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Tech, the final frontier. These are our tri-weekly voyages into the world of innovation. Our mission, to boldly bring you the tech news, and hopefully find out whatever planet Mark Gurman is from. Microsoft has quietly deleted advice recommending 32 gigs of RAM for serious Windows 11 gamers, which is convenient considering Microsoft now sells laptops with only 8 gigs of RAM while memory prices continue to skyrocket. And they are skyrocketing hard. Windows Latest was first to notice that a Windows Learning Center document titled How to Optimize Your Gaming PC Setup, which said that 32 GB of RAM was ideal for serious players, has been removed.
Of course, Windows 11 technically only requires 4 GB of RAM to run. You're going to have a bad time, but the timing of the document's removal is suspicious as Microsoft tries to sell more budget-friendly Surface laptops that only come with 8 gigs of RAM. These laptops don't even meet Microsoft's own 16 GB memory threshold required to certify those laptops as Copilot Plus PCs. Oh no, I was going to Copilot so many things. No, now I can't Copilot anything. More like Cope-ilet. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that Microsoft will be the only ones trying to make low RAM devices look sexier as industry sources have reportedly told Digitimes that basically
all of the memory capacity is sold out across the industry throughout 2027. On the plus side for anyone with only a little bit of RAM, soon enough 8 GB PCs will be cool again, just like frugal 18th century recipes came back during the Great Depression. I can't wait for some good old-fashioned boot heel soup. Apple is asking a federal court for an injunction barring OpenAI and two former employees from using trade secrets that they allegedly stole from Apple. It's the latest escalation in the lawsuit Apple filed last month, which accuses Open AI of orchestrating a campaign to steal confidential hardware designs and manufacturing details to help build its own AI devices. Open AI then pulled the
trump card of soft boy moves, writing a long blog post about a messy breakup. The post titled Apple is getting this wrong. Leave Britney alone. The post was just drenched in main character energy. In it, Open AI calls the lawsuit careless, aggressive, and oddly personal. Then includes screenshots of the iMessage threads and email chains showing how much of a good guy Open AI has been. After they did all the bad stuff. But to be fair though, the messages show that it was actually Apple employees texting former engineer Cheng Lu for help finding these confidential files that he was accused of access. They even
low-key imply that Apple was being racist when they state that Apple's lawyers never reached out to Open AI because they emailed the wrong person after confusing two similar Asian last names. I'm sure this will end the same way all messy public breakups end with a screaming fight between Tim Apple and Scam Altman at whatever the tech equivalent of prom is. Which I guess has to be the singularity. It'll be an event. Everyone shows up. They're like, "You ready?" Samsung has announced that it's banning several popular apps from its smart TV app store after Norwegian security firm Mnemonic revealed that these apps had been hijacking users internet connections to set up something called
residential proxies. These proxies give developers the ability to funnel strangers web traffic through your home internet connection, making it look like that traffic is coming from you. One of the offending apps, a Pac-Man game, honestly not surprising, Pac-Man is a freak, had even been promoted by Samsung in the editor's choice section of the App Store. See, Mom, those weird searches weren't me, they were Pac-Man. Exactly. Apparently, proxy-laced apps aren't limited to Samsung though, as a report from IP intelligence company Spur caught apps on LG TVs doing the same thing. Now, evidently, the developers behind these free apps generate income
by renting out that residential proxy access for what providers claim are legitimate purposes, like research and journalism, or web crawlers that scrape data to train AI models. That said, Amazon and Roku both see these practices as a violation of their device and system abuse policies, and have already banned them. So, luckily, it now seems like LG and Samsung are following suit. Now, as a PSA, don't use your TV's direct internet connection. Uh plug something else into it, and if you have done that, check what apps you've installed. If you've got a Samsung TV, but uh not before you check out our sponsor,
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all the souls I have encountered in my travels, theirs was the most human. Lenovo Legion Go devices are reportedly being bricked by a recent BIOS update for the 8 APU 1 model. You know the one. With users reporting unresponsive black screens and an inability to even revert to the previous BIOS. Despite the update still being hosted on Lenovo's support servers, Legion Go subreddit moderators are warning users not to install it. But you can't moderate Riley Murdoch. I'm updating LMG's Legion Go anyway, cuz I'm about to have the fanciest paperweight in the company. Oh, yeah. This is what I want this?
Yeah. You love it. You love breaking LMG items. EA's $55 billion acquisition by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners has been finalized, making it the largest leveraged buyout in history. For those of you who don't know, an LBO is an acquisition mechanism where vampires masquerading as private equity firms fund takeovers with debt that they put on the balance sheet of the company being acquired, usually before engaging in some kind of financial exsanguination. In this case, EA is being saddled with $20 billion of debt, which according to analysts will rack up interest payments so large that EA is all but guaranteed to have to do layoffs. Well, more layoffs.
I'm sure that's fine. Uh right? It's not like private equity has already asset stripped and bankrupted a bunch of beloved '90s brands, right? So, there's So, Apple has filed a second legal challenge in its ongoing saga against the UK government's order to build a back door into its encrypted iCloud backups. You may remember the whole thing started last year when the Home Office secretly demanded access to the encrypted data of Apple users worldwide. Apple refused, pulling its advanced data protection feature from the UK entirely and taking the government to court. US lawmakers then pressured the UK into backing off, so they came up with a fresh strategy. Try to force Apple to build the same back door, but
only for non-US customers. Geez. Well, Apple won't budge. So, the fight now heads to the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which, given what I know about England, will probably be a bunch of dumb wizards or something. BMW is displaying Spider-Man Brand New Day ads on its vehicle's dashboard screens. This fun little experiment is running until August 10th in more than 70 countries and appears in the form of a little Spider-Man icon on the screen. When users tap it, a full-screen animation appears featuring Spider-Man swinging around a BMW iX3. And while the animation doesn't play automatically, a BMW senior VP had explicitly said that BMWs wouldn't show ads. But, I guess that was before uh
Peter Parker uh reset the Marvel Universe and everyone forgot about him and I guess their promises about ads showing in cars. Spoiler, sorry. And speaking of cars, Flock's license plate cameras were wrong nearly three quarters of the time in a California town. Roseville police determined that 71% of Flock's alerts for stolen or felony linked vehicles were false positive caused by misread plates. Why do we have these again? No wonder a congressional candidate in Tennessee is facing four felony vandalism charges after allegedly shooting four of these cameras. He was probably tired of being falsely flagged by Flock. He's got my vote. And you're going to get my vote, too, so long as you come back Friday for more tech news.
Let me know if you're running anywhere. I worked hard today, okay? And I deserve some shore leave. So, I'm going to grab some Romulan ale and visit Risa. It's a pleasure planet, apparently. You take it easy, baby. Is Mark Gurman there? You find out. Then I'm sold.
