here we go you ready Colton i'm ready for whatever do you love christmas i
love christmas wow it's the best
hey everybody it's christmas day the day people have celebrated for over two
millennia by gathering together and going through the biggest tech stories
of the year that's right Colton james isn't here right now
he doesn't believe in christmas there's nothing that makes me feel warmer inside
than repeating traditions for no other reason than people have repeated them many times before except perhaps for a
mug of hot cocoa this is what this episode is cold and in case you were wondering i didn't know christmas so
christmas so grab a cup of hop coco yourself and snuggle up with your
favorite squishy blanket next to the aku log because it's the 2020 christmas
special and you know what i'm bringing the star wars mug back nice
you haven't watched the mandalorian i haven't watched season two
but you will you oh yeah it's the only reason you should get
disney plus or whatever skip the last five minutes yeah okay now in a normal
year we talk about stuff like companies one-upping each other with misleading
marketing product releases and price drops and we'll get to that but in 2020
the tech world went through more changes than i did in seventh grade which isn't
saying much real late bloomer the global pandemic caused by the covet-19
coronavirus ever heard of it caused tech giants like apple and google
to close offices and stores worldwide and also caused the cancellation or
virtualization of nearly every tech event scheduled for this year that
includes mwc gdc gtc pax east e3 f8
google i o sxw wwdc computex and even
ltx the Linus tips expo which is even more of a shame because those tips are
even better in person you that you were sad about that i'm very sad you went all
by yourself just when just went to the venue we
rented hey where is everybody come on where's everyone
movies delayed their theatrical releases on mass causing a huge boost in
streaming service usage which in turn caused them to reduce streaming quality
for a bit before they realize the series of tubes can handle it just fine in fact
many internet service providers lifted data caps proving that they're not
really necessary before slapping them back on since they realized ooh this uh
virus thing is gonna it's gonna keep going i guess their profits
are profits zoom came out of nowhere to become the kleenex of video chat apps do
you know what i mean by that yeah the brand name becoming a generic
yeah it's pretty straightforward but all video chat apps got a boost as did tech
giants as a whole google and facebook both saw healthy bumps in profits but
amazon more than tripled their net income from 2.1 billion in q3 2019 to
6.3 billion this year wow
just imagine how hard jeff must be working to make that much money he must
be exhausted he's just at the money crank
all day you know what i don't want to think about that let's end this story on a
positive note folding the process of donating your spare computing power to
scientists working on medical research surged in popularity to the point where
the folding at home network is now over 16 times more powerful than the world's
most powerful super computer and that project has directed their power towards
researching therapies for coven 19. see
even when things suck technology can help make things better
before it makes things worse again and that's what christmas is all about
next up it's the battle between epic games and apple for the hearts and souls
of fortnite players who probably don't care about any of this and just want to play fortnite to be fair that's an
admirable goal i'm with you however before epic went and made a scene
developers and litigators were already drawing attention to the 30 revenue cut
and myriad restrictions and guidelines that apple that happle that's what i
like to call them apple has in place in its iOS app store but epic really
blasted the issue open when it added a direct payment option to both the
Android and iOS versions of fortnite bypassing the so-called apple tax apple
and google removed fortnite from their app stores but epic was ready with
lawsuits against both of them and a parody of apple's infamous 1984 ad
what fun epic apparently wants apple to either reduce the 30 cut or to open up
iOS to alternative app stores and payment methods and they're not alone in
their quest either news conglomerates microsoft and other devs criticized
apple's app store policies and all the pressure apparently had some effect and
apple allowed developers to challenge app store rules and drop the stores cut
to 15 for devs who made less than 1 million
in 2019. epic and apple have a trial set for may 2021 so we'll have to wait till
then to see whether the industry shattering effects that epic wants will
actually happen or whether this was all the multi-billion dollar company
equivalent of a reality show yelling match that's all it turned out to be
well thanks for the laughs is apple scrooge
sorry i'm sorry is apple scrooge
i think there's two scrooges in that story and there wasn't much tech lovers
could do except laugh if they were in the market for a new graphics card or
console this past fall because literally all of them suffered from stock
shortages both due to the pandemic and
scalpers the playstation 5 took the brunt of fan criticism early on because
retailers launched pre-orders early confusing all those gamers who set their
alarms an hour too late and mashed f5 on the product page to no avail
scalpers bought up a ton of stock and while microsoft said that wouldn't happen during the xbox series xn series
s launch it did NVIDIA's rtx 3000 series
cards also got scalped big time god you got scalped dude you got hardcore scalp
for some reason that conjugation of the verb that led to ebay
listings for the cards getting inflated into the tens of thousands of dollars
for a single unit similar things happened during the launch of the ryzen
5000 series cpus and Radeon 6000 series graphics cards a story about one scalper
group made up of 12 people making off with over 2400 ps5s made it clear who
the bad guys were here sony what
no Colton scalpers got robbed at meetups and things got so bad people were
watching a stock checker bot stream a never-ending list of product skus hoping
to snag a GPU the moment it was available i mean if they didn't get a
new model how are they supposed to play the most anticipated game of the year
cyberpunk 2077 when it launched a rave reviews
oh what a cliffhanger and we'll get back to it right after this
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quick bits drop them in a mug of hot cocoa and you'll definitely get a tingle
in your mistletoes
yep after being delayed multiple times cyberpunk 2077 launched in december to
mostly grade reviews that mentioned the game had a few bugs but it quickly
became apparent this was about to get ugly while those blessed with high-end
rigs could run the game all right for many players it was unplayable and some
were even getting seizures from flashing light sequences
with no explicit epilepsy warning what a mess what an absolute mess beat the
entire game did you beat it i did i know life did i play on ps4 no
oh dear lord no initially cd project red
offered refunds that players couldn't get because there was no refund
agreement in place and sony ultimately removed the game from the playstation
store in order to fill some of those refunds now the developer is facing
lawsuits from investors and on top of all that they've also been criticized
for promising to host the controversial taiwanese game devotion then giving in
to what is clearly pressure from china who has suppressed the game's release on
other platforms turns out that this tweet from july 2018
was actually pretty prophetic 2020 will be remembered as the year apple got in
some big fights but it's also the year they won a big victory because the
company's new max powered by the custom-designed ARM-based m1 chip got
even the most step skeptical step to pill pc diehards to admit that
ARM processors may just yet have a future on desktop including Colton
you hated those things yup but it seems the rest of the industry has already
taken the hint amazon google and microsoft are all developing their own
ARM-based chips meanwhile ARM the actual company had an interesting
year as well they were bought by NVIDIA for 40 billion and the ceo of the
chinese division went rogue refusing to leave his office after he was fired come
to think of it i never heard that story resolved
next up the tick tock band remember that everyone was talking about it at least
until president trump remembered there was an election coming up yes the u.s
government was concerned about the app's ties to china so starting around august
the us government tried to force tick-tock's chinese parent company bike
dance to sell the app to microsoft within 45 days well that deadline passed
as microsoft seat at the table was taken over by oracle and not the lady from the
matrix china wasn't a fan of the whole scheme obviously and called what the us
was doing theft well the us doubled down and added wechat to the band which was a
bigger deal because wechat is owned by 10 cent and they're a big deal they're
worth a lot more than 10 cents i'd looked it up another deadline was
largely ignored and while tick tock did end up making a deal with oracle as part
of a new partnership people seem to have largely forgot about the whole thing
which is fine by me frankly the less time i spend thinking about tick-tock
the more time i have just hit my coco
that is very good what's in that
what are you drinking quick bits the tail end of 2020 saw the u.s discover
that it had been the victim of one of the biggest cyber attacks in history and
it had been ongoing since march hackers believed to be a part of the cozy bear
group which has ties to the russian government were able to exploit a flaw
in the orion it software made by a company called solarwinds that gave them
access to the internal networks of multiple us government agencies and
corporations including microsoft as of filming this episode the breach is still
being investigated but you know what i'm tired of all this negativity same stop
hacking things Colton leave it alone you know what let's end up by celebrating
one of the weirdest most wonderful trends to emerge in 2020 installing the
game doom where it doesn't belong programmers and tinkerers have figured
out how to play doom on a pregnancy test a smart fridge and even nintendo's brand
new game and watch thing that takes hope that takes courage it
takes knowledge and it takes a lot of free time so i guess in the end maybe
2020 was sort of a gift after all
sort of that's big that's a big sort of that sort of is
doing a lot of work in that sentence
prob basically not i take it back and this is a lot of work
so it's time to go to bed everybody thanks for watching i hope we all do a
little better in 2021 and from my tech news to yours and for even from Colton's
brandon do you have any tech news to give thank you
merry christmas and a happy holla longer days
i moved things over well there we go you look like my dad trying to use the
remote well i am a dad now
i as soon as you become one you forget how to use remotes
watch out the best part about editing yourself though is that you don't have to apologize to the editor it's just me
yeah did i have it tied up i did
two seconds you tie these up you should once you're
degenerate unless you're some kind of cyberpunk