OpenAI, Xbox Prices and Smart Home-a-palooza - DTNS October in Review

0:04This is the Daily Tech News Month in Review. for October 2025. We're going to look back on what the big stories of the month were and try to help each other understand them. This month, it's OpenAI getting free of Microsoft. New hardware from Amazon, Google, Apple, and Samsung, and Microsoft's Xbox strategy. Does a price increase count as new hardware? We'll find out. We'll find out. I'm Todd Merritt. I'm Jen Cutter. Let's take a look back on some of the biggest stories of October 2025. First of all, we like to ask ChatGPT what it thinks are the big stories of the month. And it never agrees with us, Jen.

0:50No, but it's also not making up stuff. So good job. No, that's true. We do this because it's interesting to see what the chatbot comes out with. We should probably try different ones. Maybe next month I'll do Claude or something. And if you have a prompt that you would like us to try, thinking like, oh, no, Tom, the reason you're not getting the results you want is because you didn't word it this way. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. We'd be happy to try a prompt. The prompt I gave it was, we're doing a 30-minute show wrapping up the biggest stories of the month in technology. Tell us what you think they are.

1:26And it gave me six of them, which I'm like, I told you it was a 30-minute show. And it gave me a – actually, I didn't put it in here. It gave me a rundown of like two minutes on this one, three minutes on this one. I was like, wow, that's not a lot of time. The AI boom and semiconductor surge. So this is NVIDIA getting the$5 trillion valuation and just the broader chip ecosystem. We had Intel story, stuff like that. Makes sense. It's big. If you're covering financial news, that's right at the top. I was going to say the NVIDIA valuation is interesting to us as tech consumers, but it's not important to me as a tech consumer, except in so much as it means like, well, Nvidia is not going away anytime soon.

2:08How much is my next card going to cost me? Yeah. Big tech earnings and investor reckoning around AI spending. It's very much taking a financial beat on this. It talks about all the earnings numbers, the implications for the tech market, which we covered on the show. I'm not sure that those are the biggest stories for tech consumers of the month. Not for consumers. But yeah, like, again, if you are Bloomberg or the Financial Times, yeah, this is what your month was. Okay, this one's interesting. Tech layoffs and workforce transformation, continued job cuts across major tech firms. I didn't think this month in particular was the one that had more of those.

2:55Honestly, the big ones were in the summer, like in July and then earlier in like February and April. They did say continued job cuts. So as an ongoing story, I can see it. But again, as a consumer, this is not what you're paying attention to. But an ongoing story isn't the big story of the month, at least not from where I'm sitting. So I disagree with that one. Geopolitics, regulation, and tech. Boy, I would grade them down for being too broad with this one. Google and Amazon sidestepping legal orders, some Israel-related stuff. U.S.-China tech tensions. Obviously, we covered that a lot. there's good stuff in here in what it's justifying, but too broad, too broad to just say politics, regulation.

3:40Yeah, like the rare earths and US-China tech tensions. And again, if you are like specifically all about hardware and chips and stuff, yes, that is relevant to you. Is that relevant to a wide audience? No. Again, number five is the same thing. FinTech partnerships with AI, media generation with AI, digital assistance. It's like, yes, that's all of tech news these days, every month. They sure exist. Quarterly forecasts, again, being very financial. Here's what it didn't include. Nobel Prize for Physics related to quantum computing. We covered that. We aren't going to cover these. These are not the big stories in our opinion, but they are big stories.

4:19They were ones we considered putting in. Honorable mentions. Yeah, we covered them earlier in the month, so you can go find our stories in the episodes. pick snapping i thought that was the you know the vulnerability with the with the photos um new intel processors which we kind of alluded to with the tech stuff in nvidia uh the cancellation of the samsung galaxy edge and the low orders for the iphone air uh we did a whole story on on just like our thin phones not what people want uh qualcomm's new mpu the hexagon and adobe max 2025. A lot of great announcements coming out of that. All right, let's start.

4:56We have four big topics. Three of them are available to everyone. The fourth is available to patrons. And the first one is OpenAI. A big month for OpenAI. The company started the month, you may not remember this, with$500 billion in valuation and ended the month with rumors of an IPO. So those two kind of related to each other. In between those two stories, OpenAI launched Sora, a generated video social platform that got lots of articles about copyright and intellectual property and abuse and all of that. They launched a browser called Atlas, which has some agentic features in it so that you can more easily get ChatGPT to do things for you in the browser.

5:44But the biggest news was peace with Microsoft and the restructuring of open AI. Jen, I think one of the biggest misses of stories this month were the ones where I saw it described as open AI becoming a for-profit company because open AI has been a for-profit company. Not throughout its entire life, they created a capped profit company and Microsoft invested in it years ago. What was new here is they created, they converted it to a public benefit company. That means there's no cap on the profits. That means more people are willing to invest in it. But being a public benefit company, they kept their obligation to serve the public good ahead of profits.

6:34That's why you incorporate as a public benefit company to say, you can't sue us as an investor if we do something that hurts profits, but serves our ultimate goal, which in OpenAI's situation is to make sure that they develop responsible AI. Yeah, I was very happy you explained all that because these were all new terms to me. I knew about a lot of different company types, but I'm like, I have never heard of these before because it happens in a lot of fields that I don't cover, like environmental stuff. And you're not going to really run into them in your day-to-day life until you're reading about something you're interested in.

7:08But there's a lot of public benefit companies out there. I think Tom's, the shoe people, where they donate a - Oh, yeah. Buy one and they send one, right? I think they're a public benefit company. There's several public benefit companies out there. I also heard a lot of people dismissing that and saying, oh, they're just saying that on paper to sound good. And I mean, I guess, but honestly, it's not worth it because you have to go through a lot of hoops to become a public benefit company. And it's a disincentive to investors. Investors sometimes don't like to invest in public benefit companies because they are pursuing a benefit ahead of profits and investors would rather have the profits.

7:47Yeah, I figured there would be a ton of paperwork involved in this sort of thing. Yeah. And the biggest thing here was Microsoft and OpenAI really figuring out a way forward where Microsoft still gets some exclusives. OpenAI gets the freedom to pursue other cloud providers. So Microsoft doesn't get everything OpenAI has, but they still get a lot of exclusives. However, Microsoft isn't the only cloud provider to OpenAI, but they are still a big cloud provider to OpenAI. So those details, I think, are more important than the restructuring. The restructuring made it possible for them to negotiate those new terms, basically.

8:31Yeah, people were trying to spin this as like, oh no, it's a big blow to blank. But I think both sides actually fully benefited here because Microsoft has more room to go in other directions as well as OpenAI. It's not a loss to me. I think Microsoft probably lost more than OpenAI did because they had a hammer hold on the profits. But the other side of that is the profits were capped. They're not anymore. So Microsoft stands to make more. And the company is going to have an easier time growing as a public benefit corp than it would have as a capped profit subsidiary. So I think there's also some freedom that the for-profit subsidiary gets now from the nonprofit foundation.

9:10But the nonprofit foundation is still in control of the for-profit company. That hasn't changed. It's just they own a smaller stake and so they have a little less influence. Did you have any thoughts on Sora or the Atlas browser? Did you play around with those? I have been so busy trying to fix up all of my friends' Windows upgrades to Windows 11 that I haven't had time to play with Atlas yet. But I have seen all of your playing around with Sora. So are you using all of your credits every single day still? No, no. I ran into the credit limit one day. Okay. I ran into the credit limit one day. There was one day I ran into the credit limit.

9:53And after that, I sort of pulled back a little because of that. And also, I just started using it less because it wasn't new anymore. I was using it a lot when it first came out because it was novel. And you've never quite solved the problem of getting yourself into videos? No, I get myself into videos. But it's tricky to get myself into a video that involves tech news because then it thinks I'm violating copyright of myself. And I have a hard time telling it I'm myself. So I wouldn't believe me either. I get it. The Atlas browser, I know Justin Robert Young was raving about it on the attention mechanism and how he's using it a lot.

10:31And it's becoming not his only browser, but one that he uses all the time and uses for more things. I'm still trying to find that reason that I should use it. But there's a little chicken and egg thing, which is the more he uses it, the more things he finds it's good for versus me who's not using it very much is not finding those things. Yeah, like because there are a couple of agents that will like look at all of your browser tabs these days. And like those are the ones that I am more likely to test out as somebody with a thousand tabs open. Yes, I know I have a problem. Don't worry about it.

11:05It's not your problem. It's our problem, right? Too many stories I'm covering. Yeah. So I know, yet again, OpenAI, a big story. But I think that that restructuring is legitimately one of the big stories of the year because OpenAI has been trying to pursue this restructuring for a long time so it can get flexibility and so that it can issue stock. It's not that it couldn't issue stock before, but a cap profit company is not nearly going to raise the amount of money that a public benefit company will. And so we are going to see an IPO possibly by the end of the year, even though there's not much year left.

11:41And it is something that these companies have been waiting to do so they can have more flexibility and more clarity. I think flexibility for OpenAI and clarity for Microsoft. All right. That's only our first topic. Hang on. There's more.

11:59Microsoft had some other non-OpenAI things going on this month with a bunch of activity over in the Xbox division. Right at the beginning of October, everyone got surprised by Xbox Game Pass price hikes, the most notable being the Game Pass Ultimate jumping to$29.99 a month up from the previous$19.99 a month, while a price bump following the price bump for physical consoles wasn't really a shock, the 50 % increase was definitely not expected. You know, you can look at it as a 50 % increase if you want to be negative, or you can look at it as just a$10 increase. And how much you get for$30 a month that you would pay$60 for every game, if not more, right?

12:47Like it's still a bargain, right? It all depends on your use case. there's there's so many different small things that people might want in a particular tier that is only in that tier while not caring about the rest of it because like ultimate did throw a whole bunch of new stuff in there uh there's a partnership with epic which includes fortnight crew and for people who don't play fortnight crew uh it gives you every single battle pass for every single mode exclusive skins a thousand v bucks all that kind of stuff which is ordinarily about 12 bucks a month so like if you're doing the math on that it's like oh okay like now i don't have to pay for that separately.

13:21Hooray. And if you were also into the Ubisoft Plus classics thing to play select Ubisoft titles, like that's a benefit for you. And then for cloud gamers, Ultimate is where you got to be because that is where you get the best speeds, the most immediate access. And Xbox cloud gaming is also officially out of beta. So like, you know, it's a real product now. And cloud gaming is available on all tiers. I mean, we should emphasize that too. We're just talking about a price increase for the ultimate tier. The other two tiers did not get a price increase. And there's, you know, the idea that they're going to have a free version that's supported with ads coming as well.

13:57Yeah, Tom Warren sources over at The Verge said that Microsoft's prepping that announcement for the ad supported thing. There's the internal test going on right now. And the report says that there is up to two minutes of pre-roll ads, which feels like a lot when you're sitting there for two minutes, but two minutes gets you an hour of time for your play session. And again, right now, none of this is concrete. You may get up to five hours of free play sessions a month, which isn't bad because you will have access to this catalog of select games, which kind of feels like old school renting a game, but just for an hour.

14:35Yeah, kind of like a game demo or the time like free weekends on Steam and Nintendo Switch online and stuff. But this may be better for games that don't have a traditional demo. You can just go in and play for an hour and not do the Steam thing where you buy the game, play it for an hour, decide you don't like it and refund it, which is terrible for everyone. Yeah, that's not good for anybody. I try to look at this and say, I know none of us like price increases. Every time a price increases, we're going to have a negative reaction. And that's perfectly normal and honest and natural as human beings.

15:10if they were announcing this now, and I do wish, well, not wish, I don't care, but I do feel like it would have made more sense if Microsoft would have announced an ad supported free version along with the price increase, right? In other words, take away something, the cheaper top tier and increase the price, but give me something, a free tier at the bottom. And maybe that's why they leaked this out because they're not ready to do it, but they wanted to make that part of the conversation, which they have successfully done, I still think$30 is a pretty good value for what you get. And I know you don't want everything that's in that$30, right?

15:49So what you have to do is look at it and say, is there enough in here that I do want that it's worth it? And I was surprised at Microsoft handling the announcement as they did, because when Sony restructured PlayStation Plus, nobody liked that. It was very poorly done. It was an abrupt announcement, taking away things from certain tiers and the huge price increase for the top tier for their thing. And it's like, you knew this was coming. And you did it at a time when everybody's already mad about every dollar they're losing on gaming. They really could handle it better. And I like your take about, yeah, throw in the ad-supported thing as soon as possible to soften that blow.

16:29Do you get enough? I know you're not interested in everything that's in that top tier. Do you get enough out of it? Because you can now do cloud on all the tiers. They didn't take away things from the other tiers and they didn't raise the price of the lower tiers. Is a lower tier better for you or are you still getting enough value out of that top tier? Well, I'm going to find out pretty soon because I'm not subscribed to anything right now. I don't have a PC capable of playing a lot of these games and I hadn't felt ready to test the cloud gaming yet. So now, especially going into 2026, I will be testing the cloud gaming and seeing how that feels.

17:03And I might be bold and like, maybe try one month at one range, one month at the other range just to see like, how noticeable is that quality jump and whether there's enough games to pique my interest because I'm not big on shooters. And that's kind of the big thing right now is all of the shooters. That's a really smart way to do it is to come in at the lowest level and then find where the friction points are and then say, okay, I'm not finding the games I want, or it's a little laggy. Let me try the next one up. If you get a benefit, you can stay at that. If you don't, you go right back down.

17:36Yeah. So I'll find out and definitely report back. But what I won't be reporting back on is the new Xbox handhelds. There's the Xbox ROG Ally and Ally X$5.99 or$9.99 each. And I'm going to admit it early on when we were talking about this earlier this month, that was like, hey, yeah, no, this could be cool. Like maybe$1 ,000 is worth it for your new best friend. And then, wow, did that ever land for the thud with the reviews with people really pointing out that Windows 11 just was not ready for handheld mode. You talked to Sean Hollister, so you know all about this already. Yeah, we had him on the show and he backed up what he said on The Verge was that you cannot trust it to sleep, wake, or charge unattended as well as lots of other things.

18:21Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't have the advantages over other handhelds that it should have with Microsoft having control of the operating system is what it sounds like to me. Yeah, like I know it's going to get better. I know it's going to get better. But like if the Switch launched without, you know, the UI being functional without having to do workarounds to get the basic Joy-Cons working, that would be a story for a month and a half. Yeah, and the Switch doesn't cost$999. In fact, it doesn't appear, but well, the Ally X is also more expensive up there. Right. So, yeah. Okay. That's two of the three big stories.

19:03We got the open AI stuff. We got the Microsoft stuff. There will be four if you're a patron. So hold please for the next one.

19:15October was a month filled with products. technically September 30th had the Amazon announcement, but we had already recorded our wrap up of September before that. So we're going to shuttle it in here. Amazon announced new Echo speakers that all come with the newest version of its voice assistant, the Echo.Max, the Echo Show 8, the Echo Show 11, and the Echo Studio. There's also a new Fire TV stick running Vega OS instead of Android. The next day, Google announced new Nest cams. This was on October 1st. You also got a new Nest doorbell, a new Google Home speaker, and a redesign of Google Home.

19:51But the big emphasis was on Gemini coming to Google Home, being available on all these devices, helping you process all your smart home info and recognize cats from people and all this kind of stuff. We also got some non-smart home stuff. Apple announced new hardware with its m5 silicon uh a 14 inch macbook pro an ipad pro and a vision pro uh the m5 has an improved neural processor so whatever you think of apple's software ai its hardware is very good at processing this stuff and then samsung uh finished us off with a version of the apple vision pro uh that's probably not how they'd say it but the galaxy xr which for my money if you don't care about ios versus android If you're comfortable in Android, the Galaxy XR is just as good as the Apple Vision Pro.

20:40The thread running through all of these is, of course, how they integrated or did not integrate generative assistance. Because I should say the Galaxy XR has some really good Gemini integration, something that Apple Vision Pro does not have an equivalent for. yeah uh for the echo stuff as soon as that broke i went to a bunch of my teammates who are parents with young kids who live off uh like their alexa and stuff because like they could just shout hey add this to the grocery list add this to play dates etc etc and i was like hey are like these new things are coming are you interested she's like why mine still works yeah it's a very particular market they're going after it and uh i gotta say i like they're gonna need to push their ads real hard to get to the moms and dads and busy people who talk to their speakers all of the time.

21:27So I don't take review units myself, although I'm not opposed to them. But we did use the company to purchase a Galaxy XR, one of the Nest Cams and an Echo Studio. The Echo Studio I'll start with definitely looks neat, but it's round. So it's harder to fit in places than the old cylinder version. Oh, I hadn't thought of that. The music is improved. It's not improved enough to replace my main way of listening to music in the living room, which is a Vizio 5.1 surround sound. But maybe that's an unfair competition. I thought it might be though. I thought like, maybe this will work. Maybe this will be so good that it'll be like, you know what?

22:11I'm listening on the Echo Studio. I don't think I will be. Also, I got the improved Amazon voice assistant, which has not propagated to my other echoes. Supposedly it's supposed to, maybe there's something I still need to do. But when I talk to my other echoes, I get old Amazon voice assistant. I only get the new one on the new one. And the few times I've tried to be really like, I don't have to think about how to say what I'm saying, just say it, it has not understood me. I've had to go back and do the old way of like formulate it this way and then Echo knows what you're talking about. So I've only had it for a couple of days, But I am not blown away with the assistant on the Echo Studio.

22:51And your mileage may vary on the form factor. Of course. Yeah. Well, once you said that, I'm thinking like I had to find room for my PS5 because that thing's a beast. Yeah. I also have some first gen Nest Cams and we added this new Nest Cam to the mix. I definitely see a video improvement. but if you don't need a new nest cam, if you've got cams, you're fine. Don't, don't go splash out on this. You don't need to replace them. Uh, you do. I did get, um, with the galaxy XR, I got a free year of the nest subscription because the galaxy XR, I'll get to that. They gave you like $1 ,400 worth of free subscriptions to stuff.

23:31Uh, I don't find that terribly useful except for the CVR. I can go back and see what Seven the Dog was doing when I was at home, right? Which is not worth paying for, but it's kind of cute. I recognized a person has not yet figured out who's who or anything like that. So I'm not really particularly impressed by it yet. But again, I've only had it for a month. So we'll see. It doesn't recognize you yet? Nope, not yet. Again, baby, I tend to approach these things the way I assume most people would, which is I will set them up and then use them. And if I'm supposed to research and find something to make it do a thing, most people are probably not going to do that.

24:15So I don't do that. I just see what comes up. And so far, it has not figured out how to recognize me. The Galaxy XR is a decent headset. I talked about it a little. But yeah, you get a free year of YouTube premium, a free year of Nest or actually a free year of Google one with AI. So you're getting Gemini and the Nest storage and a bunch of cloud storage. You also get a bunch of like some YouTube TV and you get subscriptions to a few apps that are that work on the Galaxy XR and take advantage of the, you know, spatial processing and all of that. I don't know that I would consider it to be $1 ,400 worth because you may or may not want all of that stuff.

25:01But it's certainly nice that they threw in so many free subscriptions with it. And like I said, the headset's pretty good stuff. Yeah, I'm so cynical about that stuff because I hear, oh, yeah, here's a free subscription. I'm like, oh, here's a future burden. I set alarms on my phone to cancel stuff now just because I know I forget and I know they count on forgetting. And yeah, I paid for Fortnite Crew for a few months longer than I had to because I just forgot to get some. YouTube Premium I already pay for. So I just basically knocked the payments off by a year. So that was nice. I will have to remember to step my Google One subscription down because I had a very minimal subscription and this bumped it up to the one that gives me all these bells and whistles.

25:43So that's the one thing I had to make a calendar item for. Everything else either I'm fine with already had or I didn't sign up for. Like I didn't sign up for the YouTube TV stuff because I'm like, I don't need it. I don't want to have to remember to cancel it. It was only three months, not a year. So forget it. I just didn't even do it. Yeah. And I might try the new Fire TV stick in the future because that might be interesting and really help out my parents to simplify some stuff. Yeah. They have a really, really old one. So like they are looking to upgrade. So I'm like, well, if this one ends up pretty stable, maybe I'll just do that for them.

26:13The weird thing about that stick, it is the only one with the Vega OS. The Vega OS is something that Amazon created. I believe it's actually Android based. You know what? No, I don't think it is because all the apps are Android apps running in the cloud.

26:33Now, that is not a problem since all of your TV programming is coming from the cloud, right? On a stick like that. So if you don't have the internet, you can't use it anyway. However, the other day we had a little Amazon outage. and suddenly i we uh rob dunwood and i were joking like well remember when we said how often does aws go out well now now you now i want i didn't see anybody who said that they had one of these fire tv sticks that that had a problem but you would have had the internet and been unable to use the apps which would have been a weird thing the other new amazon fire devices that they launched they launched some new Fire TVs, all have the other one with Fire OS, which is Android-based.

27:22Right, right. So your mileage may vary on that as well. I keep looking to see if anybody is reporting anything weird with Vega OS. So far, so good. Most people have not. So maybe they engineered it right, even during cloud outages. Yeah, we'll find it a lot more after Christmas when more people get them. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I thought this was a typical October, like full of product announcements. Interesting to see Apple going to just doing a press release. I didn't buy any of the Apple stuff because none of the October announcements were things I want. If they do a 16 inch with an M5, my four-year-old laptop might finally get a second look.

28:03But I wasn't tempted by any of those. And it does seem like we are finally at a point where saying AI isn't what they are doing with these announcements. They They are putting in features. They are putting in things like it will you'll be able to talk in a natural language and you actually can. You'll be able to have it recognize people. And it actually does. My experience has been that the quality of those features does not match the marketing yet. Yeah, well, we're going to have to see all of this developing, which has been developing at a rapid, rapid pace, the same way that we want your rapid feedback on what you think the biggest stories of the month were.

28:42because we want to hear all your thoughts. Give us that prompt. We want to know about the prompts for getting the AI take on the stories of the month. And we want those over at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Yeah, big thanks to you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You keep us in business. If you're not a patron already, it's easy to become one and you get a bunch of cool stuff, including direct access to us all the time. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Patrons, stick around. We have one more story for you about that AWS outage and then an Azure outage right after it. The DTNS family of podcasts.

29:21Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.