? My Top Stories of 2024: A Mountain of Words in a Momentous Year

A mountain of words

2024 was a momentous year in personal technology for reasons both good and bad. Looking back, these are the stories I think mattered the most. Many of them are ongoing and will continue impacting us into next year and beyond. But all left a mark.

Speaking of which, I write a lot. I know that probably seems obvious. But I get up every day, work, and then do it again the next day, and I don’t really think in terms of what this looks like over time. Reviewing all the posts that Laurent and I wrote this past year quickly grew daunting, and rather than let it get away from me, I decided to break it down into more easily manageable parts. None of which were particularly manageable.

Overall, I’ve written over 1,150 articles and posts this past year, 267 of which were for Thurrott Premium. That’s an average of 22 articles each week, 5 of which were, on average, for Thurrott Premium. Or 4 per day, assuming a 7-day work week, as I do work 7 days per week, every week. And these numbers will grow a bit, since there are still a few days left in 2024 as I write this.

Of those 1,150 articles (and 267 Premium articles), 35 were From the Editor’s Desk editorials, many of which were personal in nature (as opposed to personal technology topics). I wrote 37 installments of Ask Paul, most of which are several thousand words long (and will do one more tomorrow, so 38). I wrote or updated 35 chapters in the Windows 11 Field Guide. There were 28 articles in the developer-oriented Modernizing .NETpad (2024) series, with more to come. 20 laptop and PC reviews, as noted earlier (which are not Premium posts, but lengthy).

During all this, I also spent an unknowable amount of time over several months spinning up a new book, Eternal Spring: Our Guide to Mexico City, with my wife Stephanie, a major undertaking. It’s now available in preview form on Leanpub, and just getting it out the door required a marathon all-weekend push.

And then there was the time I wasn’t writing, but was instead recording podcasts and getting ready for those podcasts. I recorded 51 episodes of Windows Weekly, which takes up 3 hours of every Wednesday, not counting the time it takes to make the notes, or over 150 hours. There were 50 episodes of Hands-On Windows, though only 48 have been published so far, and this show takes several hours of prep because of the screen grab requirements. And then over 140 episodes of First Ring Daily, which is only arduous because of the daily 9 am requirement.

And yikes. In any event, straining all that through a personal filter, here’s how I view the most important developments of 2024 in personal technology.

? Intel’s death spiral

Like Microsoft, Intel ruled supreme over personal computing when it was just about PCs, and this explains why the term Wintel–Windows + Intel–is still so well known. But we live in the post-PC world now, and smartphones–or, more generally, mobile computing–and the web long ago surpassed the PC in usage, relevance, and ubiquity. Intel and Microsoft both failed in mobile, but Microsoft found a second life in cloud computing, where Intel did not. And today, the once mighty foundation of personal computing is a shadow of its former self. It hired Pat Gelsinger to turn around the company in January 2021, and his strategy was to dramatically expand Intel’s chip fabrication capabilities to take on TSMC, Samsung, and other global chipmakers.

This isn’t on Gelsinger, but it hasn’t gone well. Tied to its struggles in ramping up its fabrication capabilities, Intel’s one remaining dominant market–which it artificially and, I think, illegally extended via cash payouts to partners–refuses to grow or rebound (see below). And its own PC-based x86 chips have suffered from years of reliability issues, culminating in an ill-timed

I raised the alarm on Intel chip quality in previous years, but its latest “Meteor Lake” and “Lunar Lake” chips each set new lows for quality and reliability, and did so back-to-back. Intel has since partnered with AMD to advance x86, a task a more powerful Intel would have handled unilaterally. But the bigger issue is financial: Intel has lost most of its value this past year and, in October, it stunned with its biggest financial loss in history. So Gelsinger is gone, and my prediction is that Intel proactively sells off its non-core product lines and is broken up. The only questions are when and whether the breakup will come from within or be forced on them from the outside. But it feels inevitable now.

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? Antitrust finally goes after Big Tech

After ignoring Big Tech for decades, antitrust regulators around the world finally woke up to the issues of these behemoths enshittifying their products and behaving illegally to create, maintain, and grow oppressive monopolies. This one is a broad topic, maybe too broad. But the big themes this year were Apple’s compliance non-compliance with the DMA, Google losing big in its US Search trial, and regulators finally waking up to Microsoft still being a problem after all these years.

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? AI

I was at an HP event earlier this month and ran into Michael Miller, a long-time industry journalist and former Editor-in-Chief of PC Magazine, and we were reminiscing about all we’d seen over the years. I asked, rhetorically, whether he’d seen anything like AI in that it was happening so quickly and impacted our world so completely. But he answered, immediately, “the Internet.” And fair enough: One day in the mid-1990s, some tiny fraction of the world was going online, usually through a service like America Online, and doing so at dial-up speeds, and the next we were all clamoring for broadband Internet and the explosion of services that seemed to spring up overnight.

But AI is still different. It’s happening at a time when personal computing has matured and is part of ever facet of our lives, and it impacts an almost exponentially larger audience. As important, the speed is incredible and, I think, unprecedented. Normally slow-moving and conservative companies like Microsoft and Amazon are tripping all over themselves and chaotically adding AI everywhere, investing in and buying other companies that offer services they didn’t invent, and shifting strategies on the fly so quickly they can’t even accurately be called strategies.

In 2023, I often discussed the notion of “the seven stages of grief” (or acceptance, or whatever) of AI, which reflected how confusing it was because of that speed. But the speed–and chaos–only continued and grew and 2024, and looking just at Microsoft, you can see this clearly. There’s the tortured relationship with OpenAI. Its sudden creation of an in-house Microsoft AI “organization” run by DeepMind and Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and staffed largely by his former employees in a non-acquisition end run around regulators. The multiple strategy shifts, and feature announcements and deprecations. The many times Copilot in Windows 11 changed and then changed again. On and on it goes. It all feels so off.

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?They did it, they finally did it

I’m writing about the history of Windows on Arm in my Then and Now series–the first two installments, RT and Feeling Blue are available now–but suffice to say, it’s not been a heart-warming, feel-good story to date. But that all changed in October 2023 when Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon X chips for PCs. Not that we trusted the company, which had failed to deliver on its promises over the previous 6 years. As a long-time victim of this dynamic, I kept waiting for the bad news to hit. But that never happened. Instead, we got leaked benchmarks that looked solid, and then I finally went hands-on with several prototype Snapdragon X-based PCs in early April and discovered the truth. This was going to work.

The rest of the year was full of drama, thanks to Microsoft marketing Snapdragon X-based PCs as Copilot+ PCs instead of focusing on their incredible reliability, battery life, performance, and compatibility. Intel reared its ugly head by trying to crash the launch party and then market its own craptacular chips as being superior, which we later found to be a lie. Microsoft recalled the key feature of these Copilot+ PCs, called Recall, in a PR stunt that went south immediately. Snapdragon announced then killed its Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows, confusing everyone. And Arm Holdings sued Qualcomm (see below) over the Snapdragon X in a failed money grab.

There’s also the weirdness of the Windows 11 on Arm ISO that users will need to deal with. I raised this issue many times over the years, most recently this past July. And Microsoft finally did release that ISO, though this one is complicated by driver issues and other weirdisms.

But none of this drama obscures the basic facts. Thanks to Qualcomm’s Nuvia acquisition, the resulting Snapdragon X processor family, Microsoft’s work on the Prism x86 emulator, and the unprecedented wave of new Arm-native apps, this is the PC platform of the future. I’m calling it. I will never buy another x86 PC again. Unless you’re a PC gamer, neither should you.

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? You want chaos? Oh, we got chaos

Windows 11 is a mess. Between the monthly updates, many of which aren’t tested beforehand, the crazy-unreliable and staggered release of Windows 11 version 24H2, the self-imposed confusion of marketing AI and then Copilot+ PCs as if they were new product editions (SKUs), the ongoing debates around hardware requirements and enshittification of the product, and now a new round of security issues and fixes, 2024 was just as chaotic, if not more so than 2023. And it’s not going to end next year.

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? The big controversy that wasn’t

Everyone likes being on the right side of history, and this is my best example in 2024: Microsoft introduced Recall, intending to release it in preview on a very limited number of new PCs only, and the world imploded because so-called security researchers invented security problems to market themselves to the media. And it worked. Microsoft delayed Recall at least three times, pretended to improve its security, but mostly didn’t–that wasn’t necessary, which I pointed out many times–and then finally did the right thing by making it opt-in (instead of opt-out) and uninstallable. What a silly waste of time this all was: Recall isn’t even that interesting in its initial shipping form (yes, in preview).

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?Xbox alienated everyone

Nothing says 2024 quite like Microsoft finalizing its $68 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard in October 2023 and then spending the entire next year doing absolutely nothing with it. All while laying off employees and closing game studios multiple times and then gouging and raising the pricing on the Xbox Game Pass subscriptions that stood to gain the most. What’s striking to me is the continued pushback against the Xbox strategy to bring the platform to all the devices its customers use. This isn’t new, but complainers gonna complain. Here’s the thing. This is the right strategy. Sorry.

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? The year Sonos lost me forever

Sonos has always made terrific hardware but horrible software, and I put up with the latter because of the quality of the former, and I even defended the company against bizarre complaints from non-customers about the product line. But this year, Sonos fell off a cliff: To dramatically expand its offerings, starting with a new pair of headphones no one was asking for, the company introduced a new app that was so bad it made even me miss the old version. I called the resulting drama Sonosgate, it was self-inflicted, and it’s not clear Sonos could have done worse at any point along the way. In doing so, they lost me forever. I will never buy another Sonos product again.

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? We’re serious about security. Again. No, this time we really mean it. Really

Oh, Microsoft. In late 2023, hackers sponsored by Russia gained access to Microsoft’s internal infrastructure for several months before the company even noticed. And it then spent the next several months never explaining what happened. Then the Crowdstrike incident unfolded over a painful weekend in July, with Microsoft blaming everyone but itself for its own security failings: Yes, Crowdstrike was caused by a buggy security update issued by a third party, but Microsoft is the reason that could happen in the first place. And after months of hand wringing, public promises to change, and lots of product announcements, we ended 2024 with the same security flaw in place. So here’s to 2025 and the next Crowdstrike. You know it’s coming.

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? Arm tries to strong-arm Qualcomm, face-plants in court

Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in early 2022 to use its Arm chip designs to build new generation Snapdragon processors for PCs. That effort was successful (see above), but Arm Holdings sued the company in April 2022, accusing it of violating its license agreements. Qualcomm refused to give in, and so the matter escalated this year, with Arm warning Qualcomm that it would cancel its license in a last ditch effort to avoid a trial. But that trial got under way in December and lasted less than a week. In the end, Qualcomm won, and it can continue building Snapdragon X chips.

There were many opinions based on very little information heading into the trial. What we couldn’t know from the outside was the language of the licensing agreements that still bind Arm Holdings and Qualcomm together. Post-trial, we still don’t know: I was hoping for clarity on this, but the details of their arrangement were kept private.

What we did know heading into the trial was that while both companies were publicly trying to sound as confident as possible, only Arm based its future financial guidance on the assumption that it would lose in court and never see a revenue windfall. Qualcomm never changed its forecast. And that, to me, was an important point. Arm is a recent publicly held company, it has yet to crack the $1 billion quarterly revenue ceiling, and investors are already edgy because it’s a non-player in AI. Qualcomm, meanwhile, is an economic superpower, with over 10 times the revenues of Arm, an impressive and growing array of chips that target ever conceivable market, and strongly AI credentials.

Arm’s gambit here is all about expanding into making its own chips and competing with Qualcomm and other partners. It has created new generation designs for which it charges more, but Qualcomm doesn’t need that work as it does its own chips advances in-house. Arm says it will seek a “retrial,” but can’t–that was detailed by the judge during the ruling–and so what we’re left with is a lot of bluster and a diminished Arm Holdings. Ah well.

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? The PC sales rebound that wasn’t

2024 was supposed to be the year that the PC market rebounded, but that didn’t happen. We won’t get the final tally until late January, but I expect the year to be flat at best, and possibly down overall, when compared to last year. There are all kinds of reasons–or excuses–for this state of affairs, and lots of finger pointing. But I think it comes down to some basic facts. We may just be at the logical size of this market. Businesses have always extended usage over several years, and will continue to do so. And consumers are not interested in PCs, which they see as tools for work and not worth worrying about.

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?Passkeys, password managers, and portability

Microsoft may never get security, but personal security took a big step forward in 2024 as passkeys went portable in a big way, making this technology more viable for more people. Like any security technology, passkeys are great when they just work and thread that convenience and security needle properly. That’s finally happening. So the only major issue they face is the name: Too many associate the term passkey with something negative. My advice is to just think of this as passwordless. And we are all going passwordless.

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?Subscription services and price hikes

This one hardly needs any discussion. Most will agree that we are drowning in subscription services and then the endless fees are quietly draining our bank accounts. But with rampant price hikes across the board, we’ve reached an inflection point with subscriptions. And while returning to legacy media is off the table, we need to collectively figure this out.

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