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When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and Winter Spice Flavor Fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season, and only for a limited time. Sprite obey your thirst.
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Holy Kris Kringle's tinsel. You made it. I've been expecting you. Let me get the door. 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 that to remind you about that it happened. That's right. It's the 2025 TechLink Christmas Special. Let's kick things off with hardware and kick that off by remembering how Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang 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 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, announced 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 to 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 29, 2025 because like a certain serial mascot for 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 9070 XT 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 9950X3 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 tensor. Come on. Unfortunately, the Christmas spirit has kind of been whooshed 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 reduce 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 and 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 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 ally X on October 15, 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 handhelds 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 14, 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, it's 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 sass and his knowing looks. Although Microsoft did fix the update and shut down bug in Windows 11, not 10. And this all has Windows gamers in particular pining even harder for SteamOS as an alternative along with other forms of Linux. And the Steam Linux future is looking kind of bright right now. We got the first third party SteamOS 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 he just needs 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 Ayaneo 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 the 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 Ghibli. I don't know. Yes, standalone image generators are out, ChatGPT and Google Gemini's Nano Banana 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 to watch. 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 Grok identifying itself as Mecha Hitler and having various public breakdowns. ChatGPT users revolted when OpenAI launched GPT5 and took away the more personal, more emotionally intelligent GPT4. Oh, 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. Unitree 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 T800 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 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 ChatGPT, the latter of which also announced that adults could generate their own erotica next year. So, six, seven. I didn't mean to. I didn't. That wasn't 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. What I want to do is thank our sponsor, dbrand, who are feeling the Christmas spirit so much, they've just got to give something away. So all orders placed before January 1st are entered to win an ultra rare Galaxy Z Trifold. It's a phone, I think, but it might also evolve a Pokemon. I don't. I can't know because it's not currently available in North America, but if or when it is, it's probably gonna cost like 3,000 bucks. You don't know. Again, any and every order is eligible as a contest entry up until January 1st, including dBrand's new Sketch2D line. Look at those. Huh? That's like artistic. They kind of make me think of that superhero movie franchise owned by the company that makes PlayStation. It's cool. So go order something before January 1st and enter to win the Galaxy Z Trifold. A nice tasty treat for your Pokemon. 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 RedNote and Lemonade 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. Et cetera, leading to a surge in VPN use, which in turn has led regulators to consider banning VPNs in some US 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. Hmm. What else happened? Oh, Google decided they were gonna give Android fans a scare and and block the side loading of unverified Android apps. Yeah, barely anyone uses sideloading ever, but it's like a, 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 Quick Share. So now iPhones and Androids can blast each other with fun little pics and Apple can't do anything about. 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 and 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 Mahevin 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 earths and minerals. And I'll also give the current US Government another kudos for reportedly telling the UK to sod off with their whole we demand Apple give us a backdoor with the end of their encrypted user data thing. The UK apparently backed 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 Roblox, Fortnite and Zoom. Seriously though, it was one of those Internet problems affecting the real world situation. Some people were nearly cooked when their smart beds overheated. Then there was a similarly bad cloudflare 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 wanna 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 711 for all the Aquafin, 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 Luckey'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 kinda 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 housecoat 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.
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