We Bid a Fond Farewell to the Apple Cheesegrater - DTNS 5235

0:00Chicago, 2011. A cop is murdered. Police and prosecutors swear they have the trigger man. He swears he didn't do it. How far will each side go to prove their right? Like it's just one bombshell after another, you know, where you're like, what? The story of a PlayStation, a brain-eating amoeba, and the relentless pursuit of justice. Off-duty, out now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

0:49It 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.

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2:10This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, March 27th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context in all of it and help each other understand. Yeah. I want to understand why Apple discontinued the Mac Pro, but we're going to bid it a fond farewell oh yes we are i'm jason howell i'm tom merit let's start with what you need to know with the big story the big story like the big mac the really big one mcdonald that's what we're talking about yes apple ended the mac pro line uh confirming to nine to five mac that the tower is now discontinued with no plans for a future mac pro or mac pro hardware the machine um already been pulled from Apple's online store.

2:55Former buy page, if you go there, it now points to the general Mac homepage. So it's like they've erased it from existence at this point. You will, of course, find the Mac Studio, which was basically the next Mac Pro essentially and has been for a little while, just a whole lot smaller, along with the 24-inch iMac, the Mac Mini. You're just not going to find the Mac Pro anywhere on the Apple side, apparently. The Mac Pro launched back in 2006. I remember it fondly. Apple's most powerful successor to the Power Mac G5, which, hey, I also had that one. It was long seen as the ultimate example of a professional Mac, and it just really became a fixture.

3:36You'd see it in studios, agencies, production houses, music studios, all kinds, you name it. Definitely a large machine, if you remember. Metallic, that was one key signature of it many of them with a cheese grater design that people like to call it that and it's true you could probably grate some cheese i'm sure there are videos on youtube doing that number of pci e expansion slots so you could upgrade over time so it was very flexible the mac studio if you remember that hit the scene in march 2022 it was powered by apple's m1 max and M1 Ultra. And so that made the Intel based Mac Pro feel almost immediately outdated for many of the pro buyers.

4:20It was like immediately you're like, well, why would I do that if I could get this? Apple's latest refresh of the Mac Pro lineup was in 2023. They did include the M2 Ultra configuration in that, but it cost$7 ,000. The M2 Ultra Mac Studio with the same chip, obviously cost three thousand dollars less so that made the tower far less compelling outside of people who are really looking for specific pcie workflows and interoperability i guess and maybe maybe past um you know uh making sure that they were they were supported on their use cases that relied on past workflows versus really leaning into apple's um architecture and kind of the future of Apple's hardware designs.

5:05So yeah, I just put my extra camera up on my my good old Mac Pro sitting there without a hard drive in it. Oh, there it is. Yeah, that's it. So what year is that one? That would be a 2008-ish one. Yeah, okay. I think we might have this. It was shipped to CNET. That's how that's how i remember when we got it yes i had one at about that same time it's probably the same one actually tom because i got mine shipped to cnet as well and it's down here on the floor it's actually plugged in i haven't powered it up for a couple of years but i keep it because i have a bunch of really old like music projects stored on it and i can't bring myself to like get rid of it and move on even though i could probably figure out how to open those on i got as far as pulling the hard drive out of it and putting it in an enclosure so i can get to the stuff easier and now it's just kind of a prop for things totally i mean it's a beautiful machine you gotta give it credit for that i always really liked the design of it it didn't just look like a plastic throwaway you know uh pc or something no definitely like it was meant to survive that's very apple right yeah I do think it has probably outlived its form factor purpose.

6:25You don't see a lot of people buying a desktop that aren't going to do gaming. Even people doing video editing are often doing laptops now. And I think Apple recognizes that. They have the studio for somebody who really wants a more powerful desktop format. Granted, it's not modular. But I think Apple is just saying, you know, we don't have enough people who want a modular Mac to make this worth continuing. which really is kind of a bummer for anybody who does want a modular Mac out there. I wonder if they come up with a new form factor in the future that's purpose-built around new requirements.

7:02I wouldn't be shocked. I'd call it a 32 % chance, though. Yeah, I mean, so when it comes to Mac, I mean, the general direction really seems like limiting the ability to do those modular kind of use cases, right? PC, I wouldn't say that's necessarily the case. PC is still kind of driven largely on this idea that you can get in there if you know what you're doing and really tweak it, right? Right. I mean, there's also framework laptops and things like that, but those are fairly niche. They have a posse, don't get me wrong, but it's not like they're massively popular. and Apple wants to be massively popular.

7:38They're also doing things with the M series of chips that benefit from having on-die memory access and all of that. So that is something that is less in the modular side of things. So yeah, it's Apple looking at a form factor and every company should do this. Kill your darlings, right? If something is like, it's time has come, uh it's time has come i'm very sad to see that the mac pro's time has come but that you know to we we all must go at some point right yeah that's true even even mac mac pro you thought it was going to be around forever and actually the hardware might actually be around forever because it is made of of metal oh yeah no i truly don't know what to do with mine i guess you could responsibly recycle it uh that's really all that i think you could do with it at this point except for the more recent ones you could probably resell those to somebody if you aren't using it uh well we don't uh recycle our supporters uh we appreciate them and we will never uh deprecate you uh big thanks to everybody who supports us in all the various ways out there and a special thanks today to jim hart reed fishler and larry bailey we appreciate that we do

8:59This 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 sack. That's technology at Capital One. Chicago, 2011. A cop is murdered. Police and prosecutors swear they have the trigger man. He swears he didn't do it.

9:38How far will each side go to prove they're right? Like it's just one bombshell after another. You know, you're like, what? The story of a PlayStation, a brain-eating amoeba, and the relentless pursuit of justice. Off duty, out now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Adam Grant, host of Ted's podcast, Rethinking with Adam Grant. Let me share with you why smart finance leaders turn to Bill. They know that clarity isn't just helpful, it's strategic. As the intelligent finance platform, Bill uses AI to automate the busy work for nearly half a million businesses so they can focus on intentional growth.

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11:49All right, there's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. Yeah, thanks to me underscore gentleman in the subreddit. New face in the subreddit there. Thanks for linking us to this story. Sony is raising the prices on all PlayStation 5 models again. Again. Yeah, they already did it within the last year. Now they're doing it again. And as you might expect, pressures in the global economic landscape are to blame, along with the rise in memory chip costs. But I guess that is one of the pressures in the global economic landscape. Yep, yep, that's one of many. The PS5 Digital Edition and Disc Edition go up by$100 each from$600 and$650 to$700 and$750.

12:29No, sorry, sorry. I wrote that down wrong. It's$550 to$600 for the digital. Oh, they go up$100 each to$600 and$650 from$500 to$550. No, that's my fault. You wrote it right. While the PS5 Pro jumps$150 to$900 in the U.S. starting April 2nd, 2026. Piers Harding-Rolls at Ampere Analysis told CNBC that higher memory costs made these hikes inevitable. So they really are pointing at memory for the most part. And said they would not be surprised if Microsoft and Nintendo follow with their own price increases. And we know Nintendo is doing it. Though neither company has announced any price changes on the consoles yet.

13:10Yeah, well, you just yesterday, right, you and Jen talked about Nintendo's decision to increase the price of Switch 2 game cartridges. So we're starting to see this kind of industry-wide, these little breadcrumbs that are saying, you know, the price of everything. We knew, we had a good hunch, had a good feeling that it would happen eventually and that it wouldn't be immediate necessarily. And now we're kind of reaching that eventually mark. And these clues pointing to, yeah, you know, maybe now's the time to buy if you're actually on the fence. Yeah, well, by April 2nd, if you want to get a Sony PlayStation on the cheap.

13:46I think it's worth pointing out that price is not entirely determined by cost. It's also determined by demand. Sony has higher demand for the PlayStation. So they probably feel like they can get away with the price rise and that people will understand that memory price is increased and they keep their margin where it is. Microsoft might decide to just eat the cost and continue to make it even more of a loss leader. because they know the demand for the Xbox series is not where they want it to be. So it's a little bit of throwing the gauntlet down of like, we expect them to raise their price soon too, because Sony would love it if Microsoft raised their price, because then everyone will get mad at Microsoft and Sony instead of just Sony.

14:30And Sony would love it if Microsoft did not raise their price, because then Microsoft is having to eat more of a loss. And that's good for Sony too, at least in this particular sector. Okay, and it wouldn't be good for Nintendo, too, because they've got a new console. And raising the price on a new console when you're trying to maximize. Yeah, there's less of an overlap with Nintendo and Sony than there is with Xbox. Certainly not good for Nintendo either, you're right. Yeah. Well, Anthropic has acknowledged it is testing a new Frontier model called Claude Mythos. Ooh, nice name. with a small group of early access users after a configuration error exposed close to 3 ,000 unpublished assets and documents in a publicly accessible database or data cache that was out there on the web.

15:18And Fortune and some outside security researchers actually discovered that cache. Fortune notified Anthropic of its existence. It was promptly removed from public access. But by that point, you know, Fortune already knew about mythos, right? There was a document in there that talked all about it. Anthropic says that human error led to the data leak and that a draft blog post detailing mythos represents early drafts of its official announcement. Anthropic says that the new model, which is also internally referred to as capybara, represents, quote, a step change in performance. And of course, they're saying what we are used to hearing with all of these new models, which is it's the, quote, most capable we've built to date.

16:01of course it is it had a little weird if it was like it's actually less capable than the last it's not impressive at all but yet we want to release it anyways the draft announcement also says that the new model is capable of enabling large-scale ai-driven security exploits and so that's part of the reason why they're limiting the release to early access for cyber security users to help harden up the code base against such uses so anthropic basically saying it's so powerful it could do all these really bad things so let's not release it to everyone until i don't know we have a handle on the bad things yeah this is probably less of a story than it looks like like it's a story because we got a peek at mythos before people are ready and it's very powerful i'm not shocked that anthropics next model is more powerful than the last one i'm certainly not shocked that a new model needs to have new security protocols i think that's true of every model as well.

16:58And so we don't really know anything until this actually gets out about how much better it is. But I don't know, intriguing. And everybody loves getting a sneak peek. Yeah. And I mean, when you look at the levels of Claude models, right, you've got Haiku, you've got Sonnet. We're used to looking at Opus and saying, oh, well, it's Opus. That's the most powerful. And what this is basically detailing is that there is a step beyond Opus. This isn't the next Opus. This is the higher version beyond what Opus is. So it is kind of a new tier if I'm understanding what I'm reading here. That makes it a little bit more important than just this is the next version of Opus and it's a little bit more powerful.

17:39um it's you know i i'm very curious to play around with it i've been playing a lot with claude and relying on claude for a lot of my uh use cases over the past i'd say four or five months now and a lot of people are coming over to anthropic now uh because of all the the dod drama you know as one thing my wife is even asking me she was like so have you heard of claude oh dear i was like oh yes dear i have heard of claude and i'm using it she's like i've heard it's really good i'm like yeah you should i'll show you yeah no and it is really good so that helps me understand this thank you jason uh because because this this could seem like okay but what is it and and totally and putting it in context of like this isn't just a point upgrade this is a big step upgrade uh it makes it even more interesting yes uh here are a couple of related stories on ai interoperability uh so so cross-platform interoperability something we have not really seen a lot of starting with Google, which is rolling out two Gemini features that will let you bring over memory from rival LLMs.

18:42One option has Gemini generate a prompt that you paste into the competing bot to have it summarize what it knows about you and your preferences. Then you can drop that in Gemini and say, make this a starter profile. That's a cool way of doing it. It's not something you couldn't have figured out on yourself, but kind of giving you some guidelines for it. Another option lets you import your full chat history from the competing LLM so that you can keep referencing old conversations after the move. Now, that one's much more useful. Apple is planning to let Siri users request third-party assistance in iOS 27 as it expands beyond ChatGPT, at least according to the sources talking to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

19:23But he's usually pretty right on this stuff. The upgrade will be part of Siri's broad redesign and should allow users to choose whichever service they prefer, with that choice being made inside a new extensions setting. I imagine we'll find out about that at WWDC, since Apple is calling that their AI-related announcements. But very forward-looking of Apple to say, like, let's get ahead of the browser choice lawsuit and just let you choose your assistant from the get-go with Siri. That's interesting. So totally. And I mean, as more and more people use these different models, they kind of find, I know this has been the case for me, I kind of find why I use certain models for certain things.

20:03I find my preferences, you know, I used to use ChatGPT a lot for certain things. Now I'm using Anthropics Cloud and that kind of shifts and changes. So something like this from a user choice perspective is actually super powerful. Like as a user, I have devices that lock me into a certain AI. You know, what is it? The Meta Glasses, the Meta Oakley Houston Glasses. Oh, yeah, right. They're locked into Meta AI. And I would love to be able to switch this over to Gemini. I would use them a lot more if I could do that. I guess the question ends up being, does it behoove the companies to allow for this sort of thing?

20:36Or is it just inevitable? People are going to want it. and maybe there's legal reasons potentially down the line that they wanna get ahead of, like you say. Yeah. Well, I think the proof is in the pudding of how this works, how useful it's gonna be. Are there gonna be any restrictions? Can I use literally any model or is there a list of partners? And when I do switch models, is it confusing? Does it change how Siri works? But that'll all come in June. In the meantime, I would like you to have a sticker that says Daily Tech News Show on it. Not just you, Jason. Thank you, Tom. Everybody. We have dozens of ideas for gifts for your coworkers or colleagues at dailytechnewsshow.com.

21:19And the simplest one is a sticker. If you've been like, you know, I really like DTNS. I'd like to, you know, put something up to let people know about it, maybe on a laptop or somewhere else. Pick up a sticker or even a mug or a T-shirt or a new desktop pad with our DTNS logos on them. They're great gifts. Great way to support the show. DailyTechNewsShow.com slash store.

22:07Enterprises, Vanta is your AI-powered hub for compliance and risk, bringing together data from across your businesses and automating workflows so you can prove trust at any moment. Vanta scales with you at every stage. That's why top companies from startups like Cursor to enterprises like Snowflake choose Vanta. Do security and compliance right. Get started today at vanta.com slash TED Audio. Chicago, 2011. A cop is murdered. Police and prosecutors swear they have the trigger man. He swears he didn't do it. How far will each side go to prove their right? Like it's just one bombshell after another.

22:47You know, you're like, what? The story of a PlayStation, a brain-eating amoeba, and the relentless pursuit of justice. Off-duty, out now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

23:05All right, now some quick headlines that are good to know make you look really smart in the future. Yes, Motang making us smarter. Thanks for this subreddit note. Netflix raised prices in the United States for the first time since January 21st, 2025. The$8 plan goes to$9. Standard plan goes from$18 to$20. And the Ultra HD plan goes from$25 to$27 a month. Variety noted a Moffat Nathanson chart that shows Netflix makes the least money per hour viewed when you compare it to Disney, Peacock, HBO Max, and Paramount Plus. So put that another way. People use their Netflix subscription more, so Netflix feels like maybe you can get away with charging more.

23:43Heck yeah. Interesting. Tech Z, Explore noted on our subreddit, again, lots of subreddit activity, love it, that Judge Rita F. Lynn of the District Court for the Northern District of California granted Anthropic its request for an injunction prohibiting the U.S. from designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk until the full court case on the matter is concluded. Judge Lynn wrote in her decision that Anthropic seems likely to win as the classification appears arbitrary and applied as punishment for speech rather than actual risk. Yeah, so that indicates that she is likely to rule in Anthropic's favor in the main court case.

24:23Sure, yeah. Google updated Translate on iOS to add live Translate with support for any Bluetooth headphones, not just AirPods. and availability is greater too. You can find it in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Thailand, and the UK now. There you go. OpenAI is adding shareable workflow plugins and a marketplace to codex. So that's going to give developers the ability to package up and standardize their own multi-app automations and really does, in essence, bring it one step closer to a workflow platform, something similar to Cloud Code. If you're wondering how OpenAI's experiment with advertisements is going, looks like the pilot crossed the$100 million annualized revenue, so projected over the course of 12 months, in just two months.

25:13They're serving ads to free and Go users. Go is the cheapest paid plan from more than 600 advertisers, and they are now expanding those advertisement tests to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Okay. Okay. Apple told TechCrunch that in the nearly four years since it launched lockdown mode, it has not seen a single successful spyware hack on Apple devices running the feature. So a little bit of confidence for you. And Google is rebranding Google Fiber. So if you see G-Fiber, that's the Google Fiber company merged with Astound Broadband. Is it Astound? Anyway, Anyway, majority owned by Stone Peak.

25:53G-Fiber is reassuring customers that there will be no change in service with the change in name. Just a change in name. That's it. Everything else is normal. Your speed should be the same. In fact, there's fewer letters. It might even be faster. Right. Meta's oversight board warns that expanding community notes beyond the U.S. without strong safeguards could fuel, quote, significant human rights risks. they're saying this related to highly polarized conflict-ridden countries and urging meta not to end professional fact-checking partnerships in those areas how long before uh mark zuckerberg says you know i regret starting this board yes why did i do this yeah totally i gotta know i just have a feeling about that uh austria's government is the latest to look into introducing a ban on social media in austria the government has agreed to do it for children under 14 younger than 14 nationwide.

26:49Draft legislation is due by the end of June, targeting platforms with quote-unquote addictive algorithms and harmful content. So we'll see which ones they decide to throw in the bucket. This follows similar child safety moves in Australia and France and a lot of pressure elsewhere. A lot of other, yeah. Yeah, indeed. We end every episode of DCNS with some shared perspectives. Last week, Bob asked me to explain how prescriptions work with smart glasses. And Dale has some further thoughts. Yeah, Dale wrote, I really appreciated Bob's feedback and Jason's follow-up. I'm really interested in trying some AR glasses, but now that I wear cheaters, cheaters meaning reading glasses for those who are.

27:31I'm distrustful of whether or not any particular augmented reality glasses can be used without costly augments. Which focal deficiencies require inserts? Every time I hear about prescription inserts, to go with AR, XR, or VR glasses. I can't help but wonder why I can buy glasses at the dollar store, but the special inserts are so expensive, usually a hundred bucks or more, heavily impacting the value proposition. I get it that they may have customized the frame to the device, but cheaters have frames. Where's Zenni Optical to bring down the cost of these inserts? I mean, I guess the market for cheaters, which I'd never heard that term before, so I have a new one for my lexicon, but um you know the market for those is is much higher than i think these devices and i don't know it's a lot simpler too to just throw it into frames that we're super used to versus these you know large very very different technology things that this this strikes me as one of those problems that companies don't think is as big of a deal as it is and that they're going to have to somebody's going to come up with the way that's like you can use your existing contacts or glasses i guess you You can already use your existing contacts, but you can use your existing glasses.

28:42Because I think all the people who make these have contacts and they're like, what? You just use your contacts. What's the big deal? And there's a lot of weird people like me who haven't yet got comfortable sticking our fingers in our eyes. So I think there's something to this and they get away with it because yes, it's custom, but also you're paying so much for these things to begin with that another hundred dollars sometimes doesn't feel like it's that much of an addition, at least for the market that's buying them. But if they're going to get these down to mainstream acceptance, the price of the frames is going to have to come down, which means the price of the inserts and the prescription is going to have to come down too.

29:18I guess what's coming to mind for me is when you buy, I don't have them in front of me, but when you buy like earbuds, right, you end up getting this assortment of little ear fittings in there. Like maybe there's a model that isn't totally destructive to planet earth because it creates a bunch of plastic but maybe there's a model that's something similar to that like here's five of the most common different you know kind of corrections to get most people covered and then if you're really far outside of that then you have to make a change or you know you were talking about earlier wanting cross compatibility and the ability to choose your assistant yeah what if somebody like warby parker came out with like affordable uh smart glasses in your prescription and you choose the assistant.

30:02They don't have to be in that business. I mean, Google's doing their partnership with Warby Parker. But you know what I mean? So we could see some of this happening in the next year even. Yeah, yeah. Because I think even those are due by the end of the year. But yeah, Lensology is the one that comes up for me often when someone's like, how do I find a lens for these things? Check Lensology. They do make a lot of things specific too. But you are paying more for that. And it's not a small amount either. So I totally get it. Well, if you got more insight onto this story, please share it with us or any story we talk about.

30:35We love hearing from folks feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Yeah, big thanks to Dale for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron. And it's real easy. You just go to Patreon.com slash DTNS. We'll see you next time. Bye, everybody. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people. Host, producer, writer, Tom Merritt. Host, writer, Jason Howell. Co-host, Sarah Lane. Co-host, Rob Dunwood. Co-host, Jen Cutter. Producer, Anthony Lemos. Producer, Roger Chang. Editor, Hammond Chamberlain.

31:08Editor, Victor Bognat. Contributing producers, Kevin Tech, Noel Cow, and Brandon Richards. Science correspondent, Dr. Nikki Ackermans. Social media producer and moderator, Zoe Detterding. Our mods, Beatmaster, WScottis1, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Steve Guadarama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso, and J.D. Galloway. Mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen. Music provided by Martin Bell and Dan Luters. Art by Len Peralta. Acast ad support from Tatiana Matias. Patreon support from Bobby Wagner. And our guest this week, Andy Beach. And thanks to all our patrons who make this show possible.

31:49The DTNS family of podcasts. helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

32:02This 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. Reddit is where people go for real, human advice. When you advertise on Reddit, your brand shows up alongside the most trusted recommendations on the internet.

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