It’s the final weekend of 2024, which seems an apt time to assign the overall winners and losers for the year in technology. Who had an annus horribilis? And who ruled the tech roost in 2024?
It feels like 2024 might be seen as an epochal year in the world of technology. It was the year artificial intelligence officially became consumer technology.
Honor 200 Boxing Day offer
With powerful cameras, a gorgeous 120Hz AMOLED display and a whopping 5200mAh battery, the Honor 200 is now the ultimate budget phone thanks to this Boxing Day deal.
- Argos
- Was £349.99
- Now just £299.99
View Deal
Some of the biggest tech companies on earth – Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Google, Qualcomm et al – began aligning their strategies behind the artificially intelligent future. For many, this has been years in the making, but for others, like Apple, the focus on generative AI was very much a 2024 thing.
It was a huge year in the social media realm too, where there was also no shortage of AI involvement. One might say X had a horrible year as it continued to lose millions of users, with Threads and Bluesky hoovering up the social media refugees.
However, Elon Musk himself had a great year cementing his position as the world’s richest man and pretty much the second in command to the incoming president of the United States. So, I’m not sure he’s going to be bothered by Twitter losing the lefties.
Sony launched the PS5 Pro, pushing console gaming to new heights, but we’re yet to see whether that’ll reap the rewards. Microsoft went the other way and it could be a winning strategy. Xbox hardware is now secondary to offering its best games everywhere. That’s via the cloud on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, but also by bringing its games to PS5.
In the mobile world, there wasn’t huge hardware upheaval. Samsung did its thing with the Galaxy S and its Z Flip and Z Fold phones, while Apple and Google pushed out the iPhone 16 and Pixel 9 range respectively. They’re all great handsets, but one suspects there are greater hardware revisions on the way in the years to come. Huawei introduced the first tri-fold device with the Mate XT, but does anyone really care about having an origami mobile device in their pocket? I don’t recall anyone answering “more folds” to the question “what do you need from your smartphone?”
It was a big year for wearables, namely in the smart ring real with the Oura Ring 4 looking to hold off the new Galaxy Ring from Samsung. Samsung also launched the Galaxy Watch Ultra as an answer to Apple’s rugged outdoor watch.
Sonos finally delivered on its long-promised pair of headphones in the Sonos Ace, but it was a terrible year for the company overall with the app relaunch being one of the software disasters of the year.
Winner: Our future AI overlords
There’s no one company that stands out as “winning” 2025, but most of them have one thing in common: They all fully embraced generative AI, effectively cementing it as the technology that will drive future innovation, software, operating systems, apps and silicon design.
Some of this stuff is next-level impressive. I was blown away by Google’s Gemini Live chat feature, where you can have a contextual, natural language conversation with a human-sounding bot. Even calling it a bot now feels odd, given how sentient it felt.
Microsoft has redesigned Windows completely around AI with Copilot+ PC. Even Apple integrated ChatGPT into Siri while it works on a next-generation version of its own voice assistant. Apple Intelligence has yet to prove its worth, but new tools like Image Playground and Genmoji highlighted AI’s playful side beyond scary hyper-realism.
Speaking of ChatGPT, 2024 was an another remarkable year for OpenAI. As well as debuting its voice chat feature, it is now testing a text-to-video platform that could completely alter the course of content creation; films, games, art. All of it.
Much of the AI advances are powered by incredible next-generation processors. Apple’s M4 Series, which debuted on the new iPad Pro and filtered down to Macs later in the year, should future proof fans for the biggest AI advancements in years to come. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite promises to do the same for mobile device owners on the Android side of things.
Loser: Microsoft
It’s harsh singling out, Microsoft because it did a lot of good things in 2024.
However, one of the biggest fails of 2024 was the global tech outage that downed about 8.5 million Windows devices around the world. It was caused by the security software-maker CrowdStrike running on Windows. It kept planes on the ground, and forced hospitals to cancel appointments. This wasn’t Microsoft’s fault, but it happened on Windows devices, while Mac owners went about their day unaffected.
2024 was also the year Microsoft, for all intents and purposes, conceded defeat to Sony in the console wars. By launching previously-exclusive IPs on PlayStation, Microsoft decided that more people playing and buying its first-party games was more important than selling console hardware.
That’s to be commended in some ways, because it’s a great leveller. You don’t need a console to play the latest Call of Duty anymore. You don’t even need to buy Call of Duty to play Call of Duty anymore, thanks to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription that’s available through the Xbox app on loads of screens and offers hundreds more games.
Whether this would have been the case if the Xbox Series X had whooped the PS5’s butt in this generation remains to be seen, but 2024 was another disappointing year for people who’d invested in Xbox hardware. Even the new first-party crown jewel, Indiana Jones, will be available for PS5 owners next spring.
Microsoft’s entry into AI was also highlighted by the debacle surrounding its controversial Recall feature for Copilot+ PCs, which takes regular screenshots of what’s on your screen.
The idea behind this Photographic Memory is to create a vast database you can search at any time in order to surface files, photos, documents and more. Anything you’ve seen and saved on your PC will be easier to find.
However, it sounds anything but secure thus far: “You cannot convince me that Microsoft’s security teams looked at this and said ‘that looks secure,’” Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker and private security consultant told Wired in June. “As it stands now, it’s a security dumpster fire. This is one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen from an enterprise security standpoint.”
