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- [00:01]
A
Hi, I'm Alex. You might recognize me from Alex Week on Floatplane, where subscribers get three exclusive Alex themed videos. So subscribe to Floatplane or ye shall be banished from techlinks forever.
- [00:13]
B
Whoa, whoa. What? What? No, it'll be fine. What?
- [00:17]
A
I don't know. Sammy made the rules Apple has unveiled the iPhone 16e Tim Cook knew you were expecting a new iPhone SE, but he switched at the last second as a prank because where the SE models have historically provided an option for iPhone user who wanted something smaller and more affordable, the 16e starts at $599 USD, sporting the same 6.1-inch display found in the iPhone 16. The last iPhone SE launched at 429, which is less while the iPhone 16 and 16e share many other features, including the same A18 chip with Apple Intelligence support, others will be able to clock you as a poor thanks to the old fashioned display notch. Wow. They might also catch on to the fact that you're not using a MagSafe charger because there's no MagSafe.
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B
What?
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A
The 16e supports wireless charging, but your friends will have to watch you sliding your phone around on the charging pad to find the right spot like an idiot. Luckily, the 16e does have a customizable action button and Apple's brand new in house C1 cellular modem. Apple said goodbye to Qualcomm's modem as well as the idea of home buttons and lightning ports. It was time to move on. But for 600 bucks, you might as well look at getting Huawei's new tri fold phone, which is available outside China for $3,660.
- [01:38]
B
The same ballpark?
- [01:39]
A
Yeah, sure, might as well. I'm sure everyone's cross shopping Those reviews of Nvidia's third RTX 50 series graphics card, the RTX 5070 Ti, are up and the consensus seems to be that this card, which is only coming in third party versions that are mostly all listed for well above the $750 MSRP, makes an excellent case for getting a 4080 super instead. The LTT review found that on average the 5070 Ti performs about 10% better than the RTX 4070 Ti super, while Hardware Unboxed's cost per frame analysis indicates this card may have been a slightly better deal at a lower price. But with the card's actual launch set for tomorrow and stock expect to be as bad as the 5090 and 5080, well on the price front, you're probably f ed bud. If you like playing slightly older games, you might be better off with an older card anyway, as Nvidia has ended support for 32 bit physx on 50 series cards, as confirmed by an Nvidia support notice and Manuel on the forms. A recent era user named randomlyrandom67 posted a helpful list of all the games whose particle physics and fluid simulations will be decidedly less fluid on 50 series cards, including Assassin's Creed 4, Black Flag, Mirror's Edge, and three of the Batman Arkham games. But hey, chin up when Nvidia breaks or melts something, others might fix it, like these accessory makers who have announced cooling modules for GPU cables. I don't think those are going to help with the whole physics 50amps through one wire thing though.
- [03:12]
B
You don't know that.
- [03:13]
A
Yeah, I do. And Microsoft has announced what they think is a massive breakthrough in quantum computing with the Majorana one, a quantum chip that will blow your mind with how fast it can load Outlook okay, what they actually said is that this chip can scale to a million qubits, which is necessary for quantum computing to do anything useful other than drive hype cycles. Microsoft's claims are huge. Not only does this chip supposedly detect exotic particles called Majorana fermions, which researchers have struggled to do for decades, it also manipulates them into a new state of matter called a topological state. Microsoft claims that this is the world's first quantum processor powered by topological qubits, proving it with a paper published in Nature which says their measurements do not by themselves determine whether the low energy states detected by interferometry are topological.
- [04:07]
B
Maybe.
- [04:08]
A
Maybe not sure. Likewise, now that all the articles are out and they've read the paper, physicists are starting to question Microsoft's claims here. But if this is a quantum breakthrough, you'd expect there to be lots of uncertainty.
- [04:22]
B
Bam. Confirmed.
- [04:23]
A
I also expect Riley to tell you.
- [04:25]
B
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- [05:08]
A
I may be a king, but I'm not above dishing out a quick bit or two as a treat. Reviews are also up for AMD's high powered Ryzen AI Max 300 Series APUS aka Strix Halo. The only device sporting the new chips right now is the Asus Rog Flow Z13 gaming tablet, although YouTuber the Phawx helpfully tested multiple variants of the chip at different TDPs to see whether they could work in a gaming handheld. Hopefully we get to see some beefier laptops or mini PCs actually have them with these chips on board. Because right now most people seem to be questioning why we would need a gaming tablet at all other than to attach and detach the keyboard. Because that's fun.
- [05:52]
B
That's a game in itself.
- [05:53]
A
Yeah, thanks. Asus Humane, the makers of the AI pin, have been acquired by HP for $116million.
- [06:04]
B
Wouldn't be surprised, though, close to a.
- [06:06]
A
Year after everyone agreed to pretend for a minute that the $700 shirt dongle with a required subscription was going to do well at all, the AI pins themselves will stop working nine days from now on February 28, which the company explained in a support post quaintly titled Important Updates for the Consumer AI PIN Customers. Your thing won't work anymore. Not that you were using them anymore. Amazon is removing the ability for Kindle users to download copies of their ebooks to a computer on February 26 because some people were out there getting uppity and thinking that they actually own their purchased books, which is silly. They're just ones and zeros. They're not anything. So make sure that you download your Kindle books before then and through the Kindle web interface. Or you could use a tool like Amazon Kindle Bulk Downloader if you're a prodigious reader. Oh, shot over there.
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B
Big reader, huh?
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A
I've read so many books recently. Lenovo has a few wacky concept products it's preparing to show at Mobile World Congress in March, according to prodigious leaker Evan Blass. There's a laptop with an extra tall foldable display you can pull out at the cafe to show your dominance. There's a yoga power bank that unfolds into a large solar panel for charging this camera or AI robot assistant maybe that attaches to the lid some of the company's laptops, but going to be keeping my eye out for something called the AI stick, which I fully expect to be a literal inert stick that nevertheless sells you hotcakes.
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B
It's got AI though. It's an AI stick.
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A
Is it bad that I thought that it might be like a dildo at first? Alex It's a family show and Aleph Aeronautics has posted a video of their flying car driving up behind a normie vehicle taking off and flying over it to land in front. Aleph also posted a video of the car driving up on on a dirt road to prove that it can also drive on land. But the bike wheel looking tires don't exactly inspire confidence. I mean it doesn't seem like they're even able to come up with a name for it. Their website just has giant text that says pre order flying car. You have to admit it's a compelling argument. He makes a point for even more compelling content. Come right over here on Friday for more tech news. What will it compel you to do? I don't know. Figure it out.
- [08:30]
B
Just do something.
- [08:31]
A
Do something.