A (0:04)

Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Thursday, November 13th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today Valve is taking on gaming consoles and creating a new type of VR headset all at the same time. GPT5 gets warmer, Cursor's new raise means it has 10X'd its valuation in the span of a year, and we're one step closer to your phone completely replacing your wallet. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech foreign so does your risk of data loss, but with Veeam, your data is always on the map. Partner with Veeam for coverage that keeps you moving and get protection from workloads of all shapes and sizes, even the ones you haven't created yet so you can stay resilient as you scale. With Veeam, it's all good. Get workload coverage that works for your business@veeam.com that's V E E A M.com Valve made a bunch of headlines overnight and I'm kind of going to go and reverse order of importance to tell you about it. First, if you'll recall, Steam upended the console gaming world by releasing the Steam Deck. Now it seems Valve wants to take over the console gaming world with the new Steam Machine, a cube shaped gaming PC with Steam OS built right in a semi custom AMD Zen 4 CPU and AMD rDNA 3 GPU and 16 gigabytes of RAM expected in early 2026. Quoting Tom's Hardware this is a system meant for living room play, armed with a new semi custom amd zen 4 cpu and amd rdna 3 gpu and it runs steamos just like the Steam Deck. In many ways it's effectively a Steam based console. Valve claims that this system is six times more powerful than the Steam Deck though, so it should be a better couch experience than using the Steam Deck dock and playing games at low resolution. The company suggests that the Steam Machine can play games in 4K and 60 frames per second, with the caveat that you'll have to rely on AMD's FSR scaling. The PC measures 6.39 by 6.14 by 5.98 inches, almost a cube without the computer's feet. It's 5.83 inches tall. Most of the computer is on the bottom of the box, with the majority of the space inside taken up by a substantial heat sink and fan. The front of the system feature there's a customizable light bar that you can personalize to indicate system status, such as when it is booting up, downloading games or updating the Steam Machine's CPU is based on 6AMD Zen 4 cores, runs up to 4.8 GHz and has a 30 watt TDP. The GPU uses AMD's RDNA 3 cores and features 28 compute units, 8 gigabytes of GDDR6 VRAM and a 2.45 GHz max sustained clock. The CPU is paired with 16 gigabytes of DDR5. Technically you can upgrade it, but with some RF shielding and an attempt to keep the memory as close as possible to the CPU for signal integrity, it might be a bit of work. There's an integrated 300 watt power supply. Valve says the GPU uses 110 watts, though one Valve rep gave a range of 110 to 130 watts, stating that we're still kind of fine tuning that while the CPU goes up to 30 watts, the CPU peaks at 4 4.8 gigahertz. Valve will sell two configurations of the Steam Machine and the only difference will be storage. You can get either a 512 gigabyte SSD or a 2 terabyte SSD. Either way, Valve is using an M2 2230 SSD in the system, though there is room to support an M2 2280 if you decide to upgrade or replace the drive. There is another way to expand storage. Just like on the Steam Deck, you can use a Micro SD card. If you remove the Micro SD card and place it into a Steam Deck or a Stream frame, more on that in a second. Your library will come with you ready to go into other devices. The system supports two displays via HDMI and DisplayPort on the rear. If you add a DisplayPort hub to the rear or use daisy chaining, the system should be able to support more monitors. Valve hasn't provided pricing or an exact release date for the Steam Machine or Steam Controller just yet, though we were told to expect the hardware early next year. Some of that uncertainty is because of a volatile market for computer components. End quote on to the next news and actually now that I think about it, I'm not sure which is the more important news. I guess it depends on what you think about VR because the other news is the new Steam Frame, a VR headset that can stream games from a PC or run Windows and Android games locally. Expected to launch in 2026 for under $999. Quoting the Verge It's a standalone VR headset with a smartphone caliber ARM chip inside that lets you play flat screen windows games locally off the onboard storage or a Micro SD card. But the frame's arguably bigger trick is that it can stream games directly to the headset, bypassing your unreliable home WI fi by using a short range, high bandwidth wireless dongle that plugs into your gaming PC. And its new controllers are packed with all the buttons and inputs you need for both flat screen games and VR games. The pitch either locally or over streaming, you can play every game in your stream library on this lightweight headset. No cord required. I think Valve may be onto something. As I explored an industrial level in Half Life Alyx, jumping from floor to floor and blasting headcrabs, I couldn't tell at all that the game was being streamed to me from a nearby PC. I felt like I was playing it through a hardwired connection or natively on the headset itself. The dongle, which comes in the box with the headset, streams your games over 6 GHz spectrum, so that's its only job. It means that the experience has low latency, high bandwidth and lots of robustness, valve hardware engineer Jeremy Sellin tells the Verge. When you're streaming, to make what you're looking at appear sharp and with low latency, the frame uses a technique Valve calls foveated streaming. You might be familiar with foveated rendering, which in VR enhances what's directly in front of your eyes and lowers the resolution in your peripheral vision. To optimize the performance of a headset with foveated streaming, the frame instead uses its two eye tracking cameras to make it easier to sling compressed images from your PC anywhere the user is looking. We spend as many bits as possible to give them a very high fidelity, super high quality representation of where they're looking, and we've borrowed those bits from everywhere else in the image, sellen says. It's always on and always active, so game developers don't have to do anything to make it work. The headset checks the position of your eyes more than 80 times a second. At one point, Valve staffers entered a special special command that placed a square in front of wherever my eyes were focused. While it was on, I couldn't tell that the bits around the square were lower fidelity, and as I whipped my eyes all over the virtual room, the square kept up without any discernible lag. It was extremely impressive, and it means that depending on your PC, the frame could let you play high end VR games on a light headset. The frame weighs 440 grams with the headset and battery strap roughly half as much as the approximately 8009 gram valve index, which unlike the frame, also needed to to be physically wired to a PC. Valve's headset is also lighter than the 560 gram PSVR 2 and the 515 gram Meta Quest 3. It's nice to wear right out of the box too, with an especially plush and silky face cushion and well balanced counterweight thanks to the battery being placed in the back of the head strap. The strap also contains speakers two per side, Valve says, spaced apart so they can cancel out their own vibrations before they affect the headset's positioning sensors. The comfort might come at the cost of performance, though. While it might seem like a Steam deck for your face, the frame won't hit Steam Deck levels of performance and battery when you're playing on its own lightweight ARM system. The frame runs SteamOS on a last generation phone chip, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and it has to recompile Windows x86 game code on the fly using an emulator named FEX to let titles run on arm. Valve is welcoming Android games into Steam so you can play on the frame too, and you'll be able to sideload APKs as well. The company confirmed to gamers nexus, and at 21.6 watt hours, the frame's battery is about half the capacity of the original Steam Deck, though you can plug any sufficiently powerful USB C battery at 45 watts into the headset to extend its life. Valve is working to make streaming battery life as efficient as possible, Sellin says, though playing six hours of Hades 2 over streaming would be unlikely. Valve is also planning a Steam Frame Verified program like the Steam Deck Verified program that adds green check marks on the Steam Store pages of games that play well on the Steam Deck with no modific, so you can know which games run well locally. But playing games locally isn't the main point of the device. It's mostly designed for streaming. Steam frame is a wireless streaming headset, first and foremost, designer Lawrence Yang tells the Verge. That is what we've optimized a lot of things and a lot of decisions around not only for hardware but also in terms of software. Valve isn't sharing a price for the frame yet. The company plans to reveal that in early 2026, and it's only telling us that it's targeting a price that's less than an index. Valve's previous headset, which cost 999dol. But there are other hints that Valve's new headset won't be as expensive as competitors end quote we all remember the choices that shaped the course of our lives in business. World renowned venture capital firm Sequoia Capital calls them Crucible Moments. Their podcast brings you inside the pivotal decisions that defined some of today's most influential companies. Hosted by Sequoia's Ruloff Botha, Crucible Moments Season three pulls back the curtain on the untold stories behind companies like Stripe, Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna Supercell and more. I loved the recent episode with the founder of Zipline and how even late to the game, they are leapfrogging the bigger players to bring true autonomous drone delivery not just to hospitals, but now to customers of the likes of Walmart and Chipotle. I might win that burrito delivery bet someday soon. Tune in to Sequoia's new season of Crucible Moments to discover how some of the most transformational companies of the modern era were buil. Crucible Moments is available everywhere you get your podcasts and@CrucibleMoments.com is the daily commute making your muscles feel stiff? Well, there could be a natural way to help relieve that discomfort. Cornbread Hemp creates premium USDA Organic Full spectrum CBD gummies designed to help with stress, body aches and sleep. Their products are made exclusively from the hemp flower, the most potent part of the plant, for maximum purity and effectiveness. Every batch is third party lab tested to ensure quality, safety and consistency. In short, Cornbread Hemp gummies are formulated to work with your body, not against it. Right now, Tech Brew Ride Home listeners can save 30% on their first order. Just head to cornbreadhemp.com brew and use code BREW at checkout. That's cornbreadhemp.com Brew and use code Brew. Satya Nadella wants you to know that Microsoft has access to all of OpenAI's custom AI chip work and therefore plans to use that to help develop its own in house chip, quoting Bloomberg as they innovate, even at the system level, we get access to all of it, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said on a podcast appearance when asked about the development of in house chips. We first want to instantiate what they build for them, but will extend it under a revised agreement between the two companies. Microsoft has access to the ChatGPT makers models through 2032 and research through 2030 or until a panel of experts agrees that artificial general intelligence has been achieved. Microsoft's intellectual property rights exclude OpenAI consumer hardware. OpenAI plans to custom design chips and networking hardware with Broadcom. Microsoft has worked to develop in house chips, but has seen less success in the effort than cloud rivals such as Alphabet's Google. Microsoft will work with designs from OpenAI and its own team. QUOTE Knowing we have the IP rights, Nadella said on the podcast released Wednesday, hosted by author Dwarkesh Patel. End QUOTE OpenAI has rolled out GPT 5.1 instant, which it wants you to know is warmer and more conversational, and also GPT 5.1 thinking, which they say is easier to understand and faster. The rollout is starting, paid users quoting the Verge. The new models include GPT 5.1 instant and GPT 5.1 thinking. The former is warmer, more intelligent and better at following your instructions than its Predecessor per an OpenAI release, and the latter is now easier to understand and faster on simple tasks and more persistent on complex ones. Queries will in most cases be auto matched to the models that may best be able to answer them. The two new models will start rolling out to ChatGPT users this week, and the old GPT5 models will be available for three months in ChatGPT's legacy models dropdown menu before they disappear as part of the update. OpenAI also said it would expand its personality presets for the conversational tone of the models. The total list of options now includes default professional, friendly, candid, quirky, efficient, nerdy and cynical. Per the company's blog post, OpenAI said in a release that it would also debut an experiment for new ways to fine tune ChatGPT's style directly from settings, which which some users will begin to be able to access this week. While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hyped up the announce of GPT5 in August, the release failed the hype test. Many ChatGPT users were left unimpressed, particularly at the incremental improvements, and expressed frustration over OpenAI's choice to make it the default model for ChatGPT. There was so much pressure that OpenAI decided it would bring back GPT 4.0 as an option a day after the launch of GPT 5. Microsoft, OpenAI's strategic AI partner, has also increasingly been looking at rival models from Anthropic after GPT5 failed to raise the bar enough. Anthropic's models are now helping power Copilot researcher Copilot GitHub, Copilot Copilot Studio, and a new Office agent that is able to produce Word and PowerPoint documents from Microsoft's own CoPilot chat interface. End Quote AI coding startup Cursor just raised $2.3 billion, co led by Accel and CO2 at a $29.3 billion valuation. This is after raising a $900 million Series C at $9.9 billion in valuation just back in June, and also if my math is correct, that means they are now worth 10 times more than their valuation at the beginning of the year, quoting the Journal. Other new investors include Alphabet's, Google and Nvidia, which Cursor invited to the round to deepen the partnership, said Michael Truell, co founder of the startup, in an interview. Google provides artificial intelligence services and cloud computing to the startup, while Nvidia is an enterprise customer. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has given high praise to the startup in recent public appearances. Cursor has rebuffed acquisition interest from a number of major AI companies, according to people familiar with the matter. In late October, the company launched its new AI model called Composer. The model could eventually become an opportunity for the company to reduce its dependency on third party models and keep more of its revenue, but for now the main goal is simply to continue adding more users to its product, investors said. As the biggest AI model builders continue to grow in size and in product development, investors and founders are looking to Cursor to see if a startup can successfully build an independent company on top of the models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others. We're excited to be one of the first examples of a large company built on their platforms, says Truel. He added that the relationships between Cursor and the AI model companies is simpatico. All of the AI labs are important partners to us, he said. Finally today, news you can use Apple has officially launched Digital ID inside Apple Wallet, letting iPhone and Apple Watch owners in the US Carry a copy of their passport, which can be used at some TSA checkpoints. Quoting TechCrunch, the new feature can be used at TSA checkpoints across more than 250 US airports. When traveling domestically. Using digital ID and Apple Wallet, users can create and present an ID even if they don't have a real ID compliant driver's license or state id. The ID does not replace a physical passport, and it's not currently supported for international travel or crossing borders, Apple notes Users can add their passport to Wallet by tapping on the Add button in the Wallet app, then selecting driver's license or ID cards. From there, select Digital ID and follow the steps to complete the setup process, which includes using the iPhone to scan the photo page of their passport and scanning the chip embedded on the back ensure the passport's authenticity. Users will also have to take a selfie for verification and then complete a series of facial and head movements for additional security. Presenting Apple's new digital ID in person works pretty much like using Apple Pay. You can double click the side button or home button to access your wallet, Then select Digital ID. The iPhone or Apple Watch should be held near an identity reader, and users will use Face ID or touch ID to authenticate their information. Users will also be able to see what identity information is being requested before completing the verification process. The feature is still in beta, as it hasn't fully rolled out to all the device readers at the TSA checkpoints at this time. The TSA website offers a list of which states are currently supporting mobile id, but still advises travelers to carry their physical id. Apple says that users will eventually be able to present their digital ID at businesses and organizations where they need to verify their age, both in person and online. This could include event venues or bars where users need to present their ID at the door to verify if they're of drinking age. Online websites that restrict content to adults could also leverage Apple's APIs to verify users ages. For instance, if a user wanted to order alcohol for delivery through a service like Uber Eats, they could verify their ID during the ordering process. End quote Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.