You know what, I want to cover some old tech news. Like it's 1998, Internet Explorer just
overtook Net Vista, and there were only 151 PokÃ©mon. Good stuff. But counterpoint quacksly.
Okay, the magic's still there. Electronic Arts, the makers of your favorite full-priced
annual sports game roster update, announced today that it has been acquired for $55 billion.
The consortium buying EA includes Saudi Arabia's public investment fund, along with Infinity
Partners, which was founded by Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. Not the kind of Kush
typically associated with gamers. The enormous deal makes EA the biggest leveraged buyout ever,
and we'll see the company's shareholders get $210 per share. Right now, we don't know how this
buyout will impact EA's games. We'll have to wait to find out if this is part of Saudi Arabia's
attempt to resuscitate their public image, or if EA's video games will start to show signs of
Saudi government influence, perhaps a next-gen Sims title featuring forced labor and executions,
or a Battlefield 6 DLC game mode featuring journalist assassinations. EA already just blew
up our beloved Zac Efron. So really, nothing's off the table. Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite and
Extreme chips have been benchmarked by a number of tech outlets since their unveiling last week,
with most of those outlets running headlines like, this show's promise, and hey, not bad.
Now, normally that kind of measured, cautious enthusiasm really gets me going,
but it's important to note that the only results being shared are from specific synthetic benchmarks
that Qualcomm pre-installed on the demo laptops. Although they did let the journalists press the
start button, for which they received a sticker that said, I helped.
Now, some of you may remember Qualcomm had a similar setup while promoting the first-gen
Snapdragon X series. The pre-launch hype for those chips reached a fever pitch. Reviewers and
certain tech news-related individuals were foaming at the mouth for what we all thought and hoped
would be Windows' answer to Apple Silicon. Power, efficiency, and compatibility on the
ARM architecture, and then the actual chips launched. And their performance turned out to be
just okay. They were interesting and innovative and definitely pretty cool,
but compatibility issues remained and the gaming experience didn't live up to the hype.
So forgive me if I feel the need to use a bit more than a pinch of salt in this particular
entree, even if I do love to see it on the menu. OpenAI is adding a couple long-awaited features to
chatGPT, parental controls, and the ability to buy stuff directly from the chatbot. Two things
that actually go together quite well. After a lawsuit from the parents of a teen who took his
own life, the parental controls OpenAI promised are finally here allowing parents to link to their
teenagers' accounts if the teen opts in and if the teen doesn't ever disconnect their account,
which they can do at any time. Although the parents will be notified. And right there is a
perfect illustration of how, in the internet age, we don't know what the f*** we're doing.
This is parental controls for the good kids that need it the least, but it's something?
If the accounts stay linked, though, parents can customize their teen's experience by setting
time limits, turning off voice mode and image generation, and hopefully disabling that other
new feature, Instant Checkout. It'll let chatGPT suggest products that users can buy without
ever leaving the app. It's built on an open agent commerce protocol developed with Stripe,
and will only work with Etsy listings for now, although the plan is to add support for over
a million Shopify merchants soon, which is exciting news for the diehards who couldn't ignore that
something real was missing in their relationship with their AI boyfriend or girlfriend. The ability
to engage in commerce. Reggie Alecki is the fastest PokÃ©mon with a base speed stat of 200,
but that legend's got nothing on these quick bits.
NVIDIA's RTX 50 Super series of cards are rumored to be arriving in the first half of 2026. Bench
Life reports that although the cards were expected to be announced at January CES 2026,
the cards should actually be revealed between March and May this coming year. Bench Life suggests
that the RTX 5070, 5070 Ti, and 5080 will all get super variants, which will see all three cards'
memory capacity expanded. It's very thoughtful of NVIDIA to delay these cards, so we have more
time to process the damage they'll do to our collective bank accounts. Stop buying NVIDIA,
they're gonna sell out. It's just a fact. ASUS is working to address stuttering and
performance issues with several of its ROG gaming laptops. Apparently, the issue impacts
ROG laptops all the way back to the 2021 models, but this bug was only recently brought to light
by Zefkik on GitHub, whose work was highlighted on our September 19th WAN Show. Our, I mean...
ASUS has released beta BIOS updates for a number of the affected laptops, and in a community update,
the company says to expect more finalized work in early October. It's good of ASUS for finally
getting on this long-standing issue after being called out on a popular tech podcast. Now that's
the kind of quick customer service we love to see. Apple has made its own chat GBT-like chatbot app,
but it exists only to test their new Siri AI revamp. Ultimate knower of Apple's secrets,
the imperious germanatorious Mark Gurman, reports that the new app, code named Veritas,
is being used internally by Apple staff to test out the company's current AI models. However,
the app is not planned to be released alongside the long-awaited upgraded Siri,
which could start rolling out as early as this coming March.
Early is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Honestly though, Apple take all the time you
need to make this good. Nobody needs a slightly better Siri. It's too late for that.
Microsoft doesn't seem to like your energy when you're working with its office products,
so inspired by AI-driven Vibe coding, they're introducing Vibe Working, aka Not Working.
Using Microsoft's new office agent in co-pilot chat, you can type in prompts to create AI-generated
PowerPoint presentations and Word documents, with Excel support coming soon. Probably not
going to win any Excel championships with this, but hey, you can also use the incredibly similarly
named Agent Mode in Word or Excel to create AI-generated spreadsheets and documents right in the app.
Ultimately, what is better for your work vibes than just letting AI do a worse job of your tasks
for you? Your work doesn't make sense. Who cares? You're vibing. And what do you do for work? We vibe.
And beloved streamer SkyrimGrandma, also known as Shirley Curry, has announced her retirement from
uploading Elder Scrolls videos. In her goodbye video, the soon-to-be 90-year-old told her viewers
that after about 15 years of streaming, she is tired and not having fun anymore. But don't worry,
Curry says she'll still be posting a vlog every so often, and she even left information to stay
in contact with her. Nice to see her retire like this, instead of because of an arrow to the knee.
Plus, there are always rumors that the Elder Scrolls 6 could be right around the corner,
so one day, we might see SkyrimGrandma right again. But I know Techlinked will definitely
right again on Wednesday, so come back on that day. For now, go like and subscribe,
and I will go catch up on literal decades worth of new Pokemon. What the hell is a Blasephalon?
Blasephalon?