You no longer have to spend more than $500 to get a video card using NVIDIA's current Ada Lovelace architecture. The company is launching the GeForce RTX 4060 series, which will start at $299. The flagship RTX 4060 Ti will start at $399 with 8GB of RAM when it arrives on May 24th — a full $200 less than the base 4070. It's pitched as a direct successor to the similarly-priced RTX 3060 Ti and 2060 Super, and aimed at gamers who are more interested in high frame rates at 1080p than a high resolution.

The RTX 4060 Ti is a noticeable step down from the 4070 with 4,352 CUDA cores (versus 5,888) and a 128-bit memory interface (versus 192-bit). It's a mixed bag versus its predecessor. While the 3060 Ti has more cores and a much wider 256-bit interface, Ada, DLSS 3 upscaling and a clock speed boost (2.3GHz base compared to the old card's 1.4GHz) theoretically help the 4060 Ti deliver more actual computing power, particularly for ray tracing and tensor-based tasks. It uses less power, too, with an "average gaming power" of 140W instead of the 3060 Ti's 197W.

NVIDIA claims a roughly 15 percent average performance increase at 1080p over the 3060 Ti in games that don't use DLSS 3's frame generation, and 70 percent for those that do. You'll unsurprisingly get high 1080p frame rates in competitive titles like Counter-Strike 2 (330FPS) and Overwatch 2 (260FPS).

We're waiting on full specs for the starter RTX 4060 as we write this, but NVIDIA boasts a 20 percent average performance increase over the 3060 without DLSS 3 frame generation, and 70 percent when it kicks in. 

You may want to wait a couple of months depending on your needs and budget. The standard $299 RTX 4060 won't arrive until July, while a $499 16GB RTX 4060 Ti will also land then for those who run into memory limits for some games and creative apps. 

If you ask NVIDIA, the RTX 4060 line is the best option for most people. All but one of the most popular GPUs on Steam are NVIDIA xx60-series boards, and 77 percent of players are using 1080p or less. The 128-bit bus may make this less practical for 1440p or 4K gaming, though. There's also the question of competition. AMD is rumored to be introducing Radeon RX 7600, 7700 and 7800 desktop GPUs in June. They may be more enticing if AMD can deliver more value for your money.

If you watch YouTube videos primarily on your TV, you may soon come across 30-second ads you won't be able to skip, just like commercials on traditional TV channels. The video platform has announced during its Brandcast event for advertisers that it's bringing 30-second unskippable ads to connected TVs. It will make the option available through YouTube Select, which is a targeting option open to eligible clients who want to reach the audiences of the website's most popular channels.

YouTube says 70 percent of Select impressions land on TVs, so the new format will give advertisers the chance to show more of their services or products in a way that allows "for richer storytelling." If you already regularly see two 15-second ads consecutively, then the new format wouldn't make that much of a difference for you — unless they show up more frequently, of course. The format is now generally available in the US and Canada and will expand worldwide later this year.

In addition to introducing longer non-skips, YouTube is also bringing "pause experiences" to connected TVs as an experiment. Pause experiences are ads that show up when you hit pause on what you're watching, similar to the promos Hulu launched in 2019. They're expected to be highly visual and even interactive, and they could include QR codes you can scan to perhaps visit the brands' website or social media channels. In the image below, for instance, you'll see an ad encouraging you to scan a QR code to get a 15 percent discount.

YouTube

In a striking move of innovation, Uber is opening a toll-free phone line (1-833-USE-UBER, so 1-833-873-8237) for scheduling immediate or future ride in English or Spanish – just like a typical taxi. It’s part of several new features, including group grocery shopping for people living at the same address and upgraded Uber Eats gifts, with the ability to attach a video message to your present.

In addition, Uber announced teen accounts with safety features. Uber says that only screened drivers who are experienced and highly rated will carry out trips with teen Uber users. Drivers will be able to opt out of such rides. Teen accounts have a series of built-in safety features, including audio recordings, RideCheck (which checks in with riders if the vehicle has stopped for a while) and the option to use a PIN to ensure young users are getting in the right car.

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

The biggest stories you might have missed

Amazon unveils the $40 Echo Pop, its newest smart speaker

Sony's next PlayStation Showcase will take place on May 24th

US adults are spending less time on Twitter since Elon Musk took over

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes fails in bid to stay out of prison during appeal

Montana's governor signs bill banning TikTok

What we bought: Are touch-activated faucets smart or silly?

Nicolas Cage is coming to ‘Dead by Daylight’

Even if it doesn’t look much like him.

Dead by Daylight

Nicolas Cage will soon appear in Dead by Daylight. The actor will bring his delightful eccentricity and Billy Mays-style beard to the multiplayer survival game. Cage says in the appropriately campy teaser, “It can shape the fabric of reality, transforming everything you may think you know.” Cage will play himself in the role of a Survivor, according to Eurogamer.

Continue reading.

Logitech joins the growing list of companies with self-repair programs

It’s teaming up with iFixit to offer support for two popular mouse models.

iFixit

Logitech and iFixit announced a new partnership today to let customers repair their devices. iFixit will supply spare parts and out-of-warranty support for “select products” while developing guides for DIY repairs on Logitech gear. The program will kick off this summer in the US with support for two popular accessories: the Logitech MX Master and MX Anywhere mouse. iFixit says you can order parts a la carte or in kits with everything you need for a specific repair, including parts and tools.

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‘The New York Times’ built a standalone app for audio journalism

News subscribers can access the app on an iOS device.

The New York Times has launched a dedicated app for its audio projects: NYT Audio. Only available on iOS for now, it includes long-form audio as well as podcasts from the Athletic and Serial Productions, under one roof. The NYT first previewed the app back in 2021. It billed the software as a way to give its journalists more freedom to experiment outside of the limits imposed by platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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Beats Studio Buds + headphones review

A little bit better in every way.

Engadget

Beats has officially debuted its latest true wireless earbuds. That premature appearance was mostly accurate: The Studio Buds + have a familiar design with loads of improvements on the inside. Those upgrades include better battery life, retooled call performance and updated noise cancellation. There’s also a new transparent design option – in a blatant bid to get this Engadget newsletter editor to buy another pair of wireless buds. With the price increase, these have crept out of the midrange and are approaching premium status. They’re less obvious value than the original model, but that’s far from a dealbreaker. Check out the full review.

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Ahead of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Sony is revealing further information about what is now being, aptly, called the Access controller for the PS5. The company first shared information about the controller back in January under the name "Project Leonardo." The announcement brings it one small, and long overdue, step closer to offering parity with Microsoft, which released the Xbox Adaptive Controller back in 2018.

The Access controller is customizable to accommodate different ranges of motion and strengths. The Analog stick caps are available in standard, dome and ball shapes. The button caps come in options including pillow and flat, alongside more unique sizes. The wide flat button cap covers two button sockets, the overhang style is equipped for people with smaller hands and the curve button cap can be pushed or pulled. The controller can be laid flat, placed at various angles, and it can be installed onto a tripod or other custom mount.

Once synced to their PS5, gamers can choose controller orientation, assign actions to each button and change sensitivity settings. Controls can also be programmed to work continuously with a single push. Basically, instead of having to hold down a button to sprint, clicking it once will work the same way. This change reduces strength and mobility needs across games. There's also room to integrate the DualSense Wireless controller, which can sync with two Access controllers to create a "single virtual controller."

"We're just getting started with our accessibility journey with PS5," Mark Friend, Sony's accessibility lead, explained in an accessibilities update video featuring employees from around the world. Other notable features mentioned include high contrast mode and traversal or navigation assist.

Sony may have timed the announcement to Global Accessibility Awareness Day, the controller itself won't be around for it. Currently, the Access controller has no available release date or price, with more details coming "in the months ahead." 

You could be going on heists, stealing cars and competing in races in Grand Theft Auto VI sometime next year. Rockstar's parent company, Take-Two, has shared its projections for the future along with its yearly earnings report. And apparently, it's gearing up to release projects that it believes will take its "company to even greater levels of success." The company expects the titles it's releasing in the fiscal year 2025 to help it achieve $8 billion in net bookings, or the net amount of products and services sold. While it didn't explicitly name those titles, the Grand Theft Auto franchise has historically been one of Take-Two's biggest moneymakers. 

As IGN notes, Take-Two's net bookings for the previous fiscal year reached $5.3 billion, and it's thanks to the company's Zynga acquisition. Before that, it was earning around $3 billion a year. An almost $3 billion jump in net bookings is massive, and unless Take-Two is making another huge acquisition, GTA is the franchise that would enable it to achieve that goal. IGN asked Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick whether we're going to see GTA 6 as soon as next year, but the executive refused to confirm or deny it. 

Part of the company's press release reads:

"Looking ahead, Fiscal 2025 is a highly anticipated year for our Company. For the last several years, we have been preparing our business to release an incredibly robust pipeline of projects that we believe will take our company to even greater levels of success. In Fiscal 2025, we expect to enter this new era by launching several groundbreaking titles that we believe will set new standards in our industry and enable us to achieve over $8 billion in Net Bookings and over $1 billion in Adjusted Unrestricted Operating Cash Flow. We expect to sustain this momentum by delivering even higher levels of operating results in Fiscal 2026 and beyond."

Take-Two's fiscal year 2025 starts in April 2024 and ends on March 31st, 2025. Even if the Rockstar doesn't release GTA 6 in 2024, it could still be coming out in the first three months the year after. Bottom line: We don't have to wait that long for the game to arrive. Since 90 videos of GTA 6 gameplay footage leaked late last year, you probably already know what you can expect. The clips, which Rockstar confirmed as legit, showed two playable protagonists, including a female character named Lucia, committing crimes in a fictionalized version of Miami.

Skynet. Ultron. HAL-9000. These are but a few artificial intelligence systems that have gone rogue in films. Whether The Creator can produce a fictional AI that would make a mark on popular culture remains to be seen, but it is another movie that pits humanity against artificial intelligence. Its official website says the movie is about Joshua, an ex-special forces agent recruited to hunt down the Creator. That's the architect behind the advanced AI that was developed to protect humanity only to detonate a nuclear warhead in Los Angeles. 

The Creator apparently also developed a weapon with the power to end all war and all of humanity, and Joshua and his team were tasked to destroy it. They then discovered that the world-ending weapon is an AI in the form of a young child. Of course, Joshua couldn't kill it and ended up taking it places and letting it do kid things like playing with other children. Is it evil or not? We don't know at this point. The trailer released by 20th Century Studios, New Regency and Entertainment One only shows the AI as a playful, inquisitive child. 

The film was directed and conceptualized by Gareth Edwards, the same director behind Rogue One. John David Washington (Tenet) plays Joshua, the protagonist grieving the disappearance of his wife played by Gemma Chan. Ken Watanabe, Sturgill Simpson and Allison Janney also play roles in the movie, which will arrive in theaters on September 29th.

In December 2022, former Twitter employee Ahmad Abouammo was found guilty of taking bribes from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in return for sensitive account information on dissidents using the website. Now, the sister of Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, who was allegedly kidnapped and tortured for operating a Twitter account critical of Saudi Arabia, has filed a lawsuit accusing Twitter of breaking the law for letting its employees reveal his identity. 

Areej al-Sadhan filed the complaint on her and her brother's behalf under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute. Her brother, Abdulrahman, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for supporting terrorism. In her complaint, Areej accuses Twitter of giving her brother's "identifying information to the government of Saudi Arabia, which blatantly violates its terms and conditions." She continued: "This puts every Twitter user at risk. As a result, Saudi Arabia kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned, and — through a sham trial — sentenced my brother to 20 years in prison, simply for criticizing Saudi repression on his Twitter account." The Saudi government has apparently denied Abdulrahman contact with his family, who has no idea whether he's still alive. 

Abouammo and another former Twitter employee named Ali Alzabarah accessed confidential Twitter user data 30,892 times in 2015, the lawsuit states. They then allegedly handed Saudi Arabia identifying information for 6,000 Twitter user accounts, including names, birthdates, device identifiers, phone numbers, IP addresses and session IP histories associated with user accounts. 

While Twitter will likely defend itself by saying that it didn't approve or wasn't aware of Saudi's espionage activities, the lawsuit also states that US intelligence agencies warned the company about Alzabarah giving Saudi Arabia user information in late 2015. Six months after the warning, Jack Dorsey, who was Twitter's CEO back then, met with Mohammed bin Salman "despite knowing full well [Saudi Arabia's] malign activities and various crimes," the complaint reads. 

As The Washington Post notes, Twitter faced two other lawsuits related to Saudi's spying activities on its website. However, one was dismissed after it failed to establish a connection between the 2015 leak of information and the hacking of the plaintiff's phone three years later, which had led to his family and friends getting imprisoned. Saudi also isn't the only country conducting espionage on the website. Twitter's former security chief turned whistleblower, Peiter Zatko, revealed last year that the company was also previously warned that it had Chinese intelligence agents on its payroll. 

Montana’s TikTok ban is now official. Governor Greg Gianforte signed a bill banning the app in the state, one month after it was passed by the state’s legislature. The law is scheduled to take effect in 2024, though legal challenges could potentially delay that timeline.

The law prohibits the company from operating in the state and requires app stores to block users in Montana from downloading TikTok. The app’s users won’t face repercussions for using the service, but app stores and TikTok face daily fines of $10,000 for violating the law.

The statewide ban, and the expected legal challenge to it, offers a preview into how future attempts to ban the app could play out around the country. In a statement, a TikTok spokesperson said the Montana law “unlawfully” violates the First Amendment rights of its users.

“Governor Gianforte has signed a bill that infringes on the First Amendment rights of the people of Montana by unlawfully banning TikTok, a platform that empowers hundreds of thousands of people across the state,” the spokesperson said. “We want to reassure Montanans that they can continue using TikTok to express themselves, earn a living, and find community as we continue working to defend the rights of our users inside and outside of Montana.”

Like other officials who have proposed bans or restrictions on TikTok, Montana lawmakers have claimed that TikTok’s ties to ByteDance, a Chinese company, puts the personal data of US users at risk. The company has long denied that it would turn over such data to the Chinese government, and has invested more than $1 billion into Project Texas to address data security concerns raised by US regulators.

But officials have reportedly said those efforts don’t go far enough, and the US government is now trying to force ByteDance to sell TikTok. If it doesn’t, TikTok will face a nationwide ban and, likely, another massive legal fight.

We’re starting to get a clearer picture of how Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has changed the platform. According to new data from Pew Research, a “majority” of US Twitter users have “taken a break” from the platform over the last year, and many of the site’s “most active” users are tweeting less often than they used to.

“Six-in-ten Americans who have used Twitter in the past 12 months say they have taken a break from the platform for a period of several weeks or more during that span,” Pew writes in a report based on a survey of 10,701 Twitter users. In a separate report, Pew also studied the “actual behavior” of 1,002 of Twitter’s “most active” users and found “a noticeable posting decline in the months after” Musk’s acquisition. “These users’ average number of tweets per month declined by around 25% following the acquisition,” Pew noted.

Together, these stats suggest that engagement on Twitter has declined since Musk’s takeover, at least among formerly active users. That’s particularly notable because, as Pew notes, the vast majority of Twitter users are lurkers, not posters. Twenty percent of Twitter users send 98 percent of all tweets.

At the same time, it seems many of Twitter’s most active users haven’t given up on the platform entirely. According to Pew, only 25 percent of “highly active” users said they are “not very or not at all likely to be on Twitter a year from now.”

Pew didn’t poll Twitter users on the reasons for their pullback from Twitter, or if Musk’s actions were directly responsible for the shift. It also doesn’t take into account how many new users may have joined Twitter in the last year. But the new numbers offer new insight into the growing ranks of Twitter quitters who may be spending more time on alternative platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky since Musk’s takeover,

Unsurprisingly, Pew also found that Musk himself has become even more of a main character on Twitter over the last year. “On average, adult Twitter users in the U.S. mentioned Musk in a tweet just once between Jan. 1 and April 13, 2022, before he announced his intention to acquire the platform,” the report says. “Since then, however, references to Musk have become much more common on the site. These users tweeted about him an average of three times between April 14 and Oct. 26, 2022 – while Musk was in the process of acquiring the platform – and an average of six times in the months after the sale was finalized.”

The reports come as Musk has named a new CEO in former NBCU executive Linda Yaccarino. Yaccarino, who is slated to start in the coming weeks, is expected to draw on her ad industry experience to try to win back advertisers, many of whom have fled following controversial policy changes by Musk. Whether she'll be able to win back the much sought-after “highly active tweeters,” though, is unclear. With Musk remaining as CTO and executive chairman, he’s likely to continue to be Twitter’s most influential — and controversial — user for the foreseeable future.

Electric cars have certainly gone mainstream over the past decade or so, with many auto manufacturers shifting at least some of their production over to battery-powered cars. But going from gas to electric in other forms of transportation hasn’t really taken off in quite the same way.

BMW is looking to change that – sort of. In collaboration with TYDE, which typically builds luxury yachts, the duo has come up with a fully-electric boat. The company used its yacht racing technology (yep, you read that right!) to build this boat. However, this is not a yacht – it’s a single-deck boat that appears to seat maybe a dozen people. The boat has a top speed of 30 knots, or about 34 miles per hour. In comparison, Jaguar’s gas–powered boat that set the speed record back in 2018 clocked 77 knots or about 88 miles per hour.

To add another oddity into the mix, Hans Zimmer (known for composing the score for The Lion King, Pirates of the Caribbean and many others), developed the onboard soundtrack for the boat. It does make you wonder if the sound system is capable of playing anything but Hans Zimmer scores, but sadly the press release doesn’t say. According to that press release, the onboard sound system supports Dolby Atmos, to deliver “superb sound quality,” though that likely won’t matter with the amount of environmental noise that typically accompanies you when on water (especially with the boat’s semi-open design).

But at the end of the day, even though it’s an odd partnership all around, it’s good news that one more vehicle isn’t burning gasoline and is instead being powered by renewable energy. Whether or not this will make an impact on the broader boating industry? That’s a whole other can of worms.