Welcome to the Geek News Central podcast. I'm
your host, Chris Cochran, and I have a
great episode lined up for you guys tonight.
Leading off, Apple just dropped the $599
MacBook. It's the cheapest Mac laptop they've ever
made. And depending on who you are, this
might be the best deal in tech right
now.
Also on the show,
Samsung CEO is pointing the finger at AI
for driving up your phone's prices.
RAM costs keep climbing with no end in
sight. Meta and Nvidia are in an AI
chips arm race, and Microsoft just blew the
doors off the next gen Xbox by putting
Steam on it. Plus, SpaceX is stacking up
for critical Starship tests.
Now before we get into it, guys, I'm
super excited for this episode. Thought I'd get
one more in for you guys before
I actually go on vacation.
Yes.
I'm headed to California with my girlfriend and
some friends.
It's gonna be a super good time. I'm
really excited for it. We're gonna be going
for about ten days. I know. I don't
know for you guys, but for me, that's
a long vacation if you ask me. Especially
because I got two dogs at home. So
being away from them for so long, you
know, kinda kinda puts a knife in my
heart. I'm not gonna lie. Breaks my heart
just a little bit. But I'm sure there'll
be good boys while we're gone, while we
have a good time up in, you know,
the Mainland.
For the first half, we're gonna be going
to Disneyland. So for, like, good three or
four days, we're gonna be going to Disneyland.
And then for the rest, we're gonna be
going heading to,
LA area and just kinda chilling it for
the rest of the vacation there. I'm bringing
a lot of I'm bringing a lot of
gear up. So I've recently gotten into film
photography just because okay. I'm not trying to
sound fool of myself, guys. Right? But I
shoot a lot of digital photography. I shoot
on a Canon r six, and I've gotten
to a point in my life where I
I believe my photography is, like, pretty superb
if you ask me. I think I take
I think it's I can confidently say that
I take great photos.
And it's gotten to a point where I
kinda wanna
I wanna I wanna start from scratch again.
I wanna start from the bottom. So, I'm
trying out film photography. It is a little
bit of a shift because, you know, I'm
not used to being able to not see
the image live. I'm not being able to,
you know, seeing if the image came out
good or not. So it's quite a challenge.
Makes you more intentional with your shots as
well. But, yeah, I'm super excited. I'm shooting
on the Canon FTB on a 35 to
70 millimeter lens.
I also have a 50 millimeter that my
friend has let me borrow. 50 millimeter, by
the way, is probably, like, my favorite lens
of all time. So, you know, super excited
for that.
Also, I'm gonna be shooting on, you know,
different Kodak film,
films, film rolls. So, yeah, cool. Super cool.
Also, what I'm bringing on the trip. So
I'm bringing the film camera. I'm bringing my
Canon r six.
I'm bringing,
a Digicam.
And my cinema camera is a Blackmagic,
but I'm not bringing that because it's too
chunky to bring. So my friend is actually
letting me borrow her Sony FX three. And
if you guys know, that is like it's
a pretty good cinema camera. And I'm really
excited to shoot footage on it. I'm a
make a little edit.
And, yeah, super excited for the vacation. I
actually haven't been to California Disneyland since fifth
grade. So taking class last time I went,
it was, Incredicoaster
was California Screamin',
and Guardians of the Galaxy Mission Breakout was
Tower of Terror. So it's gonna be a
big change, but I'm I'm super excited. It's
funny because I've I've actually been to Disney
World more than Disneyland at this point. So
I've been to Disney World twice. I went
last year.
And, yeah, my girlfriend, it's gonna be her
birthday, so it's a nice little celebration,
and it should be a good time. Now
enough of enough of the personal talk, enough
of the vacation talk. So I'm sorry to
make you guys jealous, you know, if you
guys are at work or anything like that.
But, let's get into some news for you
guys.
Let's talk about this Apple MacBook, the MacBook
Neo. So
Apple
has never gone below $799
for a MacBook.
Chromebooks and budget window machines have had, you
know, the sub $700 space all to themselves
for years,
and that just ended. K? That's because the
Apple launched the MacBook Neo at $599,
and it's powered by the a 18 pro
chip. And that's the same chip from the
iPhone 16 pro.
Now that makes it the first Mac to
run on an iPhone processor.
You're gonna be getting a 13 inch liquid
retina display,
eight gigabytes of RAM, 256
gigabytes of storage,
sixteen hours of battery life, and it comes
in four colors. And it's actually available right
now.
Also, for $699,
you can bump it to 512 gigabytes and
add that touch ID onto there.
Now there is a solid market for this
laptop. Right? If you're a student at any
level, a casual office worker, or, you know,
somebody that just needs a reliable home laptop
for email, web browsing, and documents,
you know, this is perfect for you. It's
a real Mac at a price point that
was unthinkable
a year ago. And Apple says it's 50%
faster than the best selling Intel PC for
everyday task. And if that holds up, Chromebook
makers
should be, you know, just a little nervous.
Now personally, right, as a photographer and a
videographer,
I wouldn't invest in this just because I
need a machine with more horsepower,
and that's the honest advice here. You know,
if you know you eventually need
a more powerful machine for creative work or
heavier workloads,
I would I'm gonna tell you, you guys
should just skip this. K? Just invest in
a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro from the
start,
and don't buy this thinking you'll make it
work for video editing or serious photo work
because, honestly, you won't. But, you know, if
you're a casual user and you don't need
anything extravagant, you know, this might be the
Mac for you, and it's a gateway into
the Apple ecosystem
at a price that makes it really hard
to say no.
I guess the real question though at the
end of the day, does this kill Chromebook
sales and education?
I did. I guess we're just gonna have
to wait and see, how the market goes.
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Now back to the show.
While Apple is making Macs cheaper than ever
though, on the other side of the market,
everything else is getting more and more expensive.
And sole reason is because it's AI. Now
we're gonna be talking about Samsungs
and, how the CEO blames AI for phone
pricing hikes.
So pretty much what's been going on is
that Samsung has bumped the Galaxy s 26
price by a $100 on some models, and
a lot of people have noticed.
Now Samsung's consumer device CEO, TM Roe, pointed
directly at demand for AI infrastructure, calling the
supply and environment,
unprecedented.
Now here's the context. Right? You know, the
price of a standard DDR for DRAM,
it has jumped from just a dollar and
35¢ to $9.30
per chip in just a year. K? Now
that's a seven fold increase.
Memory manufacturers have shifted production toward the high
bandwidth memory that AI data centers need, and
that strangled the supply of consumer grade memory.
The shortage is real, guys. K? Nobody's gonna
dispute that, but let's not forget that Samsung
is one of three companies on the planet
that actually manufactures
memory chips.
They shifted their own production towards AI data
center chips, which helped create the shortage. And
now
they're pointing at that same shortage to justify
charging you more for a Galaxy phone.
You know, if you really think about it,
it's it's a little shady. It's a little
shady.
But,
you know,
as long as Samsung keeps being honest about
the reasoning,
about behind the pricing increase, you know, I
feel like that's gonna go a long way.
I feel like transparency helps with these situations.
But in my opinion, consumers are in a
tough spot here, and
Samsung put them there. They're profiting on the
AI chip side and they're passing the costs
through on the consumer side.
And this article kind of plays into a
lot of our next article because,
it's not just phones, right? If you're building
or upgrading a PC right now, the same
memory shortage is going to be hitting you
even harder. Okay? So
in my last episode or one of my
last episodes recently, I talked about how RAM
has had a huge increase,
I think about 300%
increase in the past year.
Now
the RAM prices,
for the third time got raised in the
in three months. So we talked about this
on the show not too long ago, like
I just said. And this article is just
another clear reminder that the situation is getting
worse and not better.
K. So framework, the modular repairable laptop company,
just
raised RAM prices for the third time in
three months.
SSDs are up too, by the way. And
they're warning that they're running low on certain
Intel processors.
Framework is transparent about its cost, which means
that when it raises prices three times in
a row, that's the raw market talking.
Okay? There's only one thing to take away
from this. Okay? If you're planning
a PC build or upgrade, you guys should
buy now. Okay? It's like, seriously, this is
not getting better for a long time. 32
gigabytes of DDR four kits that cost $60
in October,
now cost $180
DDR five is even worse, up 172%
through 2025.
Team group's GM straight up said the crisis
has only just started and that prices could
double again. And analysts say peak prices won't
hit until mid twenty twenty six, and a
shortage will run through 2027.
Now this is a Samsung story playing out
on the consumer side. Samsung explains why prices
are going up because AI is eating into
the memory supply. And framework shows you exactly
what that looks like in your shopping cart
because, you know, if you really think about
it, guys,
it's the same story.
Right? It's the same exact story.
It's a different angle.
That's literally it. Literally it. And
if you guys are asking me, should should
we buy now or do we wait?
If I were to tell you guys my
honest opinion, I think the answer is to
buy now. Right? The answer is to buy
now because it's it's
it's only gonna get worse.
Now while consumers are paying the AI tax
on phones and PCs,
on the other side of that coin, the
big tech companies are spending billions to build
the AI infrastructures
that's causing all of this.
So let's talk about what Meta's been up
to. K? Now every major tech company is
now designing its own AI chips.
Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta just joined the
party in a big way. K? So they
announced four new generations of their MTIA chips
with plans to deploy them all within the
next two years.
The MTIA 300 is already in production. It's
handling the recommendation and ranking systems that decide
what you see on Facebook and Instagram.
The 400,
four fifty, and 500, though, will progressively take
on broader workloads, including generative
AI inference through 2027.
Now the bottom line here, right, is that
Meta doesn't want to keep playing NVIDIA,
billions of dollars for GPUs forever,
And this is their move to change that.
The chips are built on the open source
RISC five architecture,
and they're manufactured by TSMC
and developed in collaboration with Broadcom.
Now what's really notable is the pace. Meta
has built the capability to release a new
chip generation every six months. That's significantly faster
than industry standard of one to two years.
Now whether that chip can truly compete with
NVIDIA's hardware remains to be seen. But, you
know, the ambition and the speed
is it's it's kinda hard to ignore. Right?
Now speaking of AI chips, guys,
while Meta is building its own to escape
NVIDIA's script, NVIDIA has its biggest event of
the year starting Monday.
NVIDIA's GTC conference runs March '19 in San
Jose, and Jensen Huang's keynote is Monday at
11AM Pacific.
So it's gonna be streaming free at nvidia.com,
and he's already teased that he's gonna unveil
several new chips the world has never seen
before.
And given Nvidia's track record, you know, that's
not hype.
Rumored architectures include Rubin Ultra and something called
Feynman.
They also expected to announce Nemo Claw, an
AI agent platform, and up to $26,000,000,000
in investments in open source models.
If you don't know, GTC has become
pretty much the Super Bowl of AI hardware.
And what gets announced here pretty much sets
the direction of the entire industry.
NVIDIA has been framing AI as a five
layer cake. Energy, chips, infrastructure,
models, and applications
with themselves at the center of it all.
Now companies like Meta are building their own
chips to reduce dependence on Nvidia and
competition from Google, AMD and others is heating
up.
But, you know, Nvidia keeps expanding
$2,000,000,000 into Nebbius, backing Miramarati's
new startup
and a two point five hour autonomous driving
demo across San Francisco.
Competition will eventually catch up, but honestly, right
now, NVIDIA is setting the pace.
And if you're interested to see where AI
is headed, you know, maybe you guys should
tune into that keynote on Monday.
Now, staying in the AI world, while NVIDIA
is building the chips everyone else runs on.
Okay? There's a guy who thinks the entire
approach to AI is, fundamentally wrong. And he
just raised a billion dollars to prove it.
Okay. So Yan Li Kun,
he's a Turing Award winner and the former
AI chief,
scientist
at Meta. Okay. He's been one of the
loudest voices saying that large language models like
Chatibouti, Claude, pretty much all of them are
dead end. He argues that real AI needs
to understand the physical world. It can't just
predict the next word in a sentence.
In my opinion, that makes sense.
He he's left Meta. He started AMI Labs
in Paris four months ago, and he raised
about $1,030,000,000
at a $3,500,000,000
valuation. Now that's the largest seed round in
European startup history.
And his backers include Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and
Samsung.
K. So
Lee Kun, he's he's building what he calls
world models. It's AI that learns from physical
reality rather than text. And the idea is
that ChatGPT can describe how a ball bounces,
but a world model would actually understand the
underlying physics and predict
what happens in a real environment.
Now
that's the kind of AI you need for
advanced robotics
and
truly autonomous systems.
Now here's what's interesting guys. Okay? It doesn't
have to be one or the other.
Large language models are clearly useful for language
task. You know, no one is denying that.
But for the physical world, for robots, for
autonomous vehicles,
Li Kun,
he might be onto something because
both approaches can coexist and
the smart money agrees. Right? NVIDIA is investing
in Lee Kun's vision while simultaneously
building the chips that power the LLMs
he is criticizing.
Yan Li Kean said the current approach to
AI through large language models is a dead
end. Real intelligence require understanding the physical world.
Okay? Whether he's right or not, a billion
dollars says the conversation,
you know, it's not over.
Anyway, enough of the AI talk, guys. I
have some gaming news I would like to
talk about, and it's just
because Microsoft just made some moves, and it
honestly has the entire,
gaming world talking. Right? So
there's been a lot of talks in recent
months that the Xbox era was coming to
an end. They were talking about how Microsoft
was going to focus on AI and let
the gaming hardware, you know, pretty much fade
away. And that was kind of like a
a sad thing a lot of people had
to kinda come to terms with.
But thankfully, we all just got a breath
of fresh air because Microsoft actually revealed Project
Kialyx at GDC twenty twenty six.
And it's the most radical rethink of what
an Xbox is since the original console.
It's a custom AMD.
SoC powers
it, and it promises an order of magnitude
leap in ray tracing and has neural rendering
and ML upscaling baked directly into the hardware.
Dev kits shipped to developers in 2027
with the consumer launch likely
late twenty twenty seven or 2028.
But here's the headline. K? So for the
first time,
an Xbox
will natively support Steam and GOG.
Not through a workaround,
natively.
It's gonna be Steam on Xbox. I want
you to think about that for a second.
Microsoft is basically admitting that their game store
can't beat Steam. So instead of fighting it,
they're going to build the best hardware to
run it on. It's desperate in a way
if you think about it because if everything's
available on Steam, what's the incentive to buy
from, you know, the Xbox store?
I feel like the only reason left would
be like Xbox exclusives,
but
it's also inevitable.
Right? The line between console and PC has
been blurring for years, and this just makes
it official. And honestly, for gamers, this is
great news. K? A console that plays your
entire Steam library,
your GOG library,
plus Xbox exclusives and Game Pass,
that's a pretty compelling package if you ask
me. And the real question is what Sony
and Nintendo
is gonna be doing in response because right
now they've got nothing like
this. Another thing I'm really thinking about is
the Steam machine that's gonna be coming out,
I think, later this year, that Steam console.
So
I don't know.
Yes.
Xbox is gonna have Steam. It's really cool,
but Steam is literally making
a console
specifically for that. So,
you know, something to keep our eye on
in the gaming community.
But
Microsoft isn't gonna be waiting for Project Helix
to ship before
changing how people game on Windows.
They've actually got something coming next month, and
pretty much
Microsoft is gonna be rolling out Xbox mode
to all Windows 11 PCs starting in April.
It's a full screen, control optimized interface that
lets you browse your game library,
launch games, and switch between apps.
It works between,
it works with Steam at the games, battle.net,
and not just Xbox titles.
It first appeared on the ROG Ally handheld,
and now it's going system wide to laptops,
desktops, tablets, and everything running Windows 11.
In my opinion, this is super cool, especially
with Project Helix on the horizon.
Think about it. Right?
Xbox on Windows 11 now.
Project Helix as dedicated hardware later. These are
two halves of the same strategy, and Microsoft
is training users on the Xbox gaming experience
today so that when Helix arrives,
the interface and ecosystem,
you know, they're gonna be pretty much familiar.
And is it late?
Yeah.
Because Steam is big picture mode has been
around for about fifteen years now,
but,
you know, better late than never. Right? And
if the execution is solid and according to,
like, early reports from the rogue ally version
are positive, then it makes every window 11
PC a potential console.
You know, you plug a laptop into your
TV, grab a controller, and now you're pretty
much gaming
free. No new hardware needed. So it's pretty
cool if you might if asked me. I
I feel like at the end of the
day, though, the real question is, you know,
is Sony and Nintendo gonna start following in
Xbox footsteps? Right?
Microsoft is making the boldest moves in gaming
right now, if you ask me. And
the traditional console model is looking increasingly
outdated.
It's funny because I used to be like
a Sony lover as a child. I used
to love my PlayStation.
I still love my PlayStation. I don't play
it as much, but
the Xbox has just been
dominating
in recent years. Yeah. PlayStation has some pretty
cool exclusive games like Spider Man and all
that stuff. I'm not gonna deny that. And
and the the graphics look amazing. The the
it looks amazing, but
Xbox should be making them moves. They're making
them moves.
Anyway,
let's close out tonight, though, with a look
at what's been happening above our heads. You
know, SpaceX
has a big one coming up. Okay.
SpaceX announced stacking complete for the next super
heavy booster at its star base facility in
South Texas.
The flight 12 is targeting April and will
debut the version three hardware across both stages.
There's gonna be new Raptor three engines, a
lighter structure, and integrated hot staging.
The really interesting detail is that ship 39
has visible docking hardware for future propellant transfer
test.
The actual orbital
refueling demonstration is targeted for summer twenty twenty
six. Now this is the year Starship either
proves itself or the Artemis timeline slips again.
Right? NASA's moon landing, Artemis three, is officially
scheduled for no earlier than 2027.
Still, it all depends on SpaceX demonstrating orbital
refueling, which is transferring rocket fuel between two
vehicles in space.
Nobody's ever done it at scale. And acting
NASA administrator Sean Duffy says The US is
in a race against China. And Blue Origin
is positioning itself as a backup option.
SpaceX
has a track record of delivering eventually.
They always get there,
you know, just,
you know, it's never on Elon's original timeline.
Flight 12 with the v three hardware is
the foundation on which everything else builds. And
if it goes well, the summer refueling test
becomes a real make or break moment for
the entire moon program.
Well,
that pretty much has to do with my
show.
I am officially
on vacation.
K. So if anything, the next episode is
gonna be Ray back on the mic. He's
gonna have some interesting topics for you guys.
He's always pretty good when it comes to
going pretty in-depth with the very,
technical stuff of the
AI space or anything going on in the
world. So,
super exciting. Looking forward to his next episode.
But in the meantime,
I'm gonna finish up today. Gonna pack my
bags and
head over to California.
And, yeah, wish me a look good flight,
y'all, and I'll I'll see you guys in
a little bit, and I'll talk to you
guys about my trip and all that. But
that has to do with today's episode. Thank
you so much for listening to Geek News
Central podcast. And like I said, I'll see
you next time. Bye.