Now that the chicken wings and chips that I ate while watching yesterday's
big sports ball match have run through you, why not wipe your butt with a
little tech news? Wait, that's gross. By now, it's pretty clear that Apple's new
M1 chips have positioned the company on the verge of being a major player in the
CPU market, meaning it was only a matter of time before the likes of Intel took
notice. Team Blue recently put out a large number of benchmarks that
unsurprisingly show its 11th gen i7 chips outperforming Apple's M1's. The
tests include web browsing, productivity, artificial intelligence,
and programs in the Adobe Creative Suite. But despite the benchmarks
running a wide gamut of programs, Intel was criticized for not keeping the
hardware consistent between tests, making it look, at least in part, like
an effort to cherrypick good results. That doesn't seem like them. Never.
Whatever the truth about the chip's performance is, Intel is clearly
concerned about a third company eating into their market share. In Soviet
Russia, Apple eats you. Soviet Russia is a company.
There's really no escaping promoted tweets, better known as ads, in your
Twitter timeline if you use the app on your smartphone. But if you've got a few
dollars to spare, that may change in the near future, as reports indicate that
Twitter is considering some paid subscription options that would allow
the platform to bring in enough extra money to lessen its reliance on ad
revenue. The ideas that seem to have the most traction offer additional features
like profile customization, exclusive content, or tweet deck. So, it probably
isn't going to be a situation where you pay a certain amount of money just to
turn off ads YouTube style, though details are murky at this point. In any
event, it sounds like a great idea. I've been waiting for yet another monthly
bill to add on top of the eight streaming services I subscribe to.
Peacock. I'm on Peacock. There's dozen there's dozens of us. Did you catch that
quick 5-second ad during the Super Bowl that you probably didn't even have time to read? That was the first ever Super
Bowl commercial from Reddit, which claimed that it spent its entire
marketing budget on the spot. Probably over a million bucks when you do the
math. The ad was mostly just words on the screen in the style of a Reddit
comment, giving a nod to the GameStop short squeeze that was propelled by Wall
Street Bets subreddit. The idea was to build Reddit as a powerful platform that
showcases the power of the people coming together, which the ad drove home by
speculating that finance textbooks might one day include a chapter on tendies. I
love tendies. It's happening. This world
I don't know if 2021's better. It's different. I don't know who's better.
Onto the quick bits. There are some new rumors about the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX
3060. The 3080 Ti will reportedly have 12 GB of GDDDR6X VRAM instead of the
originally reported 20. Bummer. As well as a few fewer CUDA cores. He wrote few
less CUDA corores, but I don't make that error. If it's countable, it's fewer.
The 3080 Ti is also rumored to come out sometime in April, while the 3060 may be
on shelves much sooner. February 25th. That's practically we're there, baby. Of
course, when I say shelves, I mean that in the abstract, non-material sense,
unless you're a bot. And you might also be disappointed if you're ready to
settle for an RTX30 series laptop as supplies of those are reportedly being
squeezed by crypto miners in China thanks to recent spikes in Bitcoin and
Ethereum. So I guess it doesn't matter whether NVIDIA is transparent about the
laptop specs or not because again abstract. They're just shadows on the
walls of a cave. And with the surge in crypto,
maybe it's not too surprising that the world's richest man, Elon Musk, is
putting his crypto where his mouth is. Tesla has bought $ 1.5 billion worth of
Bitcoin and will also soon start accepting payments in Bitcoin. The
cryptocurrency spiked to around $44,000 US after the announcement, Bitcoin. It's
2021 and the world's economy rises and falls based on the tweets of a Twitter
meme lord. God help us all. I wouldn't want it any other way. Remember the old
idea of a company town where some big manufacturer basically controlled one
whole community? Elon Musk. Just joking. Nevada might be putting a modern spin on
that idea as the state's governor wants to create innovation zones that would
give high-tech companies the power to form their own little local governments.
Although it's being built as a way to attract good jobs and more investment to
the state, company towns haven't exactly been the model of good government.
Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg started making rules to tell you how you can use
your meat smoker. You have to log in first or like he gets to be in the sauna
when you're and not have a towel. But
Mark, Mark's on Strata. Wouldn't let me have this
planter box. And are you one of the many good people who have an iPhone, but use
Spotify instead of Apple Music? Keep fighting the good fight. It looks like
Apple is finally going to let you switch your default music service as of iOS
14.5. So, if you ask Siri to play something, she'll go right to Spotify
instead of trying to make it play an Apple Music. Holy cow. I didn't know you
people lived under this regime. This is so brutal. Congratulations. Welcome.
Wow. That's our show. Come back on Wednesday for more tech news. Even if
Siri tells you not to. We tell Siri what to do now. Yeah. I bought my phone. I
should be able to use my You imagine it's like no dialing dialing Tim Cook.
We don't want you to talk to grandma. I can't let you do that,