2023-10-11 Watch Out, Apple... [5v72vj2nFN0].txt

You're back again?
You've been consuming a lot of tech news lately.
I think it's time to talk to someone.
No, not me.
I don't count.
I'm not real.
Qualcomm has announced a new series of laptop processors
representing a quantum leap forward in performance and power efficiency.
So the company has modified their Snapdragon branding
the only way any executives know how, adding an X.
It's because they're all teenagers in the 90s.
But this isn't just a naming change.
Snapdragon X chips will be the first publicly available processors developed by Nuvia,
a company founded by a few key members of the Apple Silicon team
and acquired by Qualcomm in 2021.
Like Apple's M1 and M2, Qualcomm's upcoming laptop CPUs,
which will be revealed at the Snapdragon Summit later this month,
won't simply feature modified off-the-shelf ARM Cortex chips,
but a fully custom architecture called Orion.
Building their own custom architecture is partly why Apple was able to achieve
the mind-blowing performance and efficiency boost they did with the M1,
which made the PC master race question everything they had ever known.
Gaben is just a man?
He can bleed just like us?
All that said, there's more than a handful of reasons
to be skeptical that these chips will be good.
ARM is still suing Qualcomm over not paying the proper royalties for Nuvia-produced products,
and Qualcomm's existing laptop processors
have a reputation for sucking almost as bad as the ARM version of Windows.
So Snapdragon X chips already have their work cut out for them.
I mean, do we even want Apple Silicon chips for PCs? Sounds dumb.
Microsoft has gone deep on AI, but they haven't quite figured out how to make any money off of it yet,
probably because they've been scrolling past a lot of excellent advice from former crypto bros on social media.
Diamond hands.
Create pictures of diamond hands.
GitHub Copilot, Microsoft's coding assistant, costs users $10 a month,
but reportedly lost Microsoft over $20 per month per user,
with power users apparently costing Microsoft up to $80 a month in electricity costs and other service fees.
One and a half million people have already tried GitHub Copilot,
and Microsoft Service is incredibly popular among coders,
which is terrible news for Microsoft.
Even worse, this isn't necessarily a problem that will disappear as users scale,
because the LLM that powers Copilot sucks up resources like a black hole doing a keg stand.
That's what we used to call Jimmy in college.
As of this past April,
ChatGPT cost OpenAI an estimated $700,000 a day just to run.
That's probably why both Microsoft and Google
will be charging an additional $30 per month per user
for the recently announced AI-powered upgrades to their business software suites.
AI made up 10 to 15% of Google's energy consumption back in 2021,
and researchers estimate that if generative AI was added to every Google search,
it would consume as much energy as the entire country of Ireland.
That's either a lot or not very much at all.
I don't typically think of energy in units of Ireland's.
And crucially, neither do the Irish.
A California court has ruled that Facebook's ad targeting system is discriminatory
because it requires advertisers to choose demographic characteristics like age and gender
to determine which users will see their ads.
This is then amplified by Facebook's lookalike audience tool,
which attempts to match businesses with potential customers
that share similar traits to their current audience.
To be clear, this wasn't a dispute over ads featuring truck nuts and whiskey-flavored toothpaste.
Real product.
Really?
Yes. I'm getting those ads.
Rather, an older woman found that she was being excluded from ads
offering favorable deals on life insurance targeted at younger men.
If upheld, the decision might require every ad-based platform on the internet
to restructure their ad targeting systems,
so Meta is likely to appeal the decision.
Can't have that.
Also in California,
the Delete Act passed into law,
which means that California data brokers must offer free, simple channels
for users to request that their information be deleted.
And an expansive right to repair bill was also recently signed into law,
though it passed with Apple's blessing,
so take that with a grain of salt.
You know what they say, an apple a day keeps the regulators away,
which must be why there's no apples in Europe.
Fun fact.
Now it's time for Quick Bits,
brought to you by LTTStore.com.
Feels weird, but okay.
They, we, just announced the Stubby Screwdriver last month,
and it has the same great ratchet as the full-sized LTT screwdriver.
Its light back force makes it easy to drive any screw,
whether or not they signed the waiver.
Old Stubby here is four inches in length,
so it's super pocketable and legal to carry on planes for self-defense if things come to that.
The strong magnet in the shaft ensures the six included bits and your screws don't go anywhere
except into the handle's built-in bit storage
and the proper screw holes, respectively.
You just called me a screw hole?
What?
Anyway, Mr. Stubby Screwdriver-son is durable
and made with chemical-resistant plastics,
and you can get yours at the link below.
Oh, Quick Bits, man.
I could listen to them forever up until we hit five.
Adobe has announced major updates to AI features across its creative suite,
including three new generative AI models, Firefly 2, Firefly Design, and Firefly Vector,
with nine grams of protein.
Adobe is also launching its first text-to-vector image generator,
and they teased a new AI upscaling tool,
which can be used for both clips of old movies and GIFs so compressed they're about to collapse into a supernova.
Deep fry.
Another upcoming feature is Fast Fill,
essentially generative fill for video.
And unlike many companies,
we can trust that Adobe has the bravery to make us pay through the nose for it all.
T-Mobile has decided its Price Lock guarantee is only for their newest, most expensive plans,
and is therefore forcibly switching subscribers with cheaper, grandfathered plans onto higher-cost ones.
Hey, it's business.
For the affected plans,
customers will allegedly be alerted on the 17th
before being charged an extra $10 a month per line.
Something T-Mobile won't go out of their way to tell you is
you can opt out of the change by calling customer service and complaining a lot.
It's the one simple trick that cell phone providers hate.
Intel has released two new driver updates for their ARC GPUs this past week.
The first increases performance by up to 119%,
as long as you're playing one of the 20 listed games,
with the big winner being this year's hottest game, Deus Ex Human Revolution.
It gets better every year.
And the main character's voice sounds even more...
I didn't ask for this.
Even more gaspy.
I'm part robot, you know.
Fortunately, Intel's newest driver update increases starfield performance by 117% or 149%,
depending on resolution.
To celebrate, Intel quietly released an even more budget graphics card, the A580.
This would be great news if it wasn't like $10 less than some models of the much superior A750.
I know you're trying to compete with Nvidia, Intel,
but that doesn't mean you should emulate their pricing strategy, okay?
So let's take a step back.
Google has changed the default option for logging into personal accounts.
Instead of putting in your password,
users will start seeing prompts to create and use passkeys,
which are digital credentials unlocked by things like a fingerprint,
a face scan, a pin, basically anything that doesn't give you the option of
using strong password one exclamation mark for every account you have.
Passkeys are rolling out in more places across the tech universe,
but you can still use your password and opt out of seeing the new prompts every time you log in,
if the risk of being hacked for you is part of the whole thrill.
Oh no, don't hack me.
That would be naughty.
And a 22-year-old Firefox bug has finally been fixed by a 23-year-old first-time Firefox coder,
who was horrified to find out that the annoying bug that caused tool tips to hang around in the foreground,
even after command tabbing away from the browser,
was almost as old as they are.
In fact, it's so old, it actually predates the name Firefox,
going back to when the browser was just called Mozilla.
The bug likely lasted two decades
because it was both tricky to reproduce
and more annoying than dangerous,
just like me.
Got him!
And the trick to getting more tech news is to come back on Friday for another episode of TechLinked.
That's the kind of little tips.
You won't learn that stuff elsewhere,
so come on back.