It's Black Friday week, which means you sacrifice your bank account balance to improve the health of the economy.
And you get AirPods for it, I guess. Apple's going to be making some sacrifices to achieve a thinner body for the iPhone 17 Air rumor to launch next year,
which I'm planning on buying just so I can reassure it that it'll always be beautiful no matter what.
You encounter that programming. An insider report by the information claims the iPhone Air will be between 5 and 6mm thin,
compared to the 7.8 and 8.25mm thicknesses of the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro models respectively.
To hit that thinness target, the report says Apple is degrading some iPhone functionality.
The Air will sport a single speaker in the earpiece, dropping the one usually located on the bottom,
while the phone will be the first to sport Apple's in-house 5G modem.
That'll come at the cost of not supporting faster millimeter wave 5G.
And of course, it'll have a smaller and thinner battery.
But who needs to last longer when you look this good?
Did that look good? Interestingly, the report says that the thinner design may not stop Apple from adding a physical SIM card tray,
which has been phased out of North American iPhones for a while, to its Chinese models.
It also claims the camera bump will be large and centered on the back.
But you can offset that extra thickness by slapping a big old case on it.
Rumors of an impending launch for Intel's next-gen Battle Mage ARC gaming GPUs had some fuel added
to the fire this weekend when Amazon listings for ASRock versions of the ARC B580 were spotted
by video cards with a Z, a letter I often wish I could add to my own name.
The listings revealed a steel legend 12GB OC, so we can thankfully avoid the whole
is 8GB enough VRAM debate and argue about 12GB instead.
And there was also a listing for another model called Challenger 12GB OC.
The B580's predecessor, the Alchemist-powered A580, is a roughly RTX 3060-level card that
launched for just $179 about a year ago, so hopefully the B580 has something to say to
NVIDIA's RTX 5060, which is expected sometime next spring.
Because I don't know how much releasing a good graphics card would actually help Intel's bottom
line, but they could sure use a pick-me-up right now.
The delay of their Ohio chip manufacturing plant has led the U.S. Commerce Department to
downgrade the company's chips-act funding from $8.5 billion to less than $8 billion,
which would mean a bit more if any of that money had actually reached Intel two years
after having been promised. CEO Pat Gelsinger, usually a paragon of positivity in the tech world,
spoke to Bloomberg regarding how long this process is taking.
We are disappointed, he said. Somehow still smiling. Just keep smiling, Pat.
OpenAI has blamed the New York Times for that accidentally deleted evidence
meant to be used in the newspaper's copyright lawsuit against the tech giant,
but OpenAI might be sort of right.
See, the NYT legal team was given access to look through OpenAI servers as part of the
evidence discovery process, but according to OpenAI, the team was storing some of their search
results on a drive that was meant to be used as a temporary cache.
The NYT team requested a configuration change, which resulted in removing the folder structure
and some file names, effectively tossing the data that had been found back into the haystack.
Probably shouldn't have put that particular needle in the temporary needle tray.
Why do we have that? No one knows. OpenAI offered multiple times to perform searches for the New York Times,
who nevertheless insist on what OpenAI's team calls inefficient,
boil the ocean searches, using up the AI company's precious hardware performance.
Now, discovery for both this case and another one filed by book authors have been complicated
by an OpenAI policy that provides plaintiffs with $15,000 worth of credits to prompt
OpenAI's LLMs to try and get the evidence and then charges them half the retail cost
once they use those credits up. I mean, what? You expect OpenAI to just let the lawyers bother chat GPT all day?
It's got stuff to do. The internet isn't going to sloppify itself.
It's like every day this week is Black Friday, but that's a lie because the next day is always
just another weekday. And you know who doesn't lie? Quick bits. Asterisk.
Sony is working on a proper handheld device that can play PS5 games, although it's a few years away,
according to a Bloomberg report citing anonymous sources.
Apparently Sony just realized the Nintendo Switch exists,
and maybe there's a market for a handheld product like the PS portal,
but which appeals to someone other than dads who have to constantly let their family use the TV.
The sacrifice of a father. The report comes a couple weeks after Phil Spencer confirmed that an Xbox handheld is in
development and is also a few years away, also reported by Bloomberg.
Wow, how does it feel to break all the handheld news, Bloomberg?
They just all want to talk to me. I don't know. Microsoft blocked Windows updates from systems which A had already updated to Windows 11,
2.4.H.2, and B had certain Ubisoft games installed, including Star Wars Outlaws,
the Avatar game, and a trio of Assassin's Creed titles.
Apparently something in the 2.4.H.2 update caused these games to crash and experience
various glitches, according to reports on Reddit and the Microsoft forums.
While Ubisoft delivered a temporary fix for Star Wars Outlaws, some games may still be affected,
so installing them is one way to prevent Microsoft from slamming an update down your throat.
I mean, not sure if Ubisoft games taste any better, but a seven billion pound
class action lawsuit will proceed against Google in the UK for anti-competitive behavior,
despite the tech giant trying to appeal, presumably using the same effective arguments
that led to them losing a similar lawsuit in the US. But they think differently over there,
though they talk like this. It could work. The lawsuit concerns the usual Google stuff. They control the search engine,
and the browser, and the mobile OS used by the most people, and it's all tied together,
and they pay billions of dollars to have other companies use search, but Google keeps getting sued because they're weird about it. Just admit you want a monopoly.
Look what Apple says. We're better than you. See? Just be honest.
A company called Ubitium says they're developing a universal processor that can perform the functions
of a CPU, GPU, DSP, FPGA, other acronyms, and more using a single workload agnostic
microarchitecture. That architecture is based on risk five, a rising star in the chip world,
which I think might be going to its head a little bit. The idea sounds awesome, but Ubitium's seed funding round just raised 3.7 million dollars,
which doesn't exactly scream investor confidence, probably because they didn't talk about AI
nearly enough. Oh, oh, yeah, and sentient robots are going to help design it. Oh,
why didn't you say so here? Hey, if you want sentient robots to give you the tech news on
Wednesday, I can make that happen. You know, we'll have to have to solve the hard problem of
consciousness, but I got a couple of days and we fine.