2024 wasn’t an earth-shaking year for new tech products, but it was significant when it comes to the tech industry’s impact on society and vice versa.
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Tech titans had a big impact on the 2024 election, starting with Elon Musk, whose net worth exceeds $400 billion thanks to his work and investments at several tech companies, including Zip2, PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity and Neurolink. He’s also the owner of Twitter, but that subtracted from his financial net worth while increasing his political clout. Although you can’t point to one thing that turned the election, Musk’s endorsement and financial support were a major boon to the Trump campaign.
Musk wasn’t the only tech billionaire to endorse the president-elect. Despite Silicon Valley’s liberal tradition, a number of other tech moguls did their share, including Oracle founder Larry Ellison, PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, and Netscape author and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Tech’s cozy relationship with the new administration didn’t end on Nov. 5. Since then, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have donated to Trump’s inaugural fund. Vice President-elect JD Vance, in addition to being a best-selling author, headed up a venture capital firm that invested in tech companies. On more than one occasion, Vance visited Silicon Valley to raise funds for the Trump-Vance ticket.
Australian law
There has also been legislation around tech, including a recently passed Australian law that would ban social media for anyone under 16. There were numerous state laws introduced in the U.S. around regulating artificial intelligence. Though it’s still not a law, the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act passed the Senate 91-3. The European Union passed an act regulating AI.
Product announcements
Though it’s not clear when it will ship, Meta announced its Orion AR Glasses, the company’s first true augmented reality glasses that feature holographic displays that can superimpose computer-generated images over what you’re seeing in the physical world. Using AI, they can also interpret and explain what you’re seeing. These glasses are probably still a few years away, but Meta has had success this year with its current generation Ray-Ban | Meta Smart Glasses. The glasses don’t have a smart display, but they play music, enable phone calls, read out text messages and describe what you’re looking at, which they see through a camera on the frames. It’s too early to say for sure, but it’s quite possible that future iterations of smart glasses will replace smartphones for many people, putting Meta in a good position to eventually compete with Apple, which dominates the U.S. smartphone market.
We’re also seeing growth in the smart ring category. Oura Ring, which popularized the category, came out with its new Oura Ring 4 in 2024. Ringconn, another smart-ring maker, also updated its offering, but 2024 is also the year that a major company, Samsung, entered the market. It’s too early to tell whether smart rings will get as much traction as smart watches, but they do some of the same tasks, especially for health and fitness, such as heart rate and blood oxygen sensing.
Meta also has its Quest VR headset, but now Apple is in that space with its 2024 introduction of the Apple Vision Pro, a very expensive VR/AR headset that Apple bills as “spatial computing.”
Generative AI
Generative AI was the big story last year, but there were lots of new developments in 2024,
Both Apple and Google made their annual smartphone and watch announcements this fall. Apple’s new iPhone 16 Series includes advanced AI-powered features such as Image Playground for photo and video editing and features that, according to Apple, help you “write, express yourself, and get things done effortlessly.” Apple does the processing on the phone itself, and not the cloud, which is pretty amazing considering that phones have limited memory, storage and processing power compared with cloud-based systems.
Google’s 2024 Series 9 phones have the company’s Gemini AI built in. You can now engage in a conversation with your phone with it understanding context. For example, you could say “how old is Tom Cruise,” and after you get the answer ask, “where was he born.” This contextual conversation mode is showing up in many AI products, including popular Generative AI services such as ChatGPT.
Microsoft has also integrated AI into its Windows operating system, and Apple Intelligence is now built into MacOS. Google, in addition to building AI into its hardware, introduced Google Gemini Advanced, which, when you ask it what is does, says it’s “designed to excel at complex tasks like logical reasoning, coding, following intricate instructions, and creative collaboration.”
The news isn’t entirely good for tech. There was backlash in 2024 that includes layoffs at many tech companies (along with some rehiring after the 2023 layoffs), global anti-trust actions against big tech, including Google, Amazon, Meta and Apple, and increased concerns about mental health and well-being on social media and other tech products.
Happy New Year
I’m not a fortune teller, but I’m pretty sure 2025 will bring lots of new advancements to tech, including further integration of AI into everyday products. It will also be a tumultuous year as the new administration takes over with lots of likely tech announcements, especially given the relationship between the incoming president and tech billionaires including Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and others. We’ll see an increased interest in cryptocurrency, AI regulation and a revisiting of rebates and subsidies of energy-saving tech.
Whatever comes, I’m wishing you a happy, healthy and calm new year.
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Larry Magid is a tech journalist and internet safety activist. Contact him at larry@larrymagid.com.