A (0:04)

Welcome to the Techboot ride home for Wednesday, October 15th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today the new Apple M5 chips are here and I'll tell you what devices got them and what they can do. ChatGPT wants to allow you to have sexy time, Waymo is coming to London, Netflix wants to bring podcasts to your streaming diet, and it's officially the end of the Road for Windows 10. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Apple this morning updated pieces of its hardware lineup. These are mostly spec bumps, but they're impressive bumps because this marks the arrival of the M5 chip. For example, Apple unveiled a 14 inch MacBook Pro with an M5 chip, which Apple says offers up to 3.5x more performance for AI workflows. It also gets faster storage for the same $1599 starting price. Shipping October 20The iPad Pro got an M5 chip as well. Also the new C1X cellular modem and an N1 chip for the starting price of 999 for the 11 inch and 1299 for the 13 inch model Shipping Also October 22 the Vision Pro got an M5 chip 2, which Apple says allows it to render 10% more pixels. There's also a new, reportedly more comfortable dual knit band to keep on your noggin. I will also note that Apple will begin selling Vision compatible PlayStation VR 2 Sense controllers for $250 on November 11th and a $130 Logitech Muse digital pen on October 22nd. So you know more kit for the like two or three of you out there who have one of these. But obviously the big news here is that new M5 chip. So what do it do? Quoting the Verge Talking about the MacBook Pro, Apple claims the M5 chip is 3.5 times faster at AI tasks than the M4 chip thanks to a next gen 10 core GP, a neural accelerator in each core. The new GPU also means 1.6x faster graphics performance and up to 1.6x higher frame rates in games over the M4 MacBook Pro. Multithreaded performance is also increased by 20% and the M5 chip in the 14 inch Pro also has higher memory bandwidth of 153Gbps. The M4 had 120Gbps for storage. Users can now choose up to a 4 terabyte SSD, previously only available if you upgraded to the M4 Pro chip chip. Just about everything else about the new 14 inch MacBook Pro matches the previous model. It's got the same ports, screen, battery, webcam networking specs and speakers as the M4 generation. There's not even a new color. That's not such a bad thing as last year's Base Pro laptop saw a very nice revision when it went to the M4 chip, gaining a third USB C Thunderbolt 4 port and the option for an anti glare display. It proved a big quality of life improvement over the M3 generation before it and became one of my personal favorites for students and content creation End quote We know that OpenAI has been relaxing some of their rules and safeguards around intellectual property, but what this segment presupposes is what if they're really ready to let loose? Let me read you this tweet from Sam Altman yesterday. Quote we made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realized this made it less useful enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue, we wanted to get this right. Now that we have been able to mitigate these serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases. In a few weeks we plan to put out a new version of ChatGPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about 4o. We hope it will be better. If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it. But only if you want it. Not because we are usage maxing in December as we roll out age gating more fully. And as part of our treat adult users like adults principle, we will allow even more like erotica for verified adults. So ChatGPT is about to let you talk sexy to it. Quoting the Verge earlier this month, OpenAI hinted at allowing developers to create mature ChatGPT apps after it implements the appropriate age verification and controls. OpenAI isn't the only company dipping into erotica, as Elon Musk's Xai previously launched flirty AI companions which appear as 3D anime models in the Grok app. And actually, I found this article from Ars Technica from back in February which suggests that OpenAI has been considering this for a while. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has mentioned the need for a grown up mode publicly in the past as well. While it seems like grown up mode is finally here, it's not technically a mode, but a new universal policy that potentially gives ChatGPT users more flexibility in interacting with the AI assistant. Of course, uncensored large language models have been around for years at this point, with hobbyist communities online developing them for reasons that range from wanting bespoke written pornography to not wanting any kind of paternalistic censorship. Waymo plans to launch a fully driverless robotaxi service In London in 2026, its first European launch. Human supervised cars will first collect data for a period of time, but it sounds like self driving is coming to you soon, Londoners quoting the Verge the UK currently doesn't have any fully driverless vehicles on the road. The government has said it will start piloting fully driverless Ride Ha services in spring 2026, though a fuller rollout of self driving taxis won't come until the Automated vehicles Act of 2024 fully takes effect in late 2027. Waymo says it will start deploying supervised robo taxis with safety drivers behind the wheel for data collection in London in the next few weeks. When it launches its commercial service next year, its fully driverless robo taxis will be available through Waymo's own Ride Hail app. The vehicles will be maintained by a company called Move, which provides fleet services as well as a range of financial products for mo. Move is also managing Waymo's fleets in Phoenix, Austin and soon Miami. Waymo has been eyeballing London for a while now. Last month the Telegraph reported that the company had begun advertising for staff in the UK capital, including a fleet readiness lead and various engineers. Waymo says it has strong ties in the uk, citing its engineering hubs in London and Oxford. These hubs include teams advancing large scale closed loop simulation, a gold standard development method for fully autonomous driving technology, the company says in a blog post. London won't be the first overseas city to see Waymo's distinctively driverless Jaguar SUVs. The company recently sent two dozen vehicles to Tokyo for a small trial and has said it aims to launch a commercial business in that country when it launches. Waymo is sure to find plenty of competition in London. Uber has said it is working with UK based autonomous driving startup Wave on testing some driverless cars in the city next year. Wave may have a leg up given its homegrown status, end quote. But will it call you governor when you get in? I'm joking about that, but I'm not joking about this. Cabbies in London are genuinely one of the treats of visiting that city and I say that as a New Yorker where we've got some pretty fun cabbies of our own. Spotify is partnering with Netflix to distribute a selection of video podcasts from Spotify Studios and the Ringer on Netflix starting in early 2026 in the US quoting TechCrunch. The move follows Spotify's increased focus on video podcasts, beginning with the launch of tools that made it possible for anyone to publish their shows as videos. Over the past year, the company has added incentives that paid podcaster hosts for their popular videos and launched a partner program so hosts could monetize their video content in a challenge to YouTube. Spotify's interest in streaming video comes after a major shift in its podcast Strategy back in 2023, which included layoffs, including that of Chief Content and Business Officer Don Ostroff, who had led its podcast initiatives. During Ostroff's time at the service, Spotify had invested billions in podcasts, buying studios like Parkast, the Ringer and Gimlet Media and signing exclusive podcast deals with big names like Joe Rogan and Alex Cooper, which have since expired. However, Spotify's investments failed to turn into substantial profits, necessitating a new strategy. Video, which is heavily consumed by Gen Z users in particular, offers more opportunities for ad products and monetization, the company now believes. As of Q2 2025, the company said it now has more than 430,000 video podcasts on its service and video consumption is growing 20 times faster than audio only consumption. Since 2024, more than 350 million Spotify users have also streamed a video on its platform, up 65% year over year, end quote one other interesting detail about this quoting the Times Netflix will not run ad breaks with the initial set of shows, even for subscribers who pay for the less expensive plans that shows advertising during its programming, but the advertising Spotify sells that are integrated into the shows will remain. Netflix has been exploring adding podcasts to its video service for some time. The company's interest has attracted the attention of podcast executives at other companies, some of whom say Netflix has been courting the same talent they do. The 16 shows in the deal are produced by Spotify Studios and the Ringer, the website and podcasting network that Bill Simmons started and that Spotify acquired in 2020. The shows include two popular true crime podcasts, Conspiracy Theories and Serial Killers, the Bill Simmons Podcast and rewatchables, which features Mr. Simmons and a roundtable of movie lovers discussing their favorite films, End quote.