It's a beautiful day. Don't let it get away.
It's a beautiful day. Woo-hoo!
A laptop that appears to be one of Microsoft's
upcoming Surface devices has shown up in a Geekbench listing.
Powered not by Qualcomm's much-hyped Snapdragon X Elite,
an ARM-based chip that is supposed to overturn the x86-based global order.
I believe a plague of frogs is involved. No, this one is powered by a Snapdragon X Plus.
That sounds like a lower-tier variant of the X Elite,
which jibes with the specs in the Geekbench listing.
The Plus has 10 cores to the Elite's 12. But it does still have 16 gigabytes of RAM,
giving enthusiasts hope that the brain rot, causing some to think that eight gigabytes of RAM
is an acceptable baseline, may be limited to Apple.
If you're out of the loop and wondering why anyone's making a big deal about ARM-powered laptops,
because pretty much all of them suck, well, it's because it seems like these ones don't suck.
And between Qualcomm's recent performance demos, Microsoft reportedly going all in
and using Snapdragon X Series chips in the new Surface lineup, they'll be announcing
on May 20th, and a leaked super-slim Lenovo
Snapdragon notebook, it's looking like the ARM-powered
Windows laptop revolution is upon us. Qualcomm teased a Snapdragon X-related announcement
for this Wednesday, they teased it on X,
which is exactly why you don't name things X, even if it's your favorite letter.
It's everyone else's too, it's the coolest letter. Well, you're just gonna say your favorite letter is K?
That's just X being a little sassy. Meta announced it's making the operating system
that powers its MetaQuest headsets available to third-party device makers.
And a few of them have already said they'll use it in their own VR headsets.
Though at the time of reporting, it was still unclear whether they had made that promise,
mostly to convince Mark Zuckerberg to get off their property. Sure, sure, just whatever.
You can't fight us, Mark! Just stop making eye contact. It's clear that Meta wants the Quest's operating system,
which is calling Horizon OS, to become the Windows or Android of VR slash
Mixed Reality slash Spatial Compute. I don't know what to call this anymore,
and we need to pick one. Leave your vote in the comments about what the catch-all term for headset stuff should be.
Whatever it is, Meta wants to be the Windows of it. So the company is also opening Horizon OS
to other app stores. They've reportedly invited Google
to bring the Play Store over. For a Play Date,
Google probably just gave some excuse and left. So watch out for a slew of new Metaified metastasized headsets,
including a gaming-focused one from ASUS ROG,
a productivity slash learning one from Lenovo,
as well as a limited-edition MetaQuest inspired by Xbox.
So get excited, VR fans. There'll be a green one.
Now, part of the reason Meta's opening up their headset ecosystem is clearly to compete
with Apple's walled garden approach, but it looks like Apple's $3,500 Vision Pro
is already fading into obscurity without anyone's help.
According to Apple wise man, Mark the Germanizer, German,
Apple retail stores are reporting a massive drop in demand in sales with prospective buyers
regularly no showing to appointments they've booked.
It's unclear how existing Vision Pro users feel
on the whole, but there have been many reports of discomfort, neck pain, and black eyes.
What are they doing in there? German himself testified that while he initially used
his own unit several times a day, he's down to maybe once or twice a week, even him?
Germatron Prime? Apple is reportedly dealing with this heartbreak
by pitching the Vision Pro more heavily to businesses and highly skilled workers like surgeons.
The headset has an app for practicing surgeries, but one Brazilian doctor actually used it during surgery,
which sounds kind of sketchy, but actually seemed pretty useful.
He was able to reference x-rays, see a live feed from the tiny surgery cam,
and tweet about how crazy it was. Cutting up this dude's shoulder right now
and he's not reacting at all. It's awesome.
Can I take surgeries? We doing this? Yeah, I got the quick bits.
You got the attentional resources?
It's for the trade. It doesn't. Intel doesn't appear to have done anything
to mitigate the stability issues reported by owners of the company's 13th and 14th gen processors,
other than to say they're looking into it. So other companies are stepping in.
Systems builder Falcon Northwest released a guide to modifying some BIOS settings that may help,
while ASUS has released a BIOS update for its motherboards
with a new Intel baseline profile that should help your CPU calm the F down.
I mean, can you imagine being born into the world basically overclocked to your limit already?
You'd be Bradley Cooper and limitless and it would be awesome. EK Cooling, a bastion of the PC liquid cooling space,
is in the midst of a financial and emotional meltdown,
according to a report from Gamers Nexus. The company has apparently left suppliers, employees,
and contractors unpaid for as long as four months,
in large part due to holding large amounts of unsold inventory.
But the situation has been exacerbated by what sounds like bad management,
a cease and desist letter sent to a former employee for sharing his story,
and infighting between EK Cooling's US branch
and its Slovenian headquarters. It all sounds pretty messed up.
So we can only hope that cooler heads prevail. I'm sorry, that's...
Google isn't expected to launch the Pixel 9 for another five months,
but we've already had our first leaked photos of a prototype Pixel 9 Pro,
which appears very similar to renders published by OnLeaks back in January.
According to Russian language website RosetteKid, the new prototype contains a Tensor G4 SoC
and comes with a hefty 16 gigabytes of RAM to the eight pros 12 gigabytes,
because Google would really like their phones to run local AI without cooking themselves
from the inside out. A potentially less reliable leak
has also claimed that the upcoming Pixel 8a will be more expensive than the 7a,
but Google lacks ground to complain about unreliability
as the company has released its second patch this month to fix glitches that caused missing phone calls
and text messages, which are pretty much a phone's most important job.
Otherwise it's not even a phone. At least it used to be.
UK retailer Curries has dropped the price of the MSI Claw Gaming Handheld
by 25% only weeks following its launch
with the Core Ultra i7 one terabyte model
dropping from 800 to just 600 pounds.
Awkwardly, this makes it 100 pounds more expensive
than the Core Ultra i5 512 gig model,
which hasn't dropped. Further, both models are still priced significantly higher
than a brand new one terabyte OLED Steam Deck, which by all accounts is just better.
Notably, Curries has had an exclusivity deal with MSI
and is the handheld console sole retailer in the UK,
which just goes to show that you should really check whether your partner is poorly optimized
and non-competitively priced before you consider going exclusive. It's just basic research.
On the flip side, the claw has received a Intel GPU driver update
that can boost performance by up to 43 and a half percent.
And it even comes with a free copy of Skull and Bones, if that sweetens the pot,
which honestly it probably doesn't. And Tinder is getting a new share my date feature,
which surprisingly has nothing to do with polyamory and everything to do with user safety.
Now, rather than screenshotting the details of your hiking date in the deep woods
with a complete stranger, you can share the details directly from the app,
including to non-Tinder users, so that your mom knows what to tell police
when you go missing. This is, this is dark.
I'm sorry. Tinder created this feature after user data showed
that 51% of singles under 30 told their friends the details of their dates
beforehand. Gosh, I wonder which half of the population
thought to do that. But both halves of our viewers are equally important to us.
The top and the bottom. So we hope we'll see you on Wednesday for more tech news.