The biggest losers in technology in 2024

Welcome to 2025. Say goodbye to last year with The biggest losers in technology. Choosing our favorite villains in 2024 was tough when the time wasn’t good for technology. With the depressing social media maelstrom, the dancing around the TikTok ban in the US and the never-ending edited and fake content, it’s getting very noisy. Is it internet slop? Is it exhaustion? Does AI talk to AI about AI? And in between all of that, there’s the obsolescence of past connectors, Intel’s major struggles to turn around its fortunes, and its AI assistants.

Because it’s a new year, we’ll be making some changes to the Engadget newsletter in the next few weeks. We’ll continue to feature the biggest tech stories and events, but also in more context, with more writers and editors and even some features from Engadget’s past. Is there something you’d like to see in your inbox? Contact us.

– Matt Smith

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Tintin dances to Rhapsody in Blue.

It’s the start of a new year, and a new batch of creative works have entered the public domain. Today, many materials copyrighted in 1929 and audio recordings from 1924 are fair game and can be freely modified, reused, copied and shared. Many creative directors shot their first projects with sound, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s blackmail and Cecil B. DeMille dynamite. 1929 was also the year that Walt Disney directed the animated short Skeleton Dance by Ub Iwerks, and also when Mickey Mouse starred in his first talkie.

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Two games from a decade ago and a decisive failure.

Sony has just revealed the first batch of PlayStation Plus games in 2025 available to all subscribers. Includes this month Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Need for Speed ​​Hot Pursuit Remastered and Stanley Proverb: Ultra Deluxe. Suicide squad is a surprising addition: it has gone through multiple delays, received largely negative reviews, and reportedly cost Warner Bros. About 200 million dollars. The developers have announced that the current season of content will be its last, though there are no plans to shut down the game yet. So play it while you can…?

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