For today's presentation of tech news, I please ask that you remain seated or
standing or whatever you're doing. Uh the point is to try not to make a scene.
Okay, this isn't the Minecraft movie. Chicken Jockey is not that's a that's a
no. Apple is expected to roll out a software overhaul for iPad OS to make
using it more like MacOSS. According to
Mark Gurman of House Bloomberg, watcher
of the infinite loop, his girmness doesn't go into specifics, but does say
that changes to iPad OS 19 will be a big
theme at WWDC in June, focusing on
improvements to productivity, multitasking, and window management.
noting this will be great news to iPad
power users who've been pleading with Apple for something to help them justify
spending thousands of dollars on their S tier iPad desktop setup. It's a good
setup and it works for me, right? Hey, I empathize. I've wanted
the iPad to be a Mac since before my mustache came in without even asking me
first. By the way, Warhammer Gerant Tide also mentioned Apple's AR plans, saying
Apple's working on a lighter and cheaper version of the Vision Pro, as well as
another model meant to be used while plugged in to a Mac. And those are
separate from the sleek screen equipped AR glasses that Tim Cook really wants to
get to market before Meta launches a competing product. Tim is apparently
obsessed by this idea. He's already written his own commercial for it. Buy
your mom on Apple glasses or burn burn
in the fire of your iniquity. Late on Friday, the Trump administration
clarified that semiconductors, smartphones, and various other
electronics are exempt from the 145%
total tariff that now applies to other imports from China. Somewhat
invalidating much of what I said in Friday's episode. So embarrassing.
Except I joked that the tariffs would change soon. And oh, US Commerce
Secretary Howard Lutnik said on Sunday that these exceptions are temporary, so
I guess it wasn't a joke and I was serious the whole time. Except Trump
posted on Truth Social to also clarify that smartphones, etc. are subject to
the existing 20% tariff and there was no tariff exception announced on Friday.
the exception to that statement being the executive order published on Friday
titled clarification of exceptions to the tariffs. But but
that's it's just like a slang phrase kids say. It doesn't mean anything.
China is currently making no exceptions to its new policy completely banning all
exports of rare earth minerals and magnets which are critical to the
production of basically any product with a circuit in it. The Chinese government
is building a new system to administer licenses for exporting these materials,
which are almost entirely sourced and processed in China. But they seem to
lack the motivation to get that set up quickly. NVIDIA is probably hoping they
can get one of those licenses soon as they just committed $500 billion towards
manufacturing their flagship Blackwell chips in the US at TSMC's Arizona
facility. Sure, they've been talking about doing this since last year. And
those US-made chips will still have to be shipped over to Taiwan to use TSMC's
packaging tech. But hey, that's I mean, just look at what tariffs can do. Ask if
tariffs are right for your family. Back in consumerland, Sony has vaguely
alluded to Trump's tariffs as the reason for increasing the price of the PS5 in
Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, but not the US after already hiking the
price for somewhat similar reasons back in 2022. And according to a component
supplier, game consoles are not one of the tariffex exempted goods we mentioned
earlier. So, North American gamers should brace themselves for price
increases on the PS5 and the Switch 2
potentially as well. On the plus side,
all of this could change at literally any second, which in which case we may
have just wasted a good couple minutes. Uh, you weren't doing anything. You
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off a truly unique ring. Okay, it's intermission. Uh, thank you for
respecting the show and not making your bags of popcorn explode like it's a bed
in the Nether dimension. Except for Travis's group over
there, but they will get what's coming to them. What's coming to us is the RTX
5060Ti. At least according to video cards with az.com who posted full specs
and 3D Mark results provided by their
sources showing the 5060Ti 16 gig
version performing about 20% better than the 4060 Ti 16 gig. Video cards spelled
the funway.com also leaked some specs of the RX960 XT, including its 448 stream
processors, making it kind of look like an
RX970 XT cut in half if you
squint. Seems like these cards are coming soon, hopefully intact. The FTC's
antirust lawsuit against Meta over their possibly anti-competitive acquisition of
Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014, respectively, has begun. Meta kicked
things off strong by pointing out that when Tik Tok was briefly banned earlier
this year, users flooded onto Meta's platforms. It's simple. People use other
social media sites, so Meta couldn't have bought WhatsApp and Insta to absorb
competition. Also, Meta is going to train their AI on EU users data unless
they opt out. I didn't have a segue for that. Uh, sorry, here's one. Speaking of
AI, Open AAI announced GPT4.1 this morning, a new family of
models that OpenAI says outperform its
current general purpose GPT40 family across the board while now supporting up
to 1 million tokens of context. They're starting to catch up to Gemini there.
OpenAI also says they'll now phase out
GPT4.5 because it's worse than the newlyannounced
GPT4.1. Welcome to Whose AI Is It
Anyway, where the numbers are made up and IP doesn't matter. But you can't
make this up. Google says they've made progress on an AI model called Dolphin
Gemma that could help translate dolphin sounds into human language. All right,
you could totally make that up. Uh, and I think it has been already. I take it
back. The model is a collaboration with the Wild Dolphin Project, who has been
researching dolphin society for decades.
They say language is the last barrier to cross before we finally give dolphins
the ability to ask us directly if we would kindly off. They're very busy
getting high off of puffer fish toxin and we're harshing their vibe. And many
crosswalk buttons in Palo Alto, California have apparently been hacked
to play AI generated audio clips mocking
tech CEOs. As documented on Tik Tok, one
button featured an AI Elon Musk failing to hype his Cybert truck. But it can buy
a Cyber Truck and that's pretty sick, right?
Right. I'm so alone. While another featured an AI Zuck assuring listeners,
it's okay. They can't stop the AI slop as we forcefully insert AI into every
every facet of your conscious experience. And and I just want to assure you, you don't need to worry
because there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it. Anyway, see you. The
hack probably had something to do with security researcher Deviant Olam
pointing out last year that the crosswalk buttons often have an
unchanged default password. Either that or the clips are
real and this is a cry for help. There's no way to know. Thanks AI. There is a
way for you to get more tech news though. Just come back on Wednesday and
that is the only way uh according to science. They've done lots of lots of
testing and that's really the only don't Google