WEBVTT

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Hi, I'm Alex. You might recognize me from Alex Week on Flow Plane,

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where subscribers get three exclusive Alex-themed videos.

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So subscribe to Flow Plane, or you shall be banished from tech links forever!

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Whoa, whoa, what, what, no? It'll be fine, what?

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I don't know, Sammy made the rules. Apple has unveiled the iPhone 16e.

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Tim Cook knew you were expecting a new iPhone SE,

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but he switched at the last second as a prank, because where the SE models have historically provided

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an option for iPhone users who wanted something smaller and more affordable,

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the 16e starts at 599 USD,

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sporting the same 6.1 inch display found in the iPhone 16.

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The last iPhone SE launched at 429,

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which is less. While the iPhone 16 and 16e share many other features,

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including the same A18 chip with Apple intelligence support, others will be able to clock you as a pour,

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thanks to the old-fashioned display notch. Wow.

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They might also catch on to the fact that you're not using a MagSafe charger,

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because there's no MagSafe. What? The 16e supports wireless charging,

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but your friends will have to watch you sliding your phone around on the charging pad

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to find the right spot, like an idiot.

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Luckily, the 16e does have a customizable action button

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and Apple's brand new in-house C1 cellular modem.

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Apple said goodbye to Qualcomm's modem, as well as the idea of home buttons and lightning ports.

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It was time to move on, but for 600 bucks,

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you might as well look at getting Huawei's new tri-fold phone,

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which is available now outside China for $3,660.

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It's the same ballpark. Yeah, sure. Might as well.

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I'm sure everyone's cross-shopping those. Reviews of NVIDIA's third RTX 50 series graphics card,

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the RTX 5070 Ti are up, and the consensus seems to be that this card,

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which is only coming in third-party versions that are mostly all listed for well above the $750 MSRP,

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makes an excellent case for getting a 4080 Super instead.

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The LTT review found that on average, the 5070 Ti performs about 10% better

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than the RTX 4070 Ti Super,

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while hardware unboxed, cost per frame analysis, indicates this card may have been

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a slightly better deal at a lower price.

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But with the card's actual launch set for tomorrow and stock expect to be as bad as the 5090 and 5080,

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well, on the price front, you're probably fucked, bud. If you like playing slightly older games,

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you might be better off with an older card anyway, as NVIDIA has ended support for 32-bit physics

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on 50 series cards, as confirmed by NVIDIA support notice

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and Manuel on the forms. A recent era user named randomly random67

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posted a helpful list of all the games whose particle physics and fluid simulations

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will be decidedly less fluid on 50 series cards,

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including Assassin's Creed 4, Black Flag, Mirror's Edge,

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and three of the Batman Arkham games. But hey, chin up.

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When NVIDIA breaks or melts something, others might fix it,

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like these accessory makers who have announced cooling modules for GPU cables.

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I don't think those are going to help with the whole physics 50 amps through one wire thing, though.

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You don't know that. Yeah, I do.

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And Microsoft has announced what they think is a massive breakthrough

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in quantum computing with the Majorana One, a quantum chip that will blow your mind

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with how fast it can load outlook. Okay, what they actually said

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is that this chip can scale to a million qubits, which is necessary for quantum computing

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to do anything useful other than drive hype cycles.

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Microsoft's claims are huge. Not only does this chip supposedly detect exotic particles

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called Majorana fermions, which researchers have struggled to do for decades,

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but also manipulates them into a new state of matter called a topological state.

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Microsoft claims that this is the world's first quantum processor powered by topological qubits,

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proving it with a paper published in Nature, which says their measurements do not by themselves

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determine whether the low energy states detected by interferometry are topological.

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Maybe, maybe not. Sure. Likewise, now that all the articles are out

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and they've read the paper, physicists are starting to question Microsoft's claims here.

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But if this is a quantum breakthrough, you'd expect there to be lots of uncertainty.

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Bam, confirmed. I also expect Riley to tell you about our sponsor.

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I may be a king, but I'm not above dishing out a quick bit or two

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as a treat. Reviews are also up for AMD's high powered Ryzen AI Max

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300 series APUs, aka Strix Halo.

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The only device sporting the new chips right now is the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 gaming tablet.

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Although YouTuber TheFox helpfully tested multiple variants of the chip

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at different TDPs to see whether they could work in a gaming handheld.

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Hopefully we get to see some beefier laptops or mini PCs with these chips on board

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because right now most people seem to be questioning why we would need a gaming tablet at all,

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other than to attach and detach the keyboard because that's fun.

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That's a game in itself. Yeah, thanks ASUS.

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Humane, the makers of the AI pin have been acquired by HP

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for $116, what million dollars?

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$116, wouldn't be surprised though.

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Close to a year after everyone agreed to pretend for a minute

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that the $700 shirt dongle with a required subscription was going to do well at all.

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The AI pins themselves will stop working nine days from now on February 28th,

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which the company explained in a support post quaintly titled important updates

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for the consumer AI pin customers.

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Your thing won't work anymore. Not that you were using them anyway.

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Amazon is removing the ability for Kindle users to download copies of their eBooks to a computer

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on February 26th because some people were out there

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getting uppity and thinking that they actually own

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their purchased books, which is silly.

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They're just ones and zeros, they're not anything.

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So make sure that you download your Kindle books before then and through the Kindle web interface,

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or you could use a tool like Amazon Kindle bulk downloader

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if you're a prodigious reader. Oh, big shot over there.

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Big reader, huh? I've read so many books recently. Geez, get kidding, Alex.

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Lenovo has a few wacky concept products it's preparing to show at Mobile World Congress in March,

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according to prodigious leaker Evan Blass. There's a laptop with an extra tall, foldable display

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you can pull out at the cafe to show your dominance.

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There's a yoga power bank that unfolds into a large solar panel for charging.

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This camera or AI robot assistant maybe that attaches to the lives of some of the company's laptops,

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but I'm going to be keeping my eye out for something called the AI stick,

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which I fully expect to be a literal inert stick

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that nevertheless sells you hotcakes. It's got AI though, it's an AI stick.

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Is it bad that I thought that it might be like a dildo on it first? Alex, it's a family show.

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And Aleph Aeronautics has posted a video of their flying car driving up behind a normal vehicle,

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taking off and flying over it to land in front.

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Aleph also posted a video of the car driving up on a dirt road to prove that it can also drive on land,

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but the bike wheel looking tires don't exactly inspire confidence.

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I mean, it doesn't seem like they're even able to come up with a name for it.

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Their website just has giant text that says, pre-order flying car.

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You have to admit, it's a compelling argument. Makes a point.

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For even more compelling content, come right over here on Friday for more tech news.

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What will it compel you to do? I don't know, figure it out.

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Just do something. Do something.