#26 Story Points

Grab your favorite beverage, kick back, and let's explore this week's tech land—because every great journey begins with a single scroll ??

News sprint

1. Apple event aftermath. #Apple
2. Intel launched its initial set of nine competitors to Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and AMD's Strix Point laptop chips. The company asserts that its newly branded Core Ultra 200V series, previously referred to as Lunar Lake, matches or surpasses the performance of its rivals in nearly every aspect. #Intel
3. OpenAI goes through significant changes to mitigate all previous assumptions and allegations. #OpenAI
4. Canva’s price increased by 300%. Are its AI features worth it? #design
5. A new side-channel attack, known as "RAMBO" (Radiation of Air-gapped Memory Bus for Offense), exploits electromagnetic emissions from a device's RAM to exfiltrate data from air-gapped computers. #Rambo

Retrospective

Comment from LLI’s team about Canva’s pricing change:

Given their heavy investment in AI, Canva's recent price increase is understandable – they surely have impatient investors eager for profits. However, the value generated by these AI features, or at least its perception, hasn't increased proportionally. These features are interesting to explore but they still don't deliver the level of quality or precision that users expect – and that's not specific to Canva, of course, but to many other AI tools. Furthermore, it's safe to assume most paid Canva users also pay for other AI tools that might do certain things better, prompting (see what I did there?) them to reevaluate which AI tools they really need. So far, the jump seems premature and disproportionate. Whether it will have a positive or negative impact on Canva's bottom line remains to be seen, but it will certainly be a sign of who will prevail in the battle between investors seeking immediate profits vs. users seeking value for money.