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  The PS5 Pro version of the 30th anniversary bundle comes with both varieties of DualSense controller, a plate for an (optional) optical drive, and other accessories. [credit: Sony ]

Sony launched the original PlayStation console in Japan on December 3, 1994, and Sony isn't letting the 30th anniversary pass by quietly. Today the company has announced limited-edition versions of both the PS5 and PS5 Pro with gray plastic shells and multicolored PlayStation logos, inspired by the gray plastic shells of the original. The retro-inspired modern consoles will be released on November 21 and will be available for preorder starting September 26 from Sony's direct.playstation.com site.

Sony is also releasing DualSense and DualSense Edge controllers with gray shells and colorful PS logo buttons and a gray version of the Switch-esque PlayStation Portal streaming console. Sony says that the limited-edition PS5 Pro will be limited to 12,300 units—a reference to the December 3 launch date—but didn't mention any specific manufacturing numbers for the regular PS5, either DualSense controller design, or the PlayStation Portal.

Both console bundles also come with a handful of other accessories: a PS logo sticker, a PS logo paperclip, cable ties, and (my personal favorite) a regular USB-C cable with a giant, chunky PS1-style controller connector on one end.

Enlarge / The iPhone 16. (credit: Apple)

If you've ever had an iPhone update go bad, you may have used recovery mode to resuscitate your device. A device booted into recovery mode can't do anything by itself, but it can be connected to a working Mac or PC with a cable, and that Mac or PC can download a fresh copy of iOS and all of your phone's related firmware to restore it to a factory-default state. You'll need a backup to recover your personal data, but it beats having to take a trip to an Apple Store or send your phone in for repairs.

The new iPhone 16 and 16 Pro models launching this week apparently add a new option for phones that are in recovery mode: rudimentary wireless communication, so phones that need to be recovered can be placed near another iPhone or an iPad and be restored without using a cable, a PC, or Mac.

The new system was tested by 9to5Mac, which says it uses "the same RecoveryOS that lets users restore Apple Watch and Apple TV firmware from an iPhone." When you place an iPhone 16 in recovery mode near another device, the functioning device will download the software and firmware files and then transfer them to the broken phone, where they can be installed.

Enlarge / iPads running iPadOS 18. (credit: Apple)

Apple has temporarily paused the rollout of the iPadOS 18 update for M4 iPad Pros. The company has stopped signing the update for these iPads, meaning it will no longer be offered to users when they check, and Apple's servers won't activate the update if it's installed some other way.

Apple confirmed to Ars that it had "temporarily removed" the update in order to "resolve an issue that is impacting a small number of devices."

The update has supposedly been "bricking" devices for some M4 iPad Pro users; anecdotal reports from Reddit and MacRumors forum users suggest that some users have installed the update without issue, and others have ended up with unresponsive devices. Apple is apparently offering hardware replacements to users who have been affected, which points to a pretty serious bug—usually devices can be put into recovery (or DFU) mode as a last resort in the event of a botched software update.

Enlarge / Apple's M3 Max-powered 16-inch MacBook Pro. New Pro laptops and some desktops could be on tap for later this fall. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple's newest iPhones and Apple Watches don't come out until later this week, but the rumor mill is already indicating that Apple is planning a product announcement for October to refresh some of the products that didn't get a mention at the iPhone event. Apple scheduled its release calendar similarly last year, when it announced and released new iPhones in September and then launched the first wave of M3 Macs around Halloween.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman believes that the event will mainly focus on the first wave of Macs with M4 processors, following the standard M4's introduction in the iPad Pro earlier this year. As he has reported previously, he expects new MacBook Pro models with the M4 and "pro-level M4 chip options," presumably the M4 Pro and M4 Max. He also expects an M4 version of the 24-inch iMac.

But the most interesting of the new Macs will still be the redesigned Mac mini, which hasn't gotten an M3 update at all and has been using the same basic external design since 2010. This Mac mini is said to be closer in size to the Apple TV than the current mini, but still uses an internal power supply so that owners won't have to wrangle a power brick. At least some of the current device's ports will be replaced by USB-C and/or Thunderbolt ports, something that MacRumors apparently confirmed earlier today when they found a reference to an "Apple silicon Mac mini (5 ports)" in an Apple software update (some of those ports are reportedly on the front of the device, a nice Mac Studio design upgrade that I'd like to see on a new Mac mini).

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Today is the official release date for the public versions of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS 15 Sequoia, and a scad of other Apple software updates, the foundation that Apple will use for Apple Intelligence and whatever other features it wants to add between now and next year's Worldwide Developers Conference in June. But for those who value stability and reliability over new features, you may not be excited to update to a new operating system with a version number ending in "0."

For those of you who prefer to wait for a couple of bugfix updates before installing new stuff, Apple is also releasing security-only updates for a bunch of its (now) last-generation operating systems today. The iOS 17.7, iPadOS 17.7, and macOS 14.7 updates are either available now or should be shortly, along with a security update for 2022's macOS 13 Ventura. An updated version of Safari 18 that runs on both macOS 13 and 14 should be available soon, though as of this writing is doesn't appear to be available yet.

Apple has historically been pretty good about providing security updates to older macOS releases—you can expect them for about two years after the operating system is replaced by a newer version. But for iOS and iPadOS, the company used to stop updating older versions entirely after releasing a new one. This changed back in 2021, when Apple decided to start providing some security-only updates to older iOS versions to help people who were worried about installing an all-new potentially buggy OS upgrade.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

The macOS 15 Sequoia update will inevitably be known as "the AI one" in retrospect, introducing, as it does, the first wave of "Apple Intelligence" features.

That's funny because none of that stuff is actually ready for the 15.0 release that's coming out today. A lot of it is coming "later this fall" in the 15.1 update, which Apple has been testing entirely separately from the 15.0 betas for weeks now. Some of it won't be ready until after that—rumors say image generation won't be ready until the end of the year—but in any case, none of it is ready for public consumption yet.

But the AI-free 15.0 release does give us a chance to evaluate all of the non-AI additions to macOS this year. Apple Intelligence is sucking up a lot of the media oxygen, but in most other ways, this is a typical 2020s-era macOS release, with one or two headliners, several quality-of-life tweaks, and some sparsely documented under-the-hood stuff that will subtly change how you experience the operating system.

Enlarge / Emojipedia sample images of the new Unicode 16.0 emoji. (credit: Emojipedia)

The Unicode Consortium has finalized and released version 16.0 of the Unicode standard, the elaborate character set that ensures that our phones, tablets, PCs, and other devices can all communicate and interoperate with each other. The update adds 5,185 new characters to the standard, bringing the total up to a whopping 154,998.

Of those 5,185 characters, the ones that will get the most attention are the eight new emoji characters, including a shovel, a fingerprint, a leafless tree, a radish (formally classified as "root vegetable"), a harp, a purple splat that evokes the '90s Nickelodeon logo, and a flag for the island of Sark. The standout, of course, is "face with bags under eyes," whose long-suffering thousand-yard stare perfectly encapsulates the era it has been born into. Per usual, Emojipedia has sample images that give you some idea of what these will look like when they're implemented by various operating systems, apps, and services.

Unicode 16.0 also adds support for seven new modern and historical scripts: the West African Garay alphabet; the Gurung Khema, Kirat Rai, Ol Onal, and Sunuwar scripts from Northeast India and Nepal; and historical Todhri and Tulu-Tigalari scripts from Albania and Southwest India, respectively.

Enlarge / The reMarkable Paper Pro tablet. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Our main critique of Amazon's Kindle Scribe when it launched in late 2022—and one that still mostly holds up—was that it felt like a big e-reader with writing functionality tacked on rather than a tablet designed specifically for writing and note-taking. Though Amazon's hardware is arguably superior (and definitely more affordable), we definitely wanted software that was closer to what was available on the reMarkable 2 tablet.

The reMarkable 2 mostly doesn't bother with e-reader features, though it does support EPUB and PDF documents; it's focused almost entirely on the creation and organizing of notes in various formats. And now reMarkable (the company) is out with a new reMarkable (the tablet), one that attempts to catch up with and surpass Amazon's hardware while still keeping the focus on writing.

Writing is fun

The new $579 reMarkable Paper Plus is an evolution of the previous design—slightly larger and heavier, but with a much bigger 11.8-inch display (up from 10.3 inches in the reMarkable 2) that also adds a front-light and color e-ink support. Where most color e-readers use E Ink's Kaleido technology, which offers faster page refresh times but relatively dull, washed-out color, the reMarkable Paper Pro uses E Ink Gallery, which has richer color reproduction at the expense of refresh speed.