Morning Brew Daily - Big Tech Picks Up Data Center Bills? & Apple Intros Low-Cost Laptop

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

Episode 793: Neal and Toby dive into the Big Tech’s pledge to foot the bill of their own power plants to power their AI aspirations, but will it actually work? Then, Apple debuts a new low-cost laptop to attract consumers and businesses looking for a more affordable option. Also, markets are up as the war in the Middle East enters its sixth day, signaling, they’re not so worried about it. Meanwhile, Neal shares his favorite numbers on the wealthy in Jackson Hole, solo Broadway adventures, and a crossing guard with a legitimate side business. Learn more about Bland AI at bland.ai/mbd Join us for trivia! https://mbdtrivianight-march2026.splashthat.com/  Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, America's new Gilded Age is in Wyoming. Then Apple just released its cheapest laptop ever. It's Thursday, March 5th. Let's ride. I think we're all in need for a feel-good story, and I think I found just the one.

So each year in Paris, a competition has held the Grand Prix de la Baguette de Tradition Francaise to determine the best classical baguette in the French capital. The winner receives 4,000 euros and the opportunity to supply bread to the French president's residence for the next year, plus immense bragging rights. The blind tasting competition was held last weekend, and the victor was Sithampari Pilai Jagathipan, a 43-year-old Sri Lankan immigrant who taught himself to bake in 2008. He is the second immigrant from Sri Lanka to win the competition in the last three years and joins other bagmakers from West Africa, Algeria, and Tunisia, who've been crowned the best

Breadmaker in Paris. Toby, I am submitting my candidacy as a judge for next year's Grand Prix. This is a serious operation. The judges grade the entries on five criteria, appearance, cooking, inner texture, smell, and taste. Aesthetics are huge when it comes to brand. You need the crunch of the outer shell to pair well with the soft inner pockets of air. It should look like a beehive, very uniform air pocket distribution. And each group of judges gets five baguettes at a time. So most of them say, if you are a rookie to the judging aspect of this, you take too big of bites, you fill up too soon.

So you have to pace yourself throughout the afternoon. Also, as soon as the winner was announced, people went to Google to check out this bakery. And someone screenshot at the Google reviews of this place, 88 reviews, 3.8 stars. So maybe take it with a grain of salt or a grain of yeast whenever you're shopping around for a baguette to try in Paris. All right, and now a word from our sponsor, Bland AI. Toby, I need some help. Hey, buddy, whatever it is, no can do.

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They're able to drive serious ROI across industries, and their 127% net revenue retention rate means people keep buying more of Bland for their business. To learn more, head to bland.aI slash MBD. That's Bland.A.I.mBD. When Trump was running for office, a core pledge of his was to cut electricity prices in half, but your bill has likely gone in the exact opposite direction. The cause is no secret. Power-hungry data centers are popping up everywhere, pulling billions of dollars.

worth of electricity off the grid, contributing to an affordability crisis that is looming over midterm elections. So, Trump told tech CEOs to meet him in his office. Yesterday, leaders from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Open AI, and others made the trip to the White House to sign the rate payer protection pledge. The promise is, you build these data centers, you pay for your own power. No more plugging into the grid and sticking regular old Americans with the bill. The companies also agreed to work on individual pricing deals with different power providers, put money into training local workers, and use their facilities to help power neighborhoods during power outages. Sounds good on paper, but many are criticizing the pledges for looking a lot like Neil at five months old, a little toothless. The federal government has limited control over the energy market since electrical grids are regulated state by state.

So outside a new federal law, it will be difficult to make this pledge stick. Neil, great photo op, but critics are saying it's more of a political move ahead of the midterms than real policy at this point. Trump was very blunt at the ceremony. He said that data center developers have, quote, developed a little bit of bad publicity and that they need some PR help, and the tide has turned extremely quickly. HeatMap did a survey of registered photos across the country last year. 44% said they would support a data center coming in near where they lived, and 42% said they would oppose it. So pretty even there.

And they repeated the survey in February a few months later. The contrast was huge. 52% were opposed and only 28% were supportive, which is a net approval of data center dropping of 24 points in the matter of a few months. So there is a huge PR crisis here. Trump was absolutely right. And data center developers have every incentive to not drive up residential home prices because they are in a race against each other and against China and against the world to build out these

data centers to fund their AI ambitions. They're pouring $750 billion into this. So whether this is a political ploy or not, they need to ensure that electricity prices don't go up because local places can stop the data center buildout. And the administration is trying to kind of split the middle between these two factors because Trump definitely wants to maintain a pro-business and innovation stance when it comes to the AI buildout, but also he is completely aware of the backlash going towards these data centers as well. His pledge was to cut energy prices. That was one of these big things that he talked about when he was entering office.

But if you look at the data, National Residential Electricity Costs rose 6% in February. It's even worse in places where data centers are extremely concentrated. New Jersey prices up 16%. Pennsylvania up 19%. And a lot of the energy market watchers are saying, we are entering the summer period right now where you need to get rates under control because demand on the grid is going to go up exponentially. So it could be record cost when it comes to summer cooling. And this is going to be extremely salient for the upcoming midterm elections because

politicians across the aisle, across different parties are targeting data centers. Democratic Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker proposed a two-year moratorium on tax incentives for data centers. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont wants a total data center moratorium. Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, has proposed legislation to regulate data centers and protect people from price hikes. AI companies are looking at this and saying, well, this is our business now. We need to build data centers. Zuck is spending over $100 billion a year on data centers. That's why some like Elon Musk are saying, with all this opposition, maybe it'd just be easier if we put these things in space. Yeah, because right now a lot of people are relying on gas turbines to power these things.

And if they can't, you know, connect to the grid like Trump is saying, don't do that. what are you supposed to do? And big tech is trying. They're literally bringing their demothballing nuclear power plants and they're trying to invest in a nuclear energy, but that obviously takes a long time to come online. They are buying these gas turbines, these natural gas powered solutions, but they are only temporary solutions. They can't be online all the time. So everyone is agreed that this is a problem. Everyone is aligned on they don't want to drive up electricity costs, but right now it does look like space might be the easiest option. All right, moving on, In a world where everything is getting more expensive, Apple just cut the price for a MacBook

nearly in half. Introducing the Neo, a $599 budget device that is $400 less than any new gen laptop Apple has sold before. This release is Apple's first real foray into the entry-level market that has long been dominated by Google Chromebooks and Windows devices that tend to pop up in classrooms and amongst first-time buyers. The reason Apple was able to cut the price so much was because the Neo is being. basically an iPhone in computer form. It runs on an A18 Pro chip, which is the same chip family

that powers the iPhone. The first time ever a smartphone processor has been put in a Mac. Using this chip gives Apple room to cut cost significantly, but it also means that the Neo specs are on par with something like an iPhone 16, with base storage of 256 gigs and 8 gigabytes of RAM. It also strips away things like touch ID and keyboard backlighting. The Neo caps off a week of rapid fire product launches from Apple that had a through line aimed at affordability. The iPhone 17E, which came out on Monday, clocks in at $599 as well. Sort of an interesting approach, Neil. While everyone in their mother is stuffing AI into every nook and cranny of their business, Apple is moving down a market. Well, even Apple needs a McValue menu now. This is like the Volkswagen Jedda of MacBooks.

And there was a raging debate yesterday online about who this particular laptop was for. It is very colorful too. It comes in citrus, silver, indigo, and blush color options reminded me of my first iMac that I got, you know, maybe 20 years ago with those particular pastel colors. So who is this for? Well, I was thinking this is maybe what Apple was thinking, is that when you show up to your dorm the first day of freshman year at college and you say, oh, and you're pulling out your laptop, you're meeting your new roommate for the first time, you pull out your MacBook Neo, and you say, oh, I got this particular color, what's yours, and maybe that is the sort of target audience, at least one slice of it that they're going after, is students. It's entry-level people who have never had a laptop

before. Yeah, and education pricing is part of their launch strategy. You get $100 discount if you are a student, so then the entry price is dropping to $499. That is a very cheap machine because you still do have a pretty powerful laptop. It's not great for video editing or, you know, deep projects that require a lot of compute, but most people are just surfing the web. Most people are just using, you know, their browser most of the time on their laptop. Like, I think we could easily do our jobs with the MacBook, Neil. We're not really in Premiere Pro or anything that takes a lot of RAM. So I think you are right that students are going to be a main target. Also, you mentioned the McValue menu. Zach Bowden on X did the math. You can acquire an entire Apple ecosystem for $1,925 now. The 17E, 599.

MacBook Neo 599 or $499 if you're a student. iPad is $3.49. Apple Watch, $249, AirPods, $1.29. Again, some people do acquire the entire ecosystem, and that is relatively cheap when you compare it to the rest of the tech world. But if you want the souped-up stuff, the souped-up MacBooks, those are going to cost you even more because this is three days of announcements. Well, Apple also released a new MacBook Air,

and they released a new 16-inch MacBook Pro. those are going up by $100 to $400 each. So we saw that memory is being squeezed right now. And we're seeing price hikes across Apple's laptop portfolio. Yes, they rolled out this McValue menu laptop. But when you look at the other parts of the portfolio, they are going up and we could see laptop prices increasing across the spectrum because of this memory shortage.

Okay, so we've kind of alluded to McValue and McDonald's a little bit in this segment. So I have one final stat that I want to share with you. Ethan Anderson on X said he plotted the most expensive McDonald's burger and the least expensive MacBook over time. And the analysis projects that the most expensive burger will be more expensive than the cheapest laptop as soon as 2081 because prices for laptops keep falling while prices for burgers keep going up. And if you extend the log scale out over a long enough time horizon, burgers are going to be more expensive than laptops. Wait, do we know the year? Yeah, 2081. 2081.

So mark your calendar. I can't wait for that particular podcast episode. Okay, moving on, here's some updates from the war in the Middle East, which is expanding as it's reached its sixth day. The conflict has encroached onto new territory, literally, after NATO defenses shot down a ballistic missile sent from Iran to Turkey. Over in the Indian Sea, a U.S. submarines sank an Iranian warship. The first time an American sub has taken down an enemy combat vessel since World War II. And a few hours ago, Iranian drones hit an airport in a region of Azerbaijan. John, this isn't just a Middle East war anymore. And yet, despite the war's widening scope,

stocks absolutely popped off yesterday, with the SMP 500 closing 1.3% higher to put it in the green over the last five days. If that's surprising to you, it's also a surprise to the CEO of Goldman Sachs, David Solomon, who said at a finance conference in Australia, I think the market reaction has been more benign given the magnitude of this than you might think. Investors brushed off fears of an impending energy crisis and focused instead on positive economic. data, which showed that the U.S. services sector grew more than expected last month, and hiring was brisk at private sector companies. Back to Solomon, who explained that markets tend to look at these geopolitical events, and unless they're transmitting through directly in ways that affect

economic growth, markets tend to react in a relatively benign way to these events. So while violence and potential economic threats abound, if they're not presenting a direct risk to the U.S. economy, then Wall Street is going to keep calm and carry on. And we saw kind of a broadening rally across multiple markets as well. We talked about South Korea yesterday and how it had the worst day in their entire history. Now their market had one of their best days ever. It serves over 12% in a single day. It was triggering circuit breakers in the green this time instead of going down the red. Bitcoin is also quietly up around to 9% over the past few days behaving more like the digital gold that a lot of people thought it would. It's still down 16% on the year though. But I do want to talk about a different

industry when we haven't really spoken about too much when it comes to the conflict in the Middle East, and that is fertilizer because this is a supply chain that also goes through the straight of Hormuz. There's three types of fertilizer, phosphates, potash, and nitrogen fertilizers. Nitrogen is probably the most at risk right now because they are made from natural gas. So when gas supply gets disrupted, nitrogen fertilizer supply follows as well. Phosphates also are at risk of disruption. Saudi Arabia supplies about 40 percent of all U.S. phosphate imports. So just another industry to have in the back of your mind as this conflict kind of unfolds.

Yeah, farmers are definitely watching that closely. One industry that we have talked about a lot that pertains to this conflict is AI, and the drama between the Pentagon, Anthropic, and Open AI just continues to escalate. There were reports out yesterday that Anthropic CEO Dario Amade has resumed discussions with the Pentagon about the way its AI is used in the U.S. military. Remember that at the last minute last Friday, open AIs Sam Altman swooped in with a deal with the Pentagon after the Pentagon, essentially blacklisted Anthropic and treated it worse than they do Chinese or Russian companies because they didn't agree on the way that A.I would, Anthropics

AI would be used in military warfare. Now, there was another report that came out. It was a memo from Dario Amadeh to his employees after that Open AI deal came. And he absolutely ripped into Sam Altman. Remember, these two guys do not like each other at all. He said that the Pentagon didn't want to work with Anthropic for not giving Trump dictator-style praise. And he called that OpenAI Pentagon deal, quote, safety theater. So he absolutely went into OpenAI. And who knows whether that will throw another wrench into the talks that appear to have resumed with the Pentagon between Pete Heggs at the Secretary of Defense and Anthropic.

All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back with Neil's numbers right after this. Cyber attackers these days don't need exploits. They'll just use your allowed tools against you. That's why Threat Locker enforces default deny at execution. This security model stops unknown software, scripts, and ransomware the moment it tries to run. They also help you enforce zero trust by blocking any unauthorized applications or behavior from ever running. From global enterprises to lean IT teams, Threat Locker delivers a practice.

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best every day. Try whoop on for size at join.wop.com slash brew daily. That's join. Dot whoop.com slash brew daily. Welcome to Neal's numbers, the segment where I share three stats in the week's news that will make you wiser than Yoda and Gandalf combined. For my first number, I want to take you to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which as the New York Times writes, is a symbol of America's new Gilded Age. A ski resort town in the shadow of the Teetons, Jackson has become a playground for the ultra-wealthy and an affordability nightmare for everyone else. Along the county with the highest wealth inequality in the United States, Teaton County's ultra-rich population has exploded since the pandemic as billionaires have flocked to sprawling Wyoming ranches. The county's top 1%

of households now of an estimated average annual income of $35 million, which is 221 times what the bottom 99% makes per the times. The average single family home price, over $7 million. That means the regular folks who bus tables at million-dollar cowboy bar, teach in the schools, or work as nurses in the hospital are being squeezed out. Many are forced to commute from Idaho across a mountain pass 45 minutes on a good weather day. Companies that rent out kayaks in the warmer months regularly employ people who live out of their cars. Maybe this stat sums up Jackson's crisis the best. According to the county's housing director, they have added 4,300 jobs in the last 10 years, but only

300 year-round residents. Yeah, Jackson is emblematic of everything that is going on right now when it comes to the ultra-rich, just expanding their wealth exponentially, kind of dating back to 2017, the tax cuts there that was a big boondoggle for the 0.001% of Americans. Wyoming, in general, too, has no state income tax, no real estate transferred tax. You only need to live there six months of year to qualify for those tax benefits. there are a lot of macro factors that are contributing to Jackson being just this perfect case study and what you were literally calling the new gilded age of America.

For my next number, you know, I can't resist a stat that ties into a broader societal trend. Well, you know how people are increasingly eating out alone and going on vacation alone? They're also going to more theater Han Solo. According to the Broadway League, almost 20% of Broadway theater tickets are now being purchased by single individuals, which is double the share from just a few years ago. Many of the same factors that are fueling solo travel and dining are at play here. More people are living alone. They're spending less time with friends and family.

They're living longer and the stigma of individual leisure activities is wearing off. Some theater people say that single ticket buyers present an enormous opportunity for the industry to grow its shrinking audience. And at least one company is taking advantage. As NPR writes, venue operator ATG Entertainment has launched a solo seats project that aims to make individual theater going less intimidating. at their inaugural event, a showing of the notebook in San Francisco, 60 people signed up for a $75 ticket that included a discounted orchestra street, a pre-show mixer with other solo cedars, and a free drink. Toby, we all want to know, would you see a Broadway show by yourself?

This I have thought about because we were having a discussion earlier yesterday. Is it different than going to a movie alone? And I do think it is different. One, because of the lighting. It's just a little bit brighter in Broadway theater than in a movie theater. so you feel more perceived. And then two, intermission. So intermission, you have to get up.

You're probably looking left and right. You're like, who are you talking to? So it's definitely a harder experience to go to Broadway Theater of Lone. But I do believe you have done this before. Yeah, I go to Broadway shows alone. Not all the time, but I have no, I'm not intimidated by it. There's no stigma for it. For me, I go to movies alone.

So I am all for this. I think it is a really big opportunity for the theater industry to grab people like me. know if I would go to this particular mixer event. I don't know if that's necessary because I'm happy to go alone. But for certain events like theater or movies, you're not talking to anybody anyway. So I don't see what the big deal is. Yeah, but the intermission. You got to make small talk with someone. Have you heard of your phone, Toby? No, no, no, we're not going on. We're flipping through the play bill. There's so many good things in there. This is like the peak of solo travel right now. So Google searches for solo travel, not just solo theater going

doubled from 2018 to 2023. So right now, this is the time to be, you know, solo meal out there in the world. All right, for my final number, snail mail is back and side hustlers are cashing in. According to the Wall Street Journal, a crossing guard in Burlington, Vermont, who sends out mailers featuring her daily observations, makes about $14,000 a month from the business. Another woman in Austin, Texas, who sends out letters and recipes to thousands of subscribers did about $45,000 in revenue in January alone. These entrepreneurs are part of of a growing group of artists who found a lucrative niche in analog mail clubs. They sent out everything from stickers to letters to art prints on all kinds of topics

to a list of subscribers who can't get enough. Christine Tyler Hill, the Crossing Guard in Vermont, began her mailer-mogel journey in 2003 when she started uploading a cloud report to social media in which she noted the seemingly mundane but charming things she'd see on her shift every morning, a dog on a walk, falling snow, etc. Once that began to gain traction, the journal writes, she decided to dip a toe in the actual business. In a video uploaded to TikTok, she announced she was selling an eight-page magazine with illustrations and anecdotes from her intersection for $8 a month. One thousand people signed up within a few

days and a snail male tycoon was born. Toby, A, are you surprised these types of male clubs are catching on? And B, if you were to start one of these, what would it be about? Oh, man, my mind immediately went to golf or running or something like that. But to go back to your earlier question, no, I'm not surprised at all. We've talked about this trend. A lot of lot how in a increasingly digital world, people are looking for physical things, physical manifestations of their interests, so not surprise at all. That was just delaying time so I could think about what I would do. I would lean into the concept of snail mail, I think, and just start documenting snails that you find around. I really literally, literally. I feel like people would actually get on board with that,

especially in a place like New York City where you have to go hunt for them. I'm probably not the right person to do this. I don't even know if there are snails in New York City, but that is what I'm where my mind went, snail mail literally delivering pictures of snails to you. Here's my idea. So my apartment sits right under the flight path of LaGuardia. So I'm watching planes go by pretty much every 40 seconds over the course of the day. I would maybe do a picture of those planes or illustrate them in some way and then make up stories about the people on them. Oh, I like that. I think that would be kind of quaint. It's just what I do in my head every day. There's a spirit coming in from Fort Lauderdale. Like, who are these people coming to New York?

and why are they there? And I thought, I'm not going to actually launch this because it's way too much work. No, it's not too much work. Also, in the, like the through line of this story is like, wow, snail mail is in, analog is in right now. But we kind of gloss over the fact that a seven-second clip posted to TikTok was the thing that blew up her business. So there is, you know, we keep talking about binaries. Like you're either all digital or you've got to go into the physical. Combine both and, you know, start a business like this.

Like you love to see people starting their entrepreneurial journeys using. the tools available to them of the day. So I don't think we should sleep on TikTok and sleep on the digital because it can still enhance the analog. Let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. If someone around you was wearing smart glasses,

would you want to know? Well, now you can thanks to a new app called Nearby Glasses, the brainchild of hobbyist Eve Jean Reno. The Android app taps into Bluetooth tech to alert you when aware of meta raybans or snap spectacles is in your midst,

potentially recording your activities. Jean-Renaudet framed the project more as a political statement than the next startup unicorn, the app's product page calls smart glasses a quote, intolerable intrusion, consent-neglecting horrible piece of tech, and he's particularly motivated by reports that meta was including facial recognition as a default feature. He said that a floodgate is now pushed open for all kinds of privacy-invasive behavior, something his nearby Glasses app wants to correct for. Toby, I don't know if this app is going to be that popular, but it does represent the brewing backlash to these sorts of always-on-recording devices.

Yeah, we're seeing in this everywhere. Literally just yesterday, a Y Combinator startup devalance with the handle B in Audible announced a device called the Spectre 1, which stops unwanted audio recordings. So in a world of always on listening devices, of course you're going to see people try to protect themselves, try to protect their privacy, whether it is, you know, with this app and dodging, weaving people wearing smart glasses, or it's this like sound dampener device. I think a growing wave of backlash and a growing wave of new devices.

devices are going to combat sort of the always-on listening and viewing devices that people don't really want to be on without their consent. Finally, in a bid to figure out why humans have been obsessed with crystals for thousands of years, scientists gave crystals to chimpanzees. Courts and other crystals have been discovered at archaeological sites suggesting that predecessors of early humans were gathering these stones as early as 700,000 years ago. They weren't being used as tools, so what were they? a study led by Juan Manuel Garcia Ruiz, a crystallographer at Donista International Physics Center in Spain, sought to find out.

They placed chimps in two yards. One held a multifaceted court crissal about a foot tall. One held a sandstone rock of similar dimensions. And wouldn't you know it, chimps repeatedly approached the crystal monolith until the alpha female snatched it off its pedestal. And after that, the crystal rarely left the troop's site. getting the crystal back required prolonged negotiations. The researchers ended up trading large amounts of bananas and a yogurt, which suggested the animals value the crystal, according to Dr. Garcia Ruiz.

Neil, a fascinating study, maybe there's something to the woo-woo energy around crystals that even monkeys are tapping into. I give you bananas and yogurt. You give me crystals? Okay, that's an interesting trade. No, Dr. Garcia-Ruiz probably just came back from a trip to Sedona, because he's got some out there ideas. In his most speculative theory, he believes that crystals, as the only Euclidean object in nature,

may have helped humans invent geometry and unlock abstract thought. Now, a lot of independent researchers looking at this study said, sure, this is very interesting. I think we can't go far enough yet to ascribe certain motivations behind why chimpanzees do love crystals, but there's no denying that they were absolutely fascinated by them. why they are, I think it's still an open question. I think we all know someone who, you know, has crystals in their bedroom or something like that,

and I think you should call them up an omen apology because clearly there's something to it if it is a primal urge to gravitate towards these things. All right, that is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Thursday. Toby, you're off to another far-flung wedding. Why are you so popular?

So Kyle is coming to fill in tomorrow. Have a great trip. And if you'd like to reach us, send an email to Morningbrewdaily at MorningBrew. or DM us on Instagram at MB Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Lute is our senior producer.

Our producer is Olivia Graham, and our associate producer is Olivia Lig. Hair and makeup is starting a male club. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. Own it all.

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