Valve is releasing Steam Link, its local-network game-streaming app, for Apple’s Vision Pro mixed-reality headset, enabling Vision Pro owners to stream traditional (non-VR) games from their Steam library wirelessly from a nearby Mac or PC.

We call them “traditional games” to be clear this doesn’t stream VR titles—only games designed for a conventional 2D screen like a monitor or TV. It could, however, help set the stage for VR support down the line. To be explicit, Valve has made no announcements about bringing SteamVR games to the Vision Pro.

Steam Link already existed for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. Players could pair controllers with those devices and stream Steam games over the local network—not only from other Apple devices but also from Windows or Linux gaming PCs.

Users have managed similar setups on the Vision Pro using third-party tools like ALVR, but this official app offers a simpler, more established route to the same result.

If you want to try it, you can sign up via TestFlight, Apple’s platform for distributing pre-release apps before they appear on the App Store. Valve says the current build “allows streaming up to 4K resolutions, and allows you to dynamically adjust the curve of the display in panoramic mode.”

When we reviewed the Vision Pro at launch a couple of years ago, we complained about its limited ability to connect to external gaming and media hardware or access mixed-reality content outside Apple’s walled garden. That situation has since markedly improved, though it still isn’t always as straightforward as it is on competing headsets.

“Although Lenovo has made some headway complying with French consumer law by adding more repair score PDFs to its website, we urge the company to address this long-running problem,” this year’s report states.

PIRG’s analysis found that “laptops remain largely stagnant in terms of repairability” across many of the eight most popular laptop brands in the US.

Proctor told Ars that while consumers’ access to parts, tools, and the vendor-level information has improved, gains in how easily devices can be disassembled “take longer to materialize.”

He also commended manufacturers for releasing more repair-friendly designs, such as Apple’s MacBook Neo.

Phone repairability ratings

Motorola, owned by Lenovo, received the highest score.

PIRG’s phone manufacturer scores this year draw on the European Product Registry for Energy Labelling (EPREL), a system the European Commission introduced in June 2025 to rate smartphone and tablet repairability. It considers six factors:

• Disassembly depth
• Fasteners
• Tools
• Spare part availability
• Software updates
• Repair information

US PIRG applied different criteria for this year’s report.

PIRG’s report said Apple and Samsung scored poorly under EPREL in part because the phones assessed are guaranteed updates for five years but not beyond.

PIRG observed that Apple has improved phone repairability by moving away from parts pairing—where parts must pass encrypted software checks to function—and by introducing the Repair Assistant. Still, the report’s author regretted that third-party Face ID replacements still don’t function. The report adds:

Apple also expanded its Activation Lock anti-theft feature to individual components, which repair advocates warn could leave large numbers of otherwise working parts stranded—effectively locking them out of the repair ecosystem.

Apple is not alone: parts pairing and software restrictions remain an industry-wide issue that consumers and independent technicians continue to confront across manufacturers.

The qualifications for membership also look very different between the existing charter and the renewal issued today. Under the current charter, ACIP members “shall be selected from authorities who are knowledgeable in the fields of immunization practices and public health, have expertise in the use of vaccines and other immunobiologic agents in clinical practice or preventive medicine, have expertise with clinical or laboratory vaccine research, or have expertise in assessment of vaccine efficacy and safety.” Those particular core requirements—expertise in immunization practice and vaccine science—were key to Murphy’s conclusion that Kennedy’s appointees were not fit to serve on the committee.

The renewal notice omits those specific requirements and instead emphasizes a “geographic balance” (representing various regions of the country) and a “balance of specialty areas.” It lists a broad array of specialties that cover a much wider range of medical and scientific disciplines and possibly beyond, including: “biostatistics, toxicology, immunology, epidemiology, pediatrics, internal medicine, family medicine, nursing, consumer issues, state and local health department perspective, academic perspective, public health perspective, etc.”

Suggested changes

Some of the alterations in the renewal may reflect pressure from an anti-vaccine organization aligned with Kennedy. That group, the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), is led by Kennedy ally Del Bigtree and has been collaborating with Aaron Siri, an attorney who worked on Kennedy’s unsuccessful presidential bid and has brought numerous lawsuits seeking damages for alleged vaccine injuries. Siri is also known for petitioning the Food and Drug Administration to revoke the polio vaccine.

Last month, ICAN urged Kennedy to amend ACIP’s charter, and Siri’s law firm submitted a draft with track-changed edits outlining their preferred language for the new charter. The draft proposes that ACIP members have expertise in any area “deemed relevant by the Secretary,” and it explicitly requires that “At least two members shall have direct and substantial experience advocating for and/or treating those injured by vaccines.”

The Department of Health and Human Services did not answer Ars Technica’s questions about edits to the renewal notice or possible revisions to the CDC’s full charter text. Spokesperson Andrew Nixon, in an emailed statement, only said the renewal is part of “routine statutory requirements and do not signal any broader policy shift.”

Robotics-focused machine-learning firm Generalist has unveiled GEN-1, a physical AI platform it claims “crosses into production-level success rates” across “a broad range of physical skills” that previously required the dexterity and muscle memory of human hands. Generalist also emphasizes the new model’s knack for reacting to disruptions by improvising fresh maneuvers and “connect[ing] ideas from different places in order to solve new problems.”

GEN-1 expands on Generalist’s earlier GEN-0 model, which the company promoted in November as a proof of concept for applying scaling laws to robotics training, demonstrating that more pretraining data and compute translate into better post-training performance. But whereas large language models have been able to process the trillions of words available online for training, robotic systems don’t have a comparable, easily accessible supply of high-quality examples of how humans manipulate objects.

To close that gap, Generalist has turned to “data hands”, wearable pincer devices that record micro-movements and visual cues as people perform manual tasks. The company says it has gathered more than half a million hours — and “petabytes of physical interaction data” — to train its physical model.

The outcome is an autonomous system precise enough to place cash into a wallet and versatile enough to fold laundry or sort auto parts. Generalist says the model now achieves 99 percent success rates on repetitive but delicate mechanical tasks — such as folding boxes, packing phones, and servicing robot vacuums — and operates at roughly three times the speed of GEN-0. The company adds that GEN-1 can reach these levels after only about an hour of adapting its pretraining to the “robot data” relevant to its specific robotic embodiment.

Recovering from mistakes

Historically, complex robotic systems have tended to rely on precisely preprogrammed motions or be trained to specialize in a single task with little variation. What Generalist says sets GEN-1 apart is a single model’s ability to improvise from prior experience and handle disruptions naturally, even when those situations are “well outside the training distribution.”