“We skipped over that minute to instantly arrive at this moment in time.” Looking back at 2017.

A lot of things happened over 2017. We went up to producing more than one podcast (then subsequently I got so busy with work I had to slow down production). We picked up dedicated studio recording hardware as well increasing the quality of our podcasts.

As for tech news there was a lot. Team Red AMD finally came back in to the forefront with the release of their much anticipated Ryzen cpus gaining back an impressive market share from Intel. Team Blue Intel respectively did an emergency release of their 8th generation Core cpus with more cores to compete with AMD. AMD shot at Team Green nVidia as well with their new Vega video cards. Sadly they have and are plagued with supply issues and are hardly even competitive when it comes to price/performance. nVidia poked back with the 1070ti and not too long ago released their first prosumer volta based gpu in the new Titan V.

A new player has jumped in to the fray as well. Qualcomm had joined with Microsoft to build PCs running Windows 10 on Qualcomm Snapdragon cpus opening the doorway to a possible multi-day battery life for on the go laptop users.

2017 was also a bad year for hacks and malware. The year began with a huge infestation of malware that locked computers and held their data hostage until you paid ransom. Then Equifax released that nearly every American with credit had their personal data exposed and in Canada while less of a big story several were also effected.

Last year was also the first time Amazon acknowledged that anyone other than the United States and Britain existed by releasing many of their smart devices in Canada and a hundred other countries world wide. In Canada we received Amazon Prime Video and Music, Amazon’s Echo Dot, Echo and Echo Plus as well as their FireTV stick.

Sadly we’ve had some losses as well. Towards the end of last year we lost what used to be Canada’s premier online PC hardware store NCIX to bankruptcy. In hind site it was easy to see coming with things not being out of stock or constant back order on their site but they will be remembered as one of the best tech stores for pc enthusiasts as we see Memory Express and Canada Computers move in to NCIX’s old domains.

In gaming and entertainment we saw Warner Bros finally release a good DCU movie with Wonder Woman. We also saw the release of Thor Ragnarok and Star Wars the Last Jedi. There’s also a new Doctor Who in town being played for the first time ever by a Woman by Jodie Whittaker. Nintendo’s Switch has sold impressively well, and even I (Jeff) ended up picking one up despite warding off Nintendo for their incredibly dismal introduction of their NES and SNES Classic (of which there still is not freaking stock of in Canada).

I’ll put all the links to the stories and a few bonus ones just after this next bit. I wanted to share with you my favourite video games of 2017, besides World of Warships. And I’ll mention my biggest disappointment.

Favourite Games of 2017 (What I played the game on)