274: 2016 Postdictions

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2016

This in special year-end episode we look back at what happened during the year. Specifically, we look back at our predictions for the year and grade ourselves. Honestly, it’s shocking how well we do. Below is a reference for all the events we covered from 2016. It was a busy year!

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2016 Review

  • 2016 In Space
  • CES was all about IoT, Drones And Amazon’s Shadow
  • The Two Year Contract Began It’s End
  • Bitcoin bit the dust
  • Hyperloop started to take shape
  • Apple went from definitely making a car to definitely not making a car
  • Messaging Bots were deployed and kind of fell on deaf ears
  • Alphabet Passed Apple In Market cap for like a day
  • Scientist Directly observed gravitational waves
  • Amazon
    • continued to expand AWS features
    • Started selling Echo Dot, Tap and connected tons of services
    • Opened a cashier-less shop
  • The end of Moore’s law was acknowledged
  • Apple defended encrypted iPhones
  • Samsung started out the year with some good hardware being deployed
  • VR stuff
    • It seems they did have plans for a full blown independent OS/headset
    • Vive, Oculus and PSVR all were launched this year
    • Facebook launched 360 videos
    • Google expanded Youtube 360
    • Google announced Daydream VR
    • Microsoft started selling HoloLens to devs
    • Magic leap kept being dumb
    • Microsoft announced Windows Holographic, their OS for all AR/VR
    • Facebook announced all sorts of VR initiatives
  • AI stuff
    • Google images can guess where a pic is taken
    • A Google self driving car caused an accident
    • But Tesla killed a guy
    • AlphaGo won at Go
    • Google gets great at forming speech
    • Nvidia launches a bunch of chips to hardware accelerate AI
    • George Hotz started a self driving company and shut it down
  • Raspberry Pi Foundation Launched the PI 3 and PI 0
  • Music
    • Jay Z moved even more of his music to Tidal
    • Tidal Passed 40 million users
  • Apple:
    • iPhone SE got launched
    • iPad Pro launched
    • First week in April we started worrying about Apple ignoring the Mac
    • Apple starts making serious money from services
    • Apple had more profits than Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook
    • Apple uses an intel modem in the iPhone
    • Apple updated messenger
    • Apple started revealing their machine learning
    • Hand writing for watchOS
    • Tim Cook acknowledges that AR is coming to Apple
    • The iPhone 7 and Apple Watch 2 were launched, neither with a headphone jack
    • Apple updates the Macbook Pro and nothing else
  • Pebble kicked the bucket hard
    • I mean, it was a pretty exciting year for their hardware right up until it wasn’t
  • Nintendo had a rebuilding year
    • Ended production of the Wii U. Kind of.
    • Launched apps for iOS to some success
  • Google
    • They changed the name of the chromecast literally 4 times.
    • Nest had a rough year of giving their parent company a bad name
    • Google launched Allo and Duo
    • Google home
    • Google unveiled Google Assistant
    • Google announced Android Wear 2.0 without actually launching it this year
    • Google N
    • Google started making tensor flow chips
    • Lenovo’s Phab 2 Pro launched with Tango Built in
    • Pixel phone made hay with Samsung’s disaster
  • Microsoft
    • Microsoft pushes into bots
    • They opened source an amazing amount of code
    • They played nice with other platforms by supporting their software all over and adding things like a the Bash Shell to windows
    • Windows Phone market share dropped below 1%, and they ended mobile phone production
    • Bought LinkedIn for 26 b
    • Went all in on FPGA’s
    • Microsoft launches a competitor to Slack, Slack embarrassed itself a bit.
  • Musk:
    • Tesla announced the Model 3
    • Tesla bought SolarCity
    • SpaceX landed a rocket in the middle of the ocean that put a satellite in geosync
    • Announced plans to put a permanent settlement on Mars
    • Musk revealed the second half of his Tesla master plan
    • He also spectacularly destroyed a rocket with a very expensive Facebook satallite on it.
  • Facebook
    • Launched messenger as a platform
    • Announced a slew of bots that I’m sure someone uses
    • Launched live video
    • Facebook really struggled with the trending topics once they moved it to the main facebook interface
    • Shutdown paper =(
    • Instagram began its wholesale theft of snapchat features
    • Facebook launched workplace.fb.com
  • Drone Racing became a full blown thing
  • We Got Boaty McBoatface
  • 3D printing was less exciting than last year, especially for makerbot
  • Uber went full on dominate
    • They started their self driving car program
    • Bought OTTO
  • CurrentC met it’s pitiful fate
  • If pebble had a bad year, Yahoo had a way worse year
    • Although they were sold to Yahoo, the deal is more in question then ever
  • Twitter
    • Shuttering Vine
    • Started streaming NFL games
  • Pokemon Go happened briefly
  • ARM was bought by softbank
  • Dollar shave club got bought for a cool billion
    • And it is the perfect example of how big companies innovate (it’s by buying innovators)
  • Intel started launching even more IoT chips and Merged Reality processors
    • And they’re building ARM chips
  • Samsung had an unexpected battery issue
  • Gaming:
    • Sony announces PS4 Pro
    • Microsoft announced XBOX Scorpio
    • Nintendo announced Switch
  • Snaptecles
  • Blackberry ended hardware development
  • DJI had a great year, and GoPro did nothing to help themselves
  • HPI did their thing with the 3d Printer
  • HPE did their thing with the Machine