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Bad news: Your PS5 Slim covers won’t work on the PS5 Pro

You won't be able to use your old PS5 Slim covers on a new PlayStation 5 Pro. Instead, you'll have to buy new ones when they become available.

People have a lot of questions about the PlayStation 5 Pro ahead of its launch on November 7. Is it worth $700? How much better will your games look and play? Will your PS5 Slim faceplate match? You’ll have to wait for reviews to answer a lot of those questions, but we now have an answer to that last one. Digital Trends can confirm that PS5 Slim covers won’t work with the PS5 Pro.

“PS5 console covers are not compatible with PS5 Pro. However, players will be able to swap out different console covers for PS5 Pro when they become available in the future,” a PlayStation spokesperson told IGN Thursday.

Speculation began Wednesday after a Reddit user posted that their cobalt blue plates for their PS5 Slim (the current standard PS5 you can buy) weren’t compatible with the PS5 Pro. While the two consoles share a lot of the same physical dimensions, the user said only the bottom plate seems to snap on properly. The top plate doesn’t match. “The teeth that connect to the system are [in] slightly different places. So you can’t connect the top part,” they wrote.

PlayStation 5 Pro does not work with the slim plates.
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It was previously unclear if the PS5 Slim’s swappable covers, which can change up the look of the console, would fit the PS5 Pro. In an announcement on the PlayStation Blog, Sony Interactive Entertainment co-CEO Hideaki Nishino only noted that players can add a disc drive or “swap out console covers when they become available.” This seemed to imply that PS5 Pro-specific covers would be introduced, although that doesn’t confirm if you could only buy PS5 Pro branded covers.

The PS5 Pro will set you back a whopping $700, and it doesn’t come with a disc drive. That’ll cost an extra $80 through PlayStation Direct. At the time of this writing, PS5 Slim covers cost $60 each for standard colors, or $65 for the three chroma variants. We don’t know anything yet about what the PS5 Pro faceplates will cost, but you can bet they’ll be expensive.

Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.

Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.

Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.

Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.

Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.