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This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. Not everyone is careful with your personal information, which might explain why there's a victim of identity theft every five seconds in the US. Fortunately, there's LifeLock. LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity. If your identity is stolen, a US based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year by visiting lifelock.com podcast terms apply whoa.
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Computex, Google I O Microsoft Build Somehow even more stuff. You know, it's a good thing I had a nice relaxing long weekend, because it turns out what I was coming back to is tech news. Hell, there's gnashing of teeth and magic smoke. Let's start with the biggest news out of Computex new GPUs AMD finally officially revealed. The RX9060XT will launch on June 5th with an 8 gigabyte variant for 300 USD and a 16 gigabyte version for 350. That places the 16 gig one quite favorably compared to Nvidia's $380 RTX 5060 Ti 8 gigabyte. I just hope AMD isn't lying about it having 15% more gaming performance per dollar because CEO Lisa Su is a doctor and that would be medical malpractice. AMD also announced new professional Threadripper 9000 series CPUs with up to 96 cores and a Radeon AI Pro R9700 GPU with 32 gigabytes of RAM VRAM that is. Let's hope AMD provides drivers for their new GPUs ahead of time so reviewers can do their job. Which you know is normally what happens. But you never know in these wacky times when according to myriad tech reviewers, Nvidia only allowed some outlets to publish previews ahead of the RTX 5060's launch on Monday under strict conditions, including being limited to testing certain games and capping every email back to Nvidia with Hail Jensen. Despite being at Computex once the public drivers dropped hardware unboxed, stayed up through the night like champions to test the 5060 with some loaned parts from MSI. And some other proper reviews are starting to trickle out as well, which actually they don't make the $300 card look too bad in terms of price to performance, although the eight gigs of VRAM trips it up in places and MSRP is a social construct with no inherent meaning, just like the concept of outside. Meanwhile, intel didn't reveal more gaming cards, instead unveiling the ARC Pro B50 and B60 at around $300 and $500 respectively. That's a ballpark because they'll only be available inside pre built workstations in in a variety of fun third party designs like the dual GPU version from maxsun. So cool. What's even cooler though, is Intel's name for their new multi GPU feature project Battle Matrix. Just yeah, it'll allow up to eight ARC Pro GPUs to link together to make up to 192 gigabytes of pooled VRAM available for AI workloads. On paper, that's actually more capable than an Nvidia RTX Pro 6000, which would still be much more expensive. So watch out Nvidia, you're going down any day now. I feel it. Now it's Google's turn on the mic. Which is an appropriate thing to say because at their I O conference the tech giants showed off another existential crisis generator. I mean AI video generator. Their newest model, VO3 can generate photorealistic video and sound effects and lip synced spoken dialogue from a single prompt.
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I am an idiot sandwich.
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I'm not sure I can go on. I am also not sure I can go on, but at least it's all marked right in the metadata with Google's Synth id. Now that might make it easier to identify non consensual intimate images, including deepfakes, which were just made illegal with the passing of the Take It Down Act, a seemingly well intentioned law that privacy groups are concerned could be used for censorship. There's lots to talk about there, but there's no time. Google VO3 is available in the Gemini app or in the new Google Flow AI video editing tool for subscribers to Google AI Ultra, a brand new all you can slop $250 plan that also has YouTube Premium in there. Just for fun, Google did their usual thing where they mixed together a whack ton of announcements for things you can try now, along with things that exist in a liminal non real dimension known as the coming months. So here's the stuff that's available now.ish for AI subscribers. Gemini's finally getting baked into Chrome and Gemini is going to start adapting its responses using your personal context, just like Apple said Siri would do before they scrubbed most of their online references to it. Google said this will allow you to generate more personalized replies in Gmail so you can be a better friend who tricks your loved ones into thinking you took the time to write a reply when you didn't they look so dumb right now. This is friendship. Gemini Live with camera and screen sharing is now available for everyone, which is cool, while AI mode is getting a wider rollout to infect more search queries in the US only that's good, keep it contained. A beta for real time speech translation is available in Google Meet and developers are getting new coding agents and tools including Jules Stytch and the very literally named Gemini Code Assist. You didn't get a nickname. Not cool enough yet. Google also updated the Gemini API and SDK with support for Anthropics Model Context protocol, which is catching on as a kind of USB C of AI, allowing models and systems to speak politely with each other, helping Google's AI Ultra exclusive Project Mariner computer use Agent use computers, which it needs to do now for the coming later stuff when Mariner is less experimental, it'll roll out more widely in the Gemini app as Agent mode. Not to be confused with AI mode in Search, which will be updated with a lighter version of Deep Research called Deep Search and also Search Live which is just Gemini Live but in Search. I swear they are trying to annoy us. But look, let's not let them, okay? Because there are a couple actually cool things shown off. Google's hyper realistic video call tech that makes it feel like you're in the same room as the other person known as Project Starline is now Google Beam and and will be rolling out in some form later this year. And also Google confirmed they're working on an enhanced desktop mode in Android 16, which still makes me happy despite Android desktop modes never really working out for anyone. But it might work for us, just like our sponsor UPDF, the PDF editor that's 1/6 the cost of Adobe Acrobat and gets you lifetime access and unlimited upgrades. I mean that. I mean that sounds pretty great by itself. Do I have to keep going? I might as well tell you that UPDF can edit text, images and URLs effortlessly with 13 markup tools and more than 100 annotation stickers. You can convert, add passwords, fill, sign, organize PDFs and use OCR for scanned images. Heck, you can Even use the AI features to analyze, summarize and translate multiple PDFs, turn them into mind maps. That sounds fun. UPDF is available on PC, Mac, iPhone and Android and you can access it now at a 38% discount plus five bucks off with a 30 day money back guarantee. Check it out at the link in the description. All right, you're not quite caught up in everything, yet there's still the quick bits. Just hold on. At their Build Dev conference, Microsoft also announced a whack ton of stuff, but thankfully most of it is too niche and I could safely skip except for Windows 11 getting MCP support, which will make it much easier to let AI assistants actually control your PC when you want them to. Did they put that in the code? That seems important. MCP is also a big part of Microsoft's NL Web initiative, which will make it easier for AIs and websites to all talk to each other. It's described as kind of the HTML for the agentic web, which sounds like a spider verse plot element. Also, the Windows subsystem for Linux is now open source and see, I probably could have skipped that too. It's really niche Linux people. Yes it is. I can't believe this story is way down here, but Fortnite is back on the iOS app store in the US with support for external payment options with no Apple fees. This is crazy. Five years after intentionally getting kicked off the App Store and and suing Apple over it, Epic Games actually won for now, although it seems like this might stick just because everyone's just fed up with Apple at this point. In their letter to Epic last week, Cupertino said they were denying Epic's Fortnite app submission until after their request for a stay on the judge's order was reviewed. And when the judge saw it, she was like no, do it now, you turds. If you're curious about the history of all of this, I made a big old tech longer video somewhere about three years ago. I'm just saying. We've seen laptop tablet things with one big foldable display before, but Huawei's looks real fancy. The Matebook Fold Ultimate Design is a 13 inch foldable tablet that when unfolded, is just 7.3 millimeters thick, thinner than an iPhone 16. It runs Huawei's HarmonyOS and is only available in China but for the equivalent of $3,300. But I just like knowing it's out there. And Noctua has teamed up with Pulsar to build a version of the second company's Feynman FO1 with a built in Noctua fan. It's a mouse, by the way. I probably should have said that it's not the first mouse with a fan. The Marsback Zephyr Pro has been around for a few years, cooling the sweaty hands of many a thankful gamer, but it is the first one with a fan that the color of old hospital walls. I mean, how could you say no? And how could you say no to coming back for more tech news on Friday? Was that too rude to Noctua? I don't. There's a ton of Computex stuff, at least, that we didn't cover today. So don't go online for a couple days and then come watch my show. It's a reasonable request.