I never thought the best graphics cards would become a fashion statement, much less some of the worst, but here we are. Over the weekend, a website called GPU Purse went live with a listing for a discarded Nvidia GT 730 GPU — a $20 used GPU — that had been turned into a handbag. You’ll just need to shell out $1,024 for the bag, which, according to the product page, fits a phone and comes complete with a long or short chain.
One look at the website sets off alarm bells, especially for a product that’s over $1,000, but it appears there’s some legitimacy behind it. Financial Times reports that the GPU Purse is the brainchild of Tessa Barton, a New York Times alum and current pretraining engineer at Databricks. Barton reportedly set up a Shopify store in haste after a post on X (formerly Twitter) went viral last week with over 1.4 million impressions.
#NYFW FW24 @nvidia 🔋✨@tessybarton pic.twitter.com/JtEZgs7taV
— Christina Farhat (@farhatchristina) September 4, 2024
The GPU purse might be real, and it might be something that will actually show up at your doorstep if you’re brave enough to place an order. It’s just a complete rip-off. Barton explained to FT that the arbitrary price is two raised to the 10th power — apparently due to the fact that exponents of two are important for neural networks. The shop also lists a purse made with Nvidia’s H100, which comes in at $65,536 — or two raised to the 16th power. That listing currently doesn’t have any photos.
Maybe you could frame the bag as some sort of limited-edition collector’s item — in the Shopify listing, Barton says they are a “limited edition. I am making like 10 more in the next few weeks.” The bag is still in stock, for what it’s worth, so it doesn’t seem like Barton has reached “like 10 more” orders quite yet.
Silly as it may seem for the price, apparently there’s a market for this type of, as Barton calls it, “blazingly fast fashion.” At expensive Silicon Valley parties, especially since the AI boom and Nvidia’s massive rise in stock price, Barton says you will be looked down upon if you wear a high fashion brand. “If you wear the GPU bag, you will be approached … I don’t know how to explain how many men will talk to you,” Barton said in an interview with the Financial Times.
Maybe if you frequent these types of parties and have a little Nvidia stock to blow, the GPU purse makes sense. For everyone else, you can build your own with a $20 GT 730 and a $16 clear acrylic purse on Amazon , which looks shockingly similar to what Barton currently has listed for sale.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.