise me that the company can pack so much power into such a compact frame.

While this year’s model closely resembles what Apple was already selling, it does arrive at a significant time for the iPad’s evolution. That is thanks to iPadOS 16, which launched last week. For most iPads, it’s the expected collection of useful improvements — but for the iPad Pro, it offers an entirely new multitasking system called Stage Manager. It’s a clear response to the question we tech reviewers (and many iPad Pro owners) have been asking for years: When will we get software that lets us take advantage of the iPad’s power?

Hardware

First, a quick refresher. The iPad Pro is still available in two sizes: 11 and 12.9 inches. Storage options range from a modest 128GB up to a truly outrageous 2TB, and you can configure it with an optional 5G radio for when there’s no WiFi. And for when you’re at home, it supports the WiFi 6E, whereas last year’s model was limited to WiFi 6. As usual, we reviewers get to play with a near top-of-the-line iPad: the 12.9-inch model with 1TB of storage and 5G service from Verizon. This iPad Pro costs a jaw-dropping $1,999, and that’s before you add on the $129 Apple Pencil and $349 Magic Keyboard. We’re well into MacBook Pro or Mac Studio territory at this point.

At least the iPad Pro still feels like a device worth that kind of money. (Whether it is is a different question.) The fit and finish remains exceptional, and while the 1.5-pound weight makes it a bit more of a burden to hold compared to smaller and lighter iPad models, I’m still impressed at Apple’s ability to cram such performance into a device that’s so compact. There are other well-designed tablets on the market, but I still don’t think anyone has caught up to the iPad Pro.

The 11-inch model still has to make do with the same Liquid Retina LCD display it’s had for a few years now, but the 12.9-inch version has the Liquid Retina XDR panel that was first introduced on the M1 iPad Pro in May of 2021. This screen uses mini-LED backlighting to offer 2,596 local dimming zones to offer a wide dynamic range and a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio. It also has up to 1,000 nits of full-screen brightness and 1,600 nits peak brightness when playing back HDR content, which can really make movies pop.

There’s nothing new about the screen this year, but it’s worth highlighting just how good it is. Both iPad Pro models also have the 120Hz ProMotion refresh rate; support for the P3 wide color gamut; a screen that’s fully laminated to the front glass; and an anti-reflective coating.

Just like last year, the iPad Pro has an ultrawide 12-megapixel front-facing camera that supports Face ID authentication. This wide-angle camera supports Center Stage, which crops and zooms around your face to keep you in the middle of the frame on a video call. That’s all well and good, but unfortunately the iPad Pro still has its front-facing camera on the portrait edge of the screen, which means you’re always going to be somewhat off-center and not looking directly at the screen if your iPad is in a keyboard dock. This has been true of all iPads for years already, but now that the basic model has gotten a landscape-oriented camera, we’re going to be waiting impatiently for Apple to implement that across its entire lineup.

The back cameras are also the same: There are 12-megapixel wide and 10-megapixel ultra wide options, along with a flash and LIDAR scanner. However, the M2 processor unlocks a new video trick, as the iPad Pro can now record video in Apple’s ProRes codec in 4K resolution at 30 frames per second, a feature first introduced in the iPhone 13 Pro. This is admittedly something of a niche feature, but it shows off the M2’s improvements over its predecessor.

Accessories

From an accessories standpoint, the iPad Pro uses the same 2nd-generation Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard that have been available since 2018 and 2020, respectively. The Magic Keyboard still provides the best typing experience you can find on an iPad, though the whole package is pretty heavy. It’s also crazy expensive, as I already mentioned. And now that the basic iPad’s new Magic Keyboard Folio offers a row of function keys and a slightly bigger trackpad, I’m really missing those features here. But if you make your living with words, as I do, it’s still an essential tool.

The Apple Pencil remains a tool that I’m not particularly great at evaluating, because I am sorely lacking in visual arts skills. I sure wish I could sit down and sketch and doodle and make the wonderful creations I’ve seen others do, but that’s not happening. If you’re a visual artist, chances are you already know how well the Pencil works, though.

The M2 on the new iPad Pro also enabled a new trick called Hover. If the Pencil is within 12mm of the screen, icons and interface elements can react to it. The most simple example is how app icons increase in size when you hover the Pencil over, showing you what you’re about to tap on. This works system-wide, at least in Apple apps. Third-party developers will have to build Hover features into their apps, but it should be a nice new tool in the Pencil’s arsenal. One place I was able to demo it was in the Notes app; when using the new watercolor brush, you can hover the pencil over the screen to see how the color will react with other elements you’ve already drawn.

I found another cool Hover implementation in the excellent image-editing app Pixelmator Photo. Hovering and moving the Pencil across a strip of different filters at the bottom of the app automatically applies them as a preview. It’s wickedly fast and a fun way to see what your picture will look like. That said, it’s something you could already do with the trackpad and pointer; so far, a lot of Hover actions I’ve seen are straight up clones of what you can do when hovering over an interface element with the trackpad. I’m looking forward to seeing what developers come up with going forward, though.

M2

But let’s get into that M2 processor, shall we? Thanks to our review of the M2 MacBook Air earlier this summer, we had a good idea of what to expect here. And running Geekbench 5 tests confirmed it. The M2 iPad Pro scored 1,888 and 8,419 on single-core and multicore CPU tests, respectively. Those are 12 percent and 42 percent better than the same tests on the M1 iPad Pro, and similar to the 18 percent and 38 percent gains we saw when comparing the M2 MacBook Air to its M1-powered sibling.

I saw similar improvements in the Geekbench 5 Compute test, which measures GPU performance. The M2 iPad Pro scored 32,834 – 52 percent better than the M1 model and a bit higher than the 27,083 we saw in the M2 MacBook Air’s test. Obviously, synthetic benchmarks like this aren’t the be-all and end-all way to judge performance, but it gives you an idea of what to expect. If you regularly push an M1 iPad Pro to its limits and use it in a setting where your time equals money, these improvements might justify upgrading, but unless your workflow is extremely demanding you can probably skip this generation. When you consider the fact that the iPad Pro’s basic design hasn’t changed since 2018, that’s another reason to hold off; it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple released an all-new Pro in the next year or so.

Stage manager

Finally, there’s the not-so-small addition of iPadOS 16, and more specifically Stage Manager. As a reminder, Stage Manager lets you have up to four apps open in one group at once, with overlapping, resizable windows. Four other groups (with up to four apps in each) show up on the left side of the screen, based on how recently you’ve used them. Only a select few iPads can run Stage Manager: The iPad Pro with either an M1 or M2, the M1-powered iPad Air that was released earlier this year, or the 2018 and 2020 iPad Pro models running on the A12X or A12Z chip. (Those older iPad Pro models won’t be able to use Stage Manager on an external display; that’s limited to M1 or M2 devices.)

Ever since Stage Manager arrived in beta versions of iPadOS 16 earlier this year, there’s been a lot of chatter among the iPad faithful about Apple’s execution. On one end of the spectrum you have someone like Federico Viticci over at Macstores.net — he’s well known for being a devout iPad Pro user and writes massive, detailed breakdowns of each iOS and iPadOS release. Viticci, to put it mildly, is not a fan of Stage Manager; he wrote around 10,000 words detailing its inconsistencies and bugs.

On the other hand, I have not run into nearly the same scale of difficulties as Viticci, but I recognize his overall point. There are probably too many different ways to do things in Stage Manager (like adding a new app to a group); window management is more restrictive compared to a Mac (or Windows, or ChromeOS); and the behavior of the Control Strip on the left side of the screen remains confusing. Stage Manager feels like a work in progress — but when it works, I have created app groupings that make me a lot more efficient and productive than I was using the standard two-app Split View multitasking mode with a third app in a small “Slide Over” window.

And while Stage Manager was (and still may be) buggy, I at least have run into a lot fewer problems here on the M2 iPad Pro with the final iPadOS 16.1 release. I’ve been working on this iPad for the entirety of my work day and think I’ve only had one app crash on me (Gmail, which isn’t exactly the best iPad app on its best days). There are some conceptual things about Stage Manager I’m still grappling with, like the best way to add or remove apps from a group, but I think the experience is worth spending a day or two with to see if you can find your flow.

Wrap-up

There’s no question that the new iPad Pro is better than its predecessor. It’s the same price and comes with a more powerful chip as well as a few additional features. That said, I think it’s not as sure a bet as the last iPad Pro was when it came out in early 2021. That’s primarily because of the iPad Pro’s design, which has remained essentially unchanged for the last four years. That’s good news in some ways, because you could have bought an Apple Pencil in 2018 and a Magic Keyboard in 2020 and still use them with the M2 iPad Pro.

But at a certain point, probably not too long from now, Apple will advance the form factor yet again. Not that it necessarily needs to; the iPad Pro remains well designed and continues to be a standout performer, as it should be for the price. But that landscape-edge front camera on the 10th-generation iPad tells me that we’ll see an iPad Pro before long with a more substantial redesign and not just one with a faster chip inside.

 

Now that Elon Musk owns Twitter, he’s officially taking the reins as CEO — for the moment, anyway. Twitter has made an amended filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicating that Musk is “the Chief Executive Officer” of the social network. This comes alongside the entrepreneur’s moves to dissolve the company board, become sole director and fire many of the company’s veteran executives, including former CEO Parag Agrawal. He’s clearing house, in other words.

It’s not clear how long Musk will remain in the CEO position. He states that his sole director status is “just temporary,” but hasn’t elaborated. Musk already runs Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company and Neuralink, so there’s only a limited amount of time to helm yet another firm. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has rolled over his shares (that is, transferred them to the new company), indicating his support for Musk.

Musk has already made or proposed sweeping changes in the first week of owning Twitter. On top of the leadership overhaul, he has reportedly ordered layoffs and unveiled plans for a “moderation council” that will make key content decisions. The new CEO has also floated a number of potential changes, including charging for verification as part of a Blue subscription and even resurrecting Vine.

The management shakeup is poised to be expensive, with The Guardianreporting that it could lead to a minimum $120 million in “golden parachute” exit payments. The figure pales in comparison to what Musk paid to buy Twitter in the first place, though.

 

There’s a reason that, month after month, Vampire Survivors has been the most-played game on Steam Deck: it’s a blast. Your character auto-fires weapons as thousands of enemies invade the screen. All you have control over in the heat of the moment are the character’s movement and their weapon and item loadout (there are persistent powerups you can unlock as well). It’s one of those games that you have to play to really get the appeal, and it’ll soon be far easier for many people to check it out.

Vampire Survivors will make its console debut on November 10th, when it will hit Xbox One and Xbox Series S/X. The game will also be available on Xbox Game Pass. While it only costs $5, this will lower the barrier to entry even further. 

The fact that Microsoft is bringing one of this year’s biggest breakout hits to Xbox Game Pass isn’t a big surprise. Vampire Survivors was already available to PC Game Pass members.

Also coming to Xbox consoles and Game Pass this month is Return to Monkey Island. The revival of the adventure series landed on PC and Switch in September. It’ll be available on Xbox, PC Game Pass and Xbox Cloud Gaming on November 8th.

The console edition of Football Manager 2023 will hit cloud, console and PC on the same date. The full-blown PC version of the game will land on Game Pass then as well. On the flip side, Football Manager 2022 and Football Manager 2022 Xbox Edition will leave Game Pass on November 8th.

There’s a lot of other stuff for Game Pass members to look forward to this month. A 2D metroidvania game called Ghost Song, which sees you exploring a distant moon, will arrive on cloud, console and PC on November 3rd. Obsidian’s Pentiment, one of the few remaining first-party Xbox exclusives for this year, will land on all three platforms on November 15th. Somerville, from a studio cofounded by Inside and Limbo executive producer Dino Patti, will debut on the same day.

Meanwhile, you can play the full seasons of The Walking Dead: A New Frontier and The Walking Dead: Michonne on PC Game Pass as of today. Sidescrolling beat-’em-up The Legend of Tianding just landed on console, cloud and PC as well.

Elsewhere, Halo Infinite‘s winter update will arrive on November 8th. That will finally bring online campaign co-op and Forge mode to the game, along with new maps, a fresh game mode and (at last) a way to earn XP just by playing multiplayer games. On November 11th, Microsoft Flight Simulator 40th Anniversary Editionwill be available as a free update. Helicopters, gliders and a true-to-life airliner are among the additions.

 

So you’ve got all the gifts you need for the kids, your family and the friends who really matter. But it’s been a tough year, surely you deserve some joy as well. Maybe it’s time to upgrade that HDTV to a 4K OLED, or replace a not so great early-gen 4K set. And we’re sure you’ve been thinking of moving on from sad TV speakers. It’s time to treat yourself, in true Parks and Rec fashion. Here are some of the best home theater gadgets we’d recommend when budget isn’t an issue.

Apple TV 4K

While the latest Apple TV model isn’t a massive leap over its predecessor, there are a few updates that make it worthy of a holiday splurge. The redesigned Siri remote is a big improvement over the previous version, both app and streaming performance is quicker than ever and there’s support for Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision. As always, there’s deep integration with iOS, and HomeKit compatibility is a nice bonus. And when you tire of music and movies, the Apple TV also works as a gaming console with access to Apple Arcade and support for Bluetooth gamepads. — Billy Steele, Senior News Editor

Buy Apple TV 4K at Amazon – $129

BenQ HT2050A projector

A projector is a great gift for any of the cinephiles or gamers in your life, and for around $700, the BenQ HT2050A is the best budget 1080p projector available. Its DLP tech delivers where it counts with the best contrast (ANSI 1,574:1) and color accuracy in its class, and is reasonably bright as well, with 2,200 lumens in “vivid” mode. On top of that, it comes with a 1.3x zoom and vertical lens shift option for maximum installation flexibility. It’s also a nice option for gaming, thanks to the relatively low 16-millisecond input lag. The drawbacks include slightly excessive fan noise, rainbow effect and red-tinted 3D. — Steve Dent, Associate Editor

Buy BenQ HT2050A projector at Amazon – $799

65-inch LG C2 OLED TV

If you’re looking for the best possible TV to buy, there’s no question: Pick an OLED model. Personally I’d stick with LG’s C2, the latest generation of the company’s astounding OLED screens. Unlike LCD TVs, which rely on backlights, pixels on OLED TVs can turn themselves on and off individually. That allows them to capture inky blacks and deliver better contrast than most LCD panels. The C2 is only a slight revision of last year’s C1, but that’s mainly a testament to how great the previous model was. It has a 120Hz refresh rate for speedy gaming, as well as support for G-SYNC and Freesync to avoid annoying frame stuttering. Its wide viewing angles also mean everyone can get a perfect picture, no matter where they’re sitting. — Devindra Hardawar, Senior Editor

Buy 65-inch LG C2 OLED at Amazon – $1,799

Monoprice Monolith THX Atmos home theater speakers

Sometimes, a soundbar just doesn’t cut it. No matter how many drivers you can cram in, or how good the virtual surround sound is, nothing beats the immersion of a full home theater speaker setup. Monoprice’s Monolith series is one of the best options around: It sports a powerful center channel, your choice of towers or bookshelf speakers with upward-firing Dolby Atmos drivers, and subwoofers powerful enough to rattle your walls. There are tons of surround sound systems to choose from, but the beauty of the Monolith line is that it has all of the latest speaker tech and it’s reasonably priced, at least compared to other Hi-Fi systems. It used to be that you had to mix and match speakers to create an affordable surround setup. You can start small with a few towers and a subwoofer—and once you’ve got a complete system, you may never need to go to the cinema again. — D.H.

Buy Monolith speakers at Monoprice starting at $250

Formovie Theater

If you’re looking at a trendy Ultra Short Throw projector for a lucky loved one at Noel, the model that offers the best performance and features for the price is from a new brand. The $3,500 Formovie Theater 4K projector is a triple-laser model with up to a 150-inch projection size, 2,800 lumens of brightness and an excellent 107 percent Rec.2020 color gamut. It offers several features only found on much more expensive models, most notably Dolby Vision support. It also features Bowers & Wilkins speakers with Dolby Atmos sound, along with built-in Android TV 11. The biggest issue is that it doesn’t support the Netflix app right now, but that can be fixed with a $50 Chromecast or other device. — S.D.

Buy Formovie Theater at Amazon – $3,500

Roku Ultra

If you’re not a fan of the Apple TV, the Roku Ultra is the only other set-top box worth considering. It’s fast enough to stream 4K video with Dolby Vision, and it supports just about every streaming app you’d want. It also has a solid remote with voice-search capabilities, and you can still access all of Apple’s streaming video via the Apple TV app. And while Roku’s interface isn’t pretty, it’s fast and gets the job done. — D.H.

Buy Roku Ultra at Amazon – $90

Sonos Ray

Don’t let the smaller size of the Sonos Ray fool you, it offers the same stellar sound quality you’d expect from the company. It’s more compact than the beam but it can still handle TV and music audio with ease. There’s a good amount of bass for a speaker this size and the initial setup is a breeze. If you or someone on your list has a smaller space that needs an audio boost, this is a great option to compliment your watching and listening habits. Plus, it’s only $279 – a reasonable price for a speaker that offers as much as the Ray. — B.S.

Buy Ray at Sonos – $279

Sony HT-A7000 soundbar

Sometimes when you’re shopping for the holidays, you’re willing to splurge for the best. When it comes to soundbars, Sony’s HT-A7000 is hard to beat. The 7.1.2-channel unit beams immersive Dolby Atmos and DTS:X audio around your living room. It’s also equipped with Sony’s own tech like 360 Spatial Sound Mapping, automatic room calibration, Vertical Surround Engine and S-Force Front Surround. When paired with the company’s Bravia TVs, you can harness Acoustic Center Sync that allows the television speakers to act as the center channel. The A7000 doesn’t come with a subwoofer, but Sony offers two compatible models as well as multiple rear speaker options, so you can add-on to fit your giftee’s needs. — B.S.

Buy Sony HT-A7000 at Amazon – $1,400

LG CineBeam portable projector

LG’s CineBeam FP50KA portable home projector has been around awhile now, but it’s still the best portable projector for watching outdoor movies – a fun activity for the holidays. It’s highly portable and runs on batteries, but can deliver 100-inch, Full HD video for up to 2.5 hours. It packs a 30,000-hour LED lamp to maximize brightness and battery life, offers a generous array of ports (two HDMI and USB-C) and has LG’s webOS Lite Smart TV platform built in. At 2.1 pounds it’s light enough to take camping or schlep to a presentation and it’s reasonably priced at $500. — S.D.

Buy LG CineBeam FP50KA at Amazon – $500

Valencia Theater Seating Verona seats

Where your butt sits is just as important to your home theater as your screen and sound setup. You’ll want seats that you can lounge in for hours without hurting your back, and they need to be sturdy enough to survive real-world usage with pets and kids. Valencia’s Verona seats are a solid option if you want to replicate the experience of high-end theaters with reclining seats. They’re made out of genuine leather, and they offer separate reclining options for your back and head. And sure, they’re pricey, but a decent couch will set you back just as much as three Veronas. And, let’s face it, they’ll be far more comfortable for movie watching and gaming than your typical West Elm option. — D.H.

Buy Verona seats at Amazon – $1,800