Today in tech news, events occurred and Person Slash Group is responsible.
Others say Person Slash Group has been making the events occur for a long time period.
More on that right now. The great ASUS warranty scandal of 2023,
that's what I'm calling it, has gotten a little more interesting.
Hardware busters have alleged that ASUS isn't the only AM5 motherboard manufacturer
exceeding the 1.3 volt SOC voltage limit
meant to protect Ryzen 7000 X3D series CPUs
from exploding. After testing a Gigabyte Aorus Master X670E board,
hardware busters found that the SOC voltage exceeded 1.36 volts after updating the BIOS
that supposedly applied the voltage safety cap.
Not so much vindicating ASUS as implying Gigabyte
and potentially other motherboard makers need to step up
in the making sure your products don't blow up department.
If we all explode, isn't it like none of us did?
Let's do it. After this analysis went up, Bilzoid went to Twitter to claim that Gamer's Nexus
was measuring the voltages wrong in their investigation of ASUS' motherboards
and GN destroyed them with facts
by just politely disagreeing and stating how they measured their results.
Wasted. Nerds are discussing methodology and it is getting spicy.
On Friday, hardware unboxed went off on a fan for suggesting they needed to keep their credibility
stating they weren't going to stop reviewing ASUS products
because A, reviewing their products is one way to call them out and B,
because finding tech companies that haven't done a ton of anti-consumer crap
is like finding a milkshake in a ton of crap. Like, cool, you found a milkshake,
but are you sure it's chocolate? It's a poop joke.
To be fair to ASUS, they did just publish an update clarifying
that installing beta BIOSes to fix this problem
does not void your warranty. That's right.
Faced with a sizable controversy over their lack of concern for their customers,
the company thought, wow, we should definitely address this.
After the weekend, you coming to beers tonight? DJIF, bro.
That's what they say in Taiwan, right? Man, when we did our ASUS poetry slam on Friday,
we had no idea it would generate so much drama.
So many feelings. This is clearly about us. People were crying in the audience.
Apple is prepping for a win by ramping up testing of their next-gen M3 chips.
According to German Sermon, Apple's been squirming to remove the worm
in their Mac sales figures. Jacob isn't here, but he's here in spirit.
They're sales figures which were down 31% last quarter.
Sure, they could reduce MacBook prices and make it more affordable to buy one
of their great products, but what if instead of that,
they used the more expensive three-nanometer process for their M3 chips
so they can add more cores and more memory? More high end, less low end.
That's Apple's problem. Based. Indeed, German says the baseline M3 Pro
will have two more CPU and GPU cores than the M2 Pro,
which itself had two more CPU and GPU cores than the M1 Pro.
Sets like a pattern. Every day, there will be another core.
Until something changes. We're going to add cores.
However, German determined that the M3 Pro currently being tested
has 36 gigabytes of memory, which is four more than the highest spec
of the M2 Pro MacBooks. So like two 18 Gigabyte sticks in dual channel,
this makes me physically uncomfortable. It would be so cool.
Oh, just so I can think of something else, Mark German said the long-awaited 15-inch MacBook Air
will come out equipped with an M2 chip just in time for summer.
So get ready for that MacBook's announcement to be overshadowed by the announcement
of Apple's VR headset at WWDC. You can go live in Apple's world.
Tim Cook will send you to sleep. And the European Union has given their blessing
for Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard,
the company that had a dream of being judged not by its leader's history of sexual harassment allegations,
but by the content of its game library. I ain't gonna rip on that.
We're gonna leave that alone. Sometimes you just make a Martin Luther King joke
for no reason. Now the EU didn't do this for nothing. The merger approval is subject to conditions
that Microsoft suggested to assuage concerns
that this would affect the cloud gaming slash cloud game streaming market,
which a lot of people care about. The European Commission's concerns were that
since cloud gaming is still a young market, the availability of games like Call of Duty could affect it.
If Microsoft were to make Codd exclusive to Game Pass Ultimate,
the company would be able to virtually monopolize the preteens who just learned a new slur demographic.
A key segment for advertisers. In fact, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority
blocked the merger because of similar concerns about the cloud gaming market.
As a compromise, Microsoft offered a 10-year plan
to provide licenses to consumers in the European economic area
that would allow them to stream any Activision Blizzard PC games they own
using any streaming service and a corresponding license
to any streaming service platforms to provide that capability.
So what happens when that license agreement is up?
Who cares? We'll probably all be killed by self-aware AI by then. And I'm looking forward to it.
Live for now. I bribed the mayor so we could include all five quick bits.
Just don't tell anyone. The Pixel 7 is this summer's hottest phone,
a sentence that will make sense once I let you know that Pixel 6 and 7 users have reported
a sudden unexplained bug that's causing their phones to overheat.
The apparent cause is a recent app update that's causing the Google app to suck up battery life
like a wild cherry Capri sun.
In some cases, these issues have cut usable screen time
in half. Phones are likewise charging slower and running dangerously hot,
prompting some users to turn their pixels into popsicles
by sticking them in the freezer. Nutritious and delicious. And they take great photos.
A great summer treat. Users have tried rolling back to a previous update
and even full factor resets, neither of which seemed to work.
All there's left to do is wait for Google to hurry up and fix their $600 butt warmers,
which is of little comfort here in Western Canada where the country is literally on fire.
A startup called Telly wants to give you a TV for free.
All it costs is everything. The television comes with a second banner like screen
which will be fully or partially taken up by ads,
pretty much at all times. And the TV may collect information
about the content you watch and may also track the physical presence of you
and any other individuals using the TV at any time.
Now, as we mentioned, you can get the TV for free or you can opt out of sharing all your data
and pay $500 to keep it if you are okay
with installing a billboard in your living room.
If I let them install a probe in my head, they pay me. The dystopia is here.
I've always wanted Cyberpunk 2077 to be real. A private company called Rea Space Activity
has received funding from the US Space Force to rescue the Spitzer Space Telescope.
The observatory was launched 20 years ago and remained mostly operational until three years ago
when communication stopped working. I'm not saying it's aliens,
but in a plan backed by multiple groups, including Lockheed Martin,
a small craft would be sent to act as a relay between Spitzer and Earth,
within spits in distance, you could say. The eventual hope is to use the telescope
as an early warning system for dangerous asteroids because if we have enough time,
we won't have to send Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck.
Again, they are so tired of this. Zelda, tears of the kingdom players are getting creative
by using the in-game mechanics to build tanks, planes, and even mechs.
But also, many, many, many, lots of penises.
There's just so many. You can build anything. More like tears of the schwingdom, am I right?
Okay. You can make anything you can imagine, which is mostly f***ing you.
Nintendo severely overestimated my imagination. Perhaps as revenge for the golden turd players received
for rescuing all 900 Koroks in Breath of the Wild,
a lot of creative energy has gone towards torturing the annoying creatures in different ways,
involving crucifixions. And I have to assume penises as well.
We've never said the word this many times in a show. Oh, wow.
Everyone is freaking out about the era of 100 Gigabyte games.
Meanwhile, Nintendo fit an open world war crime simulator
into 16.3 gigs. What about penis crucifixes?
We'll get there. And the creator of the Oculus, Palmer Lucky, tweeted,
quote, the apple headset is so good.
End quote. What else did he say? Nothing.
Did he go into more detail? No. Are we sure he's actually touched an apple headset?
Not really. Is this the real Palmer Lucky? Well, there's a blue check mark next to his name,
but what does that even mean anymore? Anyway, the headset's going to be announced
June 5th probably, but will it be expensive? Almost certainly.
But it will cost you nothing to come back on Wednesday. And why wouldn't you?
Don't you like us? We're cool.
We're cool people, right? Not just my mom thinks so.
She doesn't watch the show.