The message was as dull as: “performance per watt now matters more than raw headline numbers.” Laptop, desktop, and handheld makers spent the year prioritising heat and battery life in their designs and that pragmatism ran straight into politics. The US trade war kept chewing on supply chains, with export controls, licensing rules and tariff noise adding paperwork to every silicon decision.

China moved the dial on chip manufacturing to make up for what the US was trying to starve it. Progress showed up most on mature process nodes used for mainstream parts, and in building more domestic capacity across the chain.

The bleeding edge remained harder to access, with tighter access to advanced photolithography tools. Even so, the US government’s assumption that China would remain stuck started to look like wishful thinking.

Donald Trump’s government wanted a cut of the chip action. Various schemes have been floated to skim revenue from chip sales, using taxes, fees, localisation rules, and “strategic” requirements dressed up as patriotism. Trump signed off on a pile of dosh to keep Intel running on the condition that it made its Chips at home.

Graphics stayed dominated by Nvidia, though the mood shifted from awe to suspicion. GPUs remained fast, expensive and essential for serious compute, while buyers got picky about power draw, cooling and practical workloads.

The AI gold rush inflated demand early on, then cooled as many companies realised most office work does not need a neural network bolted to it. Still, Generative tools became normal, even after the mythology thinned.

Businesses stopped asking what AI could do and started asking what it was worth paying for. Plenty of internal pilots died quietly, while survivors settled into search, summarisation, customer triage and code assistance.

This started the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street, worrying about an AI tech bubble bursting. This was based on some relatively poor numbers from Big Tech that were discussed in the Finance press. Companies were sinking far too much capital into AI Data centres that were unlikely to make money. Oracle was identified as having overdone its debt and was punished by investors.

CES in January set the tone, and it felt oddly grown-up. After years of vapourware cars and booth-only AI stunts, vendors showed kit you could actually buy.

AMD opened with a Ryzen 8000 desktop refresh and broader availability of Strix Point mobile APUs. The focus remained on efficiency, mixed CPU-GPU work, and integrated graphics for daily use.

Troubled Chipzilla entered 2025 with less swagger and more damage control. Meteor Lake laptops picked up slowly, helped by cautious OEM designs and pricing that did not exactly scream bargain.

Arrow Lake previews looked decent, and they stayed a second-half promise for much of the early year. Chipzilla spent months steadying yields and rebuilding trust after too many big claims.
Storage also landed in the reality lane. PCIe 5.0 SSDs became easy to find, yet most buyers stuck with solid PCIe 4.0 drives because the real-world uplift was hard to spot.

The industry learned, again, that faster benchmarks do not automatically mean better products. It applied to storage, laptops and every shiny spec sheet that forgot how people actually use machines.

Spring belonged to laptops, and thin designs arrived without the usual port massacre or thermal panic. AMD-based notebooks gained share, particularly in Europe, where battery life and price sensitivity beat brand worship.

The Fruity Cargo Cult Apple refreshed its MacBook Pro line with M4-class silicon mid-year. Even the usual Job’s Mob fan press called the update “evolutionary” which means “nothing to see here.”
Job’s Mob nudged repairability forward in some regions, pushed along by regulation rather than sudden kindness. Apple has been suffering from staff losses this year, along with an inability to bring out anything new. It's the latest Air iPhone, which was supposed to wow with its thinness, but proved to be a disappointment, and some of its older models proved to be better value for money.

Sony and Microsoft pushed mid-cycle console updates focused on storage capacity, thermals and power efficiency. The revisions stretched lifespans and shaved manufacturing costs, which suited a market tired of forced resets.

Peripherals had a strong run because people still notice what they stare at all day. OLED monitors have become cheaper, and burn-in worries have eased thanks to improved panel management.

Summer centred on graphics cards and a market correction that had been overdue. Nvidia pushed more accessible GPUs, and AMD arrived with RDNA 4 lineups leaning hard into price-to-performance.

Ray tracing still trailed Nvidia, while raster performance and memory configurations appealed to buyers watching every euro. Cooling got saner too, with better airflow designs and quieter pumps showing up across ranges.

ARM-based Windows laptops have improved enough to be taken seriously. Qualcomm’s updated Snapdragon X platforms delivered strong battery life and compatibility that landed in the acceptable range.

The final quarter stayed calm, which in tech always feels faintly suspicious. Vendors spent time refining what they had already shipped, rather than trying to force a constant launch cycle.

Chipzilla launched Arrow Lake at scale, delivering competitive performance and improved efficiency. It did not seize unquestioned leadership, yet it clawed back credibility with parts people could buy.

AMD spent that stretch on firmware and scheduler work rather than fresh silicon drama.

Smartphones have plateaued, as mature markets do. Flagships from Samsung, Job’s Mob and Chinese manufacturers improved screens and cameras, and the year-on-year jumps stayed incremental.

Repairability and longer software support became selling points. That shift said plenty about consumer fatigue and the limits of yet another spec bump.

Networking also went sensible. Wi-Fi 7 hardware became affordable, though its benefits remained limited outside dense environments and high-client households.

NAS boxes and home servers gained traction as users chased local control, nudged along by rising cloud costs.

AI hardware continued to grow throughout the year, mostly in professional and industrial contexts. Edge accelerators, NPUs and inference-focused chips are spreading steadily, while consumer AI remains embedded in cameras, audio processing and operating systems.

The latter part of the year saw a sudden shortage of DDR5 RAM, another spin-off of the AI data centre wars. Most of the new datacentres were sucking up all the available RAM, leaving nothing left for PC builders. The shortage was not felt initially because PC builders relied on their stockpiles, but as that stock ran out, prices rose. This problem is likely to continue through-out 2026 as RAM makers don’t seem in any hurry to solve the problem.

Outside trade wars and AI bubble-bursting fears, 2025 was a bit of a snooze.