My Top Stories of 2025 ⭐

2025 was another monster year for personal technology, with AI, antitrust, and layoffs dominating the headlines.

2025 was also a big year for Thurrott.com. We published 1979 articles and posts overall (including this one). Laurent wrote 880 news stories and an excellent iPhone 16E review, and I feel obligated to point out that his work behind the scenes is invaluable and as appreciated as his writing. I was busy, too, of course. My 2025 contributions included:

• 1098 articles written overall (including this one)
• 261 Premium posts (including this one)
• 13 installments of the new Thurrott Premium newsletter since August and a partnership with Chris Hoffman on his excellent Windows ReadMe newsletter
• 33 From the Editor’s Desk editorials
• 48 Ask Paul columns
• 21 articles in the Online Accounts (2025) series, which was triggered by YouTube removing our access to our channel without warning
• 34 articles in the WinUIpad (5) and Modernizing .NETpad (2025) (29) programming series
• 50 episodes of Windows Weekly with Leo Laporte and Richard Campbell (2 with Chris)
• 50 episodes of Hands-On Windows
• 173 episodes of First Ring Daily with Brad Sams
• 11 episodes of Desk to Destination with Stephen Rose since August
• 2 episodes of RunAsRadio with Richard and 1 episode of iTechGear Weekly with Chris Spera, Larry McJunkin, and Joel McLaughlin

There’s no rest for the wicked. So let’s dive into the biggest stories and trends of 2025. Note that this is a human curated list, not a rote “x number of reads/comments” thing. I went through the entire year’s worth of stories twice to come up with this. And yet I feel it still only scratches the surface. It was just that kind of year.

? Some good news for a change

Despite all the negativity around AI, tech industry enshittification, tariffs and rising prices, uncertainty about Xbox, layoffs, and whatever else, 2025 is perhaps best remembered for all the good news, too. And there was no better news than antitrust regulation finally going after Big Tech and netting some major wins, so that gets its own category below. Here, I celebrate the smaller wins that helped get me—and, I suspect, many of you—through this objectively terrible year.

• Commodore is back, baby! And in semi-related news, Amiga Forever and C64 Forever got nice updates in 2025 too
• Affinity 3 arrived and the new owners at Canva surprised everyone by making it 100 percent free to use
• Microsoft open sourced its 6502 BASIC source code and the first three ZORK games, and Bill Gates open sourced Altair BASIC
• Microsoft made major advances in security in Windows 11 thanks to the Windows Resiliency Initiative (and so I wrote up how Windows 11 users should secure their PCs)
• Adobe Premiere shipped on iPad and iPhone for free
• Some positive news for Xbox and gamers amidst all the terribleness, including Fallout 4 adding Xbox Play Anywhere and Creations support, Red Dead Redemption coming to Android, iPhone, and iPad for free if you have a Netflix account, and remastered versions of Heretic and Hexen
• Microsoft releases a command line text editor called Edit that works in Windows and Linux
• Proton made an Authenticator app and it is glorious
• Microsoft paid it forward by bringing its improved text rendering capabilities to all Chromium browsers
• Google Earth now offers Historical Street View
• Adobe Project Indigo is a fascinating experimental camera app for the iPhone from the geniuses behind the Google Pixel computational photography efforts

? Enshittification and the rise of Little Tech

Enshittification wasn’t new to 2025, I first wrote about this term almost three years ago and I’ve been battling misunderstandings and misinformation about it ever since. But the book was, and it certainly accelerated this past year. Cory Doctorow, who invented the term, doesn’t really discuss what one can do as an individual to fight enshittification, and while he’s correct that voting with our wallets will not hurt Big Tech, I feel very strongly that we all need to do what’s right for ourselves regardless.

Increasingly, that means turning to Little Tech alternatives for enshittified Big Tech products and services. This has become a big focus for me personally, and also for Thurrott.com. And will continue into 2026 and beyond, I’m sure. This shift applies to AI, which I think is a nice lifeline for those who fear or distrust AI.

But a different tactic is required for our PCs and other personal computing devices, as each is dominated by a Big Tech abuser determined to thwart openness, interoperability, and competition. Antitrust regulation (see below) and right to repair laws are helping loosen up the artificial restrictions. But given my focus on Windows, it shouldn’t be surprising that de-enshittifying Windows 11 became central as well. And Tiny11 Builder, Win11Debloat, Rufus, ExplorerPatcher and MSEdgeRedirect have collectively emerged as the toolkit that I use and recommend to thwart Windows 11 enshittification.

A selection of other relevant enshittification and Little Tech posts includes:

• Netflix and other abusers often position enshittification as if it were for the customer’s benefit, but it’s up to us to be educated and say no
• Speaking of saying no, it’s time to say no to rental-only software when possible as well
• Brave has over 100 million users and it’s the boring and safe web browser everyone should be using
• DuckDuckGo improved its web browser and its search engine, and it released Duck.ai
• Linux now has 5 percent usage share in the U.S. and two of my favorite distributions, Zorin OS and Elementary OS, shipped major new versions
• Mozilla has a new CEO, all AI in Firefox will be opt-in
• Notion added agents but didn’t raise prices or drop the free plan, and it finally added offline support. This app continues to amaze
• I switched back to Mint Mobile and will save hundreds of dollars on cellular this year
• Proton had a big year, with Authenticator, emergency access, Mail, Pass, Sheets, Lumo AI, Lumo for Business, and more
• Sonos has a new CEO and we should probably give him the chance to save this company
• Spotify finally added lossless support
• I bought two Synology NAS devices in 2025, but the bigger news is that Synology reversed its controversial drive verification policy
• Vivaldi said no to AI
• The EU fined Apple and Meta a combined €700 million for breaking DMA rules

? AI hype collides with AI reality

This past year was AI all the time for the third year in a row and the pace of advances and hype has somehow only increased. We covered all that news, of course, and I’ve been vocal about Microsoft’s obfuscation of the money coming and going through its books each quarter. But in my own pragmatic way, I’ve been plodding along and trying to understand where AI is the most useful and where it can (and should) be avoided. So I will focus on that here with some key posts:

• Understanding when and where to use AI is key
• The real advantage of AI is that it saves you time, may be the truest words I’ve ever written
• AI has a reputation problem and it’s possible that the term is harmed irreparably. But AI is just technology, and it will become normal to us, like anything else. Oftentimes, boring is best
• When I wrote that AI meant the end of apps, I didn’t have a word to describe the process of apps becoming programmatic so that they can be controlled seamlessly by AI agents. But now I know that term is semantic
• The anti-AI movement is missing the point, especially when it comes to making videogames or anything else creative. This is a tool that creatives will use to be better at their jobs and more efficient
• Everyone is obsessed with AI slop, but human slop is a much bigger issue and it’s one that AI can, sorry, correct

? Some big wins for antitrust regulation and just two losses

The worst predations of Big Tech, from the junk fees that Apple and Google foist on developers and consumers to the anticompetitive bundling and artificial limitations that each of these companies build into their products and services, can only be thwarted with rigorous antitrust regulations and regulators. And 2025 was a golden age for Big Tech antitrust regulation: After 20+ years of silence, we’re finally forcing these horrible, horrible companies to do the right thing for consumers, businesses, and developers. And we’ve netted some incredible wins this past year. And, as is inevitable, a few losses as well.

Let’s start with those so we can get the bad taste out of our mouths:

• The ruling in U.S. v. Google (Search) could not have been more devastating to Google, and it was clear the judge was going to break up this company and drive meaningful change. Nope. He took the easy way out and avoided doing the one thing that would fix Google’s abuses, leading me to wonder if he was cowardly or just lazy
• Meta infamously acquired competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp, which is illegal when you have a monopoly, as it did at that time. And so the FTC cases against Meta seemed like a slam dunk with an obvious outcome: Break up Meta by unwinding those acquisitions. Nope. The judge determined that Meta no longer has a monopoly because these services compete, somehow, with TikTok and YouTube for users’ attention. Which is like arguing that Meta doesn’t have a monopoly because some people watch Netflix or play videogames

I know, gross. But here’s the good news. And there is a lot of it.

• Apple originally got a split verdict in Epic v. Apple despite its obvious abuses, but it engaged in its now traditional belligerent non-compliance strategy to drag out the process and keep collecting its junk fees for as long as possible. But this time, a competent judge would have none of it. In April, the judge lowered the boom on Apple, in effect overturning the original ruling and dealing the company a total loss and referring Apple executives to the U.S. Attorneys General for lying on the stand. Apple did everything it could to overturn this new verdict, but an appeals court upheld it. And now Apple will have to open up its App Store in the U.S. and no longer collect junk fees for transactions that occur outside its ecosystem. Bravo!
• Apple also tried to have U.S. v. Apple thrown out, this being the massive antitrust case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. But that was rebuffed by a judge who correctly noted that the DOJ’s complaints are valid. Given its loss against Epic, Apple should settle. But I have to be honest, I want them to go to court, where they will lose even worse
• Google somehow managed to lose even harder in Epic v. Google. It was denied on every appeal attempt and ignored by the U.S. Supreme Court, and then forced to open up the Google Play Store similarly to what’s happening to Apple now. But this is when the real miracle happened: Google and Epic actually settled this case, with Google agreeing to even more aggressive terms that will apply worldwide, and not just in the U.S. Settling is always the right choice, since this gives the abusive company a chance to have some say over its future.
• As a result of the above, Fortnite, one of the world’s most popular games, is now back in the Apple App Store worldwide and in the Google Play Store in the U.S. (it was already there in other markets)
• Epic Games and the European Union both say that the Digital Markets Act (DMA) forced Big Tech to make positive changes to their abuses products and services
• In addition to the U.S., Apple has been forced (or soon will be) to open up its App Store in the EU, the UK, Australia, and Japan to varying degrees
• Google is about to lose U.S. v. Google (Ads) so badly that the judge recommended that it settle this case before he can issue a ruling
• Amazon will let authors remove DRM from the books they sell on Kindle
• The EU determined that Apple Maps is also a gatekeeper under the DMA rules
• Right to Repair laws worldwide forced PC makers to make their products user serviceable and upgradeable, so I upgraded the SSD in one of my laptops
• Microsoft settled its Office/Teams bundling case in the EU and is making both products available separately and opening up the productivity suite to third-party competition
• In the first of what I think will be many Big AI settlements over IP and copyright theft, Anthropic agreed to pay the authors of books whose content they stole to train its AI $3000 per stolen work, for a total of about $1.5 billion

And a few final thoughts on this topic for now:

• I wrote And the Walls Come Tumbling Down (Premium) back in May, before all the best news even happened. Did I mention this was a great year?
• Apple and Google charging 30 percent for doing nothing is robbery, plain and simple. They should be paying developers to support their platforms or at least make doing so free
• Books like Apple in China, Careless People, and iWar: Fortnite, Elon Musk, Spotify, WeChat, and Laying Siege to Apple’s Empire are all wake-up calls for anyone who believes these Big Tech companies are somehow “good” in any way. They are not

? Windows 10 goes out with a whimper, Windows 11 remains controversial

The pending end of support for Windows 10 was inarguably the biggest Windows-related news story of the year, despite Microsoft supporting the OS for a full 10 years, its traditional support lifecycle. As is so often the case, Windows 10 was suddenly more beloved once it was going away, despite having a very complicated legacy. And in addition to letting businesses pay for three years of additional support, Microsoft for the first time did the same for consumers, though for only one year, and for free on multiple PCs. And it extended support for Edge on Windows 10 through October 2028 too.

The concern here was that too many people and businesses were still using Windows 10, though Windows 11 usage surpasses that of Windows 10 this past year. The truth is that Windows 10 usage wasn’t really all that different, usage-wise, from previous end-of-lifers like Windows XP and Windows 7 at the same point in their lifecycles. And there are out of support mobile platforms with a lot more users than Windows 10. Despite this, Consumer Reports urged Microsoft to extend support. Microsoft correctly ignored that.

The faux controversy over Microsoft turning Windows 11 into an agentic OS was perhaps a close second in the Windows news department. Pavan Davuluri talked up AI in Windows 11 in October, was promoted and reorged Windows in September, and then said that Windows 11 would be “AI native” in October. But when Davuluri tweeted about an Ignite session where he would discuss Windows evolving into an agentic OS, the knuckle-dragging hate mongers came out in force with personal attacks and threats. But the resulting session was, I wrote, “much AI about nothing,” rendering the complaints moot. What Microsoft is planning for Windows 11, wait for it, actually seems to make sense.

Sorry, haters

? A Google renaissance

Google was caught off-guard by Microsoft’s sudden explosion of AI capabilities in early 2023, and its first responses were a collective face-raking of back-to-back embarrassments that had critics calling for the ouster of CEO Sundar Pichai. But 2025 has told a different story. After two years of aggressively steady updates, Google unleashed Gemini 3 in November, during Microsoft Ignite. (Who is dancing now, bitch?) And then it released Nano Banana Pro, its incredible image and video model, everywhere. They are both widely regarded as the best overall AI LLMs as we exit 2025, and they position Google in the driver’s seat going forward.

? An Xbox pivot

With Xbox, the angst is real and it appears to be never-ending. Xbox fans rejoiced when Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard for $68 billion in October 2023. And they bristled at the FTC’s cry-baby unwind the acquisition after its decisive legal losses. But 2024 and 2025 will always be remembered for how badly Xbox stumbled after that acquisition through a series of missteps that included studio closures, massive layoffs, game cancelations, hardware, software, and Game Pass price hikes, and a silent but patently obvious retreat from the videogame console market.

What we learned over time is that Microsoft is transitioning Xbox from a console-focused brand to being a cross-platform game publisher and ecosystem. And that all the bad news was driven by Microsoft CTO Amy Hood, who demanded that Xbox somehow achieve an arbitrary and impossible 30 percent profit margin. Yes, Xbox was enshittified from within.

Getting from here to there, so to speak, will take some time. For now, we have our first PC-based Xbox hardware, and also our first third-party Xbox hardware, in the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally gaming handhelds. Microsoft still promises a new-generation Xbox console, but we’ll see. And it is busy porting its biggest and best games to rival platforms. May we live in interesting times, indeed.

➕ But wait, there’s more!

There’s more, there’s always more, but I have to cut this off at some point. Before doing so, here are sometimes other stories that stood out in this momentous year.

• Most of the people leading Big Tech and Big AI organizations are terrible, but I really like Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman
• Apple did the impossible and turned the iPad into a real productivity laptop without compromising the touch-first, consumption-focused UI that fans love. iPadOS 26 is easily the best-ever release of this platform. And now,the iPad may be the perfect computer for most people now and we’ll see whether Google can do the same to Android with Aluminum in 2026
• After testing several of the first agentic AI web browsers in 2025, I see mostly complexity and broken promises, but Gartner sees something far worse and wants all organizations to skip these products for the foreseeable future. If you must try such a thing, the best choices right now appear to be Perplexity Comet and Opera Neon
• The Microsoft and OpenAI relationship is clearly on the outs, and you can see that their constantly rejiggered partnership agreement and Microsoft’s steady development of its own in-house frontier models
• Windows 11 on Arm saw many improvements in 2025, but the biggest came from an unexpected angle, videogames. Fortnite and Easy Anti-Cheat are now available on the platform, you can download games using the Xbox app, there’s a Snapdragon Control Panel for tweaking game settings, and the Snapdragon X2 is on the way, with the first PCs expected to be announced next week at CES. Sweet!
• Apple saw a curious and notable number of executives leaving the company in 2025 and beyond, including COO Jeff Williams, AI lead John Giannandrea, VP of Human Interface Design Alan Dye, and general counsel Kate Adams and VP Lisa Jackson. But thankfully Apple Silicon genius Johny Srouji has no plans to leave, despite rumors
• I’m not sure what’s more notable, the non-existent but massive sums at cash that Big Tech and Big AI are throwing at each other or the sheer number of content publishers that are suing these companies for theft. The New York Times is doing well against OpenAI and Microsoft, which is good news, and now it’s sued Perplexity too. As has Amazon. Which of course licensed content from the New York Times. Round and round we go, and there’s so much more
• The Intel freefall continued in 2025, with the U.S. government bailing out the company after it appointed a new CEO and experienced multiple rounds of layoffs, a big reorg, product and asset sell-offs, new fab delays, and quarterly losses. The latter of which it most recently pretended was quarterly growth; take away the U.S. “investment,” and it was yet another loss
• Microsoft had issues with pro-Palestinian protesters multiple times in 2025, the most recent being a group “seizing” a building on its corporate campus. I experienced this first hand in Seattle during Build in May, and my two reports about this, Fear and Loathing in Seattle (Premium) and More Fear and Loathing in Seattle (Premium) are potentially noteworthy
• Bill Atkinson sadly passed away in 2025, as did Woody Leonhard
• Microsoft celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2025, and it is nothing like the company it used to be for better or worse
• The Nintendo Switch 2 is off to a solid start
• Microsoft quietly killed Skype in 2025. And OneNote for Windows 10. But not the new Outlook for some reason. Sorry
• Google abandoned its plans to help advertisers and hurt consumers with Privacy Sandbox
• Are we finally going to get Half-Life 3 in 2025? Cross your fingers!
• Recall arrived on Copilot+ PCs broadly and there hasn’t been a single security issue. Curious
• Vibe coding isn’t what you think it is
• Apple formally delayed the updated conversational Siri, I’m sure it will be fantastic in the future
• Dell inexplicably killed the XPS brand