Golf fans will have to wait another full year to play EA’s next PGA Tour game, with the publisher announcing a delay this week. When it first revealed it was returning to golf games last March, EA said its plan was to release EA Sports PGA Tour sometime in the spring of 2022. The company has now set a spring 2023 launch window. EA did not share a reason for the delay, nor did it say what platforms the “next-gen” revival would be available on when it finally does launch.

What it did do is reiterate that the title will feature all four major tournaments – the Masters, the US Open, the Britsh Open and the PGA Championship – and run on its proprietary Frostbite engine from Dice. Speaking of Dice, the delay is significantly longer than the one EA gave the Swedish studio to work on Battlefield 2042 ahead of its rocky launch. Months after release, BF2042 is still missing key features, including in-game voice chat support, and Dice only recently added a proper scoreboard to the game.        

In addition to music and podcasts, Spotify may soon offer live audio within its primary streaming app. According to Bloomberg, the company plans to integrate Greenroom into its mainline app. In the process, Spotify will reportedly also rename the platform to Spotify Live. All of this could happen before the second half of the year, according to Bloomberg. 

The outlet was tipped off on the impending move by iOS developer Steve Moser, who found evidence of it in the beta version of Spotify’s iPhone app. As for the ultimate fate of Greenroom, in a separate tweet, Bloomberg reporter Ashley Carman said the app would live on as a kind of backend for creators to record and upload their content to Spotify.   

We’ve reached out to Spotify for comment.

Speaking to Spotify’s potential motivations behind the plan, Bloomberg suggests Greenroom has “struggled to take off.” By integrating live audio into its very popular streaming app, the company would be elevating the format to a place where it would be more accessible – even if some users would complain about the app becoming even more crowded. 

In a way, it’s strange the company may only now be considering integrating the two together. When Spotify first announced its plans for Greenroom, CEO Daniel Ek said he saw live audio as something that every platform would eventually feature. "Just like Stories with video where every major platform has them as one way for its audience to communicate with each other, I see live audio similarly," he said at the time. "I expect all the platforms to have it."

The NFL is making its first-ever VR game. And rather than work with longtime partner Electronic Arts on the project, the league is partnering with StatusPro, a startup that uses real-time player data to “create authentic extended reality experiences." The NFL promised to share more details on the game, including release date information, in the future. What we know for now is that the game will come to Meta Quest and PlayStation VR and will allow fans to experience playing as a professional football player through a first-person 3D perspective.

It will be interesting to see how StatusPro designs around some of the motion sickness issues that come with playing a VR game in first-person. Games like Half-Life: Alyx offer multiple locomotion options so that players can find one that doesn’t leave them feeling nauseous. Two of the game’s options fall back on allowing individuals to teleport their avatar between on-screen locations. For most people, those are ideal for preventing motion sickness, but they also wouldn’t make for a very fast-paced (and therefore immersive) football game.

Nothing will release its first handset, the phone (1), this summer, the company confirmed on Wednesday ahead of its “The Truth” livestream. In the usual marketing style of its CEO, OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, Nothing shared a handful of details about the upcoming device while promising to reveal more over the coming months.

It announced the phone will feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset and run Nothing OS, a modified version of Android that “captures the best features” of Google’s mobile operating system while distilling it “to just the essentials.” The company promised Nothing OS would offer a fast and smooth experience, with a user interface that features “bespoke” fonts, colors, design elements and sounds. Nothing will offer a preview of its software vision in April through a launcher those with select Android phones will have the chance to download.

In short, it seemingly looks like Nothing hopes to continue where OnePlus left off before Pei departed the company and it merged with Oppo. By that point, many longtime OnePlus fans felt the company had effectively stopped catering to them with its decision to expand into the budget phone market by offering what they saw as rebranded Oppo devices. While most assumed Nothing would eventually announce a phone given Pei’s history, those assumptions became a lot more real at the start of March when a report came out that Nothing had shown off a smartphone in private meetings at Mobile World Congress. Just days later, leaker Evan Blass shared a photo of one such meeting Pei took with Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon where you can see Pei holding what looks like an unannounced phone.

The humble GIF may have been invented in 1987, but in many ways, it’s never been more popular. Whether you pronounce the acronym with a soft g as its creator does or with a hard one as most people do, many of us turn to GIFs when we want to share memorable clips of TV shows, movies and news hits.

And if you’re a frequent Twitter user, the company is making it easier to create and share those clips. It has updated its iOS app to include a built-in GIF capture feature. All you have to do is open the camera module and swipe over to the GIF mode to record one of your own clips. You can see the feature in action in the tweet where Twitter announced its availability. At the moment, the feature is only available on iOS. When Engadget reached out to Twitter to ask about the GIF functionality making its way to Android, the company told us feedback it gathered from iOS users would “inform future updates.”

The dream of an upgradeable Mac Studio is dead – at least for the time being. If you follow Apple blogs, you probably saw that over the weekend teardowns of the company’s latest desktop computer showed that it features SSD storage that isn't soldered down to its main logic board. That led some to believe that it would be possible for Mac Studio owners to upgrade the computer on their own. However, those hopes have now been dashed.

YouTuber Luke Miani conducted a test to see if he could upgrade the Mac Studio’s storage. To do so, he took one unit and wiped its SSD so that he could then transfer the drive to an open SSD slot on a second machine. The secondary Mac Studio recognized the drive, but no matter what Miani did, the computer would not boot with the component installed in it. The Mac Studio’s only response was to use its status LED to send out an SOS call. All of that suggests Apple has programmed the Mac Studio not to accept replacement SSDs.

That’s not necessarily surprising. On its website, Apple states, “Mac Studio storage is not user accessible,” and the company recommends customers configure the computer with enough storage to meet their needs when they buy it. MacRumors suggests the purpose of the Mac Studio’s SSD slots is to allow certified technicians to replace nonfunctioning drives. Presumably, they’ll have access to tools that will allow them to bypass the company's software lock. As the website also notes, it’s possible Apple may at some point allow people to replace the SSD in their Mac Studio on their own by selling storage upgrade kits, much like it started doing with the Mac Pro in mid-2020. Until then, it’s a shame a machine that costs so much doesn’t offer some form of upgradability.

Following years of litigation, Canadian “patent monetization” firm WiLAN has signed a licensing agreement with Apple. With the deal, the two companies have settled all court cases that were ongoing between them in the US, Canada and Germany related to a series of wireless technology patents. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

WiLAN’s dispute with Apple dates back to 2014 when the two companies went to court over two patents WiLAN claimed covered voice over LTE technologies featured in a variety of iPhone models at the time. Before today’s announcement, the most recent development in the dispute was that a jury reduced the damages Apple had been ordered to pay in 2018 from $145.1 million to $85.2 million. The decision came after a judge ordered a retrial after agreeing with Apple that WiLAN had used a flawed process to calculate the size of the damages owed to it by the iPhone-maker.

While this saga has come to a close, we don’t expect it will be the last time Apple and WiLAN lock horns. As something of a notorious patent troll, WiLAN has sued Apple a handful of times in the past, sometimes to mixed results. As one of the successful smartphone designers in the mobile industry, Apple makes for a seemingly irresistible target.

Following years of litigation, Canadian “patent monetization” firm WiLAN has signed a licensing agreement with Apple. With the deal, the two companies have settled all court cases that were ongoing between them in the US, Canada and Germany related to a series of wireless technology patents. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

WiLAN’s dispute with Apple dates back to 2014 when the two companies went to court over two patents WiLAN claimed covered voice over LTE technologies featured in a variety of iPhone models at the time. Before today’s announcement, the most recent development in the dispute was that a jury reduced the damages Apple had been ordered to pay in 2018 from $145.1 million to $85.2 million. The decision came after a judge ordered a retrial after agreeing with Apple that WiLAN had used a flawed process to calculate the size of the damages owed to it by the iPhone-maker.

While this saga has come to a close, we don’t expect it will be the last time Apple and WiLAN lock horns. As something of a notorious patent troll, WiLAN has sued Apple a handful of times in the past, sometimes to mixed results. As one of the successful smartphone designers in the mobile industry, Apple makes for a seemingly irresistible target.

At the start of the year, Angela Hession, Twitch’s vice-president of Trust and Safety, promised the company would implement an improved reporting and appeals process, and now it’s doing exactly that. Starting next week, the company will begin rolling out an updated reporting tool it says features a more intuitive design for flagging bad behavior. Among other enhancements, it includes new search functionality that Twitch says will make it easier to specify the exact reason you want to report someone. It will now also include menus tailored to the content you’re watching.

Twitch

The company anticipates it will take a few months to roll out its new reporting tool to all Twitch users. “We know that sounds like a while,” said Twitch. “But the reporting tool touches every single Twitch user across the globe, so we’re taking a thoughtful approach to make sure it all goes safely and smoothly for our global community.” The updated tool will be first available through Twitch’s web client, with it slated to come to its mobile app at a later date.

Twitch is also launching a new appeals portal, and that’s available to use starting today. The tool features some behind-the-scenes upgrades Twitch promises will allow its Trust and Safety team to more quickly work through appeals. As a Twitch user, the company says the updated portal will provide visibility into what enforcement actions you can appeal, as well as to see the status and outcome of any ongoing and previous requests.

Taken together, Twitch says today’s updates will allow it to more quickly and consistently enforce its safety policies. At the same time, the company believes they will provide it with better insights into emerging patterns of behavior on its platform. Twitch doesn’t mention the events of 2021 in its latest blog post, but last year was a challenging one for the company. The summer's hate raids left many streamers with the feeling that they weren't safe on the platform. Twitch promised to do better and the new tools it's introducing today represent an important milestone in those efforts.

Partway through last year, NVIDIA announced Grace, its first-ever datacenter CPU. At the time, the company only shared a few tidbits of information about the chip, noting, for instance, it would utilize its NVLink technology to provide data transfer speeds of up to 900 GB/s between components. Fast forward to the 2022 GPU Technology Conference, which kicked off on Tuesday morning. At the event, CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the Grace CPU Superchip, the first discrete CPU NVIDIA plans to release as part of its Grace lineup.

Built on ARM’s recently introduced v9 architecture, the Grace CPU Superchip is actually two Grace CPUs connected via the company’s aforementioned NVLink interconnect technology. It integrates a staggering 144 ARM cores into a single socket and consumes approximately 500 watts of power. Ultra-fast LPDDR5x memory built into the chip allows for bandwidth speeds of up to 1 terabyte per second.

While they’re very different chips, a useful way to conceptualize NVIDIA’s new silicon is to think of Apple’s recently announced M1 Ultra. In the most simple terms, the M1 Ultra is made up of two M1 Max chips connected via Apple’s aptly named UltraFusion technology.

When NVIDIA begins shipping the Grace CPU Superchip to clients like the Department of Energy in the first half of 2023, it will offer them the option to configure it either as a standalone CPU system or as part of a server with up to eight Hopper-based GPUs (more on those in just a moment). The company claims its new chip is twice as fast as traditional servers. NVIDIA estimates it will achieve a score of approximately 740 points in SPECrate®2017_int_base benchmarks, putting it in the upper echelon data center processors.

Alongside the Grace CPU Superchip, NVIDIA announced its highly anticipated Hopper GPU architecture. Named after pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper, it is the successor to the company’s current Ampere architecture (you know, the one that powers all of the company’s impossible-to-find RTX 30 series GPUs). Now before you get excited, know that NVIDIA didn’t announce any mainstream GPUs at GTC. Instead, we got to see the H100 GPU. It’s an 80 billion transistor behemoth built using TSMC’s cutting-edge 4nm process. At the heart of the H100 is NVIDIA’s new Transformer Engine, which the company claims allows it to offer unparalleled performance when it needs to compute transformer models. Over the past few years, transformer models have become widely popular with AI scientists working with systems like GPT-3 and AlphaFold. NVIDIA claims the H100 can reduce the time it takes to train large models down to days and even mere hours. The H100 will be available later this year.