Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 06/30 – Nintendo And Amazon Fight

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

Weird beef between Nintendo and Amazon. Is Apple going to make a cheap Macbook with an iPhone chip inside? OpenAI claps back at Meta. The AI avatar startup. And for the first time in a decade, Spotify has changed up the Discover Weekly playlist. Links: Amazon Misses Out on Switch 2 Sales After Nintendo Pulled Products From US Site (Bloomberg) Kuo: Apple to release cheaper MacBook powered by iPhone processor (9to5Mac) ‘F1’ Revs To $144M Opening Weekend Around The World, Brad Pitt & Apple Original Films Records (Deadline) OpenAI Leadership Responds to Meta Offers: ‘Someone Has Broken Into Our Home’ (Wired) AI avatars are here in full force—and they’re serving some of the world’s biggest companies (Fortune) Spotify revamps its Discover Weekly playlist after 10 years (TechCrunch) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Monday, June 30th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. Weird beef between Nintendo and Amazon. Is Apple going to make a cheap MacBook with an iPhone chip inside? OpenAI claps back at Meta, the AI avatar startup. And for the first time in a decade, Spotify has changed up the Discover Weekly playlist. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. This is crazy. Still don't have a Nintendo Switch 2 yet. Well, it's gotten even harder to procure one because folks are reporting that, Nintendo has pooled all of its products from Amazon's U.S. site after noticing third-party merchants were selling games in the U.S. at prices below Nintendo's rates, quoting Bloomberg.

Enterprising sellers were buying Nintendo products in bulk in Southeast Asia and exporting them to the U.S., said the person who requested anonymity to discuss confidential information. Nintendo product listings started disappearing from Amazon's U.S. site last year, gaming news outlets reported at the time. The listings had previously appeared as sold by Amazon, which typically denotes merchandise the online retailer buys directly from brands. Some Nintendo products remained on the site, but they were listed by independent merchants who sell their goods on Amazon's sprawling online marketplace. When Nintendo released the hotly anticipated Switch 2 this month, Walmart, Target, Best Buy,

and GameStop all stock the console in their U.S. stores. Amazon is selling the Switch to in foreign markets, including Canada, Japan, and the UK, but the company's U.S. customers have been out of luck, with some taking to social media to wonder when the world's largest online retailer might have it in stock. The U.S. accounts for about two-thirds of Amazon's sales, end quote. Nintendo isn't the first major company to clash with Amazon over third-party seller practices. For years, big brands have criticized Amazon for failing to rein in unauthorized sellers and counterfeit goods. Some have even pulled their products frustrated by the lack of control over how their items are marketed and priced. In response, Amazon has tried to win by.

prominent brands, including through legal action against suspected counterfeiters. Although recently, there were signs that Nintendo may be rebuilding its U.S. relationship with Amazon. Pre-orders for Donkey Kong Bonanza are now listed as sold directly by Amazon. However, as of Friday, there was still no listing for the Switch 2, and Amazon was absent from Nintendo's official roster of U.S. retailers offering the console. Despite that, the Switch 2 is off to a strong start. Nintendo sold more than 3.5 million units within four days of launch. the fastest debut in console history.

The company is aiming to ship 15 million units by March. Ming Chi Kuo must be jealous that we call it Mark German Apple Scoop Monday, because he has several interesting rumors for us today. Quo says Apple plans a cheaper MacBook powered by the iPhone 16 Pro's A18 Pro chip and with around a 13-inch display expected to enter mass production late this year or early 2026. Quoting 9 to 5 Mac. The machine may feature colorful casing options including silver, pink, and yellow. Unfortunately, it isn't yet clear how much more affordable this model will actually be. Quo says Apple is targeting production in the 5 to 7 million unit range for 2026, which would

represent a significant portion of overall Mac laptop shipments. This suggests a pretty dynamic price point to attract such high volume of sales, while all Apple Silicon Macs to date have used, the higher-powered M-series line. An iPhone chip is certainly powerful enough to capable run a mobile Mac desktop experience. On Geekbench, the A18 Prochips single-core clocks in at around 3,500, trailing only slightly behind the M4 chip found in the Mac Mini. There's a bigger gap on multi-core, but for a lower-end machine, an average Mac user might not even notice the difference. Many essential computing tasks remain mostly single-core-bound affairs. The A18's multi-core score approximately rivals the original M1 chip from 2020,

of which many people still use to this day with adequate performance characteristics. The success of the new MacBook will revolve around price and how much cheaper it is than the air to justify the performance gap. Apple has never ventured lower than the $999 starting price of the air before, so this would be uncharted territory for customers and the company alike, end quote. Or, and this is just me speculating here, but could this be the hybrid Mac slash iPad people have been rumoring for years? A Mac with a detachable screen, that might make sense, right, to put a mobile chip in there. And given the fact that, as we said, iPadOS is becoming increasingly like MacOS, interesting, right? Quo also says, though, that he expects Apple to mass

produce a Vision Pro with an M5 chip in Q3 of this year. But more interestingly, he says a Vision Air could come two years from now in Q3 of 2027, then a Vision Pro with a new design and XR glasses in the second half of 2028. Quoting 9 to 5 Mac again. Quo believes that Apple is prepping an updated M5 Vision Pro version, which is slated to go into mass production during Q3 2025. He said other specs will remain unchanged and estimates shipments between 150,000. 50,000 to 200,000 until the end of 2025. As for the rumored Vision Air, Quo says that the cheaper sibling of the original Vision Pro is expected to enter mass production in Q3, 2027. He says it will weigh 40% less than the original Vision Pro and use plastic and a magnesium alloy rather than glass

and the current titanium alloy. Finally, it will feature a highest-end iPhone processor and fewer sensors. Quo then claims that a second-generation Vision Pro will feature a new design, a Mac class processor, and will enter mass production in the second half of 2028. He claims that it will also be cheaper and significantly lighter than the original version. But contrary to recent reports that Pegg 2026 as the possible debut year for a first gen of Apple Glasses, Quo says that Apple's first crack at a meta-ray-band smart glasses competitor is expected to enter mass production in the second quarter of 27 with an estimated 3 to 5 million units shipped. Quo also says there will be multiple frames and material options. Key features will include voice control, gesture recognition, photo and video

recording, AI-powered environmental sensing, and audio, though unclear, if built-in or AirPods dependent. Two XR smart glasses are underway. According to the report, Apple's first pair of glasses with a built-in display is expected to enter mass production in 2008 and will also feature gesture and voice control. the display will use liquid crystal on silicon and waveguide technology. Quo also notes that Apple is developing a second display-equipped model, though details on its features and launch timeline remain unclear. As for the displays accessories, Quo says that work on a cable-bound accessory for the Mac and even the iPhone has been paused due to weight challenges but could still be resumed at a later date. The product was expected to use bird bath optics for display technology and was slated to begin

mass production in Q2 of 2026, end quote. I don't know. Again, this is just me, but doesn't that sound like a bit too far down the road? Like, they need a Vision Air or a cheaper, lighter version of the Vision Pro like yesterday, in my opinion. Also in Apple News, they apparently have their first bona fide blockbuster movie. The F1 movie with Brad Pitt has opened to $144 million worldwide and $55.6 million dollars in the U.S. It was pushed on Apple Music, Podcasts, Fitness Plus, and Wallet, if you'll recall, which some Apple users weren't thrilled about. Quoting deadline. For those cynics wondering why F-1 didn't move the odometer past its already over-index, $55 million were in a 10-day holiday stretch dummies. The fantastic buzz is out there on this Brad Pitt movie, and now everyone

wants the best IMAX or PLF seats in the house, so they'll wait. No one wants to sit in the first two rows. Plus, there's plenty of times to go to the movies. While studios like Universal will tub-thump their tent poles through myriad tentacles of their entertainment vertical, Apple promotes its movies and series to those who own some of the 2.2 billion Apple products. For F1, the $3 trillion company introduced the first-of-its-kind haptic trailer for iPhone, a means of marketing that has rival studios jealous. The trailer used the Taptic engine, a component inside the handset that creates a tactile feedback. The trailer was time to key moments in the trailer from the rumble of car engines to Pitt's seat buckle.

There was a themed F1 keynote at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple's biggest annual event with a special screening and convoy between the movie's producer Jerry Breckheimer and Apple's Eddie Q, end quote. Apple retail stores got surprise visits from CEO Tim Cook and Brad Pitt plus hands-on events with the film's creative team and themed product displays. The movie also got a major promotional push across Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, and Apple Fitness Plus, which introduced high-intensity workouts inspired by the film's racing action. There was even a Fandango ticket offer inside Apple,

Apple wallet, and that was what ticked off a lot of Apple customers, you'll recall, who took to social media to wonder why their $1,000-plus phone was suddenly filled with ads for a movie. OpenAI's Mark Chen has responded to the rumors of those huge offers for meta as they try to poach OpenAI employees, saying it feels like someone has broken into our home and stolen something, and Open AI is recalibrating comp. Quoting Wired, I feel a visceral feeling right now as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something, Chen wrote, trusts that we haven't been sitting idly by. Chen promised that he was working with Sam Altman,

the CEO of OpenAI and other leaders at the company around the clock to talk to those with offers, adding, we've been more proactive than ever before, we're recalibrating comp, and we're scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent. Still, even as OpenAI leadership appears desperate to retain its staff, Chen says that he has high personal standards of fairness and wants to retain top talent with that in mind. While I'll fight to keep every one of you, I won't do so at the price of fairness to others, he wrote. The remarks come as Open AI staff grapple with an intense workload that has many staffers grinding 80 hours a week. Open AI is largely shutting down next week as the company tries to give employees time to recharge, according to multiple sources.

Executives are still planning to work, those same sources say. Meta knows we're taking this week to recharge and will take advantage of it to try and pressure you to make decisions fast and in isolation, another leader at the company wrote, according to Chen's memo. If you're feeling that pressure, don't be afraid to reach out. I and Mark are around and want to support you, end quote. A source familiar with Meta's internal efforts confirm the company is aggressively ramping up its recruitment of top AI researchers, especially targeting talent from Open AI and Google. While Anthropic is also in the mix, one insider told Wired, it's seen as less compatible culturally with Meta. They haven't necessarily increased the number of positions, but for the right

person, there's no budget limit, the source said. In the memo, Chen included supportive messages from seven other research leaders aimed at reassuring current staff. One senior team member urged colleagues to contact them if approached by META, cautioning against high pressure tactics. If they make you an exploding offer pushback, you're making one of the most important decisions of your life, they wrote. While opening eye leadership acknowledges the seriousness of META's poaching attempts, Chen expressed concern that opening eye has become too focused on flashy product cycles and short-term rivalries. A former Open AI employee echoed this saying CEO Sam Altman had long pushed for frequent headline-making launches, an approach now shifting

toward deeper work aimed at achieving artificial general intelligence. Synthesia is an artificial intelligence startup that is mainly focused on using AI to create avatars. Synthesia says it now has over 65,000 customers and serves more than 70% of the Fortune 100, with the AI avatars mainly used for training and internal communications, or, you know, if you're me, posting videos of clips of this show to social media. Quoting Fortune, the company, which now has 500 employees, has raised more than $330 million from venture capitalists, including big names like Kleiner Perkins, GV, Acel, and N EA. It's a distinctly non-Hollywood form of video success.

Enterprise customers access Synthesia's platform, where they can make videos using a single tool the same way they'd pay Microsoft for PowerPoint. The appeal is a combination of cost and scale. If you have a large multinational company, making videos and multiple languages is an expensive, time-intensive endeavor that historically would be limited to teams with substantial budgets. Also, most people absorb information more readily through video than text, and that's doubly true for the burgeoning ranks of Gen Z workers who were raised on TikTok and Instagram Reels. To communicate with these workers effectively, managers need to do so with video. Synthesia's transition to corporate video

happened slowly, and then all at once, a byproduct of speaking to thousands of potential customers who wanted something better than a PDF or PowerPoint. Today, Synthasia's Fortune 500 and Fortune Global 500 customers all use the tech in ways that are both deeply specific and personalized to their businesses, but with echoes of one another. Pharmaceutical company Merck from Darmstadt, Germany, uses Synthesia to replace time-intensive live recordings about product updates and for multilingual training. The company sees great potential for avatars to information more digestible and accessible. Florian Metz, global head of analytics and AI products portfolio at Merck tells Fortune via email. Across the world in California, service now uses the technology

for its global learning programs for the company's Sales Onboarding Academy, Pasquelle Fontenna, VP of Learning Solutions Studio says that for 20 videos, Synthasia cut production time by 50% and enabled localization with an estimated cost savings of up to $5,500. Another software company, the $360 billion German giant SAP uses Synthesia videos across its sales and marketing processes. We see Synthesia not just as a training tool, but as a communications platform, wrote Andrew Steen, VP of Business Management Office for SAP North America, end quote. Finally today, for the first time in 10 years, Spotify has updated its Discover weekly playlist, adding new genre filters for premium users, and said users streamed more than 100 billion tracks via the playlist.

Quoting TechCrunch, premium users will see new controls at the top of the playlist, which allow them to push their recommendations towards certain genres. So if you mostly listen to 80s rock, but you're starting to develop a soft spot for K-pop, you can select different genre filters to push the algorithmic curation in the right direction. This feature is intended to give users a bit more control over what kinds of new music they most want to hear from their Discover Weekly playlist. According to Spotify, users have streamed over 100 billion tracks on Discover Weekly, with 77% of Discover Weekly listens being from emerging artists.

to access the new and improved Discover Weekly Spotify Premium subscribers can navigate to the Made for You Hub, then navigate to their Discover Weekly playlist. There, if the latest Spotify version is installed, users will be able to see the new genre controls. For an app that can feel overwhelmingly dominated by algorithmic recommendations, Spotify has recently announced features geared toward giving the listener input over their listening algorithms. The queue was revamped, showing which Spotify recommendations are coming up and allowing users to choose in advance what stays on deck. Listeners can also snooze songs they're tired of, so the song won't be played for 30 days, but also won't be hidden for good, end quote. Hey, hive mind, I come to you again for some help.

Let's say I had a product and I wanted to hire influencers on, say, TikTok and Instagram to make videos to promote that product, but I don't necessarily want to just pay a flat fee. I want to pay a commission for each sale. The influencers would essentially join my affiliate program. They'd get a cut of every dollar sold. What I'm looking for is some sort of marketplace where I can present this opportunity for creators to discover it or where I can reach out to influencers to shill this product. Anyone know of the go-to marketplace to do that to reach creators and influencers? If so, let me know at brian at ridehomefund.com or hit me up at brian MCC on social. Thanks in advance.