Hey there, it's Friday. This week Meta announced new glasses that really blew me away, the United States government also decided it wanted to govern passwords, and LG announced the most insane TV ads yet. Welcome to the Friday Checkout.
This video was sponsored by Bellroy. Okay, for my first story of the week, Meta had arguably the most interesting hardware event of the year, and I have so many thoughts. Starting with the less ambitious launch, the new Quest 3S is now live as a cheaper headset for $299.
It has the same Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip, the same controllers and a very similar looking pass-through, though you get much cheaper Fresnel lenses. The idea is to replace the Quest 2 as the budget option, so developers can target the entire lineup with a single app and no changes. Looks nice, but I think Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, was right when he said that VR first has to be turned into something that people really want to use and only then should companies focus on making it something that people can also really easily afford. So I wish Meta was more focused on making VR better rather than making it cheaper for now, but okay.
Second, there are a bunch of small updates like transparent Ray Bans which are functionally the same but just look cool I guess and also some updates to Meta AI but obviously the biggest announcement of the event was Orion. a Prototon pair of AR glasses. These are easily the most impressive piece of hardware of the year and everything about them is generations ahead of the competition. They weigh only 96 grams despite fitting 7 cameras in the frame which give eye tracking, hand tracking and positional tracking too.
The waveguide display is made from silicon carbide instead of plastic which should reduce rainbow effects. The waveguides are made with nanostructures and they have a 70 degree field of view. That is insane. For comparison, the Snapchat Spectacles had 46 degrees, while the Hololens 2 had 52 degrees. So this kind of box-in effect should be significantly less problematic.
They claim a ridiculous all-day battery life, which I find very hard to believe, but either way, that is a stark contrast to Snapchat's 45 minutes. The device features multiple chips that were all custom designed by Meta, which means that Meta is now also a chip company. Much of the processing was placed in an external puck, which somehow connects wirelessly and also only weighs 100 grams. And perhaps most excitingly, there's also a neural band which uses EMG to accurately track hand gestures like pinches, scrolling, and selecting with your thumb. I mean, this is absolutely insane.
It is proper AR. It's in the same class of a device as a HoloLens, for example, except not only is it more advanced than that, but it's also significantly more compact. For now, Orion glasses cost 10,000 euros.
thousand bucks to make so obviously these are not up for sale plus in an interview with The Verge Zuck confirmed that Meta also spent more than five billion dollars to develop these but he also said that he was confident that these should come down to the price of a flagship phone in a few years which is when these are supposed to be sold. And I have two predictions to make I think the neural band is gonna come out way earlier than the glasses because this is an amazing type of input that could be really useful for VR and the regular Ray-Bans and plenty of other devices as well. So I think that's gonna come first and two, I bet that by the time the glasses are ready, they're gonna try to integrate the computing puck and the neural band into a single thing, so that you just have one external device on top of your glasses. So yeah, I'm not a fan of Meta as a company, but there's so much innovation in these glasses. Okay, and for my second story of the week, the US government wants to fix dumb passwords and even dumber password rules.
Specifically, there's an agency called the US National Institute for Standards and Technology, which sets technology standards for government agencies, standard organizations, and private companies. And presumably somebody at this agency had the universal experience that we all had, which is that they tried to create a new account on some service or website, and the service or website told them that their password was invalid for some absolutely dumb reason. So they put out new guidelines, which includes how organizations should accept passwords up to 64 characters. They should accept any standard character, including spaces in passwords. They shall not require mixtures of character types.
They shall not use these dumb fallback questions alike. What was the name of your first pet? And many more common sense things. I mean these questions especially are so easy to guess, especially since everyone puts their entire lives up on social media these days. And yet just a couple months ago, I think it was Delta or one of these American airlines, specifically asked me to do this on my account and to use them as basically a password reset option.
That is absolute madness. Anyway, the NIST standards have to be adopted by basically any organization that deals directly with the federal government. which is a surprisingly long list from tech companies to airlines and more.
And the hope is that once those have adopted it, they might just roll it out to all of us, because why the hell not? They just make sense. Okay, and for my third story of the week, LG just added ads to their TVs in the worst way possible.
In short, full-screen ads are coming to LG TVs screensavers. The company announced this by putting out a press release aimed at advertisers, and boldly stated that quote, it has effectively utilized idle screen time to boost brand visibility, and LG calls this a quote Significant milestone in enhancing viewer engagement. Battery Ant Flat Panel HD shows that this even happens on LG's latest flagship television, the G4, which costs at least $3,000 and it's rolling out to others as a free update tool.
That is unbelievable. Can you imagine a company selling you a $3,000 TV and then thinking like, uh, I think we need to monetize this person further. They haven't paid enough. Let's show them full screen ads.
I mean at least companies like Free Tele gave you a literal free television in exchange for spying on you and for permanently showing you ads. That is still dumb, but at least it's something unlike with LG. Okay, and as for our release monitor, we start with a bunch of new Samsung devices.
This includes the Galaxy S24 FE, which is a $650 budget flagship with the usual downgrades and interestingly enough an Exynos 2400E chip, which is a lower clocked version of the regular 2400. Beside that there's a new Tab S10 Plus and Tab S10 Ultra which have the usual upgrades and what I found the most interesting was that the Ultra now also has Samsung's excellent anti-reflective coating. Moving on, nothing released the ear open with an open design that should allow for outside noises to pass through and reviewers say it sounds really good, especially for $150. I do wonder whether the hook would be comfortable with glasses, but oh well.
And finally for the release monitor, Insta360 released the new Link 2 and Link 2C which are lower-end models. Instead of the 3-axis gimbal, the 2 only has a 2-axis gimbal and the 2C has none, but in exchange, the two models are significantly cheaper. They still have a very similar 4K image which looks nice.
Both also have magnetic mounts now and the 2C has a cute little physical privacy shutter. Sadly though both are significantly more chunky than the original. Okay as for the brief we start with OpenAI's CTO Mira Murati leaving the company after six and a half years. By now almost the whole original team except Sam is gone so that's pretty wild.
Next a teardown from iFixit revealed that the iPhone 16 has a really cool new battery adhesive that can be unstuck by applying a mild electrical current. That is so cool and the iPhone 16 got a surprisingly good 7 out of 10 repair score overall too. Great progress.
And speaking of progress, Intel says that they finally found the root cause of the issues with their 13th and 14th gen desktop chips and they've rolled out a new patch. Fingers crossed it actually works. Also this week we learned that President Biden plans to sign a new bill that has environmental permit exemptions for chip foundries, aiming to streamline and hasten projects by Intel and TSMC. So I guess that means potentially faster construction, but also potential things like a lot more water being used. And talking of the environment, Microsoft signed a deal to restart energy production at the 3 Mile Nuclear Power Plant in a bid to power its new power-hungry AI data centers, which is pretty wild.
And in more AI news, Google reportedly paid 2.7 billion dollars to buy Character AI, which is being reported as an attempt to basically bring back its founder, Noam Chazir, who's an AI genius who quit Google in frustration earlier. I guess everyone has a price and his was 2.7 billion dollars. I mean, yeah, I guess I could work for Google if they offered me that much.
Fine. And talking of prices, MKBHD launched a new wallpaper app called Panels and boy oh boy was this a weird launch. The app is free for basic use but costs an eye-watering $50 a year or $12 a month plus the app also asked for way too many permissions and it also had its entire image catalog leaked. Not exactly a great start, although the internet turned into a really bloodthirsty mob way too quick in my opinion, especially for an app that is just an entirely optional thing that you just don't have to use if you don't want to.
Anyway, and still with the pricing, Disney officially launched its password sharing crackdown effort. Users are now asked to add an extra member for $6.99 a month for the basic subscription or $9.99 for a premium one. That sucks, but apparently it's only for TVs for now, so I guess you could just take your laptop and plug that into the TV for now? And okay, I don't know about you, but here in Berlin we have just entered the rainy season, and I got the perfect solution for that. I recently got a new Bellroy backpack, which is what I've been wearing for the last few weeks, through all the good and bad weather, and like all things Bellroy, it is just awesome.
This is the Transit Backpack Plus, which is one of their bigger models, and it's a perfect alternative to my smaller Bellroy backpack that I got earlier. Obviously, it's properly water resistant including the very neat looking coated zippers and they use this awesome 100% recycled nylon fabric for the body that is also very durable. You get the great magnetic quick-release clip like you get on many other Baroi backpacks too and also super comfortable straps with a nice back support that ensures stability and airflow.
As a glasses person, I really love the soft line pocket for glasses and sunglasses. You get really nice quick access side pockets accessible from the back on both sides. You get a dedicated laptop holder so you have quick access to it from the top.
which even comfortably handled my studio mate's 16-inch gaming monster. There's a tiny little pocket that was custom designed to hide a sneaky air tag in it, and I could go on, but I think you get the point. It's super cleverly designed like all the Bellroy products that I've tried, it looks beautiful, and it's made from sustainable materials. All my other Bellroy products have also held up extremely well over time, so I'm happy to recommend them, especially since Bellroy is also a certified B Corp, meaning they work hard to be sustainable. Using my link in the description, you can get a 10% discount on all of their products, across their website, so check it out.
I hope you find something good, and I'll see you next Friday.