Oh, uh, did someone ask for some tech news in here?
I could have sworn, I, was it you?
Was it? Why aren't you saying anything?
Turns out that little Chromecast outage we briefly covered in a quick bid on Monday
was a bigger deal than it seemed, as today marked the fourth day owners were unable to use
their second gen Chromecasts and Chromecast audio devices.
Google quickly promised users they were working on a fix when all of this news broke,
though they still haven't figured it out, so they've issued an apology, which is great.
I'll forward that over to my friends who messaged me looking for answers
after probably spending hours troubleshooting their parents' Chromecast.
Look at their faces that I won't show to you for privacy re, imagine it.
Google also helpfully instructed users to not factory reset their devices
a day after most of them probably already tried that,
especially this person who says Google told them
to factory reset it. That's how Google figured out it was bad, sacrificial lamb.
But why, why all of this pain? Well, according to Reddit user madhatter369,
the issue is most definitely due to one of the Chromecast certificates
having an expiry date of March 9th, 2025,
the day all of this shit went down. Ah, if only there was some way to predict this.
To be fair to Google though, the second gen Chromecast launched 10 years ago
and it is a Google product. At the time, they probably thought they'd let it live
a few years at most before taking it out back themselves.
Hey, you wanna hear about tech that's working great though? AMD's Ryzen 99950X3D, which launched yesterday
for $700, making it the most expensive
mainstream processor on the market right now. But reviewers are making it look
like it's also the best on the market, marrying the gaming performance
of the 8-core Ryzen 7 9800X3D
with productivity chops that beat the 16-core 99950X non-3D.
In Jake's ShortCircuit video, which is not a review,
okay, he's just vibing, the 9800X3D pulled slightly ahead in games on average
with other outlets finding similar results. But the 99950X3D was a clear leader
in multi-core optimized applications, except apparently for Cinebench,
where the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K
randomly pulled ahead. Get out of there, you're not supposed to,
that's not, sit down. Now AMD also launched the Ryzen 99900X3D yesterday
for $600, but as Leo from KitGuru points out,
this seems to be another example of Team Red's tactic of launching a Fall Guy product
to emphasize how good of a deal the more expensive one is,
which works great if you want customers to like you,
but not too much, they can be clingy. Speaking of six CPUs,
reviews also went up for Apple's new M4-powered MacBook Air
with reviewers praising yet another Apple SoC
that can run circles around basically any Windows laptop in its class without using any fans for cooling.
It's embarrassing, and it makes me feel bad.
Although, hold up, PC Mag had the Acer Swift AI 14
powered by a Ryzen AI 9365,
beating the M4 MacBook Air in Cinebench.
There's that weird Cinebench result again. Either something's wonky with that benchmark
or this laptop did better because it has AI in its name.
It's enough for investors. Reviews were similarly positive
for the other chip configurations Apple launched for the Mac Studio.
The M3 Ultra is being hailed as the most powerful SoC Apple's ever launched,
mostly because of its 32 CPU cores and support for up to 512 gigabytes of unified RAM.
The also just launched M4 Max has higher single core performance,
but max is out at 16 CPU cores and 256 gigs of RAM.
But Apple surprisingly improved on something else this week,
their receptiveness to criticism. The company added a disclaimer
on their iPhone 16 series product pages saying that series cool AI update will be coming later
after the company was criticized for continuing to advertise AI Siri
as if she was in the room with us right now. If she was, she'd probably be going around
handing out printed map quest directions that include driving through a lake or something.
It would be very obvious. I know you can't communicate directly to me
when I'm actually doing the quick bits, but I can't help thinking that you could
if you just tried a little harder, you know? Just, just, yeah.
Ooh, looky here. OnLeaks has provided Android headlines
with exclusive renders of Google's upcoming Pixel 10,
featuring three rear cameras, a privilege previously reserved
for only the pro tier Pixel models. But I'll do you one better, said YouTuber Alexis Garza,
who posted a short showing the Pixel 9a,
which is expected to arrive later this month.
It's a little sausage-shaped camera module. Looks kind of perfect next to the bag
of wet sausages Alexis was holding, which I think I'll soon learn are not sausages,
but rather another kind of wet oblong snack of some kind.
Now's your chance. I'm gonna check the comments. Niantic Labs has sold the IP rights
and development teams behind location-based games Pokemon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter Now
to Saudi Investment Company, Scopely, for three and a half billion dollars.
Scopely also owns Monopoly Go, which is kind of perfect.
Niantic said the move will ensure these games have the long-term support needed to be forever games
that players can continue to be obsessed with on their deathbed and into the beyond.
Turns out you can take it with you. Google DeepMind has announced
its latest Gemma 3 small-ish model,
which it says is the best model you can run on a single GPU,
although they mean a single NVIDIA H100 accelerator,
not the gaming GPUs that you can't buy right now. Google also announced Gemini Robotics,
a suite of multimodal models that can enable greater dexterity in robots
so they can fold origami, zip things up,
struggle to clean up your desk as you actively make it messy,
and even follow directions when told to slam dunk
a tiny basketball without being trained for that situation specifically.
Although maybe it should have been because with that little gentle drop,
this robot wasn't exactly channeling LeBron, okay, so.
Nintendo Switch emulator Citrin has dropped a new update adding multiplayer support
in the 2025 equivalent of a Neanderthal heading out to hunt a mammoth with nothing but his bare hands.
Sure, the Citrin team has a notice on their website saying they don't condone piracy,
which will probably make Nintendo's lawyers hesitate just long enough for the devs to realize
they've made a mistake. But what a thrill.
And a man with an artificial heart implant survived 100 days outside of hospital
before he was able to get a donated heart successfully implanted,
according to the artificial heart maker, Australian company, BiVacor.
The device called the Total Artificial Heart is made of metal and uses a magnetic,
constantly powered rotor to push blood throughout the body,
which results in its user having no pulse,
rendering untold numbers of love song lyrics about heartbeats meaningless.
Is the trade-off really worth it? Yeah, probably.
It's also incredibly worth it to come back here on Friday for more tech news,
a statement I can only assume you agree with unless you say otherwise right this second.
And I'm not hearing anything, so.