In the Transactional Interpretation, Cramer claims:

Further, the TI description does not need to invoke arbitrary collapse triggers such as consciousness, etc., because it is the absorber rather than the observer which precipitates the collapse of the SV, and this can occur atemporally and nonlocally across any sort of interval between elements of the measuring apparatus.

What is it about "absorbers" (which seems very much like a magical category, morally equivalent to "observers") which make them non-magical and therefore different from observers. When I go through and replace "absorber" with "observer" and the like, the result seems to say more or less the same thing. Therefore either I'm missing something (which is quite likely) or there's no ontological difference between the two concepts.

EDIT: The most interesting thing about the linked essay is that he compares TI to straw-Copenhagen in a way that is eerily similar to the way EY compared MWI to straw-Copenhagen.