Welcome to 2025. Wave farewell to yesteryear with the biggest losers in tech. Picking our favorite villains in 2024 was challenging when it simply wasn’t a great time for tech. With the depressing spiral that is social media, the will-they-or-won’t-they dance of banning TikTok in the US and the neverending edited and deepfaked content, it’s just so noisy. Is it the internet of slop? Is it exhaustion? Is it AIs talking to AIs about AIs? In between all that, there’s the obsolescence of connectors past, Intel’s major struggles to turn around its fortunes, and, ugh, those AI assistants.
And, because it’s a new year, we’ll be making some changes to the Engadget newsletter in the next few weeks. We’ll still be hitting the biggest tech stories and events, but also fold in more context, more writers and editors and even some features from Engadget’s past. Is there something you’d like to see in your inbox? Get in touch.
– Mat Smith
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Tintin dancing to Rhapsody in Blue.
It’s the start of a new year, and a fresh crop of creative works have entered the public domain. Today, many materials copyrighted in 1929 and sound recordings from 1924 become fair game to freely adapt, reuse, copy and share. Several seminal directors debuted their first projects with sound, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail and Cecil B. DeMille’s Dynamite. 1929 was also the year when Walt Disney directed the iconic Skeleton Dance short animated by Ub Iwerks, as well as when Mickey Mouse starred in his first talkie.
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Two games from a decade ago and a critical flop.
Sony just revealed the first set of PlayStation Plus games in 2025 available for all subscribers. This month includes Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered and The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. Suicide Squad is a surprising addition: It went through multiple delays, got largely negative reviews and reportedly cost Warner Bros. some $200 million. Developers announced that the current season of content would be its last, though there are no plans to shut the game down yet. So play it while you… can?
