Welcome to the TechMean right home for Monday, April 14th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, you know that meme of Ebenezer Scrooge shouting out the window. Hey, boy, what tariff regime is it today? Sam Altman, again, implies chat GPT usage has exploded. If you're coding with AI, a big new vulnerability you need to know about, and is Apple pivoting the Vision Pro to the type of product I thought they should have done all along? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Time for another exciting episode of Tariff Roulette.

Over the weekend, the Trump administration announced that smartphones, laptops, hard drives, processors, memory chips, and machines used to make semiconductors

would receive exemptions from reciprocal tariffs, quoting Bloomberg.

This is a large hole in the U.S. tariff wall that will spare key firms like

Apple and consumers of laptops and phones from sticker shock, an analyst said. But many other

consumer intermediate and capital goods from China still face prohibitively high U.S. tariffs.

This exemption only covers one segment of the U.S. economy. President Trump on Saturday declined to

elaborate on the exemptions, but hinted at further developments on Monday. I'll give you that answer

on Monday. We'll be very specific on Monday, he told reporters on Air Force One, we're taking in a lot

of money as a country. We're taking in a lot of money, end quote. More on that in a second,

the idea of Monday, another shoe dropping.

But at this point, was it all over? But the shouting, no one had to worry anymore about $2,000 iPhones

in the fall. Maybe the real treasure was the Mishigas we made along the way. Well, even at the time, people were expressing doubts.

Here are just a few tweets and skeets and whatnot that I collected over the weekend.

A lot of the chatter focused on, okay, cool. Some of the tariffs are gone. Good for Apple and other

big folks, but what about the little guy that maybe doesn't have the clout of an Apple or Google

to get these exemptions? And what about the supply chain? Like, great that the gadget itself,

its whole self, wouldn't be tariffed, but what about all the constituent parts that go into the

gadget? If they're still tariffed, then the gadget itself will still be more expensive,

right? Here's Tony Stark on Mastodon, quote. So right now, if someone wants to import all of

the parts needed to make a computer, they have to pay a massive tariff. But if they import

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