Copilot, the great confusion
Copilot, Copilot Pro, Copilot+… in 2024, Microsoft will have served us its Copilot with all the sauces. So much so that it is becoming increasingly difficult to know what we are talking about. If you too are having trouble finding your way around, here is a short simplified summary: Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant. Copilot Pro is the Premium version of Copilot integrated into Microsoft 365. Microsoft 365 will also change its visual identity, and name, to be called Microsoft 365 Copilot. As for Copilot+, this is the name given to the latest PCs with a chip designed for all tasks related to Microsoft's AI. The famous AI PCs.
Beyond this general confusion, the Copilot that Microsoft once presented as an ultimate intelligent assistant, grafted to the heart of your PC now seems to be lost in the middle of nowhere. Initially, it was supposed to be perfectly integrated into Windows 11. Microsoft also announced with great fanfare the arrival of a new key entirely dedicated to its Copilot on all new PCs stamped Copilot+. But as usual, the Redmond firm changed its mind. Copilot then went from a native application to a Progressive Web App, much less integrated into the OS. And then Microsoft changed its mind once again. Finally, Copilot will be a native application.
The operation and use of Copilot seem, for the time being, still so far removed from users’ concerns that the new Copilot key on Copilot+ PCs is not much use. Microsoft has not given up, and rather than leaving its new keyboard key orphaned, it has integrated a new option into Windows 11 to allow you to remap the Copilot key on your keyboard.
One thing is certain, in 2025, Microsoft will absolutely have to make efforts to simplify if it really wants to put Copilot at the heart of PCs.
The Free hack, a massive data leak with serious consequences
This is undoubtedly the best bad soap opera of this end of year. At the end of October, Free was the victim of a massive data leak. 19 million of the operator's subscribers saw their personal data stolen by a hacker who put them up for sale on the Amazon of cybercrime. Among this data also were 5 million IBANs. To prove his exploit, the hacker even posted 100,000 of these IBANs online. A dramatic situation for the subscribers concerned since we now know that your IBAN can be used by hackers to make purchases without your knowledge. But that's not the only risk. After this data leak, a massive wave of scams targeted Free subscribers.
Faced with this massive leak, Free has sinned heavily. The ISP has communicated very little on the subject, simply confirming the leak by alerting the subscribers concerned. We finally had to wait until this December to really understand what happened. This massive data leak was made possible thanks to the complicity of an internal customer service employee who revealed his access credentials to a third party, who could be the famous hacker.
AI that hides the lack of HW evolution
You have probably noticed that smartphone hardware innovation has slowed down significantly. 2024 may have been the pinnacle of this observation (at least we hope so, otherwise 2025 could be terrible), with most high-end smartphone tests ending with the same observation: it’s exactly the same as last year with a few more software features.
Samsung, Google, Apple, but also Honor, Xiaomi and others… All the players in the sector seemed to have found the secret sauce and to have given each other the word: AI, or rather the same few AI features were served up in droves. Throughout the year, we found what Samsung had presented to us in February 2024, the famous Galaxy AI.
So, it's nice to be able to summarize a note or a meeting in one click, we are certainly already jaded by these technologies that only yesterday impressed us. But the subject is elsewhere for us: smartphone brands seem to be bogged down in the annual renewal and can no longer find the killer feature that will justify preferring the new model to the old one with a nice discount.
PS5 Pro
While Xbox has thrown in the towel on mid-generation consoles, the PS5 Pro was expected to revitalize the console market a little. From the moment it was announced, the machine was unanimously acclaimed… but against it.
The reason is its price of 800 euros, which explodes the price ceiling for consoles, all for a very discreet gain in detail. Sony is taking advantage of its hegemonic positioning on the market, which allows it to dictate its prices and target a premium target. Let's be fair game, even if we place it among the flops of the year, the PS5 Pro will undoubtedly be able to please the most demanding players. As we indicated in our test, if the gains in graphic finesse are not obvious, the gain in fluidity is very real.
The CrowdStrike outage
At the end of July, CrowdStrike made a monumental blunder. The American publisher deployed a faulty update of the Falcon antivirus, present on millions of computers worldwide. The update caused a real wave of panic in the world. Indeed, more than eight million PCs displayed the famous Windows blue screen of death. Airports, companies and operators were forced to suspend their operations. It took several days for everything to return to normal.
This computer failure, considered the most significant in history, cost billions of dollars to the companies concerned. Several of them, including the airline Delta, even filed a complaint. It’s “the most epic fail of 2024” according to the Pwnie Awards.
The renewal of the FISA espionage law
This was the United States espionage law that was due to expire at the end of 2023, and which authorizes American Intelligence (the FBI, the NSA) to access “communications of non-Americans abroad” (of which we are part). But in December 2023 and then in April 2024, this controversial legislation was finally extended by two years.
This law requires American companies such as Google, Amazon or Microsoft to respond to the request of American intelligence agencies, if the latter wish to access the telephone conversations, messages, emails or backups in the Clouds of Europeans. For defenders of European rights, this is very bad news. The FBI, the NSA or the CIA will therefore be able to continue to spy on us until 2026.
The huge disappointment of the Vision Pro
There was a little hype at the beginning of February around the Vision Pro, and for good reason: not only was Apple entering a whole new category of products, but the launch of the mixed reality headset was also limited to the United States! The appeal of the device collapsed like a soufflé. Not so much from a technological point of view: the headset is a treasure of goldsmithing that combines dozens of screens, sensors and cameras in an extremely neat design.
But the stewardship did not follow. Apple hoped that developers would multiply the applications, in order to compensate for the absences of the manufacturer who did not deign to adapt many of its own apps for visionOS. But access to the APIs and the various components of the Vision Pro is very limited, and then the manufacturer burned its bridges with a good part of the developer community, scalded by the harmful practices of the App Store. To this day, YouTube and Netflix are still not available.
Under these conditions, working with the Vision Pro is not easy, firstly because the device ends up weighing on the nose! It is especially the applications, their absence especially, which are the most problematic. Fortunately, it is possible to display a video copy of the Mac in the headset, and it is even better with visionOS 2.2 and its ultra-wide virtual screen, perhaps the "killer feature" that the device was missing.
As for immersive content, one of the headset's strong points is not joy either. Apple, the only company with the technical and financial means to produce optimized videos, is releasing them drop by drop. The Vision Pro opens the door to other forms of storytelling, as we saw with Submerged, an impressive “blockbuster” short film… but quite alone.
The results are therefore not particularly glorious for this first year (almost) of the Vision Pro. Tim Cook recently recognized that given the asking price — starting at €4,000 in France — the headset is clearly not for the general public and is aimed at customers “who want tomorrow’s technologies today”. But is this really the case? The future seems to belong more and more to glasses...
The failure of devices dedicated to generative AI
Is generative AI just a function? The question deserves to be asked after the spectacular flops of the first two devices sold on this sole argument. The Ai Pin, this Star Trek-style connected badge designed by Humane, very quickly showed its limits: the device overheats, its battery life is miserable, it often responds off the mark (when it responds)…
A real industrial and environmental disaster, the Ai Pin may become an app. Humane is in fact trying to palm off its device's operating system to other manufacturers. The company, which is also looking to sell itself to the highest bidder, is facing a tough challenge: AI operators from Google to OpenAI to Amazon to Microsoft have widely opened their technologies to developers.
The Ai Pin wasn’t the only AI device in the spotlight this year. Rabbit’s R1 has also been in the spotlight for the wrong reasons. The device, which looks like a boxy smartphone, suffers from security flaws. And in the end, it’s not much more than an Android app… sold for $200 all the same.
Jony Ive, the former Apple designer, and Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, are working on a device completely dedicated to generative AI. We'll see what they do with it, but given the two examples above, caution is advised: can this technology really be the basis of a full-fledged product?
RCS on iPhone: a contract half-fulfilled
The arrival of RCS messages on iPhones in 2024 aimed to modernize messaging communications between iOS and Android with enhanced features such as receipts and high-quality file sharing, among others. But the protocol still has some limitations, such as end-to-end encryption, which is still not guaranteed. The deployment of RCS also depends on mobile operators, which leads to a significant disparity between subscribers, some of whom will have to wait until 2025 to access it.
Expectations around RCS on the iPhone were high, but the contract has not been completely fulfilled. Although the adoption of the protocol is a step in the right direction, Android and iOS users will have to wait a little longer to enjoy an optimal experience.
Is checking the age of Internet users the beginning of the end of the imbroglio?
We couldn't end this review of the year's flops without mentioning one of the flagship measures of the April 2024 law (known as SREN): checking the age of users of X-rated sites instead of self-declaration of majority ("yes, I declare that I am over 18"), a step that Internet users had to go through before accessing the content of these sites.
Since a 2020 law, pornographic platforms are already supposed to check the age of their visitors: "no user (should Editor's note) access pornographic content until they have proven that they are of legal age". While the more than commendable rule aimed to protect minors by preventing them from accessing adult content, it had been struggling to be implemented for four years.
How can we verify the age of Internet users while respecting their privacy and personal data, without falling into Orwell's nightmare universe? In the United Kingdom and Australia, regulators who had adopted similar rules ended up throwing in the towel, considering that there was no miracle technical solution to date that would allow age to be checked without infringing on freedoms. But in France, the French legislature had an idea: to designate Arcom – the French audiovisual regulator – to resolve this thorny problem.
And it is now done, in theory: this authority finally published a reference document last October that will have to be respected to the letter by pornographic sites, starting January 11. Problem: This document only lists deadlines – three and six months – and minimum conditions that the future age verification system will have to respect, without really imposing technical solutions and without setting up labels.
In practice, X sites domiciled in France and Europe must now choose between dual authentication systems, bank card verification tools authorized for three months only (to the great displeasure of the French banking federation, which fears repeated fraudulent transactions), and… And? And other systems that remain to be discovered. In 2025, we could therefore see this four-year-old obligation finally being applied. Or not.
A catastrophic year for Boeing, from planes to astronauts “stranded” in space
Between a door torn off an Alaska Airlines 737 at the start of the year and a strike lasting more than 60 days followed by more than 33,000 employees, Boeing has experienced the worst in 2024. The rebirth of the aircraft manufacturer has never seemed as difficult as it is today, even though in the last few hours Boeing has resumed full production of all its aircraft models. The manufacturing quality problems, against a backdrop of tense social negotiations, have particularly raised questions among airlines and embedded a feeling of insecurity in the minds of travelers.
On the aerospace side, the year was not easier. The first launch of the Starliner capsule with astronauts on board, towards the ISS, ended with the ship being abandoned, and the duo of guinea pigs being extended for another year in orbit. The explanations are reminiscent of those in the aeronautics industry: reliability concerns that alerted NASA, and the implementation of a plan B by seeking help from… SpaceX.
Reverse gear on the 100% electric car
From 2035, it will no longer be possible to sell combustion-engine cars in the European Union, whether they are petrol, diesel, hybrid or plug-in hybrid. However, 2024 has been a very difficult year on the electric car market and brands are finding themselves in a quandary, unable to sell their stocks and justify their investments in the face of very weak results. So much so that several brands have spoken out and declared that they would like to continue selling cars with combustion engines.
We are thinking in particular of BMW, which declared that a "correction of the target of 100% battery electric vehicles by 2035 as part of a global program to reduce CO2 emissions would also allow European manufacturers to be less dependent on China for batteries". Porsche is of the same opinion, while the German manufacturer is struggling to sell its Taycan and Macan. In 2025, the manufacturer must launch a model that will truly mark the transition of the range to electric, with the release of an electric 718. Volvo also moved away from plans to phase out thermal engines in 2030, with the renewal of the XC90.
Intel's endless fall
Pat Gelsinger's resignation as CEO of Intel at the beginning of December is largely the consequence of a black year for Intel: the foundry has accumulated disappointments in 2024, with finances in such bad shape that they have led to the postponement of the opening of two factories in Europe (in Germany and Poland) and the elimination of 15,000 jobs, or 15% of its workforce. Intel's stock price is taking a hit, with a drop of almost 50% in value in one year, and competitors such as Qualcomm and Arm are already rushing to buy the giant, forced to consider a split of its activities in the hope of saving what can still be saved.
But how did the former American champion get to this point? Perhaps because of a series of bad decisions, missed opportunities such as its refusal to invest in OpenAI, or consequences of the economic war between the United States and China? Probably a bit of all that, and the instability issues that its thirteenth and fourteenth generation Cores have suffered from have clearly not helped matters. Seeing Intel stumble like this is all the more heartbreaking because its consumer products are not intrinsically bad, quite the contrary; so we like to hope that its recent Core Ultra 200 processors – their problems now corrected – and Arc Celestial graphics cards will allow it to quickly get back on track.
Remember the ecological bonus?
The political instability born of the dissolution of the government last summer will have claimed one more victim than Gabriel Attal: the ecological bonus. While it was a given that the amount of aid for the purchase of an electric car could decrease on January 1, 2025, few could have predicted the pure and simple end of several other aids, and in particular all those concerning electric bicycles.
Just like the scrappage bonus (which allowed you to obtain aid of 2000 euros in exchange for scrapping an old vehicle), the boost for buying a bicycle is simply disappearing. In reality, you have a little over a month left (the official end is set for February 14) to take advantage of it. While the reduction for the car bonus can be understood, it is difficult to justify on the bicycle side, especially since the government had made the development of two-wheelers made in France one of its priorities with a rather ambitious bicycle plan. In addition to the end of the purchase aid, cyclists will also be able to deplore the cut in budgets allocated to the development of additional cycle paths. Decisions that are not only going down well with users, but also with the industry, which is struggling to recover after the splendor of the "post-covid" months.
Apple without Intelligence
Can you have marketed one of the best smartphones of the year and still find yourself listed as the worst products of the year? As paradoxical as it may seem, this is how we have chosen to summarize the early career of the iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone 16?
On the one hand, a very accomplished smartphone with a super-powerful chip and unrivaled battery life. On the other hand, a smartphone sold without its main "new application": Apple Intelligence. This is at least the case in France and Europe, and it is a situation that should last a few more months. Therefore, if everything on the hardware side has been done to give the new iPhones the power needed for artificial intelligence applications and they are still not capable of it, why rush to one of the brand's new smartphones? Why not wait for the iPhone 17? This is the observation that we made at the conclusion of our test of the iPhone 16 Pro. Three months later, it is still valid.
Note that the same logic can be applied to the new iPad mini, released a few days later, also designed for Apple Intelligence, but deprived of this part of iOS in France. The only difference with the iPhone? There are no new iPad minis every year.
0 Comments