🔝 My Top Stories of 2024: A Mountain of Words in a Momentous Year

2024 was a momentous year in personal technology for reasons both good and bad. Looking back, these are the stories I think mattered the most. Many of them are ongoing and will continue impacting us into next year and beyond. But all left a mark.

Speaking of which, I write a lot. I know that probably seems obvious. But I get up every day, work, and then do it again the next day, and I don't really think in terms of what this looks like over time. Reviewing all the posts that Laurent and I wrote this past year quickly grew daunting, and rather than let it get away from me, I decided to break it down into more easily manageable parts. None of which were particularly manageable.

Overall, I've written over 1,150 articles and posts this past year, 267 of which were for Thurrott Premium. That's an average of 22 articles each week, 5 of which were, on average, for Thurrott Premium. Or 4 per day, assuming a 7-day work week, as I do work 7 days per week, every week. And these numbers will grow a bit, since there are still a few days left in 2024 as I write this.

Of those 1,150 articles (and 267 Premium articles), 35 were From the Editor's Desk editorials, many of which were personal in nature (as opposed to personal technology topics). I wrote 37 installments of Ask Paul, most of which are several thousand words long (and will do one more tomorrow, so 38). I wrote or updated 35 chapters in the Windows 11 Field Guide. There were 28 articles in the developer-oriented Modernizing .NETpad (2024) series, with more to come. 20 laptop and PC reviews, as noted earlier (which are not Premium posts, but lengthy).

During all this, I also spent an unknowable amount of time over several months spinning up a new book, Eternal Spring: Our Guide to Mexico City, with my wife Stephanie, a major undertaking. It's now available in preview form on Leanpub, and just getting it out the door required a marathon all-weekend push.

And then there was the time I wasn't writing, but was instead recording podcasts and getting ready for those podcasts. I recorded 51 episodes of Windows Weekly, which takes up 3 hours of every Wednesday, not counting the time it takes to make the notes, or over 150 hours. There were 50 episodes of Hands-On Windows, though only 48 have been published so far, and this show takes several hours of prep because of the screen grab requirements. And then over 140 episodes of First Ring Daily, which is only arduous because of the daily 9 am requirement.

And yikes. In any event, straining all that through a personal filter, here's how I view the most important developments of 2024 in personal technology.
💀 Intel's death spiral
Like Microsoft, Intel ruled supreme over personal computing when it was just about PCs, and this explains why the term Wintel--Windows + Intel--is still so well known. But we live in the post-PC world now, and smartphones--or, more generally, mobile computing--and the web long ago surpassed the PC in usage, rel...