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 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