The Consumer Electronics Show is happening in Las Vegas this week, which means a tech-linked
episode every weekday filmed here in the studio, not on location, because have you been to Vegas?
There's just a layer of slime on everything. It's like it's underwater. Demand for desktop
GPUs hit a 20-year low in 2022, according to data from John Petty Research, which I'm sure
AMD and NVIDIA are super confused by. Like, guys, we made you these really powerful graphics cards.
All we ask in return is all of your money. So Team Red, Green, and Blue have responded,
the only way they know how, by slashing their orders for more chips from major chip manufacturer
TSMC. They're thinking, gamers must just not be into GPUs right now, so I guess we'll stop making
them? Okay fine, I'll put a pause on the sarcasm. No one's buying GPUs because despite the supply
shortage being alleviated last year, prices are still high, thanks to NVIDIA and even AMD launching
their new quite expensive flagship GPUs, which also seem to carry their own unique burn risks.
They're special. That's not to say NVIDIA has totally ignored the budget market,
they just launched a new RTX 3050 with a lower TDP of 115 watts, so you can save a few cents
on your power bill. You know, they really know about the concerns of the people.
India will be mandating the use of USB-C ports for charging portable electronics weeks after
similar legislation from the EU finally got final approval or was signed into law or got
a lot of votes or something. Honestly, I feel like I've reported on that story like 18 times.
India's reasons for the mandate seem similar to the EU's. They want to make life easier for
consumers, reduce e-ways to protect the environment, and make Apple do something they don't want to do
because that's funny. The Bureau of Indian Standards would require mobile devices to use USB-C
by March 2025, although the rules also make room for a second standard charging method for
smartwatches and other wearables. It's also important to note that Apple might be able to shimmy
its way out of rules like this by making a portless iPhone that charges via MagSafe,
since laws like these often have terms saying you have to use USB-C for wired charging,
but I really hope Apple does make at least one official USB-C iPhone, just so we have it.
Cause then we have it. And like I said, you'll want to prepare yourselves for some hot tech news
from CES this week. Usually we have a few pre-show announcements to report on, but for the most part,
so far, we've only gotten some press releases from Samsung about monitors. One is about the 8K
UltraWide, which is not really 8K, so it's kind of annoying that they keep calling it that.
They announced that in November. Monitor specs are already confusing enough as it is.
And another press release is about a color calibrated 5K monitor meant to compete with
similar models from Apple and LG. Although Samsung did also announce a smart oven with an
internal camera that can recognize over a hundred dishes so it can cook them automatically while
you stream footage of it to Twitch. Now that is a taste of the good weird CES stuff pun intended.
LG also announced their 2023 lineup of TVs is brighter. No, I don't care. It's too normal.
Give me the smart robot toilets. Incentive pillows. That's what CES is about.
Quick bits have all sorts of other qualities too. They're not just quick.
Don't put them in a box. Benchmarks have leaked for upcoming NVIDIA cards indicating that the
un-unlaunched RTX 4080 12GB aka the 4070 Ti performs about as well as the RTX 3090 Ti,
at least in 3D Mark. Another leak showed the unreleased laptop version of the RTX 4090
performing better than a desktop 3090 in geekbench. But why am I telling you this?
When NVIDIA's GeForce event at CES is going to start in a matter of hours,
they'll probably give you all sorts of reliable information that you can take at face value.
When they say it's a 4080, it's a 4080. Multiple reports are claiming that Chinese
smartphone giants Oppo and Huawei have made progress in designing and manufacturing their own
in-house chipsets, which would reduce their reliance on non-Chinese suppliers.
Huawei's designed their own chips for a while, but they recently filed a patent describing an
extreme ultraviolet or EUV lithography process, which enables the production of higher-end chips.
So once they launch phones without any non-Chinese parts, at least you can be more confident that
they're spying on you. I mean, at least I know now. It's the uncertainty that gets me.
Netflix has ads now, at least for their cheapest tier, and according to Jeremy Zimmer,
head of Hollywood's United Talent Agency, that means Netflix content creators should be getting
a cut of ad revenue because Netflix has turned them into YouTubers, basically. Now, that argument
would be pretty solid if Netflix was making a lot of money off ads, which it doesn't appear to be.
Only 9% of new Netflix signups in the US were for the ad-supported tier,
causing Netflix to actually have to pay back advertisers for some of their ad spending.
So maybe Adam Sandler should consider YouTube, uh, or Flowplain. Can you imagine we get some
Adam Sandler Flowplain exclusives? I wouldn't watch them. The royalty-free AV1 video codec
has had a hard time breaking into the mainstream, but popular transcoding app Handbrake has added
official AV1 support in the latest release. So now watch all the cards fall. Okay, fine,
the app doesn't support NVIDIA or AMD's implementations of the codec yet, but that will probably
come soon, hopefully before some tech giant or another realizes that letting an open-source
standard that lets people run things faster without paying them money might be a bad idea.
And Sam Bankman Freed, released on bail after being arrested in relation to the collapse of the
FTX exchange, just can't stop himself from commenting on stuff that he probably shouldn't.
Like recent news that crypto wallets associated with Alameda Research,
the sister company of FTX, have been spotted transferring out funds. None of these are me,
SPF tweeted. That's right, bud. Maintain innocence, even though your buddies all pled guilty to federal
charges. Look, I'm not saying he's definitely guilty. Like, let the trial play out. I'm just
telling him to shut up. Stop talking. Speaking of which, I'll take my own advice now. But you
should come back tomorrow for more tech news, different advice for different people. You
should never stop talking. We need your voice in this time.