SED News: Apple Bets on Gemini, Google’s AI Advantage, and the Talent Arms Race

Hello, and welcome to SED News. We're back after the holidays. I'm Gregor Vand. And I'm Sean Faulconer. And this is another one of our slightly different formats of SEDaily where we take a spin through the tech headlines. We look at sort of a slightly more meaty topic in the middle, and then we tend to round out with some of our favorite highlights from Hacker News. As always, we just like to kinda catch up on what we've been up to, and, obviously, we've not actually done an SCD news in about eight weeks given the holidays. So, yeah, Sean, how was your holiday season? It was good. You know, I went back to Canada where I grew up for the first time for the holidays in fourteen years. I've been maybe purposely protecting my family from what that experience is like. They're California natives. They had the got the experience in their first Christmas holiday in for winter in Canada, but we it was very nice. You know, we had a a white holiday, so that's always fun. How about you? Yeah. Still in still in Singapore, so I hadn't accrued enough leave really to take a lot when I started a new role back in, October or something. That's just the realities of what happens when you start a role. But it was nice. Still nice to be over here. One thing that did occur, though, was I did hop back to The UK just for a week to see some family, and I purposefully picked flights that were Starlink enabled or at least I thought they were gonna be Starlink enabled, and they were. And we talked a bit about this in the last SED news. I have to say it was an absolute game changer. So, yeah, I did I think I did send you on the plane a screenshot of of the speeds, Sean. Yeah. I saw that. So, yeah, it was it was just mind blowing, like, in terms of the quality of the connection and the speeds. And the fact is what's, like, gate to gate. So you literally get on the plane and you haven't even you just sat in your seat and it's already available. That's great because I find it really frustrating a lot of times when you wanna use wifi on the plane and you have to be in the air for some reason before you can actually enable it. I don't know what the rule is, but so I was in Anaheim this past weekend for my daughter's birthday. We went to Disneyland and on the as I was in the airport at John Wayne in Orange County to fly back to San Francisco, I got a message from United saying that there would be free Wi Fi courtesy of Starlink on the flight back. Oh, nice. Okay. Yeah. So that was that was pretty cool. Yeah. So my understanding is Starlink supplies Internet to an …