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Valve has jacked up the price of the Steam Deck OLED by over 40%. Presumably because the vampires refused to leave any DDR5 in the open market. Do you guys see what I There's a ramp up. It's like vampires. But I'm Riley Murdoch. This is Techlink and the Steam Deck $512 GB model now costs $789 US with the 1 TBTE variant vaultting to $950. The microscopic sliver of good news, if you can call it that, is that the decks are back in stock and ship in three to five days. Yippee. Valve has blamed the ongoing global memory and storage shortage for the price hike, and it's already punted the upcoming Steam machine and Steam frame out of their early 2026 launch windows to a vague sometime this year, we promise. Maybe considering back in
February Valve refused to release an official price for those devices, what this means for their prospective cost is ambiguously terrifying. Rest in peace, affordable handheld gaming era. All we have now is unaffordable everything era. On the bright side though, now we know the vampires are real and we can start to fight back. I want to suck your bits. Your bits? Oh, that sounds way worse than I thought it would. Suck your Nvidia has retired the Nvidia control panel, the beloved Windows XP looking dialogue box that somehow stayed largely unchanged while every GPU it ever touched aged into a landfill.
Yesterday's game ready driver 610.47 is the first to ship without the legacy panel included, and no new features will be added to the control panel going forward. Nvidia is now doubling its efforts to funnel everyone into the Nvidia app, which has been quietly absorbing control panel features since 2024, combining them with the features of GeForce Experience. In case you haven't checked in on the new app in a while, it handles driver updates, overclocking, screen recording, and the 3D settings menu that powered everyone's beloved floating Nvidia logo. We'll miss you, little guy. Thankfully, the control panel is only mostly dead. RTX Pro cards keep the old dashboard for now. Existing installs won't be nuked unless you opt
into a clean install with the new driver. And if you're missing the old times, the ancient UI will live on as a free download from the Microsoft Store, like a haunted relic anyone can summon for $0. There's no downside. YouTube is starting to automatically slap an AI label on videos it detects as significantly photorealistic AI generated content. YouTube has technically required creators to self-disclose AI use for a while now, which has apparently worked about as well as you'd expect on a platform full of people whose job is to chase engagement. I feel the tension. The label is also moving to a harder to- miss spot above the description and directly beneath the video player on long- form videos and as an overlay on
top of shorts. Creators can dispute incorrect flags through YouTube Studio, but the disclosure becomes permanent in two cases. Content made with YouTube's own AI tools like VO or Dreamcreen and any video carrying certain metadata that already flags it as synthetic. I asked my doctor if I had synthetic metadata and he told me to stop eating the plastic wrappers on American cheese slices, which is going to be hard. He also advised me some retail therapy with our sponsor, MicroEnter. May is Apple Savings Month at MicroEnter, and these deals are so intense that we're honestly kind of worried about them. Like, they're selling an M5 MacBook Air for less than $1,000. What is going on over
there? Viewers, if you can, please check in on MicroEnter. And that includes those of you in Austin, Texas, because Austin is getting a microenter. If you go to that grand opening later this year, you can sign up for a free 128 gig flash drive when the store opens. If you don't live in Texas, but you still want a free flash drive, the Columbus MicroEnter is having a grand reopening, and they're doing the same giveaway. Sign up for that at the link below. And while you're there, sign up for MicroEnter News to keep up to date with the world of tech. I just found out this morning that the Quickbits sparkle in direct sunlight, but so does the beloved CNN host Anderson Cooper.
H lots to think about. Apple's foldable iPhone is reportedly hitting production problems according to several Waybo leaks. One claimed a manufacturing issue is keeping working parts from getting out the door, while another leak last week said the hinge keeps failing quality control under repeated opening and closing. At this rate, the only thing close to folding might be Apple's launch timeline. Um uh so Bus Patrol, the company behind the AI cameras on 40,000 plus US school buses, is reportedly planning to turn them into automatic license plate readers. According to documents obtained by 404 media, the cameras would log
every car the buses pass and feed the data to law enforcement contractors like Axon, maker of popular children's toys like tasers and police body cams. The company knows the plan will be controversial, but they figure protecting children is going to sell this because that pitch remains undefeated. I mean, when in doubt, watch tech news or the kids something will happen. Duck Go. The privacy focused search engine is seeing US app installs surge 30% as users flee Google's AI overhaul. CEO Gabriel Weineberg summed up the modern zeitgeist by crediting the uptick to Google force-feeding AI with no way to opt out. Along with diminishing search quality, pointing users to their AI free search page. Who knew the secret killer feature
of 2026 would be u put change it put it back the way it was, please. NordVPN's threat intelligence team has uncovered a wave of malware and fishing pages riding the GTA 6 hype with fake pre-orders, fake beta keys, and Android apps posing as a GTA 6 beta using real Rockstar branding to hide adwear. The catch, GTA 6 isn't out. It's not doesn't exist yet. So, don't download anything that says it does. The real Grand Theft Auto was the hopes and dreams we lost along the way. And Robin Hood has announced Agentic Trading and an Agentic credit card, letting AI agents make trades and credit card purchases on your behalf via Anthropic's model context protocol. CEO and certified AI finance bro Vlad Tenev
framed the development as democratizing finance for AI. That was my favorite thing about Robin Hood. How he'd steal from the poor and give to AI. Those poor AIs. They're not able to democratize their own finance. Well, at least the card will earn 3% cash back to make up for all the fake GTA 6 keys that your AI just bought. Just like you'll have to make it up to me if you don't come back on Friday for more tech news. Hey, if you happen to see me on the street tomorrow, please don't comment on the fact that I'm sparkling. Just keep walking. Just don't make direct eye contact. See you next time.
