Holy Chris Kringles tinsel, you made it! I've been expecting you. Let me get the door.
Ha ha ha. 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
to remind you about that it happened. That's right, it's the 2025 Teckling Christmas Special.
Ha ha ha. 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, announce the RTX 50 series
GPUs and DLSS4 with multi-frame generation. They represented massive performance gains
over the 40 series, like a box of Krispy Kremes represents a balanced breakfast. The RTX 50
series launch was characterized by backlash over whether fake frames should count in benchmarks,
the somehow still ongoing melting power connectors saga, MSRP being nothing but a distant memory,
and a 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 and 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 RX 9070 and 9070XT 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 coy. 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 9950X3D 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.
Unfortunately, the Christmas spirit has kind of been wooshed 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 consumer-focused 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 a joy? Hey, how about gaming and handhelds and stuff? 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 fastest 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 Kinect failed. We did get the ROG Xbox Ally
and AllyX on October 15th, which were received kind of well and sort of are Xboxes in that they are
devices, which is now the only defining factor in what an Xbox is. Raspberry Pi, Xbox,
hearing aid, Xbox. The coolest thing about the Xbox handheld 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 f*** it,
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 ass and his knowing looks. Although Microsoft did
fix the update and shut down bug 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
slash 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 we just need to get a cube
shaped 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 Ioneo sporting
AMD's beastly Strix 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
aforementioned 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 Ghibli. Ghibli? Gribli? I don't know. Yes, standalone image generators are out.
ChatGPT and Google Gemini's Nanobanana have improved a ton and after Google VO3 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
Hopefully, this new gamer pope can do something about this.
Because ignoring the whole audio-visual problem, we had some concerning moments this year,
including Grock identifying itself as Mecca Hitler and having various public breakdowns.
ChatGPT users revolted when OpenAI launched GPT-5 and took away the more personal,
more emotionally intelligent GPT-40 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 Jonze, 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 this is getting
kind of wild. I've only mentioned American companies here, but China's AI ambitions are
going strong, Deepseek'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 T-800
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 ever-expanding 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.ai and chatgbt, the latter of which also announced
that adults could generate their own erotica next year. So,
6, 7. I didn't mean to. I didn't know that was a not 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. 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 TikTok supposed to be banned by now?
And I thought that too. And so did the hordes of TikTok users who flocked to other Chinese-owned
social apps like Red Note and Lemonate when TikTok 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
U.S. 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.
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, you know, you don't need it till you need it. Situation, you know, like 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 Quickshare. So now iPhones and
Androids can blast each other with fun little picks, 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 mechhoeven. 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 earth 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 backdoor with into their encrypted
user data thing. The UK apparently back 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
roadblocks, Fortnite and Zoom. Seriously though, it was one of those internet problems affecting
the real world situations some people were nearly cooked when their smartbeds 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, 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 gonna 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!
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.
Original Oculus founder Palmer Lucky's military tech company,
Enduril, partnered with Meta to release a cat-eared tactical AR helmet,
while Meta themselves launched the Meta Ray-Ban display with a full-color display in one of the
eyes. I'm gonna 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 gonna 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.