Apple Comes for the Chromebook - DTNS 5218

0:00Andy Beach: This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

0:29Sarah Lane: Okay, I have to tell you, I was just looking on eBay where I go for all kinds of things I love, and there it was.

0:35Andy Beach: That hologram trading card. One of the rarest. The last one I needed for my set.

0:39Sarah Lane: Shiny like the designer handbag of my dreams. One of a kind. eBay had it. And now everyone's asking, ooh, where'd you get your windshield wiper?

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1:52Tom Merritt: this is the daily tech news for wednesday march 4th 2026 we tell you what you need to know give you some important context and try our darndest to help each other understand today andy beach

2:03Sarah Lane: is reacting to a report that paramount wants to move hbo into its tech platform and apple launches an entry-level laptop to take on chromebooks here they come it's actually pretty compelling i'm tom

2:15Tom Merritt: Merritt.

2:16Sarah Lane: And I'm Sarah Lane.

2:17Tom Merritt: Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. So yeah, Apple finished its half week, three-fifths of a week of announcements with the MacBook Neo, a$599 13-inch laptop that runs on Apple's A18 Pro chip. That is one generation old for iPhone chips. It's the one that launched with the iPhone 16. But you heard me right$599. This laptop has a 2408 by 1506 liquid retina display. There's some compromises to get that price down though. It's only a 60 hertz refresh rate. Also has two older USB ports. One, they're both USB-C, but one is USB 3. That's 10 gigabits per second. That's meant for connecting things to.

3:05Tom Merritt: The other is only USB 2, which is 480 megabits per second. That's the one meant for charging. You could use it for other things, but it's going to be kind of slow. Neither one of them is USB 4, which is like 40 gigabits per second. It only weighs 2.7 pounds, comes in four different pastel colors, has a headphone jack, because I know that's important to a lot of you. There is not MagSafe charging, just the USB. Promises 16 hours of battery life, has a 1080p webcam built in as well. Base model comes with eight gigabytes of RAM, 256 gigabytes of storage, and for$100 extra, the$699 version gives you 512 gigabytes of storage.

3:47Tom Merritt: You're still only going to get eight gigs of RAM, but it does add Touch ID to that$699 version. This is available to order now. Everything's been available to order March 4th. Well, guess what? It's March 4th. You can order it right now and it'll ship on March 11th. Do you like them, Sarah? They're pretty cool looking and seem like they have decent features for the price anyway.

4:09Sarah Lane: Yeah, I mean, definitely Apple going for the Chromebook market here. And I think they're going to sell like hotcakes for anybody who's sort of like, but Apple's just too, you know, they're all too expensive. This definitely gets into that price range. When I first read the news of the Neo, I was like, this is my MacBook Air. Now, granted, my MacBook Air has 16 gigs of RAM and also has two terabytes of storage. So they're not the same, but they're very similar otherwise. If you don't need a lot of local storage. This is an extremely affordable and very light, very portable machine.

4:54Tom Merritt: Yeah, that is the compelling part of it is it's a little more expensive than some Chromebooks, but it's less expensive than others. It's, you know, in the price range of your lower end Windows laptops, the ones that you say, well, if you just need to do email and word processing, $599 is a decent price for that. And yeah, if you don't need the more powerful chip, you don't need all that RAM and storage like you were talking about, then that's the kind of device you get. And it's probably more capable in some ways because that A18 Pro chip is a pretty capable chip on its own.

5:29Sarah Lane: Yeah, yeah. I mean, there are a couple of other, you know, going back to comparing it to my MacBook Air. You don't have the force touch on the trackpad. That's not going to be a deal breaker. for if anyone's coming into the Apple ecosystem for the first time, right? You just don't care. You don't even care if you have touch ID. I mean, trust me, it's nice. But if you don't have it, you know, it's fine. Yeah, the base model is going to work out fine for you. I think that that you know, that is what Apple is going for here. It's the new people. It's not it's not it's not the people who already love Apple products.

6:06Sarah Lane: And we're not leaving. It's we're getting new people and young people.

6:10Tom Merritt: Yeah, I think it was smart of Apple to look at its in-house advantage with making silicon or designing silicon and say, you know what, we can make a really compelling entry-level laptop, pick up some new users. There's a$499 version for the educational market. So it's squarely trying to get back into that market against the Chromebook. It's that classic like, oh, our lower end model will have lots of colors, you know, so it looks pretty. I guess pastels are kind of cool these days. So that's why they remember that.

6:42Sarah Lane: I mean, remember the first iMac?

6:43Tom Merritt: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

6:44Sarah Lane: That whole, you know, it was colorful and you sort of go like, oh, okay. I mean, who cares? College students cared. Yeah. They loved it.

6:52Tom Merritt: Yeah, no, exactly. I think I was expecting this to be somewhat of a non-announcement. Like, okay, they did a cheap one. It turns out people are pretty excited about it. A lot of people reviewing this and talking about it are more excited about it than I would have guessed.

7:10Sarah Lane: Well, if you're excited about it, we're excited about you as well. DT &S is made possible by all of you listening to us right now. Special thanks to Mike Cortez, Irwin Stirr, and Ken Hayes.

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8:04Andy Beach: They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. That new thing? Yeah, we've got it. The Drop by GNC, bringing you all the newness that matters. Handpicked by the pros who actually know what's up and what's proven to work. We keep you on top of the trends and dialed into what's next.

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9:59Tom Merritt: All right, there's more we need to know today. Let's get right into the briefs.

10:03Sarah Lane: Let's do it. TikTok representatives told the BBC that the company has no plans to offer end-to-end encryption in direct messages because they believe it makes the user less safe. End-to-end encryption would mean that TikTok safety teams and law enforcement wouldn't be able to read messages if they had to. TikTok says the messages are encrypted and only accessible in response to a valid law enforcement request or to authorized employees in response to a user report of harmful behavior. It's unclear how this would apply to the US version of the app.

10:38Tom Merritt: Listen, I don't have a problem with TikTok saying we're not doing end-to-end encryption on our platform. Saying it is a safety for the user argument is really turning things on its head. It's the kind of argument that governments make when they want to have a backdoor into stuff and weaken encryption. So I don't like that. I don't like that they took that response. But sure, leave it as TikTok saying, we're not going to do end-to-end encryption. If you have sensitive messaging, don't do it on our platform. Sure, fine. That's great. I think that's probably a good idea anyway.

11:12Sarah Lane: It's all kind of in the messaging, right? You know, TikTok saying, no, this is for user safety. It's like, well, a lot of users don't want that kind of safety. They want the end-to-end encryption safety.

11:24Tom Merritt: And I even think there's an argument to say, like, if we're going to do proper moderation, this makes it easier. That's fair, right?

11:32Sarah Lane: I think so. You know, also knowing that TikTok users, not everybody, but a lot of young people on the platform, a lot of potential harm that could happen on the platform. I get the stance. I get the stance of the company saying, listen, we're going to need to get involved sometimes. sometimes maybe more than you know another competing platform and that's just that's the way that we're going to go about it is fine um but when it comes to is like this makes the user safer no it is it really doesn't we all know this i guess it makes them safer in some ways and less

12:11Tom Merritt: safe in other ways so at best you could call it a wash but i'll be curious to see what usds does the company that runs tiktok in the u.s tiktok in the u.s still run by byte dance for marketing and sales, but moderation and therefore stuff like this, including the algorithm, is run by USDS. So they could decide to do this. I'm guessing they won't either for the same reasons in that they want to make it easier to do moderation and not have to deal with that. But the upshot is don't use TikTok to send messages that you think should stay out of the hands of government, et cetera, et cetera.

12:48Sarah Lane: Right. Just know what encryption you're dealing with.

12:50Tom Merritt: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. Time for a pixel drop. Google rolling out updates to its pixel phones and some updates to regular Android phones with Android 16 QPR three. Here's some of the new features. Custom icon redesign styles. So you can say, make it in the scribbles style or cookies or easel or treasure or stardust. Comfort View, which reduces saturated colors if you're sensitive to that, so it makes it easier to view. Magic Q can now proactively recommend restaurants in a chat. It could do other things before, but now restaurants is one of the things it can say if you and your friend are chatting on where you want to go to eat.

13:31Tom Merritt: New information in the At a Glance feature, now including sports and finance. My Commute now offers departure time suggestions and can even give you an alternative route if things start to get messed up on the one you're on, whether it's public transit or something else. The Now Playing feature not only identifies songs, as it has been doing, but includes album art. Circle to Search feature has Find the Look tool that identifies the individual pieces of an outfit, if you're interested, and a Try It On tool that can pull outfits from videos or social content to see what it looks like to you. Android Auto users now have access to an educational game for kids ages three to one, and tablets get desktop windowing so you can arrange and resize windows.

14:18Tom Merritt: Finally, Android users in general can now share their FindHub tracker locations, which is helpful in finding lost things, particularly luggage. More than 10 global airlines now will officially accept FindMyLinks with more to come. Custom calling cards lets you customize your photo, your font and your color for the information you share with others. And you can share a live location in messages now, not just a pin, but something that will update over time as people look at it.

14:48Sarah Lane: Now, call me crazy, but isn't Google... You're crazy. I know I am crazy. Isn't Google already really good at directional stuff? Going to the My Commute now offering departure time suggestions and alternative routes i mean isn't that what google maps already does really well

15:08Tom Merritt: yeah so so now it will look at your calendar before you even get to maps and say like hey you might want to leave 15 minutes early i'm leaving at eight or nine don't take the three there's delays on that line take the five line and that kind of that's that's that's very handy

15:26Sarah Lane: I also love Android Auto users getting access to educational games for little kids because, you know, they're in the backseat. They're doing their stuff.

15:38Tom Merritt: Yeah, that could be a lifesaver in certain situations, I imagine.

15:41Sarah Lane: Indeed, indeed. Well, Bloomberg sources say that Sony will no longer release all its big PlayStation 5 games on PC. Online games like Marathon will be released on multiple platforms. but single-player games like Ghost of Yotei will remain exclusive to PS5. Death Stranding 2 and the upcoming Kina Scars of Cosmora are still planned for release on PC this year. Microsoft's next Xbox is also rumored to be capable of playing PC games, which Bloomberg speculates might be among the motivations for the Switch.

16:17Tom Merritt: Yeah, I think that's part of it. It is interesting to see Xbox change its chief, and Sony possibly changing its stance on this, but it might've been happening anyway. Sony really uncomfortable in being multi-platform, so I'm not shocked to see them pull it back.

16:35Sarah Lane: Yeah, I think that, you know, the idea of something being exclusive on a very certain platform is very advantageous, you know, for a Sony or a Microsoft or, you know, Nintendo, you know, all the big guys. because you can control who watches how they watch and that's sort of the deal. But as we know, many people have lots of other options now. So it's interesting that certain games are exclusive. Certain games are a little bit more open depending on how you want to play it.

17:15Tom Merritt: Yeah. Managing partner at J2 Ventures, which backs startups in the defense space, has said that 10 of his firm's companies have backed off of their use of Claude, Anthropics Claude, for defense use cases and are in active processes to replace the service with another one. Reuters reported late Tuesday that Lockheed Martin also expected to remove Anthropics products from its supply chain. Anthropics is not able to fight these removals because no official action has been taken by the U.S. government, only social media posts. So this is very concerning that the government can just say they're going to do something and companies already start to feel like they have to take action against that company.

17:59Tom Merritt: Certainly going to put pressure on Anthropic to come to an agreement because it's losing business that it has less legal recourse, not zero legal recourse, but less legal recourse to take because there hasn't been a declaration that there are supply chain risk. There hasn't been a cancellation of the contract officially yet. Just threats that they were going to do both. And that's causing defense companies to say, you know what, I don't want to get in trouble with my client. So I'm just going to start taking action now.

18:27Sarah Lane: Yeah. It feels very stock market to me. When people get sort of an air of like, something's going down, sell, sell, sell, word, buy, buy, buy. It's often just based on a temperature thing. It's not based on something that has actually happened or will happen in the future.

18:49Tom Merritt: That's why they call it the chilling effect, right? Because it's a temperature thing. I guess there could be a heating effect, but in this case, it's more of a chilling effect.

18:56Sarah Lane: I mean, Anthropic has, it's obviously a big story in the news, you know, taking a stance when it comes to the US government and, you know, yeah, for other companies to say, We just don't want to be part of this nonsense. You know, we have other options. I think that's what's interesting to me is, yeah, is Claude the right move? Maybe it is for a lot of companies, but you have other options. Well, everybody, you have options, and we're so glad that you join us week after week. We do live streams as well. If you'd like to join those, this Thursday, we're reviewing the big Apple announcements, of which there were many, and more with SnobOS' Nika Monford.

19:41Sarah Lane: Nika Monford is one of the best people to talk about Apple announcements with. Catch them all by becoming a subscriber at youtube.com slash daily tech news show.

20:20Andy Beach: We'll see you next time. and fresh finds daily. Explore what's new and what's next on The Drop by GNC. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

21:00Tom Merritt: Let's do some quick headlines now. These are just little tidbits that will make you feel smarter in the future.

21:07Sarah Lane: Corning launched Gorilla Glass Ceramic 3, which is meant to withstand repeated one meter drops over several years. If you just happen to be a person that is doing that, this might be the glass for you. It'll show up first on the Motorola Razor Folds.

21:23Tom Merritt: Yeah, I am increasingly becoming more of a person who's like that. So I'm glad to hear this. A father is suing Google alleging wrongful death after his son committed suicide on October 2nd, following a string of delusional conversations. I almost give you a warning before you go read them. They're very disturbing, delusional conversations that were encouraged by Gemini, at least in the filing of the case.

21:49Sarah Lane: Oppo announced that its Find X9 Ultra with the round high-end camera is going to launch outside of China in Europe, though we don't know the price yet.

21:58Tom Merritt: Good news, because you'll be able to get it without the Chinese ROMs on it, if that's the case. Motang tipped us off on the subreddit that Ars Technica has fired reporter Benj Edwards. I'm an admirer of Edwards reporting. He does a great job. But he used a Claude code-based tool to pull verbatim source material from a blog post written by a source. He apologized on Blue Sky and said, I didn't check to make sure that it didn't make up quotes. And it did. And they got in the published and he lost his job.

22:31Sarah Lane: You know, it's a very good reminder for all of us in the news reporting arena, you got to check. You got to check. Even if it, oh, 99 % of the time works, you got to check. Yahoo is selling Engadget to Static Media. Static Media operates Slash Gear, Slash Film, and Jalopnik, among others.

22:54Tom Merritt: Yeah. Static used to be something I wouldn't have been excited to see get a hold of Engadget, but I think they've done a better job with some of the stuff they've done lately. And they are pivoting more towards content. So maybe this will be a good thing. R.W. Nash tipped us off on our subreddit that Google posted details of an iOS exploit kit called Coruna, C-O-R-U-N-A, which can compromise unpatched iPhones running iOS 13 through 17.2.1. So if you are up to date, you are not vulnerable to this, but older, unupdated iPhones are. And then iVerify posted about the tool with research indicating it shares similarities to known U.S.

23:35Tom Merritt: government hacking tools.

23:37Sarah Lane: The European Central Bank published a study on Tuesday that found that companies that make the most use of AI tools have shown an increase in hiring in the near term. So for all of you saying, oh, they're taking our jobs, not right now.

23:53Tom Merritt: Maybe in the long term.

23:54Sarah Lane: In the short term, you got a job.

23:56Tom Merritt: uh ben q launched a 5k 27 inch monitor with thunderbolt 4 called the ma270s uh and it sells for 999 so if you're looking at for a high-res 27 inch monitor with thunderbolt 4 uh that one's not a bad price oh it's a nice monitor two candidates for parliament in columbia have

24:18Sarah Lane: pledged to defer their decisions to a digital tool that collects consensus from the new community using blockchain contracts and an avatar named Gaetana built on the DeepSeek LLM.

24:30Tom Merritt: That's a really interesting read. Also, a data center in London has tried software from Emerald AI for five days in December to adjust the energy usage of the facility as demand ebbed and flowed. Usually data centers just have their servers on. So this was able to kind of put things in sleep mode, power down, reduce power usage. The test not only successfully reacted to spikes in demand, like when everybody started watching soccer on the stream, but also over the five-day period, lowered energy use by 40%. So something that they are going to share with the wider community that would be very good for our power usage in the future, right?

25:11Tom Merritt: Yeah. Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper.

25:16Sarah Lane: Justin Robert Young tipped us off to a sub stack post from a user going under the name Ellis Slop, detailing their experience as an engineer at Warner Brothers through the sale by AT &T back in the day to Discovery and now to Paramount. They claim the plan is to shut down HBO Max and move everything onto Paramount Plus. Yes.

25:40Tom Merritt: So we brought Andy Beach on to help us understand this. Andy, thanks for coming back.

25:45Andy Beach: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for inviting me.

25:47Tom Merritt: Now, you have some bona fides in this area because you've worked in the streaming industry. What's your experience that you can bring to bear on talking about this?

25:57Andy Beach: Yeah, I mean, I've worked on a number of OTT platforms through the years, a lot in the sports era, but I used to build encoders for a living. So I sort of had to understand the guts of the streaming just to help companies stand up their different infrastructures. And just so go ahead.

26:18Tom Merritt: Yeah, no, sorry. Discovery rebuilt HBO Max from the ground up after it acquired Warner in this post. He talks about that, but he kind of says and it was a it was a horrible launch experience. Everything went wrong. Explain to me, you know, a little bit more about this than he talks about in his post. How was the HBO Max platform before the rebuild and how was it after it?

26:40Andy Beach: So I actually think they inherited a fairly clean, matured platform. If we go way back, you have to remember that when AT &T, Warner Media launched HBO Max, there were still HBO Now and HBO Go and those persisted. There was also under the hood multiple different content management systems that were driving the platform that people were seeing. So there was a lot of different like identity checks that had to go on to see if you were in the right region and you had the right premium access to get something. So it was fairly complex. And then Jason Kilar came in, I want to say 2020 or 2021. And he did a massive unification, centralized around direct to consumer strategy, brought in unified, got rid of the HBO Go.

27:31Andy Beach: Now, all of it was was HBO Max at that standpoint. On the back end or on the sort of the people side, he simplified the org structure. And so it really clarified the direction. He rebuilt a lot of clarity into what they were doing. So I feel like they actually inherited something that was fairly mature at that point when Discovery acquired them. But then you had to go sort of reset and collide their two platforms together, which made for a messy standpoint. standpoint. I think any real merger of any two businesses of these size is like a two-year exercise. And when you're talking about a direct-to-consumer platform, it's equally a year to a year and a half of operational reset that you're going through when you try and put something together.

28:21Tom Merritt: So do you think from your experience, it's a good move to switch it to Paramount now?

28:26Andy Beach: Well, so what's interesting about that is in And the substack that Sarah called out calls out the fact that a lot of people perceive the Paramount platform as inferior. It has slower load times. The UI UX is sort of a little more complex. Yeah, it has issues with fire sticks. Yeah, it's not ideal. Whereas they've spent a lot of time polishing and making a pretty good platform out of HBO Max today. the re-rebranded HBO Max. So I think saying that they're going to consolidate purely to their platform is dangerous until we understand how much of the people that were part of the HBO Max platform are now going to become part of Paramount and not get laid off.

29:17Andy Beach: And what of their influence will improve that experience that we have. If they're just saying, like if we just sort of said magically all the people are gone and we're just taking the content, it's going to be a real slog for them to get something that is a quality experience and doesn't cause a lot of churn. That's their biggest danger here is that people are going to see this and go, well, I can't really enjoy the content anymore. I'm just going to drop it. So until we know really how many people are going to come in and influence and change the look and feel of the Paramount app, it's hard to guess.

29:54Andy Beach: But another piece that I keep reminding folks when I talk about this is the there's a lot of numbers around debt that get thrown in here as well. This new combined case, the new combined Paramount and Warner number is like$79 billion in debt. When AT &T sold Warner Media to Discovery, it was like $55 billion in debt, which was a lot of debt at the time. Like that's a big number. And they're starting at 25 billion more, which all that really means in terms of what we're talking about here is that there's going to be no tolerance for risk and the execution almost has to be perfect the first time or it's going to be considered a failure.

30:39Tom Merritt: I mean, it sounds like if it were me, I'd want to stay on the HBO Max platform and move Paramount over there. But frankly, whatever you do is going to be rife with risk. It's going to cause disruption and it's going to need people to do it. I think because they've said they're going to zero out somewhere between like$4 and$6 billion a year in debt, it's hard for them on the outside looking in because remember, they know nothing about the Warner platform today and the people there.

31:06Andy Beach: They haven't had a chance to really do diligence on the tech infrastructure. So they're purely going with what they know. Maybe that changes as the two teams start to get together. But that might be optimistic of me to say so.

31:22Tom Merritt: Yeah. I mean, Paramount once was partly CBS, which once bought CNET. And I've been a part of a tech stack move. That one was actually fairly well done. Like there were hiccups along the way for sure. But things actually happened mostly smoothly. I also was part of a tech stack move when tech TV was bought by G4 and G4 made the decision to say, you know what? No, we don't want your dozen or so Spark servers in a data colo in San Jose. We'll keep these three Windows servers we have running out of a closet in our office. That did not go so well. So I hope the Paramount that I worked with, the part of Paramount that I worked with prevails, at least as somebody who likes to watch both Paramount Plus and HBO Max.

32:11Sarah Lane: I also wonder, going back to the blog post, which I thought was very interesting, and again, this is an opinion of one person who works within that company or did, the naming conventions really matter. You know, I mean, HBO Max going to Max going back to HBO Max. And, you know, it's confusing for the consumer and it doesn't really serve anybody at the company. And you just we all sort of wonder, like, what is going on over there?

32:45Andy Beach: I think the like it you're calling out one of I think the big risks that they have, Sarah, which is like reset fatigue. And that's exactly what we were seeing in that that employees writing was like they're exhausted. by the number of times they've been stuck doing this and they're doing it again. I had mentioned to Tom earlier when we were chatting about this on text that this is like a sort of a once in a lifetime thing that happens to a company, a merger and acquisition. You sort of don't assume that you're gonna be doing it every year or two. And that's exactly what happened to Warner really almost since the AOL days.

33:21Andy Beach: It's just been a continual turnover of ownership and merging with new teams. And so people who have been there for the long haul are exhausted. And when they see things like name changes, it probably drives them nuts internally.

33:36Tom Merritt: Yeah. And with AOL, you're going back 20 years. Yeah. So it's a long period of disruption. Well, Andy, thanks for dropping in and helping us understand this. Really, really appreciate it. I know you're working on a good post about all this stuff. Where can folks find that once it's out?

33:50Andy Beach: Yeah, I'm devoting all of my Friday posts to this whole Warner fracas and all the news that we've had this week. I'll be posting that on my sub stack, which is Engines of Change.ai.

34:03Tom Merritt: Fantastic. Thanks, Andy. Thank you.

34:05Sarah Lane: Thanks, Andy. We like to end every episode of DT &S with some shared perspectives. Today, Mavis has a challenge for Tom.

34:14Tom Merritt: Yes, challenge accepted, Mavis. and I don't have an answer yet, but Mavis said, I want to issue a friendly challenge to Tom to find a mini LED LCD display for around$3 ,000. This is without even considering the resolution, brightness, up to 2 ,000 nits peak HDR, 1 ,000 nits full screen SDR, color spaces, P3, Adobe RGB, build quality, full aluminum body and glass screen, refresh rate, 120 hertz, etc. that the newly announced Apple Studio Display XDR has. I perfectly understand that for its price, it's definitely not for the everyday user who just wants a monitor for common use cases. However, for those who know what they want from a monitor of this kind, you'd be hard-pressed to find something that offers the same combination of features.

35:04Tom Merritt: He's reacting to me saying like, yeah, the monitors I always think are unnecessary and overpriced. But Mavis rightly points out, I don't care about any of these specs. I am not the kind of person who needs this kind of stuff. And there are people who do care. So I think this is well said, Mavis. I will try to find something, though. See if anything's out there. I don't think it's the BenQ, although that one is 5K. I don't think it's quite close. That's more of a competitor to the lower-priced studio display that they announced. But Mavis continued. He said, on the topic of the OpenAI Anthropic Department of Defense debacle and how some people are reacting to it.

35:42Tom Merritt: I want to say that your comment on it was spot on, nuanced, objective, and mature. And you definitely hit the nail on the head. You expressed exactly what was on my mind. These are some of the reasons why I don't miss the show. Thanks very much. Well, thank you, Mavis. I appreciate both the challenge and the nice words.

35:59Sarah Lane: I'm challenging you, Tom. And also I'm complimenting you.

36:02Tom Merritt: I like it. Yeah.

36:04Sarah Lane: Well, if you're thinking about anything that we talked about on the show today, or something that we might talk about in the future. Maybe you have some insight into a story. Share it with us. We'd love to hear from you. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com.

36:17Tom Merritt: Yes, big thanks to Andy Beach and to Mavis for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You're the folks who keep us in business. Thank a patron or become one at Patreon.com slash DTNS.

36:36Andy Beach: The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

37:00Tom Merritt: of secure payments. Visit bill.com slash proven for a special offer.

37:05Andy Beach: This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.