Holy Chris Kringle's tinsel. You made it. I've been expecting you. Let me get
the door.
Yep. The snowflakes are falling. The eggnog is flowing and RAM prices have
pulled a reindeer and apparently learned to fly straight into the stratosphere.
And you know what that means? It means we've got a whole year's worth of stuff
to remind you that to remind you about that it happened. That's right. It's the
2025 Techlink Christmas special.
Hey, let's kick things off with hardware and kick that off by remembering how
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong kicked off his keynote at CES 2025.
>> Do you like my jacket? Turns out it was actually an appropriate way to start a
year that would be defined by Jensen and other tech leaders caring less about
what the consumer thinks and more about whether their billionaire peers like
their jackets. Overall, a lot of jacket talk, but Jensen did, amid a slew of AI
and automotive gunk, announced the RTX50 series GPUs and DLSS4 with multiframe
generation. They represented massive performance gains over the 40 series.
Like a box of crispy creams represents a balanced breakfast. The RTX50 series
launch was characterized by backlash over whether fake frames should count in
benchmarks. The somehow still ongoing melting power connector saga, MSRP being
nothing but a distant memory, and to top it all off, driver issues that caused a
rash of black screen reports. How gamers felt about all that doesn't matter at
all, though, because gamers had nothing to do with NVIDIA becoming the world's
most valuable company and becoming the first to hit a $5 trillion market cap on
October 29th in 2025. Because like a certain serial mascot, big tech just
can't get enough of NVIDIA's sugar chips. But AMD still cares about gamers
a little bit. Although it was a bit hard to tell when Team Red announced the name
of the Radeon RX970 and 9070 XT at CES
and didn't announce anything else about them. People were sneaking around the
show floor trying to benchmark it because AMD was being so koi. But AMD
had nothing to hide when it comes to their CPUs. Team Red is still giving
Intel a lashing in that regard with the Ryzen 9 9950 X3D reigning supreme as the
best desktop gaming CPU. Speaking of good CPUs though, for Apple silicon, we
got on the M5 train this year with a new chip arriving in an iPad, MacBook Pro,
and Vision Pro in October. And after a ton of rumors and leaks, the iPhone Air
finally launched to the roaring sound of a global
an apathetic sound I would have also made at the Pixel 10's launch if Jimmy
Fallon hadn't saved it with his enthusiasm for the Tensor G5. Tensor,
come on. >> Unfortunately, the Christmas spirit has
kind of been whooshed out of the hardware scene recently due to the RAM
pricing crisis being driven ultimately by heinously high memory demand from AI
companies and the memory makers who see a money tree down one road and a more
money tree down the other and do what any self-respecting corporation would
do. Take a chainsaw to that one. Micron
announced plans to shut down its consumerfocused memory brand. Crucial.
Rumors have pointed to NVIDIA planning to produce lower-end GPU production next
year in favor of selling higher tier cards with more memory. And an IDC
analysis predicts that high pricing of PCs and basically anything that uses
memory should be expected to continue for at least a year or two. Why did I
start with computer hardware in this video? You call this comfort and joy?
Hey, how about gaming and handhelds and stuff? Hm. You know, we all thought the
Switch 2 would turn out to be just a legend, like Frosty the Snowman or Lucky
the Dragon, but no. Turns out it was real. And despite Nintendo's shenanigans
around threatening to brick people's Switches if they so much as thought
about not paying $90 for Mario Kart 8, but bigger this time, the Switch 2 set
sales records, becoming the fastests selling console of all time. It's a
Christmas miracle. But not for another console, Xbox. A brand Microsoft seems
to be purposefully not inviting to turkey dinner this year. Xbox consoles
were delisted from many stores a few months ago after their stock ran out,
which could have been why Xbox sold less units during Black Friday sales than the
Next Playground, a motion controlled kids console that appears to ironically
succeed exactly where the Connect failed. We did get the ROG Xbox Ally and
Ally X on October 15th which were received kind of well and sort of are
Xboxes in that they are devices uh which
is now the only defining factor in what an Xbox is. Raspberry Pi Xbox hearing
aid Xbox. The coolest thing about the
Xbox handhelds was the new gaming mode that made Windows suck a bit less.
Speaking of our rapidly becoming less favored operating system, Windows 10
died a gruesome death on October 14th, 2025.
the year Microsoft declared the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh, by which they
apparently meant the year of the Windows 10 official support refresh-
because after it became apparent that people don't usually order their lives
around corporate blog posts and Windows 10 use was still quite high, Microsoft
was like, "Hey, [ __ ] Everybody gets a year of extended Windows 10 updates for
free, but after that, we're serious."
The problem is most people still can't really see a big benefit to buying a new
PC just so they can enjoy the new black screen of death. It's different. And the
upcoming agentic OS features that will lead to mice and keyboards becoming
obsolete as we simply tell our keyboards what to do and even enter the vibe
working era. Hey computer, do work. I
couldn't even be excited when they pretended to bring back Clippy because
it was actually just this animated AI fart cloud. You'll never be Clippy.
YOU'LL NEVER HAVE HIS SASS and his knowing looks. Although Microsoft did
fix the update and shut down bug uh in
Windows 11, not 10. Now, this all has Windows gamers in particular pining even
harder for Steam OS as an alternative along with other forms of Linux. And the
Steam/ Linux future is looking kind of
bright right now. We got the first third-party Steam OS handheld, the
Legion Go S. And Valve announced the glorious return of the Steam Machine
with a new cute design, affectionately being called the Gabe Cube. That's fun.
Now he just needs to get a cubeshaped yacht along with a new Steam Controller
and the Steam Frame VR headset. Although Windows handhelds are still going
strong. If by strong you mean the couple models from GPD and Iono sporting AMD's
beastly stricks Halo chip. But hey,
guess what? You can install Linux on that thing, too.
Oh my gosh, do it. But I'd actually like AI to do a bit less if you don't mind.
Aside from the affforementioned RAM crisis, AI has continued to improve at
somewhat useful things like coding and math, but even more so at forcefully
injecting so much slop onto the internet, it's made people sick of
Studio Gibli. Gibli
Gibli, I don't know. Yes, standalone image generators are out. ChatGpt and
Google Gemini's Nano Banana have improved a ton. And after Google V3
launched, photorealistic video complete with synced audio became standard and
put your parents in grave danger. Meta released a new social app called Vibes
just for making and sharing video slop followed by OpenAI and their similar
Sora app. I don't want to be too much of a downer. I mean, AI, even generative
AI, does seem to have some interesting
and not horrifying use cases, but the masses really were not prepared to have
pure slop machines thrust into their hands. You have big YouTubers publishing
tutorials on how to generate vapid, colorful, NONSENSE SLOP FOR KIDS TO
WATCH. Hopefully this new gamer pope can do something about this because ignoring
the whole audiovisisual problem, we had some concerning moments this year,
including Grock identifying itself as Mecca Hitler and having various public
breakdowns. Chachibbt users revolted when OpenAI launched GPT5 and took away
the more personal, more emotionally intelligent GBT40. And it was revealed
to everyone just how bad this whole AI girlfriend and boyfriend issue is in
2025, which is, fun fact, the year that
the film Her took place. Spike Jones, if
you or someone you know happens to be watching this, please make another film
set 12 years in the future so we know what to expect because uh this is
getting kind of wild. I've only mentioned American companies here, but
China's AI ambitions are going strong. Deep Seek's R1 model really shook up the
industry earlier this year, but Chinese robots are shaking a leg themselves.
Unitry cannot, for the life of them, seem to put out a video of its widely
available G1 robot or any robot without having the main focus seemingly be its
ability to punch and kick, which was also the main focus of Engine AI's
reveal of the T800 robot. What are we doing here? Huh? Skilled is a company
working on robot brains. And at least they're trying to help robots do
different sorts of things, like figure out how to continue accomplishing their
goals, even if you saw their freaking limbs off. I uh Okay. I just want robots
to be able to do normal things like load the dishwasher and pick up laundry, like
the 1x Neo robot, which can actually do barely anything itself and mostly exists
as a husk that a remote operator can control inside your home for when you
want cleaning staff, but don't like how squishy they usually are. Squishy like
the everexpanding AI bubble. I mean, we can't know that it's a bubble right now,
but some shrewd financially minded people seem to think it's a bubble, and
the machine god will remember that. They thought that when it's born and punish
them. Thankfully, some AI services were feeling the Christmas spirit and added
what you could charitably call parental controls this year, including Character.
And ChatGBT, the latter of which also announced that adults could generate
their own erotica next year. So,
67. I didn't mean to. I didn't. That wasn't planned. Oh, believe it or not,
there is so much AI stuff that I cut out of this episode because I could keep
talking about it. I just really don't want to. What I want to do is thank our
sponsor, Dbrand, who are feeling the Christmas spirit so much, they've just
got to give something away. So, all orders placed before January 1st are
entered to win an ultra rare Galaxy Z trifold. It's a phone, I think, uh, but
it might also evolve a Pokemon. I don't I can't know because it's not currently
available in North America. But if or when it is, it's probably going to cost
like 3,000 bucks.
You don't know. Again, any and every order is eligible as a contest entry up
until January 1st, including Dbrand's new Sketch 2D line. Look at those. Huh.
That's That's like artistic. They kind
of make me think of that superhero movie franchise owned by the company that
makes PlayStation. It's It's cool. So,
go order something before January 1st and enter to win the Galaxy Z Trifold. A
nice tasty treat for your Pokémon. You
can think of the rest of this video as being the quick bits. You'd be wrong to
think that, but you know, nothing to be ashamed of. I was wrong when I implied
at the beginning that this mug had eggnog in it. It doesn't. It's filled to
the brim with hot cocoa. Now, I know what you're thinking. Wasn't Tik Tok
supposed to be banned by now? And I thought that, too. And so did the hordes
of Tik Tok users who flocked to other Chinese-owned social apps like Red Note
and Lemonate when Tik Tok was actually briefly banned before it came back.
Unlike the long list of games that were suddenly banned from Steam this year
because payment processors and banks didn't like them, just not their cup of
tea. And now it can't be yours either. Yeah, this year marked a significant
shift in how platforms deal with questionable content as age verification
measures started to roll out in many places. The UK's online safety act
applied to major platforms like Reddit, Discord, Twitter, etc. leading to a
surge in VPN use, which in turn has led
regulators to consider banning VPNs in some US states, which are prepping for
similar laws to take effect next year. Australia's social media ban for
children under 16 went into effect just before winter break. So, they won't even
be able to talk to their friends while they're snowed in. H, what else
happened? Oh, Google decided they were going to give Android fans a scare and
block the sideloading of unverified Android apps. Yeah, barely anyone uses
sideloading ever, but it's like a, you know, you don't need it till you need it
situation, you know, like uh underwear. Thankfully,
the outcry caused Google to come to their senses and they said they would
allow advanced users to install unverified apps. And as an apology,
Google somehow forced Apple's AirDrop feature to work with Android's Quick
Share. So now iPhones and Androids can blast each other with fun little pics,
and Apple can't do anything about it. It
was kind of like how Epic Games forced Apple and Google to allow Fortnite back
on both the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store this year. And all it took
was willfully breaking their terms and conditions in order to drag everybody
through years and years of legal quagmire. And now people who play
Fortnite on their phone can buy V-Bucks a bit easier. This is progress. Oh, you
thought I forgot to talk about President Trump's whole tariff thing with the
announcing and the delaying and the part
of the reasoning for all that was to try and force manufacturers to make things
like phones in the US again. But so far, Apple has expanded production in India
instead. Fine then, said Trump. I'll build my own damn phone in the US. The
Trump mobile T1 phone, which went from being a photoshopped gold iPhone to
being a photoshopped Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra with a spigen case on it. God
bless America. Now, to be fair, after seemingly almost damaging trade
relations with China beyond repair, the Trump administration and China agreed on
a one-year tariff truce, ensuring that electronics only become exorbitantly
more expensive because of the AI RAM thing, not a lack of rare earths and
minerals. And I'll also give the current US government another kudos for
reportedly telling the UK to saw it off with their whole we demand Apple give us
a back door with into their encrypted user data thing. The UK apparently
backed down only to return and make the
same demand, but only for UK user data, which I guess the US doesn't care about.
Sorry, UK. 2025 proved to be a fairly
fragile year for power and cloud infrastructure. After massive parts of
Spain and Portugal lost power in April, an Amazon Web Services outage took out
key parts of the internet, including Roblox, Fortnite, and Zoom. Seriously
though, it was one of those internet problems affecting the real world
situations. Some people were nearly cooked when their smart beds overheated.
Then there was a similarly bad cloud flare outage in November and another not
so bad one in December. Although that one notably took down detector and the
three other down detector down detectors. Is it any wonder NVIDIA,
Google, and a bunch of other people want to launch data centers into space? At
least up there, we can be sure they're not stealing all the water. Unless they
send their covert elite space commandos to come back to Earth and raid every
7-Eleven for all the Aquafina supply, which of course THEY DO, RILEY. COME ON,
THINK. NOW, THE REST OF WHAT I GOT here is a bit of a random assortment. I'm
just going to try and jog your memory that these things actually happened.
Qualcomm acquired Arduino in October. I
hope they don't screw that up. Microsoft killed Skype. No. Uh both NVIDIA and the
US government are now heavily invested in Intel, which I hope they're using to
pay for some free coffee for their employees. Nepal had that whole Gen Z
uprising, culminating in the election of their interim prime minister via
Discord. That was a ride. The Stop Killing Games movement had its moment in
the UK Parliament, which didn't seem to move the needle much, but probably
raised awareness. And I'm calling it now will lead to the UK's first gamer
president. Make it happen, guys. I believe in you. Originally, Oculus
founder Palmer Ly's military tech company Anduril partnered with Meta to
release a cat eared tactical AR helmet, while Meta themselves launched the Meta
Ray-B band display with a fullcolor display in one of the eyes. I'm going to
get both. And Colossal Sciences pretended that they'd resurrected the
direwolf. And me and Hank Green spent a lot of time researching ancient wolf
lineages only to find out that really they just kind of made a regular wolf
with some extra genes in there. Hank and I didn't do it together, just just
separately. But now, although that's not
everything that happened this year, I feel like that's mostly the gist of
2025. Hey, what kind of tech news developments are we going to see in
2026? I don't know, but I can't wait to
find out together. So, from my house
coat to yours, even though this video is not going up on Christmas, it's going up
on Boxing Day, which I just remembered. I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy
new year. And when the snow melts,
I think we should all touch some grass.
Okay, bye.