AMD Promise You’ll Get a new Xbox Next Year - DTNS 5199

0:02This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, January 4th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and try to help each other understand. Today's AMD earnings disappoint analysts, so they really want us to talk about the next Xbox. They do. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Sarah Lane. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. Motang spotted the big story on our subreddit today. Thank you, Motang. During AMD's earnings call, CEO Lisa Su said Microsoft's development of an Xbox with a semi-custom sock system on a chip from AMD is, quote, progressing well to support a launch in 2027.

0:44Now, this is probably the rumored Magnus sock supposedly built on TSMC's N3P node based on RDNA 5. the CEO of AMD doesn't accidentally give the launch time for an Xbox. So I'm guessing Microsoft wanted to let this slip for some reason. There were some court documents from an FTC case against Microsoft last year that indicated Microsoft planned a 2028 release. So maybe they wanted it out there that it's going to come earlier. Sue also confirmed that Valve's Steam machine is on track for a release early this year. That's something Valve has talked about publicly before. And don't forget, AMD also makes custom socks for Sony's PlayStation as well.

1:24AMD is also happy for us to talk about that Xbox stuff because their earnings, while good, included a disappointing forecast for Q1. Analysts didn't see the boost from data center spending that they had hoped to see. But still, Q4 sales for AMD rose 34%. Data center spending for AMD rose 39%. People just thought it was going to be bigger and they expected AMD to project more coming in the next quarter. And Gadget reminds us that Xbox president Sarah Bond said last year that AMD and Microsoft are going to co-engineer silicon for living room and handheld consoles. So getting back to the Xbox stuff, it does make sense that AMD is making this.

2:04And I guess I don't know. Are we going to get a new Xbox next year? Is this for a handheld? It's hard to say, but it got everybody all buzzing, you know, because everybody is excited about Xbox getting back into the console game. Well, and especially because AMD knew that they were going to disappoint some investors, right? And some folks kind of watching that data center space, that AI space. So to say, yeah, people are looking at 2028 for the next Xbox, maybe 2027, obviously is going to have a lot of people saying, all right, they're farther ahead than we thought. This is good news. And good news helps when you get bad news.

2:43maybe you start with the bad news first and then you give people some good news and they walk away saying, you know what? AMD is on a roll here. Yeah. You know what? It actually works both ways. Now that you're saying that I'm realizing it not only helps AMD, but also Microsoft is looking at Nintendo's huge console sales that were announced this week. And everybody kind of saying Microsoft's been having problems selling consoles. I think a lot of people are like, yeah, but they're betting on cloud in the future, which they absolutely are. but Microsoft might want to deflect a little bit there and say, hey, but we are making a new console.

3:15Don't worry. It's coming sooner than you think. What do you think NVIDIA thinks about all this? They're just accounting. They're just like, we're number one. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know who's number one in our hearts? Everyone who listens to our show, DTNS, is made possible by all of you listening right now. Special thanks to Dale McKay, Matt Zaglin, and Jeff Wilkes.

3:40All right, there's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. Amazon is making its upgraded voice assistant available to all U.S. customers. You might have gotten an email about it. I did over the weekend. If your device supports it, you no longer need to join a wait list or buy a new device to get a plus. It's free for Amazon Prime members. $20 a month for others. Little fuzzy math going on here. Given that Amazon Prime costs$15 a month, seems like buying Prime would be the move here, but your mileage may vary. You can also use a limited version of it for free in the app or on the web.

4:16Yeah, I mean, clearly they don't want you to pay for this on its own. They want to get you into the Prime universe where you're getting the free shipping. It's almost insulting in a way. It's like that much of a difference, like at least make it the same for$15 a month. Yeah, if for some reason you're really just anti-Prime. Um, listen, I, I subscribe to Amazon prime. Uh, I have good financial reasons for doing so because it saves me more money per year than I would have spent otherwise. Um, but for those who were kind of like Amazon ecosystem, not really into it. I just want this on its own. I don't know who that is, but I'm sure you're out there saying it's me, uh, let us know.

4:55Uh, but, uh, but otherwise, Yeah, I played around with Amazon's Assistant Plus on the web version once I realized that it was available to me. It's not really something I think I would use all that often, you know, as a bookmarked tab in my browser. But I have been pretty impressed with it on the Echo Studio that I have here in my office. Yeah, same for me. It has gotten better the more I've used it. I don't know if that's just me getting used to the new one. We still have an Echo display that doesn't, or an Echo show, that doesn't have the new assistant. So I can do A-B comparisons. And the new one is better.

5:37It is absolutely better. It's more conversational. It gives better answers. It less often goes, I found this on the web, you know, kind of stuff. It definitely feels more human-like, which isn't always something that people are looking for. But I agree with you that the information itself is, I don't know if I want to say drastically better, but it's definitely a step forward. Yeah. And I guess that's why they priced it$20 a month. If you're just going to treat this as a competitor to ChatGPT or Claude or something, then that would be the price. That's what they charge. I just don't know that anybody looks at it that way because I don't think of it.

6:16I think that's what Amazon has cut out for it, right? is we think of Amazon's assistant being built into speakers or an Echo Show or, you know, yeah, what I talk to in my kitchen, not something that's an AI assistant that's part of my life. Yeah, I don't open Gemini, Claw, ChetGPT, and Amazon. That just doesn't, yeah. Yeah, well, we'll see how we feel here. The U.S. Department of Justice and several state attorneys general will appeal the September remedy ruling from the U.S. District Judge Ahmet Mehta. This is the one against Google over its search position. This is the case about search contracts.

6:53There is a separate U.S. antitrust case still going on about advertising exchanges. This is not that one. To refresh your memory, the remedy that Judge Meta issued in September to remedy Google's conviction or decision that they had abused their market position was requiring Google not to make exclusive deals to distribute Search, the Chrome browser, or Gemini. They could still make deals. They could still get paid. They could still pay for a position, but they couldn't make them exclusive. They would have to make those deals for one-year terms so that others could try to bid against them every year.

7:27They could not require the use of Chrome, Gemini, or Search as a condition of carrying the Google Play Store. And they had to sell at marginal cost a one-time snapshot of search index data and user interaction data to any company that wanted it, as well as sell syndication of its search data above marginal cost, so they can make some money on that for at least five years. Google had already appealed the decision that it had abused its market position. It says it's not appealing the remedies, it's saying the decision that we abused anything at all is wrong, and it has requested a pause in implementing the remedies until those appeals are heard.

8:09The U.S. Department of Justice appeal will likely end up in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit later this year. So we've got a Google appeal of the decision. We've got a Department of Justice appeal of the remedies. Appeals like this usually take a year to reach a decision. You've got a cross appeal here, which might complicate it. And of course, either side can appeal that decision afterward to the U.S. Supreme Court, which I expect somebody might. So we're still quite far away from this having any effect on Google. I also, I have to assume some people on legal teams on all sides of this are excited.

8:46Yeah. Because they got a lot of work to do for the next few years. The billable hours going up. Even renegotiating deals every year, which is what the remedy requires Google to do. There are people who are like, you know what? That gives me something to do. Not that, you know, legal teams were twiddling their thumbs otherwise, you know, at Google, but this is, it's not necessarily bad news. I suppose, you know, Google, obviously appealing, would think differently, but none of this feels like, oh, you know, now Google's hands are tied or, you know, anything like this. And again, these things drag out a lot.

9:26Yeah, yeah. No, this is going to drag on for a lot longer. Adobe announced on Monday that it would discontinue its 25-year-old 2D animation product called Adobe Animate. Tuesday, it announced we are not discontinuing or removing access to Adobe Animate. Animate will continue to be available for both current and new customers and will ensure you continue to have access to your content. The app is going to remain in maintenance mode, which gets support, gets security, and it gets some bug fixes, but you don't get new features. Yeah, Adobe actually emailed us with a link to our Daily Tech Headlines post where we covered their announcement and said, oh, did you see?

10:09We posted the blog. We've changed our mind. So Adobe, very concerned in getting the word out that they are putting this in maintenance mode, not discontinuing it. The big difference is they will allow new users to download Animate. They're not going to add features. They're not going to develop features. But before it was, well, if you've got Animate, you can keep using it. But, you know, eventually we're just not going to support it anymore. But no new users. Now you will be able to download it. Just know you're not going to get any new features. Well, and this is a good reminder that a company, you know, Adobe has lots of products.

10:46Animate is old. Adobe has other offerings, but there were enough people who still use Animate who said, no, this is totally screwing up my workflow. though. I'm upset about this. You know, there was enough backlash. The company was like, okay, hold on, hold on, hold on. Okay, you got this wrong. We're not screwing anybody over here. We just are, we're slowly sunsetting this. Yeah. We don't want to spend any more money on it than we have to, but okay, fine. We'll keep doing this. Yes. Have your anime. Big thanks to R.W. Nash for pointing out this next one on our subreddit. The buzziest agentic product of the moment is, of course, the open source OpenClaw.

11:27It's a risky piece of software to run if you don't know or don't pay attention to what you're doing. And so one of the things most people do to keep it a little less risky is run it in an isolated instance. A lot of people get a dedicated Mac Mini to run it on. Others get a cloud service, get a virtual private server. The cloud providers are, of course, happy to take your money. So the register noting today that Tencent Cloud now offers one-click install of OpenClaw on its Lighthouse service for just a few dollars a month. DigitalOcean has a similar offering at its Droplets IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service product.

12:04And Alibaba Cloud launched a$4 a month service Wednesday that's similar to Tencent's Lighthouse, with the promise that it will soon offer OpenClaw on its Elastic desktop service, where you could just rent a cloud PC and run it there. Gartner, by the way, recommends not running it at all, at least in the enterprise, and says, if you must install it on an isolated non-production virtual machine with throwaway credentials. Gartner usually doesn't get that insistent about stuff. It was interesting to see. I mean, I guess if you've got, if you don't have the dedicated Mac mini or you're not willing to spend the money on that, you know, or something similar, the cloud services make sense.

12:47Especially if you're kind of like, nah, I might play around with this for a few months, you know, or a few weeks or whatever. Otherwise these services do seem to be taking advantage of the fact that this is a buzzy project that a lot of people are going to spend money on. $4 a month too. I mean, it's not bad if you consider a couple of hundred dollars for a Mac mini. It's true. Yeah. It's going to take a while to, to, to make up that, make up that difference. Yeah. A blog post from Anthropics says, Claude will remain ad-free. Our users won't see sponsored links adjacent to their conversations with Claude, nor will Claude's responses be influenced by advertisers or include third-party product placements our users did not ask for.

13:31Hmm, who do you think they're going for here? I have no idea. Couldn't even imagine. Now, OpenAI said last month that it would test ads on its free products. Google has said it has no plans to use ads on Gemini. And to back all this up, Wall Street Journal reports that Anthropic is going to run ads during the Super Bowl, happening Sunday, with the tagline, ads are coming to AI, but not to Clodds. So they're running an ad to tell us that. I mean, I kind of, I'm being overly cheeky about this because it's sort of like competitors doing things like this is, that's advertising. We're all so used to this.

14:10But the idea of ads being part of the AI and chatbot experience is new. I think all these companies are going to be doing this eventually. OpenAI is just first. So it gives a company like Anthropic a great excuse to be like, we wouldn't do such a thing. We want your experience to be organic and genuine. I'll be shocked if Gemini doesn't have some kind of advertising related to it somehow at some point, right? But Google can afford to kick that can down the road for a long time. So it might not happen anytime soon. Anthropic, I don't know, maybe they will continue with the principled stance of like, you are not the product when it comes to Anthropic and maybe we'll be a little more expensive, but we're very good at what we do and we can get enterprise contracts and maybe they'll be able to hold off from doing that.

15:00You look at companies like Proton and Signal and they're able to do that because they have a dedicated customer base that values that. And I think Anthropic could possibly develop that as well. Well, if you'd like honest reviews from people who actually bought tech products and then lived with them, then you need our show, Live With It. Join me and a bunch of great folks for a weekly look at all the tech that we've spent months living with, taking a lot of notes, figured out if it's right for us or not, because we thought maybe we needed it, but did we? Recent episodes include Patrick Norton on headphones, Roger's wise cameras.

15:37I'm currently living with the Fiat dog collar from my dog Rex. That review is coming up soon. Find Live With It at youtube.com slash daily tech news show or listen wherever you get your pods.

15:53And we got some quick headlines for you. Just good stuff to know. This is, you know, you can throw this little gem down at a cocktail party and look smart. Speaking of cocktail parties, I bet France has really nice ones. France's Mistral launched its next speech-to-text model called VoxTrail Transcribe 2 that can do low-latency transcription with timestamps on device across accents, jargons, and languages. Spotify announced its lyrics translation feature is now available globally, and you can now access lyrics when you're offline. Egypt has joined Algeria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates in ordering that Roblox be blocked for all users in the country.

16:37Roblox. The Financial Times reports that two Russian space vehicles, Luch 1 and Luch 2, are likely to have intercepted European satellite communications by positioning themselves in the path of transmissions to the ground. I called it luch on Daily Tech Headlines this morning, but Tom, you're kind of the Russian expert of the group. Luch. Luch. Windows insiders on Windows 11 have begun to get access to built-in sysman functionality that blocks and logs malicious and suspicious activity, meaning that sysadmins won't need to install it on each device manually. Apple announced that Xcode 26.3 will include access to Claude Agent and OpenAI's codecs directly in the app.

17:23So if you're an Apple developer, you get to them easier now. NVIDIA is still waiting for the U.S. State Department to sign off on the Commerce Department's security review before it can actually sell those H200 chips to Chinese companies, as approved by the administration. Yeah, so if you're like, oh, so they've been selling those. No, they haven't. State Department dragging its feet. Intel CEO Liputon confirmed that Intel will make GPUs meant for data centers, just like NVIDIA does, under the direction of former Qualcomm engineer Eric Demers. Uber announced it's going to partner with Chinese Baidu and WeRide, as well as the U.S.'s Waymo, to expand autonomous taxi service to quite a few locations this year, hopes the company, starting with Hong Kong, Madrid, Houston, and Zurich.

18:12And 9to5Google reports that the Google Apps 17.4 beta, they are always doing these like code examinations to see what they can find, contains strings. So these are like little text fields about the lab's screen automation capability, codename Bonobo. The string explains how, quote, Gemini can help with tasks like placing orders or booking rides using screen automation on certain apps on your device. We like to end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. And thankfully, we get them from you every single day. Today, Katinka and John have additional thoughts. Yeah, so yesterday we talked about France's investigation of XAI over several allegations, one of which is failing to do enough to prevent the creation and distribution of CSAM.

19:01And Katinka wanted us to make it clear that distribution of CSAM is not only illegal, but it is unacceptable. So we're not in favor in any way. And Kiwi Graham wrote in earlier saying that he wanted any foldable iPhone to have Apple pencil support so he can save money and have two devices in one. In response to that email, John wrote, I would like to think that I am with Kiwi Graham on the iPhone Fold, but my family would probably share that I still want the other devices. I've been trying to cut down on the extra technology purchases as I am finding that the time I have to use the devices in a non-productive manner dwindles.

19:40My name is John and I have a technology problem. Hi, John. Hi, John. We're here for you. Yeah. I, I, I totally, I totally get this, John. I'm looking at my wall. Being productive, um, on, on devices, obviously essential for work, right. Um, or just, you know, everyday life, um, having stuff just to, you know, have fun with it. There are so many hours in the day, you know, sometimes I'm like, I didn't have fun today at all on tech, but it was useful. Um, so, so I'm with you on that one. Absolutely, John. Uh, I certainly don't have a room around me filled with gadgets that maybe I didn't need to have.

20:24So I guess. No, me either. Not one. Well, if you're thinking about gadgets, you either need to have, or don't need to have, or anything else we talk about on any of our shows, If you have insight into a story, share it with us. Feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Thanks to Katinka and John for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for the Daily Tech News Show. You keep us in business, folks, by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS.

20:58The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.