Battlefront 2023 Predictions Results Thread

• Apple glasses arrive Ish. Announced but not shipped.
• FB investors rebel at the metaverse financial black hole and force Zuck to pull back I think this is true. Much downsizing rightsizing took place at Meta.
• MS disinvests in HoloLens Yep
• Google tries something in the AR space Nope

• First instances of ChatGPT-like models weaponized for automating disinformation at scale (Russia) Yep
• Apple moves a substantially increased amount of Siri to on-device Ish. Apple Watch got a neural engine and more moved to on device but I wouldn’t call it a substantial increase.

• Pixel Watch cancelled Nope
• Apple Watch moves on from 7nm and gets a MUCH more energy efficient chip and substantially longer battery life Ish. More energy efficient but not more battery life.
• No new sensors in the Apple Watch - new chip is the tent pole. Yep.

• A17/M3 at 3nm is a generational improvement - CPU, GPU and NPU get substantially new architectures. Mostly. Both the CPU and GPU saw major microarchitectural improvements but the NPU not so much. I’m a call this a win anyways.
• Qualcomm releases their first chip from the Nuvia acqui-hire. Nope.
• Windows on ARM still lukewarm Yep.

• AMD continues to drink Intel’s milkshake and put them in a world of hurt. Ish.
• Twitter dies and Mastodon takes off Yes but… the Twitter we know is good and dead, and Mastodon did get a bump. But it looks like Threads will win in the long run… which depending on how you feel about Threads participating in the Fediverse may count as a Mastodon win.
• Tik Tok is banned in the US over national security concerns Not yet…

Nevarre said:

Apple

• Meaningful details of a car project leak, but no actual product is announced. Nope.
• Apple makes some concrete progress to producing products anywhere but mainland China, pissing off the PRC in the process. 50%+ of iPhones still made in PR China by year's end despite efforts. Yes. Foxconn plants in South India have expanded significantly, and are a major producer of the iPhone 15. India is on track to produce 25% of all iPhones globally by 2025, but China still holds the lead for now.

Gaming

• Activision/Blizzard purchase by Microsoft falls through due to extreme regulatory headwinds by multiple governments and MS seeing that the road to maybe eventually being able to overcome all of the complaints would compromise the value they were seeking (also value of Activision stock and possibly Microsoft stock drop enough to make this a bad deal financially.) Nope. It took all year of wrangling and deal-making but the sale was finally approved.
• Consumer Pressure/depressed PC market/depressed add-in GPU market forces GPU makers to drop prices closer to but not reaching pre-pandemic levels and consumers remain unimpressed with sales still ho-hum despite price cuts/introduction of cheaper models. This remains largely true as we've seen some price cuts, new budget models, other deals and pricing below MSRP with the Super cards from nVidia pushing until early 2024. Demand is not awful but remains somewhat depressed.
• Battlemage is announced, much to everyone's surprise but will be a mobile-only part and only paired with Intel CPUs. Mostly nope. Mid-year rumors indicated that Intel was going to cancel all their discrete graphics, but that appears to have been FUD. Battlemage is still on the roadmap as a discrete as well as probably a mobile part, is still promising significant improvements for desktop power users, but has pushed to 2024.

Industry

• Elon Musk is forced to step down from CEO position of Tesla (more likely) or SpaceX (slightly less likely) or both, but remains CEO of The Boring Company. He will retain board membership, however. No, but I totally missed the call that he would (through strange means) heed the call to step down from Twitter/X and install a puppet CEO.
• Cyber Insurance will become extremely difficult for companies to acquire as prices skyrocket and compliance requirements for companies to qualify get much stricter--they'll have to meet or have a concrete plan to meet compliance regimes stricter than are typically current to qualify. Super duper wrong. Despite soaring rates in 2022, the market corrected hard the other direction with rates going down significantly by mid-late 2023.
• At least one major event with a major cloud company involving a zero-day will lead to data loss/theft/compromise that isn't due to negligence on the part of the customer. It'll get some cute name like HeartBleed or ShellShock. I'm calling this one a yes, with the breach of Office 365 via certificates obtained by a Chinese APT. It didn't get a cool name though, and didn't involve a then-unknown vulnerability. I guess worth noting, because it was explainable and appeared targeted mostly at government agencies, it didn't scare customers away en masse. Also I implied that it would be one of the big hosting companies infrastructure themselves, so I'm counting Microsoft 365 as part of Microsoft Azure writ large.
• I ain't touchin' Twitter's outlook. dumpsterfire.gif

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