Welcome to Tech News, National Geographic Edition. Here in the vast
digital savanna, we observe the tech industry in its natural habitat. Shh,
don't startle it. Let's watch. Oh, it's
It's me. I I have to Okay. It really seems like NVIDIA will launch their N1
and N1X ARM-based SoCs in the first half
of this year with Dell and Lenovo already on board with laptop designs,
according to insider sources who spoke to the Wall Street Journal. As previous
leaks have indicated, the N1X is essentially expected to be a
consumer-focused version of the GB10, a
superchip that powers NVIDIA's DGX Spark
Enterprise mini PCs with up to 20 ARM cores, a massive 6,144
CUDA core iGPU, and don't forget that
sweet, sweet unified memory. But while ARM-powered Windows laptops have come a
long way, they're still not great for gaming. So, why should gamers care?
Well, one reason might be that, as much as we rag on NVIDIA for caring more
about AI than us, they do still put
resources into gaming. I mean, look, they're hiring software engineers to
work on native speed x86-64
gaming on Linux/ARM64 platforms. They're hiring someone to
make the gaming experience better for a niche within a niche. Maybe Jensen does
still have a gamer soul hiding beneath all those layers of leather jackets.
They protect him from the outside, all the hurtful words. However things shake
out, with a full reveal anticipated at the NVIDIA GTC keynote on March 16th,
the laptop market is heating up and Qualcomm and AMD are sweating profusely
through their quarter-zips. Samsung took the wraps off the Galaxy S26 phone
lineup at an Unpacked event this morning, completely shocking the world
by unveiling new smartphone tech that isn't just chat GPT with extra steps,
although that was there, too. Samsung says the new Galaxy S26 Ultra features
the world's first privacy display on mobile, which makes your phone screen
completely opaque when viewed from outside of the primary user cone in
front of the phone the cone of brain rot, maybe we could call it. And it can
even selectively blackout parts of the screen like sensitive message
notifications from your landlord that say in all caps, for the last time you
cannot pay rent in Funko Pops. It is up to you to sell them for money first. It
is not legal tender. The way the privacy display works is
kind of cool. Every other pixel in the grid is a narrow pixel with little
donuts above it that modulate how much light escapes to the sides, and you
can't eat them. But at least they're in there. The rest
of the features are fairly standard new phone stuff to Cameras are largely the
same, but apparently let in more light now with a new super steady mode that
can keep footage level with the ground. There's a few more AI photo editing
options to help you construct false memories of things that never happened,
very fun. But there's a couple cool AI
features, too. Ask Samsung's Bixby AI
assistant to change your phone settings and it will present you with a toggle
for the feature you want, hopefully, right there in the chat interface.
Finally, an audio eraser can strip background noise from third-party apps
like Instagram now, not just Samsung ones. The S26 Ultra starts at the same
price as the S25 Ultra, $1,300 USD,
while the S26 and S26 Plus have gotten
$100 price hikes. They start at $900 and
$1,100 USD, respectively. Although, the
base model does come with 256 gigs of storage instead of 128 this year, so
it's not all just storage crisis stuff. But still, for those prices, you could
pick up a few pairs of the new $250
Galaxy Buds 4 Pro, which have been redesigned with what Samsung calls a
real metal blade. >> For your ears? They've got bigger
woofers and are shaped for all-day comfort, as long as you're careful not
to accidentally put the metal blade end in first. It's I'm still like picking it
up. I got to be careful. Feels awesome though.
Every time I Every time I listen to something, it's like I'm a samurai.
Department of War is going toe-to-toe with Anthropic over ethical restrictions
baked into its AI model Claude in the ultimate nerds versus jocks slugfest.
This is what we've been waiting for. Defense Secretary, or
war secretary, Pete Hegseth summoned
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to the
Pentagon on Tuesday to deliver an ultimatum. Let the government use Claude
for mass domestic surveillance of US citizens and/or making targeting
decisions in physical attacks without human input, or Amodei's going to get a
hell of a swirly. And I'll make you do my homework. >> Uh no. Hegseth reportedly threatened to
designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, blocking it from working with the
government and a wide swath of affiliated companies, or maybe Hegseth
will invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to adapt its model to
the military's needs. Or maybe even bolt. I know that doesn't make sense,
but I'm just so angry right now because you keep saying words I don't
understand. The Pentagon has given Anthropic until Friday to comply, but
Anthropic reportedly does not plan on budging. A senior government official
commented that taking this action against Anthropic would be massively
disruptive for the Pentagon because Claude is currently the only AI model
used in classified defense systems. The Pentagon is currently addressing this
issue by signing a deal to bring xAI's Grok into classified defense networks,
which has real pouty teenager energy. Oh, you're not letting me use your AI to
autonomously kill people? Fine, I'll just go hang out with Mecha Hitler. How
do you like that, Dad? Go to your room. Now, Anthropic has budged on a separate
safety pledge, the commitment to never train an AI model unless they could
guarantee it would be safe first, which seems hard to
to be fair. Why? Well, to paraphrase their chief science officer, other AI
companies are never going to stop never stopping, so Anthropic is not actually
contributing any additional risk to the ecosystem, which is basically just them
saying, "We're committed to safety, but we're also committed to money and
winning, which is super self-aware and honestly super wise." I believe it was
Marcus Aurelius who said, "Never regard something as doing you good if it makes
you betray a trust, unless you're about to lose an AI arms race to Elon Musk,
then it." That's almost as good as his meditation on integrity. If it is
not right, do not do it. If it is not true, do not say it. And if it's a
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Again, I don't know what it is. I'm sure it's helpful, though. And here we see
the quick bits in the wild, often moving in packs of five. Scientists believe
they communicate through a series of rapid-fire headlines. Fascinating
creatures. Remarkably savage. Discord is
delaying its global age verification rollout to the second half of 2026. CTO
Stanislav Vishnevsky, coming at the
problem with the energy of a beleaguered substitute teacher, posted that many of
you walked away thinking we're requiring face scans and ID uploads from everyone
just to use Discord. That's not That's not what's happening. He went on to
clarify that over 90% of users will never need to verify their age to keep
using Discord exactly as they do today. That said, Discord stressed they'll
still meet any legal obligations for age verification, which currently means
using third-party vendors like KID in the UK and Australia, with Brazil soon
to follow. The company will use the delay to learn how to write a blog post
properly, I guess. I Product listings for budget HP laptops have been spotted
advertising 1.2 terabytes of storage,
the catch being that 1 terabyte of that is just a 1-year free trial of Microsoft
OneDrive cloud storage. Uh Reddit user BMR99 posted several
links to blatant cases of spec padding in the LTT subreddit showing that with
NAND prices spiking, I guess the new industry standard is just download more
storage, bro. It's a you problem. Thankfully, Canadians get to avoid this
specific trap. We have a different one. Some amazon.ca listings advertise 1 TB
drives as 1,024 GB SSDs, which actually
makes the listing even more deceitful because 1 TB drives usually have less
than 1,000 gigs of usable space. But I don't know. That still sounds like a
heck of a deal there, but I think you should freaking send it. Tech giants are
hunting for cheap farmland for their power-hungry AI data centers and have
offered million-dollar payouts that many US farmers are nonetheless flat-out
refusing, according to a report from The Guardian. But these companies want that
land. Some utility companies have threatened to invoke eminent domain, the
government's power to seize private property for public use. But for the
farmers, it ain't about the money. It's about protecting their family legacies.
They got tegrity. And unlike them Silicon Valley boys, farmers recognize
that God didn't intend for us to eat servers or become romantically entwined
with AI waifus. It ain't right. Panasonic, the former plasma TV king,
will no longer make its own television. All Panasonic-branded TVs will now be
manufactured, marketed, and sold by Skyworth, a Chinese company with the
same name as my high school World of Warcraft character. Skyworth. Skyworth.
It is I, Skyworth. Skyworth CEO pitched
it as a meeting of minds, but the real trade is pretty obvious. Skyworth gets
to use a legendary brand name to sell TVs in western markets, and Panasonic
gets to stop spending money making TVs. If it seems familiar, that's because
it's a very similar deal to the Sony and TCL one that just happened recently.
This is a bummer for Panasonic, though. They controlled over 40% of the global
plasma market until price sensitivity caused by the 2008 financial crisis
ended up destroying their margins. After that, Panasonic never really recovered.
Don't worry, Panasonic, none of us did. And Spotify and Liquid Death have
released the Eternal Playlist Urn, a limited edition Bluetooth speaker shaped
like a cremation urn. It asks you questions about your eternal vibe and
your go-to ghost noise, all right? Then
generates a playlist that syncs to the urn and plays you into the afterlife. Is
it a real urn, like for ashes? >> Yeah, you can put ashes in there.
It might screw it up, but the Bluetooth speaker. So, for me, that'll be an
infinite loop of Monster Mash and Fall Out Boy's Sugar, We're Going Down
Swinging. But given Spotify's history of launching
then bricking physical devices like the car thing, eternity might be more like 2
years. And I guess you'll have to keep paying for Spotify Premium, otherwise
you'll be hearing ads for the rest of eternity, which again, according to
Spotify, is just 2 years. So, it's not that bad. And that concludes today's
episode of Planet Tech. Oh, okay. Join us on Friday when we will watch as the
AI hype beast performs its mating display for potential investors. It is
truly so cringe.