Who's Running Your Smart Home? - DTNS 5375

Tom Merritt (0:06)

Welcome to the Daily Tech News Show Big Tech Question, where we look at the tech news this week and ask, what does that mean? I'm Tom Merritt. This week, the big questions are, do you want Apple to run your smart home?

The answer won't surprise you. Are governments or corporations the biggest corporate espionage threat? And would you rather own a self-driving car or just hail one when you need it? Joining us here to draw the top tech news of the week, Len Peralta, welcome Len.

Go guards for you. First, today's tech news, though, let's get to Sarah Lane and Jason Howell.

Sarah Lane (0:43)

The iPhone duo went up for pre-order today, and a combination of reportedly limited production and high demand has already pushed shipping dates into next year. In fact, my own personal delivery is currently scheduled for January 25th. 2027, and I got up at 445 Pacific time this morning to do this.

So it goes. Meanwhile, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says Apple is planning another announcement on October 28th with a touchscreen MacBook Pro expected to be that big headliner.

Jason Howell (1:16)

Wow, I woke up at 445 a.m. too, and I'm not getting an Apple phone. I don't know what's wrong with me. Well, neither am I.

Yeah, that's true. You're going to have to wait. I'm not getting one probably ever. OpenAI updated its ChatGPT extension for Chrome, so it can now see all of your open tabs and into them. Regular ChatGPT can compare the contents that appear between them, right? While ChatGPT work can go a little further. It can do things like fill out forms and messages, organize those tabs for you, that sort of stuff. It's available on any ChatGPT plan, it works in other Chromium browsers as well, like Edge, Brave and Opera.

Sarah Lane (1:54)

Google is updating links in its AI mode and AI overviews, yet again, adding more inline links, placing key sources higher in responses, and making related articles more prominent to encourage clicks through to publishers. But Search Engine Roundtable is noting, it still doesn't share the click data that publishers need to assess whether those changes are actually working.

Jason Howell (2:18)

Yeah, they really want that click data. They keep asking.

Meta released MuseSpark Open. It is a open weight model, 816 billion parameters, 1 million token context window. It's a mixture of experts model, by the way. It handles text, images, other media natively, as you could expect, and is built with coding and agentic tasks in mind. Designed though, to run locally on Apple's M5 Ultra Max Studios. Though Engadget does say that it needs at least a terabyte of RAM to do that, so something that maxed out Max Studio could do. Definitely not going to do any of this stuff on a MacBook Air, let's say, but most people will likely use it through the API platforms where it is available now.

Sarah Lane (3:06)

Can you imagine just a few years ago, if someone was like, I need a terabyte of RAM, I'd be like, no, you don't. What are you talking about?

Like, where are we? But again, we all used to have like 60 megs of hard drive storage in our computers as well. E Ink announced the Kaleido 4, a new color e-paper display that could bring better looking pages and smoother performance to future e-readers. According to the company, it can produce more than 40,000 colors, brighter whites and 50% better contrast, plus faster refresh rates and support video up to 15, 18 frames per second.

Hanvon's M10C2 tablet is the first device to use this. So if you happen to have your hands on one, you might have thoughts on it. More availability is coming to e-readers soon.

Jason Howell (4:00)

I'd love to see that in person, see how it stacks up.

The General Conference on Weights and Measures voted on the 15th to stop adding leap seconds to coordinated universal time, which is the standard that the world's clocks are set to. Now, there have been 27 leap seconds since 1972, and they've been a source of complication, let's say, for websites and services that assume that every single minute has 60 seconds. The change is going to take effect on May 20th, 2027, and yes, over time, UTC and Earth's rotational time will eventually drift further apart, but that's an issue for another lifetime. You don't need to worry about that in your lifetime.

Sarah Lane (4:44)

Are we even going to be around?

Jason Howell (4:46)

Yeah, we're not going to be there to deal with that.

Sarah Lane (4:48)

Linux open source community KDE marked its 30th anniversary with Plasma 6.8. That's an update to its Linux desktop that improves remote access and drops native X11 sessions in favor of Wayland. Older X11 apps will still work with X Wayland. The update adds clipboard sharing between remote computers, better streaming on slower connections, integrated backups and more control over which CPU cores run specific tasks. KDE also released a documentary. You might be interested in this. It's called A Story of Free Software Underdogs. That's to celebrate its anniversary.