Welcome to Tech News, National Geographic Edition.
Here in the vast digital savannah,
we observe the tech industry in its natural habitat.
Shh, don't startle it, let's watch.
Oh, it's me, I have to, okay.
It really seems like NVIDIA will launch their N1
and N1X ARM-based SOCs in the first half of this year,
with Dell and Lenovo already on board with laptop designs,
according to insider sources who spoke to the Wall Street Journal.
As previous leaks have indicated, the N1X is essentially expected to be
a consumer-focused version of the GB10 Super Chip
that powers NVIDIA's DGX Spark Enterprise mini PCs,
with up to 20 ARM cores, a massive 6,144 CUDA cord IGPU,
and don't forget that sweet, sweet, unified memory.
But while ARM-powered Windows laptops have come a long way,
they're still not great for gaming. So why should gamers care?
Well, one reason might be that, as much as we rag on NVIDIA for caring more about AI than us,
they do still put resources into gaming. I mean, look, they're hiring software engineers
to work on native speed x8664 gaming
on Linux slash ARM64 platforms.
They're hiring someone to make the gaming experience better for a niche within a niche.
Maybe Jensen does still have a gamer soul
hiding beneath all those layers of leather jackets.
They protect him from the outside, all the hurtful words.
However things shake out, with a full reveal anticipated at the NVIDIA GTC keynote
on March 16th, the laptop market is heating up
and Qualcomm and AMD are sweating profusely
through their quarter zips. Samsung took the wraps off the Galaxy S26 phone lineup
at an unpacked event this morning, completely shocking the world
by unveiling new smartphone tech that isn't just chat GPT with extra steps.
Although that was there too. Samsung says the new Galaxy S26 Ultra features
the world's first privacy display on mobile,
which makes your phone screen completely opaque when viewed from outside of the primary user cone
in front of the phone, the cone of brain rot, maybe we could call it.
And it can even selectively black out parts
of the screen like sensitive message notifications from your landlord that say in all caps,
for the last time you cannot pay rent in Funko Pops,
it is up to you to sell them for money first. It is not legal tender.
The way the privacy display works is kind of cool. Every other pixel in the grid is a narrow pixel
with little donuts above it that modulate how much light escapes to the sides
and you can't eat them, but at least they're in there.
The rest of the features are fairly standard new phone stuff.
The cameras are largely the same, but apparently let in more light now
with a new super steady mode that can keep footage level with the ground.
There's a few more AI photo editing options to help you construct false memories
of things that never happened, very fun. But there's a couple cool AI features too.
Ask Samsung's Bixby AI Assistant to change your phone settings
and it will present you with a toggle for the feature you want, hopefully right there in the chat interface, finally.
And audio eraser can strip background noise from third-party apps like Instagram now,
not just Samsung ones. The S26 Ultra starts at the same price as the S25 Ultra,
$1,300 USD, while the S26 and S26 Plus
have gotten $100 price hikes. They start at $900 and $1,100 USD respectively,
although the base model does come with 256 gigs of storage
instead of 128 this year. So it's not all just storage crisis stuff.
But still, for those prices, you can pick up a few pairs of the new $250 Galaxy Buds 4 Pro,
which have been redesigned with what Samsung calls a real metal blade.
They've got bigger woofers and are shaped for all day comfort,
as long as you're careful not to accidentally put the metal blade in first.
I'm still like picking it up, gotta be careful.
Feels awesome though. Every time I listen to something, it's like I'm a samurai.
Department of War is going toe-to-toe with Anthropic
over ethical restrictions baked into its AI model, Claude,
in the ultimate Nerds versus Jocks slug fest.
This is what we've been waiting for. Defense Secretary or War Secretary,
Pete Hegseth summoned Anthropic CEO, Dario Amode
to the Pentagon on Tuesday to deliver an ultimatum.
Let the government use Claude for mass domestic surveillance of US citizens
and or making targeting decisions in physical attacks
without human input, or Amode is gonna get a hell of a swirly
and I'll make you do my homework. No, Hegseth reportedly threatened to designate Anthropic
as a supply chain risk, blocking it from working
with the government and a wide swath of affiliated companies,
or maybe Hegseth will invoke the Defense Production Act
to force Anthropic to adapt its model to the military's needs.
Or maybe even both. Ah, I know that doesn't make sense,
but I'm just so angry right now because you keep saying words, I don't understand.
The Pentagon has given Anthropic until Friday to comply,
but Anthropic reportedly does not plan on budging.
A senior government official commented that taking this action against Anthropic
would be massively disrupted for the Pentagon because Claude is currently the only AI model used
in classified defense systems. The Pentagon is currently addressing this issue
by signing a deal to bring XAI's GROC
into classified defense networks, which has real pouty teenager energy.
Oh, you're not letting me use your AI to autonomously kill people?
Fine, I'll just go hang out with Mecha Hitler. How do you like that, dad?
Go to your room. Now, Anthropic has budged on a separate safety pledge,
the commitment to never train an AI model unless they could guarantee it would be safe first,
which seems hard to be fair. Why?
Well, to paraphrase their chief science officer, other AI companies are never gonna stop, never stopping,
so Anthropic is not actually contributing
any additional risk to the ecosystem, which is basically just them saying,
we're committed to safety, but we're also committed to money and winning,
which is super self-aware and honestly super wise.
I believe it was Marcus Aurelius who said, never regard something as doing you good
if it makes you betray a trust, unless you're about to lose an AI arms race
to Elon Musk, then f*** it. And here we see the quick bits in the wild,
often moving in packs of five. Scientists believe they communicate
through a series of rapid-fire headlines, fascinating creatures, remarkably savage.
Discord is delaying its global age verification rollout
to the second half of 2026. CTO Stanislav Vishnevsky,
coming at the problem with the energy of a beleaguered substitute teacher,
posted that many of you walked away thinking we're requiring face scans and ID uploads
from everyone just to use Discord. That's not what's happening.
He went on to clarify that over 90% of users will never need to verify their age
to keep using Discord exactly as they do today. That said, Discord stressed they'll still meet
any legal obligations for age verification, which currently means using third-party vendors
like KID in the UK and Australia, with Brazil soon to follow.
The company will use the delay to learn how to write a f***ing blog post properly, I guess.
Product listings for budget HP laptops have been spotted advertising 1.2 terabytes of storage,
the catch being that one terabyte of that is just a one-year free trial
of Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage. Reddit user BMR99 posted several links
to blatant cases of spec padding in the LTT subreddit,
showing that with NAND prices spiking, I guess the new industry standard
is just download more storage, bro, it's a you problem.
Thankfully, Canadians get to avoid this specific trap.
We have a different one. Some Amazon.ca listings advertise one terabyte drives
as 1,024 Gigabyte SSDs,
which actually makes the listing even more deceitful because one terabyte drives usually have less
than 1,000 gigs of usable space, but I don't know. That still sounds like a heck of a deal there,
but I think you should fricking send it. Tech giants are hunting for cheap farmland
for their power-hungry AI data centers and have offered million-dollar payouts
that many US farmers are none of the less flat-out refusing
according to a report from The Guardian. But these companies want that land.
Some utility companies have threatened to invoke eminent domain, the government's power
to seize private property for public use.
But for the farmers, it ain't about the money. It's about protecting their family legacies.
They got Tigriti and unlike them Silicon Valley boys,
farmers recognize that God didn't intend for us to eat servers or become romantically entwined
with AIY foods, it ain't right. Panasonic, the former plasma TV king,
will no longer make its own television. All Panasonic branded TVs will now be manufactured,
marketed and sold by Skyworth, a Chinese company,
with the same name as my high school World of Warcraft character, Skyworth.
Skyworth. It's just AI, Skyworth. Skyworth's CEO pitched it as a meeting of minds,
but the real trade is pretty obvious. Skyworth gets to use a legendary brand name
to sell TVs in Western markets, and Panasonic gets to stop spending money making TVs.
If it seems familiar, that's because it's a very similar deal to the Sony and TCL one that just happened recently.
This is a bummer for Panasonic though. They controlled over 40% of the global plasma market
until price sensitivity caused by the 2008 financial crisis
ended up destroying their margins. After that, Panasonic never really recovered.
Don't worry Panasonic, none of us did. And Spotify and Liquid Death have released
the Eternal Playlist Earn, a limited edition Bluetooth speaker
shaped like a cremation urn. It asks you questions about your eternal vibe
and your go-to ghost noise, all right?
Then generates a playlist that syncs to the urn
and plays you into the afterlife. Is it a real urn, like for ashes?
Yeah, you didn't put ashes in there. Might screw it up, but the Bluetooth speaker.
So for me, that'll be an infinite loop of monster mash
and fallout boys, sugar we're going down swinging.
But given Spotify's history of launching then bricking physical devices like the car thing,
eternity might be more like two years.
And I guess you'll have to keep paying for Spotify premium. Otherwise you'll be hearing ads for the rest of eternity,
which again, according to Spotify, is just two years. So it's not that bad.
And that concludes today's episode of Planet Tech.
Oh, okay, join us on Friday when we will watch as the AI hype beast performs its mating display
for potential investors. It is truly so cringe.