The PS5 Pro made us sit closer to the screen

Think about how you like to play video games. Are you the type to sink into your couch, controller in hand, TV across the living room, for a few hours of Madden? If so, Sony’s new PlayStation 5 Pro is not for you. But if you find yourself leaning forward, creeping ever closer to the screen, looking for every clue hidden in the grass or every tiny twitchy graphical advantage, a $700 console might not be such a silly idea.

On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge’s Sean Hollister joins the show to talk about his experience with the PS5 Pro. We go through what you can expect from this super-powered new gaming machine, which games and which gamers might get the most from it, and why the PS5 Pro might have more in common with a gaming PC than a standard console.

But before we get to that, there’s some news this week to talk about. After a hotly contested election, and looking ahead to the upcoming Trump presidency, we spend a few minutes talking through our plans to cover the new administration — and how we’re thinking differently than we did in 2016. Once we’re done with that, we talk about our reviews of the new Mac Mini and MacBook Pro, and the way they seem to nicely simplify the process of buying a Mac. For the first time in a long time, the lineup makes a lot of sense.

Then it’s gaming time. In addition to the PS5 Pro, Sean talks us through the news that Nintendo’s next console will be backwards compatible with Switch games, but cautions that the announcement isn’t necessarily unequivocally good news. Then he gives us an update on Nintendo’s fight against emulators, which has taken a bit of a confusing turn.

Finally, in the lightning round, we talk about the ultra-expensive new domain name for ChatGPT, and why .coms are still so important. We also talk about the new cap on Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service, and the good and bad news in the Matter 1.4 standard. Matter: it’ll be great next year. Every year. Forever.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with Apple and gadget news:

And in gaming news:

And in the lightning round: