YouTube's latest social feature is letting users share videos to Snapchat as stickers. If you liked a video that a friend or family member might be interested in, you can immediately share it via Snapchat in the form of a sticker slapped onto the snap.

The social feature, available on both iOS and Android smartphones, pulls up the Snapchat app when you select it from the 'Share' menu on a YouTube video. A handy box containing the video's thumbnail and title will appear on your snap. And after you've taken a photo, you can adjust the thumbnail's size, angle and location on the snap. Then, when you've sent your snap to a friend, they can open the YouTube video by simply tapping the link embedded in the thumbnail.

The new sharing process eschews the need to directly copy a link from YouTube for pasting into Snapchat. Instead, one tap of that Share button is all you need to transfer the video to your snap, with all info and the link contained in one convenient snippet.

Analysis: Improvement or gimmick?

Within the confines of Snapchat, this new YouTube video-sharing feature sounds great. It requires fewer taps and link management and means Snapchat doesn't have to rely on your clipboard for copied content. Being able to customize the embedded video's placement, size, and angle is nice, too. But are Snapchat users really going to be impressed by this feature, and more importantly, will people use it?

The real issue here lies in whether or not Snapchat is the most convenient social platform with which to share YouTube videos. While this overhaul to sharing YouTube videos via Snapchat is an improvement, it's really just a nifty addition to what is still a cumbersome process.

You still have to create a snap to host the YouTube snippet. That in itself could be a decently lengthy process, depending on your own preferences and attention to detail when it comes to taking snaps. In this case, it would be much quicker and easier to simply share a YouTube link through more conventional social platforms, like Whatsapp, Discord, or even Twitter and Facebook depending on the group of contacts you wish to reach.

It's still a win for avid Snapchat users, of course, especially those who use it as their primary social platform. We can even see there being some particularly creative uses of this YouTube video sharing feature. One example that comes to mind would be an online merchant taking a snap of their product and inserting a YouTube snippet that the user can open and learn more about the product.

Therein lies what we feel is the biggest issue with this update. It's harmless, and definitely doesn't detract from the Snapchat experience. However, it's also very situational, will work better for some more than others, and isn't something we see a swathe of Snapchat users flocking to in order to share their favorite YouTube videos with friends. There are quicker ways of doing that, even if those methods aren't quite as fun or creative.

Thor 4 may not be the funny Marvel movie we expect it to be

Thor: Love and Thunder will deal with far more serious themes than its predecessor – Thor: Ragnarok – did.

That's according to director Taika Waititi, who told Entertainment Weekly (EW) that the god of thunder's fourth solo Marvel movie won't be as hilarious or wacky as fans expect it to be.

Released in late April, the first Thor 4 teaser implied that the Marvel Phase 4 film would be another action-packed and witty offering from Waititi. However, the JoJo Rabbit and What We Do in the Shadows director suggested fans shouldn't expect Ragnarok's follow-up to be as "festive" or packed with laughs, what with the deep, meaningful themes that Love and Thunder explores.

"Ragnarok felt a bit like a party," Waititi explained to EW. "It was quite festive. This one is still fun, and it's got moments of being over the top, but thematically, it's about something a bit deeper than the last film.

"It's not a serious film, and it's not a drama, but we do deal with ideas that I think a lot of humans deal with – universal themes about love and loss and our place in the world. Everyone sort of asks this question in the film: What is your purpose? What is the reason that you're a hero, and what do you do when you have these powers?"

That isn't to say that Thor: Love and Thunder will be devoid of humor – far from it, in fact. But, as Waititi explained, his second Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) superhero flick needed to explore new, unexpected territory. Not only for Chris Hemsworth's Thor, but also to push the boundaries of the MCU itself.

"What I didn't want to do is just make Ragnarok again, because that's been done," Waititi continued. "I needed to do something more interesting for myself to keep the whole thing ignited and to make sure that I'm feeling creatively stimulated. I thought, What's the least expected thing with this franchise?

"It's sort of like a midlife crisis film, really. That's the question we ask everyone: Are we doing the right thing, and are we doing all we can in the world? I think right now, while the world is still healing from this pandemic, it's a good question to ask. It's like, well, are we doing enough to look after each other and to look after ourselves?"

Thor: Love and Thunder will be the next Marvel movie to arrive exclusively in theaters. The Norse god's next solo outing will be released on July 8, exactly one month after Ms Marvel – the next MCU TV series – makes landfall on Disney Plus .

For more Marvel-based content, check out our ending explainer and all cameos articles for Doctor Strange 2 . Alternatively, read up on which director may be replacing Jon Watts on Marvel's Fantastic Four movie .

Analysis: perfectly balanced, in every way

As wonderful as Thor: Ragnarok is, it seems that Waititi has found a better balance between his signature humor and the heartfelt, universal themes that are sure to be at play in Love and Thunder.

Ragnarok was a breath of fresh air for the god of thunder in the MCU. Until Waititi showed up, Thor was positioned as a serious superhero severely lacking in personality. The superhero's third solo movie gave him a new lease of life, though, with its laughs-a-minute and 80s-style plot allowing Hemsworth and company to really lean into the comedic side of their acting talents.

As Waititi notes above, however, Love and Thunder couldn't follow the same formula or narrative that Ragnarok did. Fans would have been quick to install it as nothing more than a Ragnarok clone if it had followed a similar story or retread old ground from a humor perspective.

Given his arc in the last two Avengers films, too, Thor has gone through enough pain and suffering to last a lifetime – and, as a god of sorts, that's a long lifetime. He's also undergone plenty of character development in his more recent MCU outings, so he's not the same individual that we saw in 2012's Avengers or even Ragnarok itself.

Clearly, then, Love and Thunder needs to tell a story that's not only funny, but also thematically resonant. When we find Thor at the start of this film, he'll be going through a midlife crisis – and the arrival of Jane Foster's Mighty Thor and Gorr the God Butcher (plus the problems that come with them) will only force him to face up to the existential issues he's going through. In that sense, Thor 4 will be an emotionally deeper film than we've been led to believe.

And that's a good thing. The character has already evolved from a one-note, serious individual to a funnier (if slightly wacky) person. The irony, though, is that Thor was in danger of becoming too amusing or eccentric, which would have brought his MCU arc full circle and made him a one-dimensional character once more.

Thankfully, it sounds like Thor: Love and Thunder will push him out of his comfort zone again, with Waititi keen not to walk a road that Thor has already traveled. Hopefully, Love and Thunder will be – to use Thanos' well-known phrase – perfectly balanced in every way, but especially from humor and heartfelt standpoints.

Apple M1 Ultra solves a multi-GPU problem that’s been plaguing AMD and Nvidia

It looks like Apple may have solved a multi-GPU problem that has been plaguing AMD and Nvidia for years thanks to the UltraFusion interface it unveiled earlier this week, which allows two M1 Max chip to connect together to make a single M1 Ultra chip.

When Apple announced the M1 Max last year, it rather cunningly didn’t reveal that there was a hidden secret built into the chip. This secret was revealed earlier this week at Apple’s March Event, where the company revealed that it can combine two M1 Max chips, turning them into an M1 Ultra with double the power – including twice as many GPU cores.

Of course, Apple isn’t the first company to harness the power of two GPUs. For many years, Nvidia graphics cards supported SLI (Scalable Link Interface) – a high-speed link that allowed you to connect multiple GPUs at once for increased performance. AMD had a similar tech with CrossFire that did the same.

Cracking the problem

The problem with SLI and CrossFire was that they weren’t good enough to multiply the power of the PC by the number of GPUs installed. So, if you had two Nvidia GPUs in SLI, you didn’t get twice the performance.

Best case scenario would be a 90% improvement, but in many cases, it was more around a 50% improvement – and that performance diminished the more GPUs you added. The return in investment just wasn’t worth it for many people, then, especially if you paid for three GPUs, but got around the power of 2.5 GPUs instead.

Both SLI and CrossFire also added overheads to the PC, especially with the CPU, which impacted performance. There was then also an increase in power consumption, and therefore running costs and cooling considerations, and the amount of space needed inside a PC chassis and motherboard to accommodate multiple GPUs.

Finally, there was also an issue with applications, and especially games, offering poor – or non-existent – support for SLI and CrossFire. In some cases, a game would only use a single GPU, no matter how many you had installed.

So, it’s perhaps little surprise that CrossFire and SLI ended up being extremely niche features, and you won’t hear either AMD or Nvidia talk about them. In fact, Nvidia essentially killed off SLI a few years ago in favor of NVLink for its RTX cards. However, price and the fact that it’s hard enough trying to buy one Nvidia GPU let alone multiple GPUs, has meant this has remained unloved.

With the M1 Ultra, though, Apple appears to have addressed many of these issues. For a start, the UltraFusion connection has been designed to offer extremely low latency (essentially a delay in the transfer of data, and the lower the better) between the two M1 Max chips – with a bandwidth of 2.5TB/s. This is incredibly fast, and much higher than SLI or CrossFire ever offered.

The speed of UltraFusion brings numerous benefits, the most obvious being when it comes to performance, which is why Apple feels confident in claiming the M1 Ultra will offer twice the performance of the M1 Max.

By turning two M1 Max chips into a single M1 Ultra chip, Apple has also avoided the performance overheads that multi-GPU setups usually encounter. While the M1 Ultra is now the largest chip Apple has ever made, it’s still smaller than having  physical discrete graphics cards, allowing it to be used inside the compact Mac Studio , which was also announced at Tuesday’s event.

The M1 family of chips have also been acclaimed for their performance per watt, being much more power efficient than rival chips. This has allowed MacBooks with M1 chips to have longer battery lives, while keeping cool even when working hard, and the M1 Ultra continues this. According to Apple, the M1 Ultra’s GPU offers better performance than Nvidia’s mighty RTX 3090 , while consuming 200W less power.

That’s certainly a bold statement, but in these days of rising energy costs, the power efficiency of our components is going to be an important consideration. Rumors suggest that Nvidia’s next generation of GPUs, such as the RTX 4080 , will be even more power-hungry, which could make Apple’s approach look far more appealing.

Finally, Apple’s approach looks like it will pay dividends when it comes to software support as well. Applications will see the M1 Ultra as a single chip, meaning that no extra coding is required – support will be out of the box, allowing applications to take advantage of the extra power. This is a key difference that could prove to be a game-changer.

Speaking of which, while Macs aren’t traditionally thought of as games machines, games should also see the M1 Ultra as a single chip, allowing them to use the extra power. With the M1 Ultra apparently out-performing the RTX 3090, could Apple have just made a fantastic gaming GPU?

We’ll have to wait to test Apple’s claims ourselves, but it certainly sounds promising. Apple’s wins here could also spur Nvidia and AMD to revaluate their multi-GPU technology, which could lead to increasingly impressive performance for both gaming and professional use. We can’t wait.