Welcome to 2025. Wave farewell to yesteryear with the greatest losers in tech. Selecting our favourite villains in 2024 was difficult when it merely wasn’t a good time for tech. With the miserable spiral that’s social media, the will-they-or-won’t-they dance of banning TikTok within the US and the neverending edited and deepfaked content material, it’s simply so noisy. Is it the web of slop? Is it exhaustion? Is it AIs speaking to AIs about AIs? In between all that, there’s the obsolescence of connectors previous, Intel’s main struggles to show round its fortunes, and, ugh, these AI assistants.
And, as a result of it is a new yr, we’ll be making some modifications to the Engadget e-newsletter within the subsequent few weeks. We’ll nonetheless be hitting the largest tech tales and occasions, but in addition fold in additional context, extra writers and editors and even some options from Engadget’s previous. Is there one thing you’d prefer to see in your inbox? Get in contact.
– Mat Smith
The most important tech tales you missed
Get this delivered every day direct to your inbox. Subscribe proper right here!
Tintin dancing to Rhapsody in Blue.
It is the beginning of a brand new yr, and a recent crop of inventive works have entered the general public area. At the moment, many supplies copyrighted in 1929 and sound recordings from 1924 turn out to be truthful recreation to freely adapt, reuse, copy and share. A number of seminal administrators debuted their first tasks with sound, reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail and Cecil B. DeMille’s Dynamite. 1929 was additionally the yr when Walt Disney directed the long-lasting Skeleton Dance quick animated by Ub Iwerks, in addition to when Mickey Mouse starred in his first talkie.
Two video games from a decade in the past and a crucial flop.
Sony simply revealed the primary set of PlayStation Plus video games in 2025 obtainable for all subscribers. This month consists of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Want for Pace Sizzling Pursuit Remastered and The Stanley Parable: Extremely Deluxe. Suicide Squad is a shocking addition: It went by way of a number of delays, bought largely damaging evaluations and reportedly price Warner Bros. some $200 million. Builders introduced that the present season of content material can be its final, although there are not any plans to close the sport down but. So play it whilst you… can?