For today's presentation of tech news, I please ask that you remain seated or standing or whatever
you're doing. The point is to try not to make a scene, okay? This isn't the Minecraft movie,
chicken jockey is not, that's a no. Apple is expected to roll out a software overhaul for
iPad OS to make using it more like macOS, according to Mark Gurman of House Bloomberg,
watcher of the infinite loop. His grimness doesn't go into specifics, but does say that changes to
iPad OS 19 will be a big theme at WWDC in June, focusing on improvements to productivity, multitasking,
and window management. Noting this will be great news to iPad power users who've been pleading
with Apple for something to help them justify spending thousands of dollars on their S tier
iPad desktop setup. It's a good setup, and it works for me. Right? Hey, I empathize, I've wanted
the iPad to be a Mac since before my mustache came in. Without even asking me first, by the way,
Warhammer Gurmentide also mentioned Apple's AR plan, saying Apple's working on a lighter and
cheaper version of the Vision Pro, as well as another model meant to be used while plugged in
to a Mac. And those are separate from the sleek, screen-equipped AR glasses that Tim Cook really
wants to get to market before Meta launches a competing product. Tim is apparently obsessed
by this idea. He's already written his own commercial for it. By your mom on Apple glasses,
or burn. Burn in the fire of your iniquity! Late on Friday, the Trump administration clarified
that semiconductors, smartphones, and various other electronics are exempt from the 145% total
tariff that now applies to other imports from China. Somewhat invalidating much of what I said
in Friday's episode, so embarrassing, except I joked that the tariffs would change soon, and oh,
US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on Sunday that these exceptions are temporary,
so I guess it wasn't a joke, and I was serious the whole time. Except Trump posted on Truth
Social to also clarify that smartphones, etc., are subject to the existing 20% tariff,
and there was no tariff exception announced on Friday. The exception to that statement being
the executive order published on Friday titled Clarification of Exceptions to the Tariffs.
But that's just like a slang phrase kids say it doesn't mean anything.
China is currently making no exceptions to its new policy, completely banning all exports of
rare earth minerals and magnets, which are critical to the production of basically any product with
a circuit in it. The Chinese government is building a new system to administer licenses for exporting
these materials, which are almost entirely sourced and processed in China, but they seem to
lack the motivation to get that set up quickly. NVIDIA is probably hoping they can get one of
those licenses soon, as they just committed $500 billion towards manufacturing their flagship
Blackwell chips in the US at TSMC's Arizona facility. Sure, they've been talking about
doing this since last year, and those US made chips will still have to be shipped over to Taiwan
to use TSMC's packaging tech, but hey, that's, I mean, just look at what tariffs can do. Ask
if tariffs are right for your family. Back in consumer land, Sony has vaguely alluded to Trump's
tariffs as the reason for increasing the price of the PS5 in Europe, Australia and New Zealand,
but not the US, after already hiking the price for somewhat similar reasons back in 2022.
And according to a component supplier, game consoles are not one of the tariff-exempted
goods we mentioned earlier, so North American gamers should brace themselves for price increases
on the PS5 and the Switch 2 potentially as well. On the plus side, all of this could change at
literally any second, which in which case we may have just wasted a good couple minutes.
Ah, you weren't doing anything. You might as well check out our sponsor.
Okay, it's intermission. Thank you for respecting the show and not making your bags of popcorn
explode like it's a bed in the nether dimension, except for Travis's group over there.
So, but they will get what's coming to them. What's coming to us is the RTX 5060 Ti,
at least according to video cards with a Z.com who posted full specs and 3D mark results provided
by their sources, showing the 5060 Ti 16 gig version performing about 20% better than the 4060 Ti 16
gig. Video cards spelled thefunway.com also leaked some specs of the RX 9060 XT,
including its 2048 stream processors, making it kind of look like an RX 9070 XT cut in half,
if you squint. Seems like these cards are coming soon, hopefully intact.
The FTC's antitrust lawsuit against Meta over their possibly anti-competitive acquisition
of Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014 respectively has begun. Meta kicked things off
strong by pointing out that when TikTok was briefly banned earlier this year, users flooded
onto Meta's platforms. It's simple. People use other social media sites, so Meta couldn't have
bought WhatsApp and Insta to absorb competition. Also, Meta's going to train their AI on EU users'
unless they opt out. Speaking of AI, OpenAI announced GPT 4.1 this morning. A new family
of models that OpenAI says outperform its current general purpose GPT 4.0 family across the board
while now supporting up to 1 million tokens of context. OpenAI also says they'll now phase out
GPT 4.5 because it's worse than the newly announced GPT 4.1. Welcome to who's AI is it anyway,
where the numbers are made up and IP doesn't matter. But you can't make this up. Google says
they've made progress on an AI model called Dolphin Gemma that could help translate dolphin
sounds into human language. Alright, you could totally make that up. And I think it has been
already. I take it back. The model is a collaboration with the Wild Dolphin Project who has been
researching dolphin society for decades. They say language is the last barrier to cross before we
finally give dolphins the ability to ask us directly if we would kindly f*** off. They're
very busy getting high off of pufferfish toxin and we're harshing their vibe. And many crosswalk
buttons in Palo Alto, California have apparently been hacked to play AI-generated audio clips
mocking tech CEOs. As documented on TikTok, one button featured an AI Elon Musk failing to
hype his Cybertruck. While another featured an AI Zuck assuring listeners, it's okay,
they can't stop the AI slot. As we forcefully insert AI into every facet of your conscious
experience and I just want to assure you, you don't need to worry because there's absolutely
nothing you can do to stop it. Anyway, see ya. The hack probably had something to do with security
researcher Deviant Olam pointing out last year that the crosswalk buttons often have an unchanged
default password. Either that or the clips are real and this is a cry for help. There's no way to
know. Thanks AI. There is a way for you to get more tech news though, just come back on Wednesday
and that is the only way, uh, according to science. They've done lots of, lots of testing and that's
really the only, don't Google it.