What Tariffs Are Doing to Tech - DTNSB 4992
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See if you qualify at oracle.com slash tech headlines. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, April 7th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know, follow up on context, and man, we're doing our best to help each other understand. Today, we dive into the history of augmented reality. It's older than you think, and more from your emails. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Rob Dunwood. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story, which is tariffs.

Nintendo president Doug Bowser told The Verge that the $449.99 price of the Nintendo Switch 2 was not higher than people expected due to tariffs. A lot of people said, ah, they priced the tariffs in. He says that is not the case. He said, quote,

they were not factored into the price itself. Instead, he told The Verge that it's the bigger screen, the more powerful internal components, the redesigned controllers that raised the price. I think he didn't say this exactly, but prices in general for parts have been going up for the past few years. So that probably factored in too. And of course, there's demand. Now, Bowser didn't say that either, but when something is in high demand, people will pay more for it

and the Switch 2 is one of the most highly anticipated pieces of hardware coming this year. So all of that on its own would be enough to raise the price of the Nintendo Switch 2.

What is happening because of U.S. tariffs is the delay in U.S. pre-orders. Nintendo is going to let everybody order the Switch to April 9th, except in the U.S., where they suspended that pre-order date after announcing it, because they say they are actively assessing what the impact of U.S. tariffs might be. In other words, they're going to see if these

tariffs stick and if they do if the u.s price needs to be adjusted probably up the blanket u.s tariffs continue to have widespread effects elsewhere as well including in chip stocks i'm not going to try to run down everything that is affected but here's some of the notable ones nintendo itself had its stock price drop 10 on monday shares of tsmc tokyo electron which makes chip making equipment and nvidia supplier sk hynix

all opened Monday down 10% or so. Other chip making equipment suppliers like ASML Holdings, ASM International, they make equipment to manufacture chips and chip makers themselves, Infineon and STMicroelectronics are down 3% to 4%. NVIDIA and Intel opened down 2% to 3%. Cryptocurrency is also dropping, Bitcoin dropping 4%. Ether and Solana both dropped close to 15%.

On the other hand, Samsung says its TV business should be less affected by U.S. tariffs because it produces TVs in Mexico. And Mexico under the USMC largely escaped the blanket 10% tariffs from the U.S., not entirely, but more than a lot of other countries. And over the weekend, the U.S. president announced a conversation with Vietnam about bringing tariffs between the two countries down to zero, a problem.

possible hint that that could be where this all ends up with lots of deals being made. Although with China, things have been a little stickier and there was some saber rattling that they might raise the tariffs even more on China, which would raise prices coming from mainland China. So are the prices of your tech things going to rise? Nobody can say. Some companies will eat the cost of tariffs to keep the demand even if they can't. Some will not.

Some will have to pass along those costs. It is not simple as if the price of the tariff goes up 10%, the price of your goods going to go up 10% because there is only so much people will pay and so it will eat into profit margins as much as it will eat into the cost of goods. When it eats into profit margins, it starts to eat into jobs.

Some think the tariffs won't last long enough to have an effect. Some companies stockpiled parts ahead of the tariffs to help weather a short-term situation like that. In those cases, they might be able to just keep everything even keel if the tariffs go away soon, which again...

Again, we don't know. Predicting U.S. economic moves these days is a bad gamble. Don't try to do it because right now I don't think anybody, including the people making the decisions, know exactly what's going to happen. Rob, I know a lot of people who bought their tech ahead of time, even back during Black Friday, are feeling pretty good about that decision right now. How are you feeling about all this? I'm feeling like I was planning on pre-ordering a Nintendo Switch 2 this coming Wednesday.

And now I'm not able to. And the question for me will be, will it still be $450 when a thing comes out? Because if it goes up significantly, as you said, Tom, we don't know what's going to happen. But if the price is not right,

This may be the first time in a long time that I don't get a new console as soon as that new console is available, because I would no longer call myself a gamer, but I do play video games. It's something that I enjoy doing and I like playing on all the platforms. And Nintendo Switch is one of those like those platforms that I love to play. So I I'm really interested to see how the tariffs are going to specifically affect the Nintendo Switch, too, because I want to get one. I don't know that I want to pay 20, 30, 40 percent more for it.

Well, and people were already blanching a little bit at that $450 price and the $80 price of Mario and some other games, the $10 DLC price. And so the idea that it might cost even more would hurt sales. And so what Nintendo is probably scrambling around and what a lot of companies are scrambling around trying to do is figure out, OK,

If we eat into our profit margins, what does that mean? If we don't eat into our profit margins and raise the cost, what does that mean for sales? Because it will lower the sales. If we, you know, and they're probably game theorying out, like, if the tariffs don't last, what, you know, what do we do? And if they do last, what do we do? It's the uncertainty of all of this that I think is the most damaging for businesses today.

Because they're making decisions that they're going to have to stick with one way or the other, and they're going to be conservative, and those decisions are going to reduce expenditures and reduce economic activity.

Tom, the NAB, you know, Broadcasters Association conference is going on right now out in Las Vegas. I've got a couple of friends who are out there and one of them has already reported back saying, hey, one of the things that's weird is that no one's giving prices. In fact, some places where they may have actually had the price on their display, they're

those are being covered up with other signage that they just because they don't know what stuff is going to cost simply because what they thought going into the you know into the conference things significantly changed uh after you know one day last week when we put these tariffs on so it is really interesting to see because we don't know how these things are going to play out but at least the companies right now that are that are thinking about bringing stuff into the United States

they may have to determine that, hey, we may need to change these prices. So let's just not say anything to anybody right now. Yeah. Somebody out there is like, ah, they never say the prices at conferences. And that's kind of true. A lot of times they don't. But a lot of times they do. The fact that they have prices to display and are covering them up would be significant.

that that is something where you're like oh it's it's not because they just don't know what the price is that happens at conferences all the time when they're announcing products it's that they had a price and now they're not sure now they're not sure if they have a price and that is very that that's going to dampen pre-orders because you know when you have a price and you can say when it's ready to order you're going to get more orders and you're going to get a

a solid lead time on your orders. There's lots of advantages to doing that, and this is going to affect that. The number of effects of the uncertainty on this, I think, are incalculable. And certainly, as I said, the more damaging part of this. Maybe May comes around and we look back and go, wow, that was a tough patch to get through. But there will be long-lasting effects from this as well. There definitely will be.

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Hey, there's non-tariff news today too. Let's get to the briefs. The Cengen 8K Ultra High Definition Video Industry Collaboration Alliance announced an 8K ready competing standard to DisplayPort called GPMI or General Purpose Media Interface. The alliance is made up of more than 50 Chinese tech companies and the new standard allows one cable to supply 192 gigabits per second of image data with 480 watts of power. It can run over a

proprietary USB type B connector, a standard USB-C version, which has reportedly received a USB-IF approval, would deliver a bit less at 96 gigabits per second and 240 watts of power. That would still outperform USB 4 V2 and match HDMI 2.2. Yeah.

proprietary connector USB type B adoption I don't know how many companies they're gonna get on board for this especially with all the uncertainty about manufacturing however that USB C standard is pretty interesting and it's a lot easier to adopt

I don't know that this is going to be a DisplayPort competitor out of the gate or not, but it's certainly interesting and interesting to see Chinese tech companies getting together to push the standard. I'll be watching to see if European and other countries in Asia and the United States jump on board this as well. I don't tend to buy a lot of stuff that has HDMI ports or USB needs to plug in a lot.

So you've got a new spec. How long would it take to even get to that spec is the question that I have on this. Yeah, it will take a little while to see whether adoption is even going to happen, right? And then it takes a while to get into the supply chain.

The UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal published a ruling on Monday that Apple's dispute with the UK government over providing access to encrypted data may not be kept secret. The ruling said, we do not accept that the revelation of the bare details of the case would be damaging to the public interest or prejudicial to national security.

Now, restrictions on what Apple may say about the case still apply. So you're going to see vague statements from them. And the details of the case may still be kept secret. What they actually reveal during the arguments and all of that, that can still be under wraps. But the court ruled, and it's kind of

revealing that we're at this stage that the court had to rule this, that the fact that there is a case being held cannot be kept secret. They're like, no, I don't think you're going to have any security implications of letting people know that there is a case. Before this ruling, it was kind of like, we're going to do stuff.

We're not going to talk about it. And you can't talk about it. You can't tell people what we're doing. You can't. It was. Yeah, it was. I don't want to say I felt bad for Apple, but I do understand that Apple was in a bad spot. It's like the law is saying that we can't even respond to the stuff that they're telling us that we do, that people are going to see it, but we can't talk about it. So there's still a lot they can't talk about it, but at least they can say, yes, we are disputing this case. So that's good.

Google added a widget to mobile search that gives you a Pokeball if you search for one of its first 151 Pokemon in the Pokedex. If you log in, it will track your progress towards catching them all. You'll need to earn Master Balls to catch legendary or mythical Pokemon, which you can do by catching the rest of them. Google says searches for Pokemon card reach an all-time high in the U.S. this February.

Yeah, I don't know that this is sponsored. I think this is just Google celebrating something that their users are interested in. And having spent the past two weeks going to Pokemon centers and finding Pokemon manholes and playing Pokemon Go with my nieces, I feel like this is something a lot of people will be excited about. Tom, I've never understood why Pokemon is so popular.

But it is. And I love it, too. I don't know why I love it as much as I do. I thought, well, maybe I'm maybe I'm aged out of it. I was already I was already a young adult when it came out. But it's like, man, I just I just love this stuff. So there's there's something about it.

Anchor's Eufy brand has almost driven iRobot out of existence in the vacuum market, and it is now coming for your lawn. You know, I covered a lot of these kinds of things at CES this year. So the Eufy E15 and E18 autonomous mowers caught my eye.

They can cover 800 and 1200 square meters respectively. Charging station comes with a rain cover, although the hardware itself is IPX6 rated, so you can clean it with a hose. It doesn't need to be kept out of the rain. It's a nice little thing to put in the charger.

It connects by Wi-Fi, needs one or two mapping runs after which it can mow your lawn while you relax. Remote operations mean you can take control even if you're not there. So if it runs into a problem while you're out of the house and it's doing its autonomous thing, you can maybe help get it out of a jam. Both of these mowers are available now for $1,599 and $1,999 respectively.

Tom, we definitely saw these at CES or things similar to this. Yeah, yeah. The prices seem like they keep coming down and down and down. This is still significantly more than a regular lawnmower. Sure. But they're getting into the range. Well, OK, it's a little bit more, but I don't have to cut the grass. And if you're making the difference between the mower and paying someone to mow your lawn, even paying your children to mow your lawn, you know, it starts to make financial sense at some point.

The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Index reports that the U.S. produced 40 foundational models in 2024 compared to 15 in China and three in Europe. The U.S. also led in private AI investment at 12 times what China spent. China has the lead in publications of patents and has reached parity on quality in two leading benchmarks. 78% of organizations say they were using AI in 2024, up from 55% the year before. Yeah, this is just documenting that China keeps catching up. U.S. still in the lead, but China keeps catching up.

And they're closing the gap. U.S. is planning a hackathon to create an API for access to the Internal Revenue Services database. The idea is to make it easy to provide data to authorized third-party vendors. Palantir may get the contract to manage the API once it is done. A lot of folks are concerned, though, that it could open up sensitive data without proper safeguards. It concerns me, too. Just the name hackathon just worries me when you're talking about this stuff.

Yeah, I know what you mean, but we're always, at least I am, I am always of the people who's like, just because it's called a hackathon doesn't mean it's bad. When they're hacking voting machines, it means they're making them more secure. I understand that there's a lot of lack of trust around this sort of thing right now, but the idea itself I don't think is a bad idea.

UTELSAT announced that Germany has been funding its provision for satellite Internet access in Ukraine for the past year. There are about 1,000 UTELSAT's one-web terminals in Ukraine compared to about 50,000 for Starlink, which is being funded by Poland and the United States. UTELSAT thinks it could get that number to 5,000 to 10,000 quickly and is talking with EU Space Rise Consortium about using its forthcoming IRIS-2 satellite Constellation.

Bloomberg reports that any sphere's coding assistant cursor has reached a million users by word of mouth. Corporate customers include Spotify, Instacart, Uber and Major League Baseball, who all pay for the service.

The service suggests lines of code. That's one of the big things that people like is it'll just say, oh, you wrote that line of code? I bet this line of code would work well next, and it often does. There's also the typical chatbot that you can ask about code and generate code that way. And it supports a wide range of large language models. It has its own, but it supports Anthropic and OpenAI and others. It is praised for how easy it is to use. In fact, it has given rise to the phrase vibe-coding.

because its suggestions are so good. Some people are like, yeah, you just go with the vibes of this cursor suggestions and you know it's good. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the AI industry, OpenAI is reportedly testing a new watermark for the image generation model, which is part of the ChatGPT 4.0 model.

One million users by word of mouth. That's pretty impressive. Yeah, that's why I wanted this in the show today is like, if you haven't heard of Cursor, which I know a lot of you have, you might want to hear about Cursor because it seems to be something that's just kind of grassroots bubbling up.

And we would be remiss if we didn't mention that Microsoft has released a browser-based playable level of Quake 2 created by Copilot using the Muse family of models for creating video games. Microsoft researchers note that you're testing a model not playing a game. In other words, it's playable, but not nearly as good as a game created by humans, at least not yet. I like how they got ahead of like, we know this is bad.

don't don't don't tell us it's bad we know that but look it could actually do the thing right uh those are the essentials for today let's dive a little deeper into the ongoing stories and follow up we like to give you the context of the tech stories on this show and every once in a while we'll dig a little deeper into history for the context today tom tells us about that first augmented reality headset and its roots in ancient mythology

We're going to be hearing a lot this year about mixed reality or extended reality headsets, the ones from Meta, the Quest, Apple Vision Pro, X-Reel, a whole lot more. So I thought today might be a good opportunity to take a quick look at how far we've come. And we're going to start by going way back in history.

According to an ancient and possibly apocryphal tale, a person named Damocles once switched places with his king, Dionysius I, ruler of Syracuse in Sicily. Because Damocles kept saying like, oh, it's so great to be king. You get everything. It's so wonderful being king. Wish I would get to be king. And so...

Dionysius was like, yes, it's not all that great. Why don't we switch places? They switched places and Dionysius hung a sword above the throne held in place by a single horsehair. The idea was to give Damocles a feeling for the anxiety that a king has, like everybody is coming for me. I'm in danger at any moment. I never know when it might hit me.

Of course, I guess Damocles could have just got up from the throne. But, you know, the idea was like when you're on the throne, you feel that danger. You've probably heard of the proverbial sword of Damocles. Now, I think an argument could be made that it should be called the sword of Dionysius since he's the one that hung it there. Another questionable use of sword of Damocles was to use it as the name of the very first working augmented reality headset.

The device was actually called the Head Mounted Display, or HMD.

Ivan Sutherland was an associate professor at Harvard, and in 1968, a group of his students helped him create the first head-mounted display that rendered an image that adapted to the viewer's pose. Now, previously, there had been attempts at virtual reality, like the sensorama or telescope, but those projected a static image. It didn't pay any attention to where you were as the viewer. The HMD tracked images

the position of your head, and changed the image to compensate. Images were simple wireframe rooms. These weren't like high-res images, but it did what no other kind of display had done before it.

Sutherland students included Bob Spruill, who would go on to work at Xerox PARC and literally write the book on graphics. But in 1968, he helped Quentin Foster, Danny Cohen, and Sutherland with the HMD. And it needed a lot of people. The head-mounted display itself was attached to a mechanical arm that was suspended from the ceiling due to the weight of that whole apparatus.

Linkages to the arm helped track the position of your head and transmit coordinates to a computer that was sitting over on the other side of the room. This wasn't like the MetaQuest where it had the thing in your head. It didn't even have a phone connected to it in your pocket like an X-Reel. You had to be installed in this thing.

To use the HMD, you had to have your head securely fastened inside the device. And yeah, you could move your head, but you weren't getting up and walking around with this thing. Much like the legendary Damocles, you sat with a giant dangerous piece of metal dangling above you. And they began to joke that because it had kind of a cross-like shape like a sword, that it looked like the sword of Damocles and the name stuck.

Sutherland's other idea for calling it a different name than HMD was the stereoscopic television apparatus for individual use, which would be like stay you stay as T.A.I.U. Not catchy at all. So sort of Damocles is what you will hear people talk about even to this day.

If you hear someone say the Sword of Damocles was the first VR headset, you can quietly muse to yourself that that's not quite right. The HMD was the first augmented reality headset. But be kind. The subtle differences between virtual reality and augmented reality are often hard to delineate. 57 years later, it's still early days.

Folks, we're going to give you a good example of this in a minute, but you can join conversations in our Discord. We've got a great Discord going on. You can join it by linking your Patreon account. Just go to patreon.com slash DTNS.

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We in every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom. Today, Ryan and Warslinger share some coding thoughts in our Discord. Yeah, so I took this from a conversation in the random channel of our Discord. Ryan was saying, I took direction for Dr. Jippity, which has now become a term for ChatGPT.

And Ryan said, because this is not my area of expertise and I ask for help from others way too often for my comfort level. Warsinger chimed in and said, Dr. Jippity's pretty good at writing shell scripts, in my experience, way better than I am. And Ryan said, I've relied more on that in the last few months than I ever thought I'd feel comfortable, but I know enough about Node.js to fix errors. Same with Python. I just couldn't code my way out of a paperback.

or bag in either language. That's mostly my use case for it. How can Chad make my life a little easier? So far, it's helped complete some code sets that were first envisioned in 2010. So I think Ryan providing a good example of what these tools can do when you know enough to know whether it's giving you good code or not, but maybe you don't know enough to do it from scratch, right? It can give you that bootstrap up.

Yeah. And it's these things just keep getting better and better and better. So I say get on board. You know, they're going to help you. They're tools, they're hammers, they're drills, they're useful to you if you learn how to use them. Yeah. And if you're drilling the right thing with them and they're in the right hands of someone knows how to use the drill, that's that's the key to it. Right.

Big thanks to Ryan and Warsinger for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. The show is made possible by our patrons at patreon.com slash DTNS. Hey, I want to tell you about a new show we've got. Music News in less than five minutes. Keep up on the music world at dailymusicheadlines.com. Talk to you tomorrow, everybody. The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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