Battlefront 2024 Predictions

[Horatio]

It's predictions time! I haven't thought all of mine through yet, but some early ones:

AR/VR
Meta announces a new headset, but it's not the Quest 4 or Quest Pro 2
Meta shows off new AR tech by EOY, but not a product
AVP sells through its initial launch, but fails to find PMF by EOY

AI
At least one major AI company goes out of business
The AI copyright lawsuits are not definitively resolved with cases going both directions
iPhone 16 has a new AI powered Siri on board. It's roughly as good as existing Siri.

The Tech Industry
Threads has at least one month with MAU > X
X goes under
Cybertruck is a failure
Tesla experiences an emperor has no clothes moment
Google loses its antitrust case regarding paying off Apple, and is forced to stop doing that

 

[Shavano]

iPhone 16 has a new AI powered Siri on board. It's roughly as good as existing Siri.

but makes stuff up, so overall less useful

Tech Industry/Government
EU goes after Google again for failing to comply with the same rules it just got fined for last fall.
Congress makes lots of noise about EU style antitrust legislation but it fails to pass.
Musk blames X loss of profits on Big Government/Biden
NVIDIA stock takes a 30% hit in (YTD) valuation ($346 to make this specific) after peaking over $550.
Tesla fined by FTC for 8 for years of failing to deliver on "full self driving"
Congress makes lots of noise about Right to Repair but doesn't do anything for most consumer products.

 

[Louis XVI]

I’ll take a shot this year!

• At least one very prominent tech figure is included in the list of Jeffrey Epstein associates that’s about to be unsealed. (I have my guesses as to who, but it’s not fair to tar specific individuals with what’s really just speculation.)
• X/Twitter ceases to operate as a functioning website, either due to a technical failure or pissed off European regulators.
• X/Twitter declares bankruptcy after losing a deluge of lawsuits to former employees, contractors, landlords, customer class actions, and regulators.
• Bluesky opens to the general public and becomes the de facto Twitter replacement.
• Apple continues to dominate the video game field, as iOS’s gaming revenue swamps that of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.
• The Vision Pro is a very cool piece of kit, but doesn’t sell many copies due to both limited supply and limited application support. At the end of the year, it’s still not entirely clear what to do with the thing.
• New iPad Pros with OLED screens are awesome, but most people opt to buy the iPad Air, especially when it is also available with a larger screen.
• Microsoft continues to make unfathomable amounts of money, despite not introducing anything particularly new or innovative this year.
• Tesla’s stock falls by 50% or more.

 

[wrylachlan]

Wearable

• This is the year of the Apple Watch redesign
• Apple Watch smart bands
• First AirPods with health sensors (HR and temp)
• Pixel Watch and Galaxy Watch keep trucking but nothing meaningfully changes in terms of marketshare

AI/ML

• At least one lawsuit for content scraping makes it through the courts and OpenAI/MS gets a historically massive fine.
• Someone releases a LLM based on only full rights input and it performs essentially as well as the scrape everything ChatGPT.
• First silicon expressly designed to accelerate LLMs on device (Apple M4/A18 generation)
• Apple uses any extremely cautious approach to LLMs in their new Siri. Lots of ‘I can’t answer that Dave’ but substantially less hallucination issues.
• At least one post-LLM new model architecture comes to prominence
• A major player claims to have achieved AGI

AR/VR

• AVP continues to wow everyone who tries one, while price and availability keep that number very small
• Quest continues to be the mass market winner in the VR space.

Silicon

• Qualcomm’s Nuvia-designed chip turns out to make a pretty damn good Surface Pro and Windows on ARM gets some small but notable traction.
• All the investment in in-house chips for the big cloud players + the shift to GPU computing in the cloud really start to put Intel in a world of hurt.
• Apple puts the petal to the Metal and releases the M4 generation just a year after M3. Focus on ML, GPU and increasing memory bandwidth.

Misc

• Twitter files for bankruptcy
• Despite much wailing and gnashing of teeth over Meta owning yet another platform… Threads is the new Twitter.
• Foldables continue their moderate growth but the giddy prospect of acceleration towards a market dominance that you read about in past years is gone. They remain niche with a long slow growth trajectory, slipping margins and no iPhone foldable on the horizon.
• Bing (with ChatGPT) making meaningful gains on Google becomes a story.
• Netflix’s side hustle in gaming gets more serious with a move into AAA gaming.
• Every streamer not named Netflix or Apple has a rough year (and Apple would have a rough year if it had to stand on its own and not as part of bundles and the ecosystem customer sat strategy.)
• A story breaks of either Ukraine or Russia using the worlds first fully autonomous targeting kill drone.

 

[Shavano]

Israel on that last one. I don't think either Ukraine or Russia is capable.

 

[LordDaMan]

Lets see:

Microsoft:

• Windows 12 is confirmed. Supposedly to come out by year's end but gets delayed unstill 2025
• Copilot integrates with damn near everything Microsoft makes.
• In conjunction with above, there will be support on the xbox and even integration with games. "Build an x-wing in Minecraft"

Apple:

• Apple Vision pro comes out. V1 has massive software problems and it ends up being a "hobby" within a year or two
• Some celebrity will wear apple vision pro in public in normal settings. The person will be mocked relenetlessy on social media
• Multiple M(x) cpus come out. Each new one is less and less improvement to the point where a bump in clock speed with zero other differences is classified as a new CPU
• Some sort of widespread iOs malware

Google:

• They come up with yet another sneaky way to track you bypassing all other blockers
• A series of chrome 0 day exploits that force an almost near dayley version builds for a period of under a week. This also effects anything based or borrowing form Googles code (edge, safari, etc)

Misc:

• Antisemitism reaches a point where people on social media post about how correct Hitler in everything he said about jews. These will get liked and shared and nothing is done about it. Only twitters bans this
• This is the year of the linux desktop claimed by at least one tech writer.
• There's a ton of new handheld gaming devices competing with the steam deck. Some are linux, some are windows
• There's a new troll on the battlefront that posts a ton of nonsense.

 

[koala]

It's a weird day, so why not.

The ones I expect to happen, but I wish they wouldn't.

• X survives and doesn't really decay too much- most prominent figures on X keep posting on X. Exception: X stops operating in EU due to regulations, massive fines, etc., all bets are off in this case.
• Crypto stays more or less in the same state as 2023. Some cryptocoins still increase their value.

I'm somewhat neutral on those

• Threads has more users than the Fediverse, but no one cares. Threads only steals mindshare from Instagram. Mastodon continues to be a modest success within technical circles, but no major celebrity/journalist publishes anything exclusively there.
• AI hallucinations are not solved. However, LLMs continue to be useful in fields where hallucinations are not really a problem. Image/video generation continue to improve.
• Humane AI pin gets good reviews, but sells modestly
• Vision Pro is not the second coming, but it really meets the promises made in demos. It sells better than pessimistic pundits predict, but has no impact other than tons of media attention, and other companies copying stuff from it (and perhaps being more successful with their cheaper copies). The only use it gets is as a personal streaming device, but it's too expensive and only people with money to burn get it. Perhaps it gets used on planes or similar scenarios.

 

[lithven]

I'll throw my hat in:

• Twitter does not go out of business but they do declare bankruptcy. More advertisers stop advertising (but some also come back).
• At least one person is pulled over for driving while using an AVP; they’re driving a Tesla.
• Microsoft announces the discontinuation of the HoloLens.
• There are many copyright lawsuits regarding AI use of scraped data leading to a split between districts in the US
• Another “hard problem” is “solved” through the use of an AI model.
• EV sales continue to stagnate in the US as manufacturers chase the high end and profits while consumers await NACS vehicles.
• NACS doesn't solve the problem with non-Tesla charger reliability.
• Third party NACS compatibility with Tesla chargers is hit or miss initially including people trying to use NACS vehicles at non-CCS Tesla chargers.
• Windows 10 has more installed base at the end of 2024 than Windows 11.
• Google continues efforts to block ad blockers on youtube with improved success due in part to changes to Chrome addons.
• Streaming platforms introduce annual pricing in an effort to reduce hopping.

 

[Shavano]

Lets see:

...

Apple:

• Some sort of widespread iOs malware

not that widespread but:
https://www.wired.com/story/kaspersky-apple-ios-zero-day-intrusion/can't get credit for predicting something that happened two days ago.

Google:

• They come up with yet another sneaky way to track you bypassing all other blockers

seems like that's already underway too.
https://www.extremetech.com/internet/google-expands-youtube-ad-blocker-detection

• There's a new troll on the battlefront that posts a ton of nonsense.

What month doesn't that happen?

 

[MrElbbiw]

In no particular order...

A pornhub-esq lawsuit hits Reddit. This kills the IPO, scares away advertisers, and pushes Reddit to the edge of bankruptcy.
Twitter/Threads/Insta/Facebook tread water.
Blusky opens up but the current userbases insularity and determination not to allow a repeat of the mistakes of Twitter puts a large number of normies off.
Apple Vision treads water.
M(x) get's what would be reasonable performance bumps for x64; commentariat overreacts about slowdown, pessimism about x64 reduces.
Tech sector / commercial landlords PR war over WFH.
A TikTok ban in at least 1 G7 nation.
Google antitrust investigation in at least one G7 nation over Chrome/Ad Blockers/Youtube. Google eventually pays fine, spins Chrome off as nominally arms length foundation.
No longer needed as a Potemkin competitor, Google ends Firefox sponsorship. Bing steps in, but with sponsorship rates at a lower figure. The three remaining users of slashdot all have breakdowns...
Waymo begins Phoenix-scale public testing in second country.
Apple car rumours resurface.
Summer rumours of a China/Taiwan war cause an availability crunch for hardware as people rush to avoid a repeat of spring 20. This does not fully unwind before Christmas '24.
An advance in mechanised textiles handling is hyped as an on-shoring breakthrough and provokes a negative reaction from large parts of the developing world with empty threats of raw cotton bans.

 

[WDReinhart]

A pornhub-esq lawsuit hits Reddit. This kills the IPO, scares away advertisers, and pushes Reddit to the edge of bankruptcy.

If the CEO accidentally admitting in an argument about API access that reddit has never made money didn't do it...

 

[Shavano]

BYD partners with US car maker.

 

[koala]

It's a weird day, so why not.

The ones I expect to happen, but I wish they wouldn't.

• X survives and doesn't really decay too much- most prominent figures on X keep posting on X. Exception: X stops operating in EU due to regulations, massive fines, etc., all bets are off in this case.
• Crypto stays more or less in the same state as 2023. Some cryptocoins still increase their value.

I think I got these right, although looking back at this, I'm very surprised at how these arrived to be...

I'm somewhat neutral on those

• Threads has more users than the Fediverse, but no one cares. Threads only steals mindshare from Instagram. Mastodon continues to be a modest success within technical circles, but no major celebrity/journalist publishes anything exclusively there.

I think this is mostly true? Although I think some high-profile people are posting on Mastodon.

• AI hallucinations are not solved. However, LLMs continue to be useful in fields where hallucinations are not really a problem. Image/video generation continue to improve.

I think mostly right, although I think there are still valid LLM use cases still majorly unexplored. (And a lot useless ones hyped to death.)

• Humane AI pin gets good reviews, but sells modestly

NOPE!

• Vision Pro is not the second coming, but it really meets the promises made in demos. It sells better than pessimistic pundits predict, but has no impact other than tons of media attention, and other companies copying stuff from it (and perhaps being more successful with their cheaper copies). The only use it gets is as a personal streaming device, but it's too expensive and only people with money to burn get it. Perhaps it gets used on planes or similar scenarios.

I don't think so, right?

 

[Louis XVI]

I’ll take a shot this year!

• At least one very prominent tech figure is included in the list of Jeffrey Epstein associates that’s about to be unsealed. (I have my guesses as to who, but it’s not fair to tar specific individuals with what’s really just speculation.)

I don’t remember what happened with this. Did the list somehow stay sealed?

• X/Twitter ceases to operate as a functioning website, either due to a technical failure or pissed off European regulators.
• X/Twitter declares bankruptcy after losing a deluge of lawsuits to former employees, contractors, landlords, customer class actions, and regulators.

Alas, no.

• Bluesky opens to the general public and becomes the de facto Twitter replacement.

Yes.

• Apple continues to dominate the video game field, as iOS’s gaming revenue swamps that of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.

Yep.

• The Vision Pro is a very cool piece of kit, but doesn’t sell many copies due to both limited supply and limited application support. At the end of the year, it’s still not entirely clear what to do with the thing.

Yes.

• New iPad Pros with OLED screens are awesome, but most people opt to buy the iPad Air, especially when it is also available with a larger screen.

The new iPad Pros are indeed fantastic, though I don’t know how their sales were relative to the Air.

• Microsoft continues to make unfathomable amounts of money, despite not introducing anything particularly new or innovative this year.

Yep.

• Tesla’s stock falls by 50% or more.

Ah, well, nevertheless…

 

[LordDaMan]

Lets see:

Microsoft:

• Windows 12 is confirmed. Supposedly to come out by year's end but gets delayed unstill 2025

Nope

• Copilot integrates with damn near everything Microsoft makes.

Pretty much anything you input data into in any fashion uses AI now. Office, github, powertoys even notepad

• In conjunction with above, there will be support on the xbox and even integration with games. "Build an x-wing in Minecraft"

Nope. Didn't even hear a word about it

Apple:

• Apple Vision pro comes out. V1 has massive software problems and it ends up being a "hobby" within a year or two

Nope. Although it does seem like apple massively cooled down on the AVP.

• Some celebrity will wear apple vision pro in public in normal settings. The person will be mocked relenetlessy on social media

Nope. Really though that would happen. I guess the days of weaning some apple gadget as a fashion statement are long gone

• Multiple M(x) cpus come out. Each new one is less and less improvement to the point where a bump in clock speed with zero other differences is classified as a new CPU

No, not really. There's still some differences, but they do seem to be getting smaller

• Some sort of widespread iOs malware

Nope

Google:

• They come up with yet another sneaky way to track you bypassing all other blockers

Nothing I have heard of

• A series of chrome 0 day exploits that force an almost near dayley version builds for a period of under a week. This also effects anything based or borrowing form Googles code (edge, safari, etc)

Nope. Also "dayley", wtf was I thinking?

Misc:

• Antisemitism reaches a point where people on social media post about how correct Hitler in everything he said about jews. These will get liked and shared and nothing is done about it. Only twitters bans this

No ,but killing people is welcome and celebrated by a not so tiny portion of the population online as long as you only kill certain types of people

• This is the year of the linux desktop claimed by at least one tech writer.

Too lazy to look it up if I was right or not. i would guess yes

• There's a ton of new handheld gaming devices competing with the steam deck. Some are linux, some are windows

Yup. There's at least two, with more coming shortly

• There's a new troll on the battlefront that posts a ton of nonsense.

Surprisingly not so much.

 

[Shavano]

but makes stuff up, so overall less useful

Tech Industry/Government
EU goes after Google again for failing to comply with the same rules it just got fined for last fall.
Congress makes lots of noise about EU style antitrust legislation but it fails to pass.
Musk blames X loss of profits on Big Government/Biden
NVIDIA stock takes a 30% hit in (YTD) valuation ($346 to make this specific) after peaking over $550.
Tesla fined by FTC for 8 for years of failing to deliver on "full self driving"
Congress makes lots of noise about Right to Repair but doesn't do anything for most consumer products.

followup on my predictions.

My Predictions	HIT or MISS (with comments)
EU goes after Google again for failing to comply with the same rules it just got fined for last fall.	MISS (qualified) Google won a challenge to a 2019 antitrust fine, but the US DOJ went after them and Japan is also on this train.
Congress makes lots of noise about EU style antitrust legislation but it fails to pass.	HIT (qualified) Some noise but not A LOT.
Musk blames X loss of profits on Big Government/Biden	MISS. He blamed Biden for just about everything else, but not that.
NVIDIA stock takes a 30% hit in (YTD) valuation ($346 to make this specific) after peaking over $550.	MISS. There was 10:1 split in June, so these values translate to $34.60 after peaking over $55.00 when considered by after the split prices. In retrospect, I didn't think through how I stated this well at all. On 3/22, Nvidia hit 942.9 in pre-split bucks. A 30% drop from that level would have been 660, and it never went that low. But post split, it peaked at $134.91 on 7/9. The lowest price since then has been $98.91, only a 27% loss if you bought at the peak and sold at the trough. But most investors didn't and NVIDIA is way up since the start of the year. It has been very volatile.
Tesla fined by FTC for 8 for years of failing to deliver on "full self driving"	MISS. Wrong agency and wrong issues. NHTSA is investigating Tesla safety issues related to self driving. It doesn't look right now like the government's going after the fraud angle at all.
Congress makes lots of noise about Right to Repair but doesn't do anything for most consumer products.	HIT.

Crystal ball needs recalibration.

 

[wrylachlan]

Rough year for predictions:

Wearable

• This is the year of the Apple Watch redesign
• Apple Watch smart bands
• First AirPods with health sensors (HR and temp)

Nope

• Pixel Watch and Galaxy Watch keep trucking but nothing meaningfully changes in terms of marketshare

Yep

AI/ML

• At least one lawsuit for content scraping makes it through the courts and OpenAI/MS gets a historically massive fine.
• Someone releases a LLM based on only full rights input and it performs essentially as well as the scrape everything ChatGPT.

Nope

• First silicon expressly designed to accelerate LLMs on device (Apple M4/A18 generation)

Ish. Apple markets it that way but under the hood it’s small incremental evolutions

• Apple uses any extremely cautious approach to LLMs in their new Siri. Lots of ‘I can’t answer that Dave’ but substantially less hallucination issues.

Yup

• At least one post-LLM new model architecture comes to prominence

Yup

• A major player claims to have achieved AGI

Nope

• AVP continues to wow everyone who tries one, while price and availability keep that number very small
• Quest continues to be the mass market winner in the VR space.

Yup

• Silicon
  • Qualcomm’s Nuvia-designed chip turns out to make a pretty damn good Surface Pro and Windows on ARM gets some small but notable traction.

Ish

• • All the investment in in-house chips for the big cloud players + the shift to GPU computing in the cloud really start to put Intel in a world of hurt.

Turns out AMD more than the cloud ARM did most of the damage to Intel in 2024 but Intel is 100% in a world of hurt.

• Apple puts the petal to the Metal and releases the M4 generation just a year after M3. Focus on ML, GPU and increasing memory bandwidth.

Yup.

• Misc
  • Twitter files for bankruptcy

A boy can dream

• • Despite much wailing and gnashing of teeth over Meta owning yet another platform… Threads is the new Twitter.

Bluesky has been the media darling lately Threads still has more users. Half a point.

• Foldables continue their moderate growth but the giddy prospect of acceleration towards a market dominance that you read about in past years is gone. They remain niche with a long slow growth trajectory, slipping margins and no iPhone foldable on the horizon.

Ish depending on whether you consider late 2026 to 2027 “on the horizon”.

• Bing (with ChatGPT) making meaningful gains on Google becomes a story.

Na

• Netflix’s side hustle in gaming gets more serious with a move into AAA gaming.

Does Civ 6 count?

• Every streamer not named Netflix or Apple has a rough year (and Apple would have a rough year if it had to stand on its own and not as part of bundles and the ecosystem customer sat strategy.)

Not really - Disney and Amazon seem to have gotten a handle on things. Who knew?

• A story breaks of either Ukraine or Russia using the worlds first fully autonomous targeting kill drone.

Nope AI used for target acquisition but human operator orders the kill. But it’s coming…

 

[cateye]

• Despite much wailing and gnashing of teeth over Meta owning yet another platform… Threads is the new Twitter.

Bluesky has been the media darling lately Threads still has more users. Half a point.

What I find most unexpected (at least by me) over the last year: It's not that one stupid microblogging site has replaced another, it's that no matter how many more get added, none go away. They all attract a critical mass of users and money. Without even getting into the peak-nerd that is Mastodon, there's Xitter, Threads, Blue Sky, Truth Social, Instagram kinda-sorta... I'm sure I'm missing one or more.

What fresh hell has brought us to the point that we need this many "town squares"? I can barely keep up with Ars, I'm not going to waste my time reading someone's bullshit theories on Twapper, much less posting my own, regardless of who owns it.

 

[LordDaMan]

What fresh hell has brought us to the point that we need this many "town squares"? I can barely keep up with Ars, I'm not going to waste my time reading someone's bullshit theories on Twapper, much less posting my own, regardless of who owns it.

No one listens to each other anymore and moderation got bad, So we have a bunch of tiny ones with only very limited viewpoints tolerated

 

[Horatio]

AR/VR
Meta announces a new headset, but it's not the Quest 4 or Quest Pro 2

Yup, Quest 3S. Whoopie.

Meta shows off new AR tech by EOY, but not a product

Yup, Orion!

AVP sells through its initial launch, but fails to find PMF by EOY

I think this happened, though maybe it didn't sell through on the initial launch, especially when returns are taken in to account. Regardless, they did not find PMF (or a pathway to find PMF)

AI
At least one major AI company goes out of business

Hmm, nope.

The AI copyright lawsuits are not definitively resolved with cases going both directions

No real resolution, but content deals aplenty!

iPhone 16 has a new AI powered Siri on board. It's roughly as good as existing Siri.

Yup, and well, Siri is about as useful as before, Apple Intelligence is, well, not great.

The Tech Industry
Threads has at least one month with MAU > X

Nope

X goes under

Nope, le sigh

Cybertruck is a failure

It's the best selling EV truck in the nation, but also a failure, alongside its occupants. Half point

Tesla experiences an emperor has no clothes moment

And the emperor paraded around naked, fully aware of being so.

Google loses its antitrust case regarding paying off Apple, and is forced to stop doing that

Ongoing, but the first part happened.