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Google has revealed its 2026 pixel lineup, and the boldest new idea is a ring of LEDs that tells you when someone's calling. It's called highlight because it needs a brand, and it replaced the temperature sensor. Sorry if you liked that. Because when Google asked themselves what people wanted from a $1,300 phone, the answer was apparently fewer sensors, more mood lighting. I'm Riley Murdoch. This is Tackling, and the rest of the presentation was standard fare. A new Tensor G6 chip, a camera bar that's 40% thinner, and four phones that all cost $100 more than last year's equivalent model. $900 for the Pixel 11, and up to $1,900 for the Pro Fold. Google blames the memory shortage for these price hikes, which tracks since a gig of RAM went
from under $3 to 12, which is also why the Pro dropped from 16 gigs of RAM to 12 gigs of RAM, unless you pay up for more storage. Now, that's not to say that there wasn't any genuinely cool stuff. It just had nothing to do with the phone. DeepMind's new AI model lets deaf users sign language towards the camera and have it come out as text anywhere they'd normally type. It just does ASL to English for now, but Google says this is the first time that sign language AI has shipped in a consumer product. Hey, this is super cool. Is there a way to sign that I think that's super cool? Is that Okay, jazz hands.
Okay, this is applause. I'm clapping. Yay! Now, there was some other hardware as well. The $29 Pixel Tag is a tracker that warns you every 2 weeks before its year-long battery dies instead of Apple's single farewell notification. And the Watch 5 adds breathing emergency detection, available only in select countries since the FDA hasn't reviewed it yet. Plus, monthly blood pressure and insulin resistance trends. So, the most exciting things at a phone launch were a keychain, a watch, and a genuine accessibility breakthrough. And then, a light. Uh, that apparently works for calls and Gemini for some things. You don't get a thermometer anymore, though. That's the important part.
YouTube is making it harder for creators to get paid. Starting February 2027, creators will need 8,000 watch hours in a year or 20 million shorts views in 90 days to qualify for monetization, which is up from 4,000 hours and 10 million shorts views before. Giving new meaning to the old saying, double or nothing. Existing partner program members won't be kicked out under the new thresholds, but there's a nasty new catch. You need 10 million shorts views every 90 days to keep earning shorts ad revenue. Fall below that, and you keep your long form money, but shorts pay switches off. Hopefully incentivizing people to make less shorts. YouTube says it's rewarding active creators while adding new ways to make money. 30% of regular
YouTube Premium's net revenue and 60% of Premium Lights will go into creator pools, while smaller channels can chase as yet undetailed shopping bonuses, brand deal incentives, and trend boosting payouts. Nothing says creator economy quite like making it harder for creators to make money, and then offering a nondescript pamphlet on potential other ways they might get paid. Internet feudalism in action. I hope today's bounty of content satisfies you, my lord YouTube. Don't eat my, kids. Meta has been ordered to pay $567 million after a New Mexico judge found its platforms harmed young people. What?
Guys, I really think this slap on the wrist is going to make Meta change its ways. Yeah, we got this now. The judge found Facebook and Instagram created a public nuisance, and the abatement fund comes on top of a previous $375 million jury award, bringing the case's total to 942 million bucks, about what Zuck might pay for a couple super yachts that will not respond to distress signals. The money will fund youth mental health treatment and preventative measures, while many of the changes ordered by the judge hinge on Meta implementing stronger age verification measures.
Naturally, Meta plans to appeal, but there's hope that the ruling could become a playbook for other states, spurring lawmakers to pursue stronger child safety laws. Personally, I might sue Meta just for the mental health damage caused by constantly seeing them show up in my newsfeed. These guys are becoming a real text pest. Just go away already. Shoo. Go check out our sponsor, Privacy. Everybody cares about privacy, but are you doing enough to protect yours when you're shopping? Thankfully, there's actually a product literally named Privacy, go figure, that creates a secure layer between your real card and merchants, so your banking info stays hidden. Even if a merchant gets breached, there's nothing useful to
steal. Merchant locked cards are perfect for subscriptions like Netflix or Amazon, while single-use cards are great for one-time purchases, especially when you don't trust the site. On top of all that, Privacy doesn't sell customer data, ever. Instead, it earns revenue from merchant interchange fees. Not to mention, Privacy has a free plan with no transaction fees for domestic purchases. So, go to privacy.com/techlink today to get a $5 sign-up bonus to be used on your first purchase. That's p r i v a c y.com/techlink in case you forgot how to spell. Five quick bits, five Sailor Scouts.
Moon, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Venus. And just like them, our quick bits get a super cute spinning transformation every episode. MOON PRISM POWER! Roku has added a 24/7 channel that plays nothing but AI-generated movies and shows. Fairground AI runs sci-fi, drama, true crime, and animation from what its founder calls the world's best AI filmmakers. So, still pretty bad. And it's a scheduled stream, so you can't even pick what slop you want to consume. Right now, that's a medieval battle where a guy takes a crossbow bolt to the chest and gently floats off his horse. Absolute cinema. McDonald's knows a lot about you.
Just thought you should know. One Wired reporter requested his loyalty app data and got a 515-page dossier tracking his orders, visits, favorite locations, and spending all while using algorithms to predict his behavior. The writer even got an attrition score of zero, essentially predicting he'll never quit eating Mickey D's. It's fate. You're locked in. Now, McDonald's is pooling the loyalty data from 220 million customers across 70 markets into a global AI system designed to learn from those billions of transactions. Personally, I'm not loving it. Microsoft's unannounced Xbox Elite Series 3 controller has a tiny screen in it, according to leaked photos of a prototype. A Redditor bought the unit
for $200 on OfferUp, posted photos of it to r/controller, and the thread came down shortly after. Now, while this specific controller unit apparently wasn't functional, one cool thing is that the battery door has a repair QR code, and it shows you the screw size you need to fix it. Right to repair! The screen also appears to show local and cloud gaming mode, so we might see kind of like a Stadia connecting directly to the cloud thing to reduce latency. And right now, it's displaying a little rocket ship, which is just fun. After 26 years, someone has finally built a controller worthy of Leonard Nimoy's Seaman. French researchers have taught postmortem human brain tissue to play piano. The team kept some brain tissue from a dead
person alive in a dish and wired it to a robotic hand and a microphone, letting it associate key presses with sounds. This tissue could then hear a human play a note and cause the robot to imitate it with the learning lasting for days. So, I guess that's how long the soul stays in the body. The paper is a preprint and has yet to be peer-reviewed, but I'll give my review of it RIGHT NOW. AH! WHAT THE AH! [screaming] AND SPEAKING OF DEAD PEOPLE, GOOGLE briefly declared Sam Altman had perished after a vandalized Wikipedia page falsely listed his death. The bogus info was automatically picked up by Google's knowledge panel and put out there in
Google search results. Google says the result wasn't changed manually and has since removed the error. And I'm sure they promised to do this every single time something similar happens. Now, it's your turn to promise that you'll come back here on Friday for more tech news. Okay? Now, I have to go figure out the secret identity of that dreamy tuxedo mask. But first, I have to talk to our stupid new hire, Darian. Ah, he keeps calling me meatball head. Darian.
