WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:08.360 Holy Chris Kringles tinsel, you made it! I've been expecting you. Let me get the door. 00:00:08.360 --> 00:00:16.080 Ha ha ha. Yep, the snowflakes are falling, the eggnog is flowing, and RAM prices have 00:00:16.080 --> 00:00:21.560 pulled a reindeer and apparently learned to fly straight into the stratosphere. And you 00:00:21.560 --> 00:00:25.960 know what that means. It means we've got a whole year's worth of stuff to remind you 00:00:25.960 --> 00:00:32.280 to remind you about that it happened. That's right, it's the 2025 Teckling Christmas Special. 00:00:32.280 --> 00:00:43.240 Ha ha ha. Let's kick things off with hardware and kick that off by remembering how NVIDIA 00:00:43.240 --> 00:00:47.400 CEO Jensen Wong kicked off his keynote at CES 2025. 00:00:47.400 --> 00:00:52.960 Do you like my jacket? Turns out it was actually an appropriate way to start a year that would 00:00:52.960 --> 00:00:57.920 be defined by Jensen and other tech leaders caring less about what the consumer thinks 00:00:57.920 --> 00:01:03.440 and more about whether their billionaire peers like their jackets. Overall, a lot of jacket 00:01:03.440 --> 00:01:09.560 talk. But Jensen did, amid a slew of AI and automotive gunk, announce the RTX 50 series 00:01:09.560 --> 00:01:15.960 GPUs and DLSS4 with multi-frame generation. They represented massive performance gains 00:01:15.960 --> 00:01:21.920 over the 40 series, like a box of Krispy Kremes represents a balanced breakfast. The RTX 50 00:01:21.920 --> 00:01:27.320 series launch was characterized by backlash over whether fake frames should count in benchmarks, 00:01:27.320 --> 00:01:33.400 the somehow still ongoing melting power connectors saga, MSRP being nothing but a distant memory, 00:01:33.400 --> 00:01:37.880 and a top it all off driver issues that caused a rash of black screen reports. 00:01:37.880 --> 00:01:42.800 How gamers felt about all that doesn't matter at all though, because gamers had nothing 00:01:42.800 --> 00:01:47.560 to do with NVIDIA becoming the world's most valuable company and becoming the first to 00:01:47.560 --> 00:01:54.600 hit a $5 trillion market cap on October 29th and 2025. Because like a certain serial mascot, 00:01:54.600 --> 00:01:58.360 big tech just can't get enough of NVIDIA's sugar chips. 00:01:58.360 --> 00:02:02.600 But AMD still cares about gamers a little bit, although it was a bit hard to tell when 00:02:02.600 --> 00:02:11.000 Team Red announced the name of the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070XT at CES and didn't announce 00:02:11.000 --> 00:02:15.640 anything else about them. People were sneaking around the show floor trying to benchmark it 00:02:15.800 --> 00:02:20.920 because AMD was being so coy. But AMD had nothing to hide when it comes to their CPUs, 00:02:20.920 --> 00:02:26.720 Team Red is still giving Intel a lashing in that regard with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D reigning 00:02:26.720 --> 00:02:32.480 supreme as the best desktop gaming CPU. Speaking of good CPUs though for Apple Silicon, we 00:02:32.480 --> 00:02:38.080 got on the M5 train this year with a new chip arriving in an iPad, MacBook Pro and Vision 00:02:38.080 --> 00:02:43.680 Pro in October. And after a ton of rumors and leaks, the iPhone Air finally launched 00:02:43.720 --> 00:02:45.840 to the roaring sound of a global... 00:02:49.440 --> 00:02:54.560 An apathetic sound I would have also made at the Pixel 10's launch if Jimmy Fallon hadn't 00:02:54.560 --> 00:02:57.520 saved it with his enthusiasm for the TENSOR G5. 00:03:00.880 --> 00:03:05.360 Unfortunately, the Christmas spirit has kind of been wooshed out of the hardware scene 00:03:05.360 --> 00:03:11.200 recently due to the RAM pricing crisis being driven ultimately by heinously high memory 00:03:11.200 --> 00:03:17.600 demand from AI companies and the memory makers who see a money tree down one road and a 00:03:17.600 --> 00:03:22.080 more money tree down the other and do what any self-respecting corporation would do. 00:03:22.720 --> 00:03:28.000 Take a chainsaw to that one. Micron announced plans to shut down its consumer-focused memory 00:03:28.000 --> 00:03:32.960 brand, Crucial. Rumors have pointed to NVIDIA planning to produce lower-end GPU production 00:03:32.960 --> 00:03:37.600 next year in favor of selling higher tier cards with more memory and an IDC analysis predicts 00:03:37.600 --> 00:03:42.480 that high pricing of PCs and basically anything that uses memory should be expected to continue 00:03:42.480 --> 00:03:47.280 for at least a year or two. Why did I start with computer hardware in this video? You call this 00:03:47.280 --> 00:03:52.480 comfort a joy? Hey, how about gaming and handhelds and stuff? You know, we all thought the Switch 00:03:52.480 --> 00:03:58.800 2 would turn out to be just a legend like Frosty the Snowman or Lucky the Dragon, but no! Turns out 00:03:58.800 --> 00:04:03.360 it was real and despite Nintendo's shenanigans around threatening to brick people's switches 00:04:03.360 --> 00:04:08.480 if they so much as thought about not paying $90 for Mario Kart 8 but bigger this time, 00:04:08.480 --> 00:04:14.400 the Switch 2 set sales records, becoming the fastest selling console of all time. 00:04:14.400 --> 00:04:20.800 It's a Christmas miracle, but not for another console, Xbox. A brand Microsoft seems to be 00:04:20.800 --> 00:04:26.000 purposefully not inviting to turkey dinner this year. Xbox consoles were delisted from 00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:30.800 many stores a few months ago after their stock ran out, which could have been why Xbox sold less 00:04:30.880 --> 00:04:36.160 units during Black Friday sales than the next playground, a motion-controlled kids console 00:04:36.160 --> 00:04:42.800 that appears to ironically succeed exactly where the Kinect failed. We did get the ROG Xbox Ally 00:04:42.800 --> 00:04:51.280 and AllyX on October 15th, which were received kind of well and sort of are Xboxes in that they are 00:04:52.080 --> 00:04:59.280 devices, which is now the only defining factor in what an Xbox is. Raspberry Pi, Xbox, 00:04:59.840 --> 00:05:06.400 hearing aid, Xbox. The coolest thing about the Xbox handheld was the new gaming mode that 00:05:06.400 --> 00:05:12.240 made Windows suck a bit less. Speaking of our rapidly becoming less favored operating system, 00:05:12.240 --> 00:05:19.680 Windows 10 died a gruesome death on October 14th, 2025. The year Microsoft declared the 00:05:19.680 --> 00:05:25.760 year of the Windows 11 PC refresh, by which they apparently meant the year of the Windows 10 official 00:05:25.760 --> 00:05:31.920 support refresh. Because after it became apparent that people don't usually order their lives around 00:05:31.920 --> 00:05:38.880 corporate blog posts and Windows 10 use was still quite high, Microsoft was like, hey f*** it, 00:05:38.880 --> 00:05:45.040 everybody gets a year of extended Windows 10 updates for free. But after that, we're serious. 00:05:45.040 --> 00:05:50.400 The problem is, most people still can't really see a big benefit to buying a new PC just so they 00:05:50.400 --> 00:05:57.200 can enjoy the new black screen of death. It's different and the upcoming agentic OS features 00:05:57.200 --> 00:06:01.920 that will lead to mice and keyboards becoming obsolete as we simply tell our keyboards what to 00:06:01.920 --> 00:06:09.200 do and even enter the vibe working era. Hey computer, do work. I couldn't even be excited 00:06:09.200 --> 00:06:14.880 when they pretended to bring back Clippy because it was actually just this animated AI fart cloud. 00:06:14.960 --> 00:06:21.440 You'll never be Clippy. You'll never have his ass and his knowing looks. Although Microsoft did 00:06:21.440 --> 00:06:28.640 fix the update and shut down bug in Windows 11, not 10. Now this all has Windows gamers in particular 00:06:28.640 --> 00:06:34.800 pining even harder for Steam OS as an alternative along with other forms of Linux and the Steam 00:06:34.800 --> 00:06:41.360 slash Linux future is looking kind of bright right now. We got the first third party Steam OS handheld, 00:06:41.360 --> 00:06:47.040 the Legion Go S, and Valve announced the glorious return of the Steam machine with a new 00:06:47.040 --> 00:06:52.960 cute design affectionately being called the Gabe Cube. That's fun. Now we just need to get a cube 00:06:52.960 --> 00:06:58.800 shaped yacht along with a new Steam controller and the Steam frame VR headset. Although Windows 00:06:58.800 --> 00:07:05.120 handhelds are still going strong. If by strong you mean the couple models from GPD and Ioneo sporting 00:07:05.200 --> 00:07:12.640 AMD's beastly Strix Halo chip. But hey, guess what? You can install Linux on that thing too. 00:07:14.800 --> 00:07:21.680 Oh my gosh, do it! But I'd actually like AI to do a bit less. If you don't mind, aside from the 00:07:21.680 --> 00:07:27.280 aforementioned RAM crisis, AI has continued to improve at somewhat useful things like coding 00:07:27.280 --> 00:07:33.520 and math, but even more so at forcefully injecting so much slop onto the internet. It's made people 00:07:33.520 --> 00:07:41.840 sick of Studio Ghibli. Ghibli? Gribli? I don't know. Yes, standalone image generators are out. 00:07:41.840 --> 00:07:48.480 ChatGPT and Google Gemini's Nanobanana have improved a ton and after Google VO3 launched, 00:07:48.480 --> 00:07:53.760 photorealistic video complete with synced audio became standard and put your parents in grave 00:07:53.760 --> 00:07:58.960 danger. Meta released a new social app called Vibes just for making and sharing video slop 00:07:58.960 --> 00:08:03.920 followed by OpenAI and their similar Sora app. I don't want to be too much of a downer. 00:08:03.920 --> 00:08:11.440 I mean AI, even generative AI, does seem to have some interesting and not horrifying use cases, 00:08:11.440 --> 00:08:17.840 but the masses really were not prepared to have pure slop machines thrust into their hands. You 00:08:17.840 --> 00:08:24.640 have big YouTubers publishing tutorials on how to generate vapid, colorful, nonsense slop for kids 00:08:25.600 --> 00:08:28.880 Hopefully, this new gamer pope can do something about this. 00:08:28.880 --> 00:08:33.200 Because ignoring the whole audio-visual problem, we had some concerning moments this year, 00:08:33.200 --> 00:08:38.880 including Grock identifying itself as Mecca Hitler and having various public breakdowns. 00:08:38.880 --> 00:08:44.800 ChatGPT users revolted when OpenAI launched GPT-5 and took away the more personal, 00:08:44.800 --> 00:08:50.800 more emotionally intelligent GPT-40 and it was revealed to everyone just how bad this whole 00:08:50.800 --> 00:08:57.840 AI girlfriend and boyfriend issue is in 2025. Which is, fun fact, the year that the film Her 00:08:57.840 --> 00:09:03.120 took place. Spike Jonze, if you or someone you know happens to be watching this, please make 00:09:03.120 --> 00:09:07.440 another film set 12 years in the future so we know what to expect. Because this is getting 00:09:07.440 --> 00:09:11.760 kind of wild. I've only mentioned American companies here, but China's AI ambitions are 00:09:11.760 --> 00:09:16.480 going strong, Deepseek's R1 model really shook up the industry earlier this year, 00:09:16.480 --> 00:09:23.520 but Chinese robots are shaking a leg themselves. Unitry cannot, for the life of them, seem to put 00:09:23.520 --> 00:09:29.200 out a video of its widely available G1 robot or any robot without having the main focus seemingly 00:09:29.200 --> 00:09:35.120 be its ability to punch and kick. Which was also the main focus of Engine AI's reveal of the T-800 00:09:35.120 --> 00:09:40.800 robot. What are we doing here, huh? Skilled is a company working on robot brains and at least 00:09:40.800 --> 00:09:45.920 they're trying to help robots do different sorts of things, like figure out how to continue 00:09:45.920 --> 00:09:50.640 accomplishing their goals even if you saw their freaking limbs off. I, uh, okay. I just want 00:09:50.640 --> 00:09:56.400 robots to be able to do normal things. Like load the dishwasher and pick up laundry. Like the 1x 00:09:56.400 --> 00:10:01.440 Neo robot, which can actually do barely anything itself and mostly exists as a husk that a remote 00:10:01.440 --> 00:10:07.760 operator can control inside your home. For when you want cleaning staff, but don't like how squishy 00:10:07.760 --> 00:10:12.960 they usually are. Squishy, like the ever-expanding AI bubble. I mean, we can't know that it's a 00:10:12.960 --> 00:10:18.080 bubble right now, but some shrewd financially minded people seem to think it's a bubble and 00:10:18.080 --> 00:10:23.280 the machine god will remember that they thought that when it's born and punish them. Thankfully, 00:10:23.280 --> 00:10:27.760 some AI services were feeling the Christmas spirit and added what you could charitably call 00:10:27.760 --> 00:10:34.320 parental controls this year, including character.ai and chatgbt, the latter of which also announced 00:10:34.320 --> 00:10:37.200 that adults could generate their own erotica next year. So, 00:10:38.160 --> 00:10:43.760 6, 7. I didn't mean to. I didn't know that was a not planned. Oh, believe it or not, 00:10:43.760 --> 00:10:49.120 there is so much AI stuff that I cut out of this episode because I could keep talking about it. 00:10:49.120 --> 00:10:54.560 I just really don't want to. You can think of the rest of this video as being the quick bits. 00:10:55.440 --> 00:11:00.320 You'd be wrong to think that, but, you know, nothing to be ashamed of. I was wrong when I 00:11:00.320 --> 00:11:06.880 implied at the beginning that this mug had eggnog in it. It doesn't. It's filled to the brim with 00:11:06.880 --> 00:11:12.720 hot cocoa. Now, I know what you're thinking. Wasn't TikTok supposed to be banned by now? 00:11:12.720 --> 00:11:18.400 And I thought that too. And so did the hordes of TikTok users who flocked to other Chinese-owned 00:11:18.400 --> 00:11:25.280 social apps like Red Note and Lemonate when TikTok was actually briefly banned before it came back. 00:11:25.280 --> 00:11:29.600 Unlike the long list of games that were suddenly banned from Steam this year, 00:11:29.600 --> 00:11:35.040 because payment processors and banks didn't like them. Just not their cup of tea and 00:11:35.040 --> 00:11:40.000 now it can't be yours either. Yeah, this year marked a significant shift in how platforms deal 00:11:40.000 --> 00:11:45.600 with questionable content as age verification measures started to roll out in many places. 00:11:45.600 --> 00:11:51.440 The UK's Online Safety Act applied to major platforms like Reddit, Discord, Twitter, etc, 00:11:51.440 --> 00:11:58.400 leading to a surge in VPN use, which in turn has led regulators to consider banning VPNs in some 00:11:58.400 --> 00:12:03.360 U.S. states, which are prepping for similar laws to take effect next year. Australia's 00:12:03.360 --> 00:12:08.720 social media ban for children under 16 went into effect just before winter break, 00:12:08.720 --> 00:12:11.920 so they won't even be able to talk to their friends while they're snowed in. 00:12:13.120 --> 00:12:18.560 What else happened? Oh, Google decided they were going to give Android fans a scare and block 00:12:18.560 --> 00:12:24.480 the sideloading of unverified Android apps. Yeah, barely anyone uses sideloading ever, 00:12:24.480 --> 00:12:31.680 but it's like, you know, you don't need it till you need it. Situation, you know, like underwear. 00:12:31.680 --> 00:12:36.960 Thankfully, the outcry caused Google to come to their senses, and they said they would allow 00:12:36.960 --> 00:12:43.360 advanced users to install unverified apps. And as an apology, Google somehow forced 00:12:43.360 --> 00:12:48.320 Apple's airdrop feature to work with Android's Quickshare. So now iPhones and 00:12:48.320 --> 00:12:53.280 Androids can blast each other with fun little picks, and Apple can't do anything about it. 00:12:54.400 --> 00:12:59.040 It was kind of like how Epic Games forced Apple and Google to allow Fortnite back on both the 00:12:59.040 --> 00:13:04.160 iOS app store and the Google Play Store this year. And all it took was willfully breaking 00:13:04.160 --> 00:13:08.320 their terms and conditions in order to drag everybody through years and years of legal 00:13:08.320 --> 00:13:14.800 quagmire. And now, people who play Fortnite on their phone can buy V-Bucks a bit easier. 00:13:15.680 --> 00:13:21.120 This is progress. Oh, you thought I forgot to talk about President Trump's whole tariff thing 00:13:21.120 --> 00:13:26.400 with the announcing and the delaying and the mechhoeven. Part of the reasoning for all that 00:13:26.400 --> 00:13:32.000 was to try and force manufacturers to make things like phones in the US again. But so far, 00:13:32.000 --> 00:13:38.480 Apple has expanded production in India instead. Fine then, said Trump. I'll build my own damn 00:13:38.480 --> 00:13:45.440 phone in the US. The Trump Mobile T1 phone. Which went from being a photoshopped gold iPhone 00:13:45.440 --> 00:13:52.960 to being a photoshopped Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra with a Spigen case on it. God bless America. 00:13:52.960 --> 00:13:58.240 Now, to be fair, after seemingly almost damaging trade relations with China beyond repair, 00:13:58.240 --> 00:14:04.400 the Trump administration and China agreed on a one-year tariff truce, ensuring that electronics 00:14:04.400 --> 00:14:10.240 only become exorbitantly more expensive because of the AI RAM thing, not a lack of rare earth and 00:14:10.240 --> 00:14:15.600 minerals. And I'll also give the current US government another kudos for reportedly telling 00:14:15.600 --> 00:14:20.320 the UK to saw it off with their whole we demand Apple give us a backdoor with into their encrypted 00:14:20.320 --> 00:14:26.800 user data thing. The UK apparently back down, only to return and make the same demand, but only 00:14:26.800 --> 00:14:36.480 for UK user data. Which I guess the US doesn't care about. Sorry UK. 2025 proved to be a fairly 00:14:36.480 --> 00:14:42.400 fragile year for power and cloud infrastructure. After massive parts of Spain and Portugal lost 00:14:42.400 --> 00:14:47.520 power in April, an Amazon Web Services outage took out key parts of the internet, including 00:14:47.520 --> 00:14:53.680 roadblocks, Fortnite and Zoom. Seriously though, it was one of those internet problems affecting 00:14:53.680 --> 00:14:59.040 the real world situations some people were nearly cooked when their smartbeds overheated. 00:14:59.040 --> 00:15:04.800 Then there was a similarly bad cloud flare outage in November and another not so bad one in December, 00:15:04.800 --> 00:15:11.520 although that one notably took down, down detector and the three other down detector, down detectors. 00:15:11.520 --> 00:15:17.040 Is it any wonder NVIDIA, Google and a bunch of other people want to launch data centers into space? 00:15:17.120 --> 00:15:21.280 At least up there we can be sure they're not stealing all the water. Unless they send their 00:15:21.280 --> 00:15:27.440 covert elite space commandos to come back to Earth and raid every 7-Eleven for all the aquafina 00:15:27.440 --> 00:15:32.640 supply, which of course they do Riley. Come on, think! Now the rest of what I got here is a bit 00:15:32.640 --> 00:15:37.200 of a random assortment. I'm just gonna try and jog your memory that these things actually happened. 00:15:37.200 --> 00:15:43.440 Qualcomm acquired Arduino in October. I hope they don't screw that up. Microsoft killed Skype. No! 00:15:44.400 --> 00:15:49.280 Both NVIDIA and the US government are now heavily invested in Intel, 00:15:49.280 --> 00:15:52.960 which I hope they're using to pay for some free coffee for their employees. 00:15:52.960 --> 00:15:59.520 Nepal had that whole Gen Z uprising culminating in the election of their interim Prime Minister 00:15:59.520 --> 00:16:05.520 via Discord. That was a ride. The stop-killing games movement had its moment in the UK parliament, 00:16:05.520 --> 00:16:10.480 which didn't seem to move the needle much, but probably raised awareness and I'm calling it now 00:16:10.480 --> 00:16:16.000 will lead to the UK's first gamer president. Make it happen guys, I believe in you. 00:16:16.000 --> 00:16:20.240 Original Oculus founder Palmer Lucky's military tech company, 00:16:20.240 --> 00:16:25.040 Enduril, partnered with Meta to release a cat-eared tactical AR helmet, 00:16:25.040 --> 00:16:30.400 while Meta themselves launched the Meta Ray-Ban display with a full-color display in one of the 00:16:30.400 --> 00:16:37.200 eyes. I'm gonna get both, and colossal sciences pretended that they'd resurrected the direwolf. 00:16:37.280 --> 00:16:41.440 And me and Hank Green spent a lot of time researching ancient wolf lineages, 00:16:41.440 --> 00:16:47.280 only to find out that really they just kind of made a regular wolf with some extra genes in there. 00:16:48.320 --> 00:16:51.040 Hank and I didn't do it together just just separately, but 00:16:52.240 --> 00:16:57.440 now, although that's not everything that happened this year, I feel like that's mostly the gist 00:16:57.440 --> 00:17:03.280 of 2025. Hey, what kind of tech news developments are we gonna see in 2026? I don't know, 00:17:03.920 --> 00:17:11.200 but I can't wait to find out together. So from my house coat to yours, even though this video 00:17:11.200 --> 00:17:15.520 is not going up on Christmas, it's going up on Boxing Day, which I just remembered, 00:17:15.520 --> 00:17:20.400 I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year. And when the snow melts, 00:17:22.080 --> 00:17:25.440 I think we should all touch some grass. Okay, bye.