And you get an M4! And you get an M4! Hey, look under your seat! It's Tim Cook! How long has he
been there? We don't know! Apple has followed up Monday's new M4 iMac reveal by unveiling the
M4 Mac Mini on Tuesday and the M4 MacBook Pros today, this morning. I'm not sure how much longer
this Apple a day trend will continue, but as soon as it stops, I'm going to see my doctor.
The new 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros are largely hardware refreshes priced the same as their
predecessors and coming in M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max flavors with the Pro and Max variants
upgrading their three Thunderbolt 4 ports to Thunderbolt 5. But that's not the case for the Mac Mini.
In its first major redesign since 2010, the Mini has become significantly
minier, shrinking in total volume by around 40%. To achieve this, Apple reduced the Mini's footprint
to 5 inches by 5 inches, while also increasing its height to 2 inches, which I wouldn't necessarily
call Mini. I mean, sounds perfectly average to me. Huge, even. Can I tell them that a woman wrote that?
This little guy starts at just $5.99 and it doesn't get an M4 Max option, just M4 and M4 Pro.
The latter of which again gets you three Thunderbolt 5 ports. Apple even caved to public pressure
and moved another two non-Thunderbolt USB-C ports and a headphone jack to the front of the device,
making them easier to access. Wow, thanks Apple. But in order to keep its D&D alignment firmly in
chaotic neutral, my favorite alignment, they stuck the power button on the bottom in what I can only
assume is meant to troll critics of the Magic Mouse design. Oh, you like things on the bottom,
you like that, huh? You don't like that. There's apparently enough space to stick a finger down
there without lifting the whole thing up, but this is going to confuse more than a few grandmas.
Pray for your local IT support technician. Just press the power button. It doesn't have one!
Apple reacted to public outcry over their previously standard 8GB of RAM in a different way, though.
Every new Mac announced this week comes with 16GB of RAM in the base model, an upgrade that was
also backported to the M2 and M3-powered MacBook Air. But don't forget, the most important detail
of the Mac Mini, it's apparently the first carbon-neutral Mac, which Apple has accomplished
by throwing a mature redwood into the bottomless pit underneath their Cupertino headquarters for
every purchase. Microsoft has accused Google of running a shadow campaign to sway European
regulators against Microsoft's Azure services using the Open Cloud Coalition as an astroturfing
front. Now, would Google ever do something like that? Well, I mean, yeah, possibly.
Google is a member of the Open Cloud Coalition, alongside several smaller cloud organizations.
But Microsoft has insinuated that Google may have bribed those smaller providers
as a means of disguising its influence. Microsoft's allegations are apparently in
response to an antitrust complaint filed by Google against Azure in the EU,
alleging that Microsoft is using unfair licensing contracts to make it harder and more expensive
to run non-Azure cloud services on a Windows-based server. Ooh, that's monopoly, baby.
Google's cloud services are only the third largest globally after Microsoft's Azure and
Amazon Web Services. That being said, Google parent company Alphabet had its third quarter
profit spike by 34% this year, due largely to increased demand for cloud services,
as generative AI training slurps up all available compute and data resources.
It's not for you anymore, it's for them. This will most likely calm investor concerns about
how much Alphabet itself has been spending on AI. Indeed, Google CEO Sundar Pichai claims that over
25% of the company's new code is now AI-generated, which is either an astounding achievement in
efficiency or the death knell of modern civilization, depending on whether we're talking about
skilled engineers getting an assist filling in basic code or an advanced autocorrect farting
around basically unsupervised. They should have a limited amount of farts. Wow, that was really good.
Good news! We've used the quantum instability of the quick bits to replicate Riley.
Oh, who am I, you ask? Well, I'm Riley. I killed the other one.
AMD has confirmed that their next-gen RDNA4 GPUs will be launching early next year,
and they may be launching with some added oof. On Monday, the company wrote a post on GPU Open,
titled Neural Super Sampling and Denoising for Real-Time Path Tracing. It appears AMD may be
taking a page out of NVIDIA's book and creating their own AI Denoiser to boost ray tracing results.
On top of that, they may be adding dedicated AI hardware to their GPUs, similar to NVIDIA's
Tensor Cores. Honestly, copying some of NVIDIA's ideas sounds like a win for PC gamers, as long
as Team Red doesn't also copy NVIDIA's pricing. They're so expensive. Got em!
Recent reporting indicated that YouTube might be testing a homepage layout that lacks any view
counts or upload dates, which a lot of people believed because, well, that would be just like
YouTube now, wouldn't it? YouTube, however, has explicitly denied that this is the case.
Users who experienced missing view counts most likely encountered a bug caused by
certain browser extensions being enabled, according to YouTube.
Adblockers! YouTube, of course, suggests disabling these extensions and letting them know if the
issue continues. Maybe if you just put down the adblock at the dinner table for once,
we could enjoy these view counts together as a family. 34! That's great. Apologize to your mother!
Modder Beth Lee has built a mostly 3D printed, fully functional gaming handheld using a
framework laptop motherboard, an 8-inch touchscreen, and a USB-C dongle. This isn't the first time
something like this has happened either. Modern Tommy B made something like it back in March.
However, this new handheld, called fittingly the Beth Deck, is both more polished and apparently
far easier to assemble. According to Beth, you can put the whole thing together in around 15 minutes.
If you're interested, you might want to wait for a revised version of the 3D printed chassis,
which will have better airflow. I personally find the smell of melted plastic accentuates that DIY
feel. Plastic Fume Rush. It feels so good right before you fall unconscious.
A Russian court has ruled that Google unlawfully blocked the content of Russian media stations
on YouTube and is serving them with a fine of 20 decillion rubles. That's 20, followed by 33 zeros.
Or if you prefer, 2 non-illion US dollars, which is a 2, followed by 30 zeros. And an amount of
money that makes the total global GDP look like a rounding error. The court reached this objectively
bananas some by imposing a fine of 100,000 rubles a day with the total doubling every week,
leading them to demand that a single company pay a fine worth more money than has ever existed.
And a recently filed criminal complaint claims that a fired Disney employee
used his still functional work credentials to access third-party menu creation software
and add profanity and remove allergy warnings from the menus. Disney staff discovered the breach
after all of the fonts in the database were replaced by wingdings. We're normally looking
at 40% wingdings at best. Fixing this required restoring a backup, meaning the system was down
for around two weeks. This ex-employee also used a script to attempt thousands of incorrect logins
under the credentials of other employees, leading to them being locked out of their accounts.
Personal information for several of these employees was also found in a folder on the
ex-employee's computer labeled DOCS, which is right below not porn in terms of subtlety.
But I don't want to be too subtle when I tell you to come back on Friday for more tech news.
It's really important to me that that's clear. Friday or Saturday, depending on your time zone.
Friday. Okay? Even you, Europe. Make it happen.