- Now that the chicken wings and chips that you ate
while watching yesterday's big sportsball match
have run through you,
why not wipe your butt with a little tech news?
- [Riley] Wait. That's gross.
- By now it's pretty clear that Apple's new M1 chips
have positioned the company on the verge
of being a major player in the CPU market,
meaning it was only a matter of time
before the likes of Intel took notice.
Team blue recently put out a large number of benchmarks
that unsurprisingly show its 11th gen i7 chips
outperforming Apple's M1s.
The tests include web browsing,
productivity, artificial intelligence,
and programs in the Adobe Creative Suite.
But despite the benchmarks running a wide gamut of programs,
Intel was criticized for not keeping the hardware
consistent between tests,
making it look at least in part
like an effort to cherry-pick good results.
- [Riley] That doesn't seem like them!
- Never.
Whatever the truth about the chips' performance is,
Intel is clearly concerned about a third company
eating into their market share.
In Soviet Russia, Apple eats you!
- [Riley] Soviet Russia is a company?
- (chuckles) Eh?
There's really no escaping promoted tweets,
better known as ads, in your Twitter timeline
if you use the app on your smartphone,
but if you've got a few dollars to spare,
that may change in the near future
as reports indicate that Twitter
is considering some paid subscription options
that would allow the platform to bring in
enough extra money to lessen its reliance on ad revenue.
The ideas that seem to have the most traction
offer additional features like profile customization,
exclusive content, or Tweetdeck,
so it probably isn't gonna be a situation
where you pay a certain amount of money
just to turn off ads YouTube-style,
though details are murky at this point.
In any event it sounds like a great idea.
I've been waiting for yet another monthly bill
to add on top of the eight streaming services
I subscribe to.
- I don't think I- - Peacock! I'm on Peacock.
There's dozens of us! - Why?
- Did you catch that,
a quick five-second ad during the Super Bowl
that you probably didn't even have time to read?
That was the first-ever Super Bowl commercial from Reddit,
which claimed that it spent
its entire marketing budget on the spot,
probably over a million bucks when you do the math.
The ad was mostly just words on the screen
in the style of a Reddit comment,
giving a nod to the GameStop short squeeze
that was propelled by WallStreetBets subreddit.
The idea was to bill Reddit as a powerful platform
that showcases the power of the people coming together,
which the ad drove home by speculating
that finance textbooks might one day
include a chapter tendies.
- [Riley] I love tendies.
- What is happening? - Extra spice!
- This world. I don't know if 2021's better.
Onto the Quick Bits.
There are some new rumors about the RTX 3080 Ti
and RTX 3060.
The 3080 Ti will reportedly have 12 gigabytes of GDDR6X VRAM
instead of the originally reported 20, bummer,
as well as a few fewer CUDA cores.
He wrote "few less CUDA cores,"
but I don't make that error. - What an error!
- If it's countable, it's fewer.
The 3080 Ti is also rumored to come out sometime in April
while the 3060 may be on shelves much sooner, February 25th.
That's practically...
We're there, baby.
- Whoo! - Of course,
when I say shelves I mean that
in the abstract nonmaterial sense, unless you're a bot.
And you might also be disappointed
if you're ready to settle for an RTX 30-series laptop
as supplies of those are reportedly being squeezed
by cryptominers in China
thanks to recent spikes in bitcoin and ethereum,
so I guess it doesn't matter whether Nvidia is transparent
about the laptop specs or not because, again, abstract.
They're just shadows on the walls of a cave. (laughs)
And with the surge in crypto,
maybe it's not too surprising
that the world's richest man, Elon Musk,
is putting his crypto where his mouth is.
Tesla has bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin, huh,
and will also soon start accepting payments in bitcoin.
The cryptocurrency spiked
to around 44,000 U.S. dollars after the announcement.
Bitcoin.
It's 2021 and the world's economy rises and falls
based on the tweets of a Twitter memelord.
God help us all.
- [Riley] I wouldn't want it any other way.
- Remember the old idea of a company town
where some big manufacturer
basically controlled one whole community?
Elon Musk...
Just joking.
Nevada might be putting a modern spin on that idea
as the state's governor wants to create innovation zones
that would give high-tech companies
the power to form their own little local governments.
- Ew! - Although it's being billed
as a way to attract good jobs
and more investment to the state,
company towns haven't exactly been
the model of good government.
Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg started making rules
to tell you how you can use your meat smoker.
- [Riley] You have to log in first.
- Or, like, he gets to be in the sauna
and not have a towel...
- [Riley] What? (James giggles)
Mark, no!
- Mark's on Strata!
He wouldn't let me have this planter box.
And are you one of the many good people who have an iPhone
but use Spotify instead of Apple Music?
Keep fightin' the good fight.
It looks like Apple is finally going to let you
switch your default music service as of iOS 14.5,
so if you ask Siri to play something
she'll go right to Spotify
instead of trying to make it play in Apple Music.
Holy cow. - Wow!
- I didn't know you people lived under this regime.
This is so brutal!
Congratulations. Welcome.
Wow!
That's our show. Come back on Wednesday for more tech news.
Even if Siri tells you not to.
- [Riley] We tell Siri what to do now!
- Yeah! I bought my phone!
I should be able to use my...
Can you imagine? It's like, "No, dialing Tim Cook.
We don't want you to talk to Grandma.