oh well hello there looking for some
company on this fine Christmas day well you're welcome to a mug of hot coco
what's that you're also looking for someone to round up the biggest Tech
stories of the year it's a Christmas miracle because this is the 2024 tling
Christmas special let's begin let's start off with a classic story 2024 had
a pretty good run of major Tech Hardware launches NVIDIA launched the RTX 40
Super Series at CES did Gamers hate them
like them here's the fun part it doesn't matter because NVIDIA's AI accelerator
products drove the company to a 2 trillion then $3 trillion valuation for
the first time and now NVIDIA regularly trades places with apple and Microsoft
as the most valuable company in the world I think they take turns there's a
system Google is not allowed after announcing its spatial Computing headset
last year Apple launched the Vision Pro in February for
$3,500 and it was never heard from again
I'm being hyperbolic of course but why shouldn't I be it's Christmas besides
the usual things like iPads iPhones and Macs Apple updated the Magic Mouse with
USBC but put the port on the bottom
again which is [ __ ] insane but okay
and they made up for it Anyway by surprise launching an incredibly
powerful yet teeny tiny new M4 Mac Mini
that starts at only 600 bucks in contrast Qualcomm continued to Hype up
the launch of their Snapdragon X Elite ARM-based laptop chips making bold
claims about their performance would this be Windows PC's Apple silicon
moment well Snapdragon X promised the
world and delivered perhaps Luxembourg
small a small part of the world like the laptops were fine great battery life
some compatibility issues it didn't match the hype though and enthusiasm for
the devices was also hindered by Microsoft's co-pilot plus PC branding
and their headline AI records everything you do feature recall which creeped
everyone out as the verges Tom Warren puts it it was a massive own goal to
make things worse for Qualcomm laptops with AMD's ryzen AI 300 and Intel's core
200v chips also had excellent battery
life with none of the compatibility issues Qualcomm did just secure an
initial win in its Court battle with ARM so hopefully we'll get to see whether
the Snapdragon X Elite Gen 2 is any
better now that's not to say Intel and AMD had a stellar year either Intel was
plagued for most of the Year by instability issues in its 13th and 14th
gen desktop CPUs which it eventually figured out how to fix in October then
both the ryzen 9000 Series and Intel's new aerol Lake desktop chips were
criticized for bringing very little gaming chops to the table and in AOL
Lake's case actually performing worse
than its predecessor apparently an update is coming next month that will
boost performance but even if that doesn't work I can't stay mad at Intel
right now because the little Elves and the graphics Department delivered the
ark b580 a banging GPU for 250 bucks if
you somehow managed to find it at that price because it's sold out everywhere
and that's the best Christmas present a PC Gamer could ask for next up Tech
giants like apple Google and Microsoft have had a pretty great time the last
few years reaching record valuations building little walled fortresses so
it's hard for anyone to compete with them hiring thousands of people firing
them against it's like a fun game they play but this year governments around
the world were like ah no oh hold on particularly the European
Union their digital markets act came into force in March and its primary
purpose seemed to be to fill Tech company's stockings with fines you were
very good this year comparatively still getting a fine though in January Apple
complied with the dma adding support for for third-party Payment Systems browser
engines and what they called app marketplaces for the first time but they
were not happy about it requiring all
apps on alternative stores to pay Apple royalties and be notorized and vetted by
Apple anyway with a new per install core
technology fee that for many developers actually made it more expensive to
distribute outside the Apple App Store some accused Apple of malicious
compliance and indeed the EU charged apple with breaching the dma rules in
June how many fines is that we lost
count we just love giving them out it's taking a while but the EU is slowly
forcing Apple to open up their ecosystem Apple even approved the epic game store
to launch on iOS after epic complained to the EU because they were rejected
twice over in the US the Department of Justice sued Apple for monopolizing
smartphone markets but while Apple has weathered the regulatory attacks Google
ain't looking so hot after losing their Court battle with epic games over the
Play Store last December the tech giant also lost to the Department of Justice
in August of this year for monopolizing the market with Google search and could
be forced to sell off the Chrome browser as a result that giant leak of Google
search related documents from earlier in the year showing that results heavily
prioritized big Brands over small ones
probably didn't help and then the UK and Canada sued Google too because at this
point it's like why not everyone's doing it and the Federal Trade Commission had
a Christmas candle lit under their butts this year they took all sorts of pro
consumer action including opening an investigation into personalized
surveillance pricing adopting the click to cancel Rule and proposing a ban on
the sale of sensitive location data I mean it felt like the government was
actively trying to hand off a corpo
dominated cyberpunk dystopia which wouldn't be in the Christmas spirit at
all meanwhile the AI industry was doing
the opposite video generation took off this year open AI unveiled the
groundbreaking Sora model in February and waited until December to publicly
release an upgraded version that was necessary because competitors had nearly
caught up with sora's capabilities including Chinese models like 10 cents
Han Yuan which can generate a realistic dancing guy in a ghost costume no
problem and that's why we need AI for that stuff open AI also launched its
faster GPT 40 model with advanced voice
mode kicking off a fun little debate over its auditory resemblance to Scarlet
Johansson 2024 solidified the idea that
if AI is going anywhere it's going in search Google's AI overviews launched
and promptly recommended eating rocks open aai revealed their search Ambitions
with search GPT which is now just chat
GPT search and Reddit announced its AI powered answers feature because most of
your Google searches end up on Reddit anyway hey remember those beautifully
designed AI assistant devices the Humane
AI pin and the rabbit R1 they
launched and crashed look can you blame
them there's a lot of money going into AI right now and we need to sell
something I guess it's just phones for now since iPhones have apple
intelligence and Google and Samsung are putting their own AI features in phones
too yep generative AI trained on massive
data sets scraped from the entire internet is coming along all right it
sure would be nice to figure out where that leaves the idea of copyright
because while companies like open Ai and perplexity are embroiled in a ton of
plagiarism accusations and copyright lawsuits most of them are still in
progress leaving us in this kind of limbo where stories come out about
multiple AI companies training models on YouTube videos without permission and
even pirated movies and nothing happens YouTube's like oh
what oh hey that's against to don't do
that new studies continue to show how
gen AI models can deceive people published by the very people building
them and with AI generated SEO content
flooding the web there's Rising concern that as the old internet is disappearing
it's being replaced by industrial grade slop but look AI can be used for good
stuff too like this company that works with college professors to generate $25
digital textbooks based on Old course notes so students don't have to pay
through the nose for a heavy physical version of a barely changed yearly
Edition I guess AI can feel the holiday
spirit after after all there's something else you don't have to pay through the
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these quick bits might be a little jumbled up because I think someone may
have dropped a little special eggnog in my hot
cocoa which is especially concerning because I'm the only one here what else
happened this year ah YouTube really had it out for ad block or at least it
seemed like they did reports of slow video buffering were initially
attributed to YouTube early in the year but eventually found to be caused by a
flawed update from the developers of ad block
plus no YouTube actually began a harsh
Crackdown on ad blocking apps in April despite still promoting them on the
Chrome web store old habits die hard I
guess don't I know it in June the developer of sponsor block said YouTube
was experimenting with serers side ad injection which was reportedly to blame
for some ad block users seeing black screens instead of ads on YouTube videos
but wait if YouTube doesn't want to block ads why' they introduce the jump
ahead feature for YouTube premium which is pretty much designed to skip ads also
you see ads when you pause YouTube videos now Merry Christmas Microsoft
really thinks you should be upgrading to Windows 11 before Windows 10 loses
official support next October so tell you what they'll you with a full screen
ad every time your PC boots up okay just
trying to help yeah despite Microsoft's efforts Windows 11 market share is
barely budging no doubt that's partially because some people who would want to
upgrade need to buy a new PC to do so
thanks to Windows 11's non-negotiable TPM 2.0 requirement but many others are
probably just hesitant to go along with it when Microsoft's releasing things
like recall which was pulled from release uh fixed and is now slowly
rolling out again despite still not working properly speaking of not working
properly the list of issues with the Windows 11 24 H2 update is longer than
Santa's at this point and the OS comes along with lovely baked in ads you have
to go turn off what's the matter guys why don't you want to upgrade are you
okay enter a bright Hope on the horizon
Steam OS no you can't get the modern
version on desktop yet but valve has confirmed they adding support to Steam
OS for third-party gaming handhelds they
dropped new branding guidelines with powered by Steam OS labels and signs
point to Lenovo announcing a Steam OS powered handheld of their own at CES in
a couple weeks so why not put it on my gaming PC too valve hello they never
answer even though it's Christmas 2024 also saw the launch of the PlayStation 5
Pro with Sony's own pssr upscaling Tech
and a $700 price tag not that it hurt
sales much apparently it's doing all right we didn't get an upgraded Xbox
series X which is fine by me because I don't even want to know what they'd add
on to that name Xbox series XS actually
I'd go for that Xbox Chief Phil Spencer
said they might make an Xbox handheld
but that'd be years out the same can't be said for the Nintendo switch 2 which
has sprung so many leaks in recent weeks
I think she's about to blow Nintendo's bound to reveal the switch 2 soon they
were going to do it this year but decided to hurl lawyers at the
developers of the Yuzu and ryujin switch emulators instead forcing them both to
shut down don't worry about the lawyers they're fine and to top things off here
are some other things that happened Australia passed a social media ban for
kids under 16 it's still unclear how that'll be enforced or where kids will
get their skibby RZ speaking of which a law was passed to ban Tik Tok from the
US unless parent company bite dance sells the app to someone else but
they've got a hearing with the supreme court on January 10th which I'm sure
will fix everything in October SpaceX
caught the Starship booster in midair with the giant robot arms of its launch
Tower remember that that one's just cool back in June SoftBank demoed another
heart warming use case for AI a filter
that makes angry customers sound calm on the phone I'm sure it'll be very
appreciated by any customer service agents that haven't been replaced by AI
yeah well guess what scientists are building processors with literal brain
cells inside so I guess the old biological organisms get to take the
machine job this time as a Christmas
present and there's my present to you
I'm not going to lie I think I missed a few things things but I have to go to
sleep now or St Nicholas is going to skip right over my house so farewell
2024 and cheers to another year full of tech news because it just keeps
coming it doesn't stop