Let's start with the positives. The Cloud III Wireless offers a sturdy build that is yet to creak, bend, or break during my usage over the past two weeks. The headset's earcups are held in place by a tell-tale metal frame bathed in red and the surrounds are all plastic. The ear and head cushioning is a comfy and uniform leatherette. All together, it's a pretty standard gaming headset, and while the slightly hollow feeling earcups aren't my favourite, it's similar in styling to the Cloud line-up we've come to know so well.

A volume wheel with a smooth, slightly tactile action sits on the right earcup. On the left, a microphone mute button, power button and a USB Type-C charging port. The removable microphone extends out from the left earcup, connected via a slotted 3.5mm jack. 

My personal preference for a boom arm microphone is a flip-to-mute, simply for ease of muting it and moving it aside when it's not needed, though HyperX has employed a removable microphone for a long time and it remains a popular choice. This particular microphone comes with a small red light on the tip of the boom arm to indicate when it's muted—enough to give a quick visual cue to when the mic's disabled, and a good way to avoid accidentally talking to myself.

A mic's tone and profile are its most important qualities. The one included on the Cloud III delivers a tone favouring the upper ranges and with a much less pronounced bass response than some. That means it's not a natural sounding microphone, but an extremely clear one. For gaming over Discord or in-game voice chat, boosting the higher frequencies is not a bad thing—the Cloud III's mic cuts through game audio like a knife through butter. However, if you want a headset that's better suited to streaming or recording your voice, you'll want to look elsewhere.

I haven't felt the need to take the microphone off the headset much, as I'm not wearing this headset out of the house at all. There's no Bluetooth connectivity included on the Cloud III Wireless, only HyperX's 2.4 GHz connection via a dedicated dongle, meaning it's much more a dedicated PC headset than something like the SteelSeries Nova Pro or Bang & Olufsen Portal.

The dedicated wireless dongle will work across PC, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch, however, thanks to an adaptor in the box to change it from a native Type-C connection into a Type-A.

Unfortunately, I did have a couple issues with the Cloud III's dongle, namely what appeared to be interference with other wireless devices I'm using alongside it. Side-by-side with a Logitech G Pro X Superlight dongle—which is much smaller than the Cloud III's—I had some instances of rogue disconnections, which had at times caused the headset to repeat the word 'disconnected' at me over and over. There were also a few moments where the audio cut out or was distorted in some way—the first time I've experienced anything of the sort in recent years, and which happened a few too many times during a Destiny 2 raid. Thankfully this behaviour hasn't continued since moving onto another USB port on my PC's case, away from other device dongles.

The fit of the Cloud III isn't all that comfortable for me over longer periods of working and gaming. I find myself itching to remove the headset after four or more hours of wearing it. Four hours is a long time to wear anything on your head, and the Cloud III is not particularly heavy (I weighed it at 340 grams), but I have noticed some ear fatigue with the Cloud III that I hadn't experienced with the AceZone A-Spire I was previously using prior to testing.

The 120-hour battery life brandished by the Cloud III Wireless is good compared to the wider market, and in a few weeks of testing I've hardly reached for the charging cable much at all. Though HyperX does offer a much, much lengthier battery life in the Cloud Alpha Wireless, upwards of 300 hours, and that's just one of a few reasons to favour the more expensive Alpha kit, if you can consider spending the extra cash.

What's left to say about the Cloud III's? The sound quality, of course. The most important part of any headset, gaming or otherwise. I went into this review expecting a familiar sound, but conversely the profile of the Cloud III Wireless is difficult to put a finger on. 

The bass feels more pronounced on this headset than some more neutral sounding headsets and yet lacks any real oomph. It's trying, really trying, to highlight the lower frequencies, yet the actual drivers don't sound like they're capable of it. As a result, when the bass is kicking, it detracts from the rest of the mids and highs. Without any bass thumping, the high-end is better and for a closed-back headset—it doesn't sound pointy or harsh—but the high-end response is nothing to write home about.

The profile on the Cloud III Wireless is better suited to gaming than listening to music. Without too much going on all at once, it's easy to hone in on individual cues in-game, and I've been playing The Finals and Destiny 2 on this headset all week and I've had no complaints. I've nothing spectacular to report, either, but this headset does not provide a bad gaming experience by any means.

Overall, the sound profile of the Cloud III Wireless is simply quite unremarkable, and as someone that listens to music during the work day, and hops on a game during the night, I'd look to other, more flexible gaming headsets with a wider-ranging profile to cover my needs. More generally, the headset itself is just fine. You could happily use it for a long time without much of a thought, but as a picky reviewer I'd side with the Razer BlackShark V2 Pro instead, the older version of which is frequently discounted to a similar $120 – $150 price as the Cloud III.

Ideally, we'd all be able to hold off for a Black Friday discount on the Cloud Alpha Wireless, which really is a more all-round impressive headset, but that's quite a long time to wait for a discount that might never arrive.

The Cloud III Wireless highlights an uncomfortable truth with wireless gaming headsets. You can pick up a fantastic sounding pair of wired headphones for less than $100, but you need to spend a decent amount more cash to pick up similarly capable cable-free headphones. I've not been blown away by any wireless headset beneath the $150 mark. In that sense, and compared to similarly priced competition such as the Corsair HS80 Max, the HyperX Cloud III Wireless is fine enough, yet doesn't feel anything close to a legend in the making like its more expensive sibling. 

Launched in 1977, Voyager I was part of a twin spacecraft mission to study the gas planets, flying past Jupiter and then Saturn, before heading off out into the unknown. Powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), it continued to send back data to Earth and in 2012, it crossed the heliopause and officially entered interstellar space.

It's fair to say that nobody really expected the spacecraft to continue functioning for so long but despite a few glitches along the way, it's continued to provide valuable information about the nature of our Solar System.

That was until November 2023, when its Telemetry Modulation Unit (TMU) appeared to have failed, as it just sent a constantly repeating pattern of data. NASA's engineers ultimately discovered that the TMU was working as intended—the issue was one of the ancient memory chips for the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS) had failed, either due to a high-energy particle wrecking it or just through over four decades of wear and tear.

Since that chip stored instructions for how the FDS should communicate with the TMU, its loss meant the latter had no way to work properly. The two Voyager spacecraft were some of the first ever to use volatile memory to store data, so it's remarkable that they've lasted as long as they have. But with the problem identified, a solution could be developed and it was about essentially figuring out which code had been lost and then resending it to be stored on another memory chip.

Not that it would be a quick fix. Voyager I is over 15 billion miles away and it takes around 22.5 hours for a radio signal to reach it and then another 22.5 hours for any response to return to Earth—imagine clicking on a desktop icon and waiting for nearly two days for it to activate, and you'll get a sense of how challenging it is to work with the spacecraft.

NASA can only send part of the required instructions in any one signal but the first batch was sent on April 18. Two days later, a response was received indicating that the memory relocation had gone as planned and the spacecraft could now correctly report its status.

Over the next few weeks, the engineers will continue to move the code for the FDS into other memory locations and once complete, Voyager I will be able to send scientific data back.

At some point in the next few years, the RTG will no longer have sufficient radioactivity to power the spacecraft's transmitter and it will fall silent for good. By 2036, even if it does somehow continue to work, Voyager I will be too far for NASA's Deep Space Network.

We'll probably never know the ultimate fate of the incredible machine but its discoveries have been an astonishing testament to the skill and ingenuity of NASA scientists and engineers.

Somehow I doubt anything in my current PC will last half as long but if it does start going wonky, I think I know who might be best at fixing it.

And, honestly, the new Qualcomm chips are the single piece of PC technology I'm most excited about seeing this year. With the promise that standard Windows games will "just work" with the Snapdragon X series, and the expectation that we are looking at performance levels around the already impressive AMD RDNA 3-based Radeon 780M built into the best of the red team's laptop chips and the best handheld gaming PCs around, there's some real promise in moving away from that classic x86 CPU in your next laptop.

Qualcomm has even said its chips can happily operate with discrete graphics cards, too, which means that gaming laptops based on the Snapdragon X Elite or X Plus chips aren't an impossibility, either.

Most of the specs of the new ARM chips have already been announced, but today we've got the full suite of processors, along with a decoder to help us understand the different part numbers. Gotta love a decoder… 

Personally, I feel like if you need a decoder to understand a part's platform then you're doing naming schemes wrong. But at least there are only four different chips to get to grips with right now, and the decoder is nowhere near as convoluted and counterintuitive as AMD's laptop decoding wheel.

There are three X Elite chips and a single one of the only just announced X Plus processors. The X Elite chips are all 12-core parts, while the X Plus is a 10-core CPU. Other than that it's mostly a clock speed difference and a lack of Dual Core Boost that separates the X Plus chip. Though in those terms it actually matches the lowest spec X Elite, so potentially more affordable Snapdragon X series laptops will still have a pretty decent level of performance.

They all use the same Qualcomm Oryon CPU core at their hearts, though with a different core count. But there is one thing to note from this specs drop, however, and that is a slight drop in the Dual Core Boost performance of the top Snapdragon X Elite chip. In the original material around Qualcomm's top chips, it originally stated that it could boost up to 4.3 GHz, but the new details show the X1E-84-100 CPU only capable of a 4.2 GHz boost. Though, in the grand scheme of things, that's probably not going to make a huge difference.

One thing we're pretty confident about the new ARM-based machines will be that they're not going to be the cheap alternative to AMD or Intel notebooks. Samsung is one of the manufacturers producing laptops with Qualcomm's latest processors, and early dealer prices for the Galaxy Book4 Edge indicate that it's going to be a premium-priced beastie.

So, one thing they're going to need to do is properly compete in performance terms with the x86 competition, and Qualcomm is seemingly pretty bullish about all this. In Cinebench 2024 (presumably the ARM64 version) it's promising the weaker X Plus will deliver up to 28% higher performance at the same power level compared with the Meteor Lake Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and that its slower Adreno iGPU will manage up to 36% higher performance at the same power level in the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme benchmark.

Videocardz has released a slide showing some specific benchmark numbers (which we didn't receive from Qualcomm ahead of the embargo) and from testing the Core Ultra 5 135H against it, those numbers are making sense when I'm limiting my machine to 20 W. Though even at its max 35 W, the Intel chip is posting 3DMark numbers behind even the Snapdragon X Plus. It's worth noting these are 3DMark numbers, and Intel's GPUs are well optimised for those workloads.

But what's really exciting about these numbers, and about the possibility of having an ARM-based solution for Windows laptops, is the power consumption of these chips. On the CPU side Qualcomm is promising the lowest spec Snapdragon X Plus CPU will be able to match the peak performance of AMD and Intel's competing processors using 39% less power.

And that only looks better when you check out the promised gaming performance. Qualcomm states that the X Plus will match the Meteor Lake Arc iGPU frame for frame with 50% less power. That's going to do great things for mobile gaming if you can genuinely squeeze anything like that extra battery life out of your machine with proper 1080p gaming performance.

And that's what we're expecting; frame rates on par with even the AMD 780M, and that can offer gaming performance I'll happily take in a thin and light laptop. Because that's what Qualcomm is demonstrating here, genuinely MacBook Air styled machines with actual PC performance in PC applications.

This is the promise, and why we're so excited to get our hands on laptops powered by Qualcomm's new chips when they launch in the middle of this year. And you know what happens in the middle of the year? Computex… where Qualcomm's CEO, Cristiano Amon, will be hosting a keynote right after Dr. Lisa Su.

Whether the Snapdragon X series of chips can live up to the hype is still to be seen, but it's looking good so far, and if you were AMD and Intel maybe you'd be starting to worry about your mobile lineups.

The chart was tweaked last week to "match the performance and optimization improvements made coming up to launch", which is May 13. I'm not a big fan of developers posting minimum requirements and much prefer to use their recommended specs as the entry point for enjoyable gameplay. For playing at 1080p, using the medium quality preset, a Core i5 9600K or Ryzen 5 3600X is suggested for the CPU.

Those are both six-core processors, though AMD's does offer multithreading support for 12 threads in total. That Intel chip dates back to 2018 (the Ryzen is a year younger) so it doesn't look like Homeworld 3 will be especially CPU-heavy. That said, it is a real-time strategy game set in space, so I should imagine that in really big battles, especially online ones, the 9600K might struggle a bit.

For graphics cards, Blackbird Interactive suggests an Arc A580, GeForce 'RTX 1080 Ti', or a Radeon RX 5700. The Nvidia recommendation is obviously a typo and should be a GTX 1080 Ti, which is a seven-year-old GPU. At the time, it was one of the most powerful graphics cards you could buy but today's mainstream GPUs are more than a match. It does make a pleasant change seeing Intel's graphics cards getting a mention in system requirements.

RAM requirements are 16GB across the board and that's pretty much the norm for PC gaming these days. What is unusual is the amount of storage space needed, just 40GB. Compared to the 100GB+ behemoths we often see nowadays, that seems like a mere drop in the ocean. Mind you, space is mostly empty.

Going to the other scale of things, 4K gaming on the Epic preset needs far more recent and potent hardware. A Core i7 12700K or Ryzen 7 7700X for the CPU, and an RTX 3080 or RX 6900 XT for the graphics card. So you're looking at processors with eight or more cores (16+ threads) and while that makes more sense for this type of game, it's rare to see any game actually use that many threads.

Those GPUs aren't the latest models, of course, but neither are they lightweight offerings. Blackbird Interactive also points out that with these settings, you'll need 12GB of VRAM on your card.

And then there's good ol' ray tracing. There isn't much call for highly accurate global illumination in open-space games, so the developers are only using it for shadows. The system requirements for enabling ray tracing start very reasonably at 1080p, Low RT but jump right to the very latest and greatest components if you want to play at 4K, Ultra RT.

A Core i9 14900K or a Ryzen 9 7950X3D suggests that it will be extremely demanding, especially with the GPU requirement being an RTX 4080 or RX 7900 XTX. That's...umm...mighty. Fortunately, upscalers are on offer in the form of AMD's FSR 2 and Nvidia's DLSS 3 to claw back some performance, though there's no direct mention of frame generation in the system requirements. DLSS 3 implies that it's present but I suspect it's not.

If I have one criticism of Blackbird Interactive's system requirements is that while they're pretty comprehensive, the chart says nothing at all about expected performance—in other words, what kind of frame rate should expect to see with that hardware and setting combination. One could take this as a sign that the game isn't going to run at very high fps but in RTS games, what really counts as high?

When Homeworld 3 launches on May 13, we'll be sure to let you know.

Kuo reckons the original plan was for up to 800,000 units of the headset in 2024. This has now been cut to 400,000 to 450,000. He also notes that Apple has made the call to reduce production before the headset has even gone on sale in markets outside the US.

That suggests demand in the US has been much lower than expected. What's more, Kuo says the poor performance of the Vision Pro could mean that a planned update to the headset in 2025 may be cancelled.

It's tempting to conclude that once the initial flurry of sales to YouTubers and influencers died down, the underlying demand from real-world users was always going to be limited. Arguably that's thanks to two pretty obvious factors.

First, the Apple Vision Pro costs $3,499 before extras, so it's not going to be an impulse purchase for any but the most well heeled. Second, it's a big, bulky, awkward device to use, not something that many people are going to be happy to have on during their normal day-to-day activities.

In other words, you have to be very keen on the concept to buy in, both financially and ergonomically. That's despite the fact that the headset represents a significant technological stepchange thanks to the quality of its micro-OLED displays and optics, not to mention a very slick interface.

Moreover as Kuo points out, Apple has yet to surface a really killer app for the headset. It's pitched more precisely as a mixed reality headset with a strong emphasis on real-world video passthrough as opposed to a pure VR or virtual reality headset, the latter arguably more niche but at least offering one really compelling application, namely gaming.

Yes, it's a very nice toy. It's an interesting alternative to a large TV or projector for consuming content. And it does provide an intriguing glimpse into one possible future for human-machine interfaces. But it's an awful lot of money for that kind of whimsy, no matter how superficially spectacular.

As for what this says about the future of MR and VR headsets, well, probably not very much. While Vision Pro is a technical marvel in some regards, it is ultimately expensive and physically clunky. The $3,500 price and sheer weight and size of the thing sitting on your head narrow the market pretty dramatically.

So, the Vision Pro doesn't provide much insight into how a more accessible and usable MR device with similar technical capabilities might be received. It also doesn't say much about the gaming VR market and how initiatives like Meta opening out its Horizon OS for use by third party headset makers including Asus.

In other words, if Kuo is right about Apple reigning in Vision Pro production it probably doesn't change the outlook for MR or VR much. It was never going to be a mass market device.

The first recipients of the updated GPU architecture will almost certainly be the forthcoming Strix Point and Strix Halo laptop APUs. In the case of the latter, it's being claimed to be packing a graphics chip that's on par with a laptop RTX 4070, though that's mostly down to the number of shaders it has, rather than the updated architecture.

News of the repository upload was reported by Linux gurus Phoronix, whereas the changes to the LLVM compiler were analysed by Chips and Cheese. Both of them point out that the new GPU firmware, codenamed GC 11.5, is the main clue to it being an RDNA 3 Refresh (or RDNA 3.5 or RDNA 3+, take your pick). That particular code isn't used by any current graphics processor, so it's definitely for something new.

Additional evidence comes in the form of the VCN (Video Core Next) firmware update, which is still on version 4. That's used in current RDNA 3 GPUs and AMD is unlikely to completely redo the video encoders just for a refresh.

So what exactly can we expect with RDNA 3+? According to Chips and Cheese, the updates are fairly minor and mostly concern just making the chips more flexible, in terms of programming and getting the best performance out of them. For example, every Compute Unit in an RDNA 3 GPU contains two scalar ALU (arithmetic logic units) that only handle integer or whole number calculations.

That's been changed to include floating-point values, which means the scalar units can be utilised more often, though they won't have the same capabilities as the full vector ALUs that handle most of the shader routines.

There are some other changes underneath the hood but the improved scalar ALUs are the most significant. It all points to Strix Halo APUs being seriously beefy and they could go a long well to helping AMD crack Nvidia's dominance of the discrete GPU market for laptops.

Adding more capability to a GPU typically requires more transistors, which in turn makes the chips larger, but with AMD expected to use TMSC's N4 process nodes for Strix Halo/Point, they shouldn't be too large at all.

Phoronix points out that, historically, AMD releases Linux firmware updates when it is very close to launching a new product, which implies that the new APUs are close to launch. Computex 2024 is a little over a month away and if I was a betting kind of person, I'd probably stick a penny or two down on AMD announcing an updated RDNA 3 in its new APUs.

Meta has announced that it will be opening up the OS included with the Meta Quest 3 to other hardware manufacturers, including Lenovo and Asus. The latter is supposedly creating a dedicated gaming headset with all the ROG trimmings, too. But not to be left out, Microsoft reportedly has teamed up with Meta for its own headset, an Xbox themed Meta Quest.

"Xbox and Meta teamed up last year to bring Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) to Meta Quest, letting people play Xbox games on a large 2D virtual screen in mixed reality. Now, we’re working together again to create a limited-edition Meta Quest, inspired by Xbox," Meta says.

Assumedly that's the Meta Quest 3 receiving the console-themed makeover, as that's Meta's main VR headset right now, and unlike the other two it doesn't sound like Microsoft will be designing the headset from scratch. Rather, it's suggested we're looking at a Quest 3, and a render suggests something along the lines of a black colourway, with a splash of green for the face cushion.

The render provided is "Not an actual product render," so it might look entirely different. If it is mostly black, it may end up looking a lot like every other headset. The Xbox Series X is a black box with a bit of green on it, so the theme would hardly be surprising, and given the excitement over the Xbox-styled mini fridge I'd guess some fans will be pretty keen on this one, too. Whatever it ends up looking like.

The Meta Quest headset will be limited edition, and that could mean anything from a couple headsets to a tens of thousands of headsets. It's tough to say. All we know is, Zuckerberg suggests it'll come with an Xbox controller and a Game Pass code in the box, which will pair nicely with the recent Xbox Cloud Gaming beta application on the headset.

All these goodies will set you back $180 (£170, AU$311). That's a little more than the good old HyperX QuadCast S and the Blue Yeti GX that also boasts RGB. However, there's a lot more to a good mic than just specs and, after a couple of weeks of using the ROG Carnyx, I'm left feeling a little shortchanged.

Let's start with the design of the thing which is no doubt one of the most striking gaming microphones I've seen yet, and a perfect showpiece on any live stream. The solid metal tube sits in an interestingly angled desk stand with elastic suspension cables, and that isolates external vibrations to the mic. The top half has machined triangular grills that expose the RGB lighting and, of course, allow sound to pass through to the condenser. Behind that are foam and mesh layers to prevent unwanted plosives.

There's a single, multi-functional dial on the front that controls gain, headset volume, and can also be used to toggle the built-in high-pass filter. Around the back of the microphone, you'll find the USB Type-C port and 3.5mm headphone jack so you can listen to the mic as you speak. On the top of the mic is a touchpad to mute the mic, which then glows a warm red to let you know it's muted. Touch and hold it will turn the RGB lighting on or off, too.

The desk stand for the Carnyx is solid and rigid, keeping the mic exactly where you want it to be. It allows you to tilt the microphone maybe 30-degrees. I like the base of the stand which is a triangular metal piece with tasteful grooves that highlight the ROG logo depending on the angle you look at. 

You aren't beholden to the desk stand though; a single screw unlocks the triangle base so you can attach the rest of the mic to a boom arm. The Carnyx uses a 3/8-inch thread which is common to a variety of boom arms.

Inside the Carnyx is a studio-grade, 25mm condenser capsule designed to improve low-frequency performance and deliver richer, warmer vocal tones. Combined with a lossless audio bitrate of 24-bit and 192kHz, the Carnyx can sound really good.

The microphone also uses a cardioid polar pattern, so as long as it's in front of you, and preferably less than five inches from your mouth, you will sound hella sexy.

I've recorded a sample of the difference proximity makes to the mic's quality and it is obvious to me that despite the lovely desk stand, the intended use case is a boom arm to get the mic as close to your face and in the camera frame as possible. I messed around with the gain levels while using the desk stand but couldn't get anywhere near the warmth and depth of vocals as when the mic was close to my mouth.

Having the Carnyx in its desk stand positioned at a reasonable foot distance would result in much lower audio volume—that's just physics. However, pushing the gain higher to get things louder introduces significant background hiss as well as other unwanted ambient noises. The high-pass filter never fully helps things much. Whether I sat the microphone close to my gaming rig or closer to my mouth, it always picked up the fan hum from my PC.

Lowering the gain helps much more than the high-pass filter but further necessitates proximity to your mouth for solid audio. Thankfully, there's also a noise-gate but being a fairly soft-spoken fella with a relatively quiet home (most of the time), I didn't need it much.

Now, while you can adjust the basics directly on the mic using the dial, you'll need Armoury Crate to really dial things in. In here, you can adjust volume, bitrate, noise gate, Perfect voice and an equalizer with three presets; Natural, Dark and Bright. I prefer the natural and dark, but it all depends on your voice and your own preference.

One issue I have with the physical control on the Carnyx is that you don't get any sort of feedback to acknowledge your changes. Turning the dial doesn't use the RGB to indicate gain or volume levels, which can be frustrating.

At the end of the day, the ROG Carnyx is a good first attempt by Asus though not quite groundbreaking. It's a handsome microphone that any RGB-loving game streamer would be happy to have in their setup and it can sound good if you set it up correctly.

But at close to $200, the Carnyx is far from the best microphone money can buy. Simpler microphones without the fancy RGB can deliver the goods for less money. Unless you are particularly sold on the aesthetic or Asus Aura Sync ecosystem, this wouldn't be my first choice. That said, I look forward to future iterations of the ROG Carnyx.

And if you're wondering who's signed up to make a brand new Horizon OS-powered headset, Asus and Lenovo are already onboard.

So, what's included in Meta Horizon OS? Just about everything embedded into the software of the popular Quest 3, including inside-out tracking, high-resolution passthrough and Spatial Anchors, which are a way for Meta's Quest headset to 'lock-in' on real-world reference points. Whether access to these features in the OS translates into new headsets with specifications and features to match the Quest 3 will depend on how other manufacturers set up their own devices, however.

Asus has plans to produce an ROG branded VR headset. It will focus on gaming performance, and that's pretty much everything we can say about it right now. Well, except that it will utilise the new Meta Horizon OS to some degree, and that it will likely be built using Qualcomm's Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor. As Meta says in a press release: "All of these devices will benefit from our long-term collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., which builds the Snapdragon processors that are tightly integrated with our software and hardware stacks."

Essentially, this OS is built for Qualcomm's own brand of Arm chip. Though, as is the case with the Quest line-up from Meta and as mentioned in Meta's press release, we should expect full support on PC including via SteamVR.

How this new ROG VR headset will look is anyone's guess. Though if you were to picture a beefed up Quest 3 with more angular styling and RGB lighting, you're probably not too far off the end product. That's entirely speculation on my part, however.

"We’ve been inspired by the incredible gaming community that has formed around virtual and mixed reality, and we know that the most passionate gamers want high-performance hardware," says S.Y Hsu, co-CEO of Asus. "With Meta Horizon OS, Asus and Republic of Gamers will build the gaming headset of the next generation."

Lenovo's upcoming device is initially less attractive sounding to my gaming headset adorned ears: it's a device primarily billed as being for productivity (yuck), learning (double yuck), and entertainment (sure). Still, with Lenovo's recent good form in gaming laptops and handheld gaming PCs, I'd be keen to see it take a more gaming angle on a VR headset as well.

The important thing is Meta seems to be committed to opening up its VR software to others, which comes at a similar time to Zuckerberg's announcement that it hopes to fund open-source AI as well. This seems like quite the turnaround for a company which had, with the release of the Quest 2, forced a mandatory login onto users. That's gone now, so let's see if other companies can utilise Meta's platform for the best. 

Speaking of which, my only initial concern to the new headsets is whether Asus will be able to match Meta on pricing, or whether it would even want to. The Quest 3 isn't as affordable as its predecessor, but it's still quite cheap compared to some VR headsets. I would guess an ROG badge and gaming specific features would jack up the price, which, if I'm honest, is the last thing we really need to bolster player numbers in virtual reality.

"Consumers’ right to repair products will now become a reality," says René Repasi, MEP. "It will be easier and cheaper to repair instead of purchase new, expensive items. This is a significant achievement for Parliament and its commitment to empower consumers in the fight against climate change. The new legislation extends legal guarantees by 12 months when opting for repair, gives better access to spare parts and ensures easier, cheaper and faster repair."

Under the new rules, manufacturers will need to inform consumers about their rights, offer extended legal guarantees, and provide cost-effective repair services. Furthermore, they will have to provide spare parts and tools at a reasonable price and can no longer block consumer repairs through hardware or software, which strengthens the ability of repair shops to fit suitable replacements.

"In particular, [manufacturers] cannot impede the use of second-hand or 3D-printed spare parts by independent repairers, nor can they refuse to repair a product solely for economic reasons or because it was previously repaired by someone else," notes a press release for the legislation.

A pan-European online platform will be set up to offer advice to consumers about where they will be able to get a product repaired, including local repair shops, and community-led repair initiatives, such as repair cafes.

One manufacturer that will likely be at odds with the new legislation is Apple, which has employed something called parts pairing to prevent third-party replacements of certain components. Parts pairing means that even if a part on an iPhone is replaced with a like-for-like replacement by a third party, it may not be recognised by the phone unless officially sanctioned by Apple. 

Apple isn't the only company to use tactics such as parts pairing, but Repasi did note in a press conference that Apple would now need to justify any way in which it intends to block repairs on its devices and that it would have difficulty in doing so once the legislation is in place. They said it may end up as a matter for the courts to decide.

"The right to repair is actually extending consumer rights, and is giving a very current example of what Europe is doing to support its citizens," Repasi said.

The State of Oregon also passed legislation recently to strengthen the right to repair and prevent parts pairing and similar practices, and more widely a few US states have been keen to adopt stronger right to repair legislation, including California.