Oh, well hello there!
Looking for some company on this fine Christmas day? Well, you're welcome to a mug of hot cocoa.
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 Tackling 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 two trillion,
then three trillion dollar 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
USB-C, but put the port on the bottom again.
Which is f***ing 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.
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?
Haha. A small part of the world?
Like the laptops were fine, great battery life, some compatibility issues.
It didn't match the hype, though. An 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 Aero Lake desktop chips were criticized
for bringing very little gaming chops to the table.
Even in Aero 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 in the graphics department delivered the ARC B580, a bangin' 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 again.
It's like a fun game they play. But this year, governments around the world were like, ah, no, no, no, but just, 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 companies 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 third-party payment systems,
browser engines, and what they called app marketplaces for the first time.
But they were not happy about it. Acquiring all apps on alternative stores to pay Apple royalties and be notarized 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 high.
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 fend 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, OpenAI 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 Tencent's 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.
OpenAI also launched its faster GPT-40 model with advanced voice mode, kicking off a fun
little debate over its auditory resemblance to Scarlett 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.
OpenAI revealed their search ambitions with SearchGBT, which is now just chat-gbt-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 alright. It sure would be nice to figure out where that leaves the idea of copyright.
Because while companies like OpenAI 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 TOS, 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 all.
Alright, 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 server-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'd 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 remind 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, 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 24H2 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.
SteamOS. No, you can't get the modern version on desktop yet, but Valve has confirmed they're adding
support to SteamOS for third-party gaming handhelds.
They drop new branding guidelines with powered-by-SteamOS labels and signs point to Lenovo announcing
a SteamOS-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 hurts sales much, apparently it's doing alright.
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 Ryu Jinx 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 skibbity riz.
Speaking of which, a law was passed to ban TikTok from the US unless parent company ByteDance
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 heartwarming 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's job this time.
As a Christmas present. And there's my present to you.
I'm not gonna lie, I think I missed a few things.
But I have to go to sleep now, or St. Nicholas is gonna 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.