Apple will launch the iPhone 15 Pro on
September 13th, according to 9to5Mac.
And while they didn't say whether the phone would launch with an exclusive set
of unsatisfying GIFs, it wouldn't surprise me. September 15th is is a
Friday. You could It's right there. I'm Riley Murdoch. This is TechLinked, and
this is a render of the iPhone 15 Pro posted by Ian Zelbo on Twitter, showing
a noticeably smaller bezel than the 14 Pro. An obviously misleading post that
Twitter's community notes could not let stand without linking to a clarifying
article written by Ian Zelbo. Community
notes are actually one of the few things that have gotten noticeably better under
Elon. It's like people tweet sassy things, and they'll say, "Additional
context, this person is just a little hangry right now." But the thinner
bezels might not help iPhone sales as much as being the only smartphone on the
market with a 3 nanometer processor, thanks to a timed exclusivity deal with
TSMC. The foundry will eat the cost of any defective batches, but Apple will be
paying more for the chips, which probably explains other rumors that
Apple's increasing the storage for the 15 Pro and Pro Max, while also upping
the price for the base model by $100 and $200, respectively, to $1299 and $1199,
disrespectively. I don't know if that's a word, and I'm not checking. The quest
for a room-temperature superconductor continues with scientists, Twitter
users, and degenerates racing to validate it, argue about it, and create
fake evidence for it, respectively. I'm sorry, that was that was the last one.
If you've either been living under a rock or have simply realized you're
incredibly out of your depth trying to read pre-print physical chemistry
papers, a couple weeks ago Korean researchers claimed to have synthesized
a room-temperature superconductor they called LK-99.
A sassy Star Wars droid. Just kidding. Kicking off a mad dash to replicate the
study's findings. Since if it's real, LK-99 could revolutionize human
technology by letting us do things like levitate frogs. That's not true, but it
kind of is. So I'm moving on. Making the material itself is pretty complicated,
but some groups have claimed to have some success. From established
researchers to engineers like Andrew McCalip, who have been live blogging
their attempts on Twitter. Despite all the developments though, the
superconductivity of LK-99 is still heavily in question. So commercial
fusion power probably isn't just around the corner. It might only be around a
couple more corners though, since the same researchers who demoed the first
net gain fusion reaction back in December just announced another, even
more net gainier success. Stay on the ground, frogs. Your time shall yet come.
Unless you're an incredibly wealthy frog who can afford a ticket to the
commercial space station built by Airbus and Voyager Space when it replaces the
International Space Station sometime after 2031, maybe. Frogs apparently only
live for 6 to 8 years, but that's not Airbus's problem. The proposed station,
called Starlab, was originally a joint project between Colorado-based Voyager
Space and Lockheed Martin, but the latter is being downgraded to a
supplier. European aerospace giant Airbus is replacing them as a designer
and builder of Starlab, bringing closer ties with the European Space Agency, or
ESA, to the project. Starlab is receiving the largest funding award
given by NASA towards many such proposed space stations, continuing the space
industry's current trend of having private companies with names like Axiom
Space, that's a real one, spearhead humanity's starward expansion. Because
that always went quite well in my favorite space documentaries. You know,
like like Alien. They confirmed we're not alone. They can do the things we
can't. Now it's time for Quick Bits, brought to you by The Ridge Wallet,
whose compact and slim design allows you to carry your essential cards and cash
without weighing you down. I mean I mean you would hate that. You're
always on the go. I know you so well. With RFID blocking
technology, your cards are protected from digital theft, and The Ridge Wallet
is made from high-quality materials like titanium, carbon fiber, and aluminum,
ensuring its durability. Upgrade your everyday carry with The Ridge Wallet and
enjoy the freedom of a minimalist lifestyle, which comes with the bonus
feeling of superiority. Check them out at the link below and use the code
linked at checkout for free shipping and 10% off your purchase.
This Quick Bits intro ain't what it used to be.
Cuz they're all different. We never do We never do the same one. We got AMD's
next-gen RDNA 4 gaming graphics cards won't compete with NVIDIA's high-end
models, according to Twitter leaker Kepler, causing some people, I imagine,
to freak out. But as Kepler tweeted, yes, I'm still calling them tweets, AMD
has actually used this strategy numerous times in the past. Team Red's
Polaris-based RX 400 and 500 series were praised on their price to performance,
despite avoiding a direct toe-to-toe with NVIDIA's RTX 1080. It's why
TechLinked doesn't benchmark GPUs. Linus Tech Tips does that. We just stay in our
lane of, you know, pulling things out of our ass. In other GPU news, Intel
announced their graphics drivers will now collect telemetry by default,
causing a bit of a fuss among those who thought this meant their GPUs would
start spying on them and selling their data to advertisers. And well, I mean,
those people are right. If by spying they mean logging the categories of
websites you visit, and by selling to advertisers they mean making the data
available to Intel so they can use it to optimize GPU drivers in the same way
that NVIDIA and AMD do. I'm assuming Intel just didn't know they could do
this. What? Selling their data to advertisers, by which I mean our
engineers? No. OpenAI has provided a way for
website admins to block the company's web crawler, called GPTBot, from
scraping their websites for AI training data. Wow. Pretty big of OpenAI to allow
this. Although they did already scrape
like the entire web to train their existing models, but you know, it's like
a bunch of kids promising to not throw a bag of turds at your front door if you
don't want them to, after they already did it about a dozen times. And I would
have to admit that I would appreciate them saying that. YouTuber Mr. Beast,
aka Jimmy Donaldson, has been sued by Virtual Dining Concepts, VDC, the
company that operated the YouTuber's ghost kitchen restaurant chain, for
failing to follow through with his contractual obligations. Obligations
that Donaldson tried to get out of by first suing VDC himself a week ago over,
among other things, burger quality. It's a big issue. This really is not tech
news, but I'm putting it in because maybe this might end the abomination
that is ghost kitchens through the power of corporations and rich people suing
each other. It's all any of us can hope for. And despite everyone agreeing that
it's probably not going to happen, Elon Musk seems to think his fight with Mark
Zuckerberg is still on, tweeting that he's lifting weights at work in
preparation. Zuck replied on, of course,
Threads, saying his suggested date of August 26th wasn't confirmed, suggesting
the fight be streamed on a more reliable platform than Twitter. I don't know
whether he means Threads or Facebook there, because what? And calling out
Musk's tweets as akin to his famous claim of having funding secured to buy
Twitter, which he only did after being forced to, basically. Sure enough,
yesterday Musk tweeted that the exact date is still in flux, and he may
require surgery before the fight can happen, which I can only assume means
he's getting a Neuralink installed so he can activate cyborg reflexes, like in
Cyberpunk. I don't know, that's the only way he's beating Zuck. This guy is
killing it on the jiu-jitsu mat and on social media. I don't want to like Zuck,
and I don't, but And you killed this episode. Thanks a lot, now it's dead.
Come back on Wednesday for a freshly revived episode, thanks to a combination
of magic, science, and floating frogs.