- Death, taxes, and tech news.
The new album from the guy that brought you
Brian, the electrician.
That's a banger.
- [James] Let's hear it.
- Play it.
Our favorite electronics
have been pretty expensive for a while now.
So let's have some positive news, okay?
The US federal government has lifted some tariffs
on goods from China, specifically PCBs.
So the hope is that products like motherboards
will see price drops in the near future.
Yes, the import taxes ranged anywhere
from an additional 7.5 to 25%.
So this will definitely make things easier on manufacturers,
and hopefully they'll pass some of those savings
along to us.
- [James] By us we mean the Americans.
(laughing)
- We're fine, we're not, we're all suffering.
As far as whether graphics card prices will also drop,
that's a bit harder to predict across the board
due to high demand.
But Asus is announcing
that it's dropping its graphics card prices
by up to 25% starting on April 1st.
- [James] No joke!
- No, you would think so.
That would be really bad, for them.
- [James] It's only good luck guys.
- Horrible timing!
Unfortunately, there still looks to be some not great news
further out on the horizon for the entire chip industry.
According to a report out of Taiwan,
it's expected that Fabs will have to pay over 200 bucks
for a 12 inch Silicon wafer by 2024,
the highest price on record.
It's just gonna equal out, I guess.
This marks an increase of 20 to 25% over current levels,
and to make matters worse,
most Fabs have multi-year contracts with wafer makers.
Meaning if some company needs extra
to keep up with demand, looking at you Nvidia,
you are so--
- [James] They just keep putting 'em out.
- Thirsty for wafers, (slurping) slurping 'em up.
They're going to be rather hard to obtain.
The good news is that the big wafer makers
are planning to expand capacity,
and wafer costs aren't typically the biggest driver
of how much you, the user, ends up paying at the store.
But I'm still not too keen on spending an extra five bucks
that I could have spent on actual wafers, you know--
- [James] Or horse armor.
- The (laughing)
An Eldon ring.
Do they even have it?
It wouldn't help.
- [James] Do they have horses?
I can't say I'm too surprised,
but apple is reportedly cutting down production
of the new iPhone SE.
In fact, the company is planning
to cut production next quarter by a full one fifth
- [James] IPhone slash edition.
- I'd buy it.
Apple is still expected to ship as many as 20 million
of the lower end iPhones this year
but this is a lower number than Apple was hoping for. Aw.
- Number go down!
- Poor apple!
Low demand, and not the chip shortage,
is apparently the culprit marking the latest example
of consumers simply not being all that excited
about lower end iPhones, because they're jewelry.
This is, it's simple.
Remember what happened with the iPhone 5C?
- [James] I got it from Ardene's.
- What is that?
- [James] Claire's! At the mall!
- There's also the price increase
of $30 over the previous iPhone SE
that's not helping at all.
Especially when the iPhone 13 mini is also positioned
as Apple's main mid-range product right now.
- [James] Can't have two small ones.
- Now it's time for quick bits,
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That's brilliant.org/techlinked
Come on, get smart.
Quick bits are the little things in the sky
you can see on a clear moonless night.
Pew, pew, pew, pew, see all the little things with
- [James] Riley!
- A new iPad Pro is on its way, and unsurprisingly,
this one is expected to feature the new M2 chip.
- [James] Oh, like new, new
- The new, you know, that new new.
The news comes from well known Apple insider, Mark Gurman,
who expects the latest iteration of the tablet
to come out this fall.
The upcoming iPad Pro is also expected to support mag safe.
So you can mount it to one of your car vents
If you want a nice big picture to help you drive.
- [James] Get a Tesla!
- Well, if you didn't wanna use the one in the Tesla.
If you get that one terabyte version
then you got like a $2,000 GPS.
And some news about AMD Zen 4 chips.
I hope you've got a hefty cooler at the ready,
as a recent leak indicates the upper tier rise
in nine 7950 X will have a whopping TDP of 170 Watts.
- [James] That's a lot of Watts.
- Have you ever seen that many Watts?
A huge increase over the 5950 Xs, 105 Watts.
- [James] What?
- Unsurprisingly, this would be a 16 core processor,
but that's a high TDP, even considering the core count.
So maybe don't pair it with a $20 air cooler,
unless you wanna burn your house down, for points.
- [James] Wish dot com!
- Moscow based cybersecurity and antivirus provider
Kaspersky is now ironically
on the FCCS security threat list.
- [James] I didn't know there were companies
who were Moscow based.
- Not anymore. You wouldn't know it.
It isn't super surprising,
given that founder Eugene Kaspersky
is suspected of being connected to Russian intelligence.
And Kaspersky products were already banned
from US government networks,
but it does make Kaspersky the first Russian company
to be added to the list, which includes
Chinese companies suspected of government entanglement,
like Huawei and ZTE.
American companies on the other hand,
they don't speak to the government at all.
They barely know anything about each other.
They don't go to luncheons.
- [James] They just give you a red envelope,
right under the table.
(slurping sound)
- If you paid for iCloud in late 2015 or late 2016,
congratulations!
There's a class action settlement
that came out of a lawsuit
alleging that Apple improperly handled iCloud data.
So not congratulations.
- [James] I got 25 cents coming to me!
- Yeah, you got manipulated, bud.
Some, some coins.
Payouts won't be going out until at least late 2022.
And we're not sure exactly how much they'll be,
but you should at least be able to, you know,
pay for a couple months of Apple TV Plus, if that even.
- [James] I doubt it, honestly
- Severance though? Apparently it's good.
- [James] Should we cover it on our podcast?
- On They're Just Movies!
Or with that little bit of money
you could also buy a game
on Apple's first ever game console
- [James] The Pippin?
- Oh, that's right. They already had one. Uhh.
Nothing is confirmed yet,
but Apple is consulting with developers
like Capcom and Ubisoft,
as well as folks in the hardware industry
to see if they can get one off of the ground.
Off of the ground. Hover.
This follows earlier reports of Apple
poaching engineers from Microsoft for the same purpose
or maybe for a hilarious prank.
There's no console. We hired you for nothing.
You don't have a job.
And we're not playing
when we say that you better come back on Wednesday
for more tech news, because there's gonna be more baby.
And maybe even James will be here.
Maybe we'll just call it the Apple Gaming Console.
We're not talking about that anymore.
The episode's over.
No more tech. No!