The Verge 2017 tech report cards

The biggest story about apps in 2017 was, well, stories. Snapchat still deserves the credit for coming up with the concept, and Instagram shamelessly ripped it off back in 2016, but this year, everyone got on board. WhatsApp added stories (and then later made them less prominent after users complained). Facebook added stories (and tried to guilt users into using them with digital ghosts of friends.) Medium — a largely text based app — added stories! YouTube added stories! It’s stories all the way down as far as the eye can see.

Of course, there’s a very good reason for all this — stories are popular, and popular places on the internet are ripe for that sweet advertising money.

If 2016 was the year that streaming music became a necessity, 2017 is the year streaming music showed its clout. This couldn’t have been showcased any more clearly than at the Grammys, where Chance the Rapper won best new artist, best rap album, and best rap performance — an honor only made possible because nomination rules changed, allowing for streaming-only albums to be eligible for nomination. In his acceptance speech, Chance gave a shout out to SoundCloud.

Streaming music consumption continues to ramp up, not slow down. Mid-way through the year, the RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America) released statistics on the US music industry, and during the first half of 2017, revenues from streaming services accounted for 62 percent of the total market. Digital download sales were down, but revenues from streaming services were also up 48 percent, and across all categories of streaming, the revenue levels were at record highs.

My best way to look back on 2017 in the world of headphones is to consider the things I wasn’t able to say a year ago.

The best portable headphones today are wireless. That wasn’t true last year — at least not in my Beoplay H6-loving judgment — however Bowers & Wilkins’ PX have shot to the top of the charts with an exquisitely tuned sound, handsome looks, and solid battery life. The noise-cancelling PX are a transformational pair of headphones because they take NC cans out of their traditional role of being merely functional and into the competition for best sound quality. Gone are the days of Bose singularly dominating the NC field with awesome ergonomics but mediocre sound: today we have all the big names like Beats, Sony, and Sennheiser offering noise-cancelling headphones with sound that’s constantly getting better. AKG also did an outstanding job with its wireless N60 NC model this year. The only downside to this laudable evolution? Prices remain high, with the PX costing $400 and the on-ear N60 NC requiring $250.

It’s been a pretty good year for gadgets. While the most popular gadget may have been the fidget spinner, there have been a number of devices released in 2017 that will make a lasting impact for years to come. From the Nintendo Switch, which turned out to be a major hit for the Japanese gaming company, to new smart home devices from companies like Nest and Arlo, to changes in policy around smart luggage that threaten industry leaders in the space, 2017 has been nothing if not exciting for gadget enthusiasts.

The biggest gadget win of the year is undoubtedly the Nintendo Switch. The portable gaming console landed in March and immediately made its mark as the best portable console in years. There have been very few gadgets that have launched with the impact of the Switch in recent memory; it’s easy to play (and keep charged) on the go, the controls are intuitive, and the flagship game for the console, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, may end up as the unanimous choice for game of the year.

Artificial intelligence boomed this year like few other areas in tech, but despite the scientific breakthroughs, glut of funding, and new products rolling out to consumers, the field has problems that can’t be ignored. Some of these, like company-driven hype and sensationalist headlines, need better communication from the media and experts. Others challenges are more nuanced and will take longer to address, such as bias in algorithms and the growing threat of tech firms becoming AI monopolies as they hoover up data and talent.

But first, the good stuff. Artificial intelligence was everywhere in 2017, and although you’re right to be skeptical when you hear this, it’s positive news. Experts compare AI to electricity because it’s a resource with the potential to transform a broad range of industries. Sure, there are particularly important technologies in each sector (like autonomous driving in transportation), but it’s the smaller implementations of machine cleverness that may add up to have the biggest impact.

I wouldn’t blame you for tuning out VR news in 2017. There was no string of huge hardware releases, like last year’s Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR. The medium’s limits became clearer. For some people, VR reached a trough of irrelevance — stories about it were no longer conceptually fresh and fascinating, but they weren’t relevant to daily life yet, either.

Despite this, 2017 laid exciting groundwork for VR’s future. The biggest advance was arguably Windows Mixed Reality: a VR platform built into Microsoft’s Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, supporting headsets that don’t need external cameras or markers. Mixed Reality headsets and motion controllers still aren’t very comfortable or stylish. But their tracking feels remarkably smooth and accurate, and setup is easy — you can basically just plug the headset into a computer and get started.

Digital photography as we know it is about to change. It’s already changing, really, judging by some of the cameras released in 2017. Where last year was a solid, occasionally exciting one for the camera industry, the past 12 months held even more signs that the basics of photography are evolving. And a lot that has to do with advancements in software and computational photography.

That sounds boring! But hear me out.

SpaceX started 2017 at one of its lowest points ever. The company hadn’t launched a single rocket since September 1st, 2016, when a Falcon 9 exploded on a Florida launch pad as it was being fueled. The mishap destroyed both the rocket and the satellite the vehicle was supposed to carry to space — prompting many to question the reliability of the company’s hardware. But in January, just four and a half months after the accident, SpaceX was ready to convince the world that it had figured out the problem and was prepared to safely return to spaceflight again.

Its first launch on January 14th was a success, and ever since that crucial return-to-flight mission, SpaceX has shown that it has firmly moved on from the September failure. In fact, the company has had its most prolific year yet, launching a total of 18 rockets — more than twice as many missions as it conducted in 2016. That amounts to approximately one launch every three and a half weeks, meaning SpaceX seems to have finally fulfilled its long-held promise to increase its launch frequency from year-to-year.

It was supposed to be Tesla’s year for delivering big on Elon Musk’s ambitious vision: the mainstream electric car known as the Model 3. And at the beginning of 2017, things looked great from the outside. But instead of delivering, 2017 was a year where Tesla stalled on that promise, and in the end was forced to buy itself more time with the strength of its brand and the promises of its CEO.

Tesla entered the year with around half a million preorders for the Model 3, each worth $1,000. Musk had promised in 2016 that the car would be at “production capability” by July 1st of this year — a date he called “impossible” to meet. In the end, Musk missed by a week. He tweeted a photo of the first Model 3 to come off the company’s production line on July 8th, just days after he announced that the first deliveries would come later that month.

Has any other company had a more batshit year than Uber? In lieu of a traditional report card, I briefly considered just copying and pasting text from the Book of Revelation into this article. That’s how bad it was.

Let’s recap: Uber CEO Travis Kalanick joins President Trump’s business council, and faces an immediate backlash; Uber is accused of undermining a taxi driver protest at JFK airport; the #DeleteUber hashtag goes viral; Susan Fowler speaks her mind; Waymo files its lawsuit; a self-driving Uber runs a red light; a self-driving Uber crashes; Travis Kalanick is caught on camera being a jerk; we learn about Uber executives visiting a South Korean escort bar; Apple threatens to remove Uber from the App Store; “Greyball;” “Hell;” Anthony Levandowski pleads the Fifth; Anthony Levandowski is fired; Uber considers smearing a rape victim in India; many Uber executives resign; Kalanick resigns; Lyft outpaces Uber; London bans Uber; the new CEO apologizes; a failed auto-leasing program is canceled; a major Uber investor sues Kalanick, who countersues; Uber is subject to five separate criminal investigations; Uber is fined for enabling unqualified drivers; a data hack exposes personal information of 57 million riders and drivers; the hacker is paid off and the hack is covered up; and (last but not least) Uber’s secret spying unit is exposed, and it sounds insane.

If 2016 was the year of putting failures behind it, Microsoft’s 2017 was a year of focus. Over the past 12 months we’ve seen the software giant successfully execute on its plan to become a major cloud competitor. It’s a massive part of Microsoft’s business now, and it will only continue to grow into 2018. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also revealed that the company’s future is in artificial intelligence, Mixed Reality, and quantum computing. We’ve seen early work in all three areas this year, even if quantum computing and true artificial intelligence are still a ways off in the industry.

Microsoft might have hinted at its future and started winning in cloud, but it didn’t stop doing what it’s best at over the years: Windows. This year saw two big “Creators” updates to Windows 10, with a focus on Mixed Reality, creating in 3D Paint, and pen / touch improvements. Microsoft has continued to update Windows 10 regularly with new features, and as we approach its three-year anniversary it doesn’t look like a “Windows 11” successor is likely any time soon.

Few tech companies have had a rougher go of it in this past year than Twitter. The company remains in a constant struggle for its soul against malicious trolls, harassers, and foreign government propaganda machines. All the while, its leadership has rolled out new features design changes in hopes of making the site a more inviting and entertaining internet utility — something that seems all the harder in the age of President Donald Trump.

The social network, which turned 10 last year, remains both a vital force for free expression on the web and yet also a cesspool of hate, abuse, and harassment. This imbalance has only become more visible during the first 12 months of Trump’s administration. An avid Twitter user even before becoming president, Trump has transformed his account into a warped and weaponized right-wing PR vehicle focused on cruel score settling and dangerous attacks on the basic institutions of democracy. In the process, Twitter has struggled with how to handle the behavior of a man who uses it to attack his political enemies, journalists, civilians, and the leader of North Korea in almost equal measure.

If you only care about Apple’s products and not Apple as a corporate entity, I’m going to have to be the bearer of bad news: this year was the year it became impossible to disassociate tech products from the humans and corporate cultures from which they sprung.

It was the year the tech industry’s ugly side was exposed. As Wired’s Erin Griffith put it, it was the year tech workers became the world’s villain, not bankers. It was the year we expected big, important tech companies to be better, and in large part, they failed.

So many things happened in 2017 that it’s hard to know where to get started when sizing up a wide-reaching tech behemoth’s past year. So for Amazon, maybe it’s best to start with a simple statement: it lowered prices on avocados.

Yes. In June, Amazon bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion and reduced avocado prices at its stores by $0.50 to $1.00, in a move that, generally speaking, pleased consumers. It also added more Alexa features and more and cheaper Echo devices in a series of moves that, generally speaking, pleased consumers.

Over the course of the year, Snap went public, and 2017 became all about its ability to prove its worth after a pricey IPO. Unfortunately for Snap, things didn’t turn out as well as last year. Its stock tanked. Instagram stole all its best and most recognizable features. The company’s head of HR was outed as deeply problematic, and, by the end of the year, the company unveiled its redesign as a last ditch effort to scrounge up ad revenue.

Let’s break down the year a bit more, particularly the most recent bad events. Following its third quarter earnings report — the last one we currently have — Snap’s share price dropped over 15 percent in after-hours trading. The company missed investors’ expectations both in terms of revenue and user growth. To be fair, the company said it grew its daily active users by 17 percent year over year, up to 178 million. Snap’s trying and succeeding in growing modestly, but put next to the behemoths that are Facebook and Instagram, the company isn’t faring well. In comparison, Instagram has 300 million active story users.

During the darkest days of the Wii U, some armchair analysts wondered whether Nintendo should even continue to compete in the ultra-competitive hardware space — but nobody thinks that any more.

After less than a year on the market, the Switch has been an unqualified success, selling 10 million units, a pace that puts it on par with the Wii, Nintendo’s best-selling console to date. Along the way, Nintendo seems creatively revitalized. 2017 saw the release of two of the company’s best-received games ever, with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey, along with inventive new experiences like the wild fighter Arms. After struggling for an entire console generation, the company is back, and it looks stronger than ever.

Let’s start with the good news: no Samsung phones caught fire or exploded this year.

Samsung entered 2017 on its heels, coming off the embarrassing debacle of the Galaxy Note 7, a phone that was recalled not just once but twice in 2016, for having a propensity to spontaneously catch fire. And so, Samsung started off the year by apologizing for what happened and vowing that it would do things better in the future.

The world was kind of a crappy place in 2017, especially online. Google, as a company, needs to do a better job dealing with that.

Google is doing so much that it can be a little difficult for any one thing to break through as the primary narrative for the company, something to move it beyond just search. Apple and Samsung make mostly hardware, but Google seems to be trying to do everything. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has decided what he’d like that primary to be — the expansion of AI and Machine Learning into every corner of the world — but damned reality keeps upending that narrative.

Facebook entered 2017 stronger than it ever had, but with its reputation smeared. During the US presidential election, Facebook had been manipulated by profiteers and Russian agents, who flooded it with fake news and posts meant to inflame partisan divides. Beset by public-relations crises, Facebook spent this year trying to win back the public’s trust, with uneven results.

Facebook’s most consistent public release this year may have been the apology. It apologized for letting Russians buy election ads. It apologized after a Palestinian man after his post of “good morning” was mistranslated as “attack them” in Hebrew, leading to his arrest. It apologized to a black activist whose account was suspended after she posted screenshots of racist threats. It apologized to the LGBT community after suspending their accounts for posting messages during Pride.