Tech companies faced highs and lows in 2016, from hacking scandals to exploding phones to brand new innovations. Technology reporter Adam Balkin explains it all in a review of the year in Tech.
The 2016 year in technology had just about equal buzz about the tech triumphs as there was about the big tech failures and controversies.
On the triumph front, there were lots of cutting-edge innovations that hit shelves. The most highly anticipated perhaps, however, revolved around virtual reality.
The three mainstream, high-end systems that launched during 2016 signaled the start of a brand new way to truly immerse yourself in some sort of foreign experience. Oculus, part of Facebook, launched the Rift; HTC had the Vive; and Sony boasted the Playstation VR.
Samsung's Note 7 was hailed as a triumph when it first hit shelves, touted by most tech journalists as the best smartphone built to date.
Soon after its launch, however, reports started to surface of Note 7s exploding, and after one massive recall to fix the problem failed, Samsung was forced to issue a second recall of all Note 7s for good, in what would become one of the largest tech failures of all time.
Apple launched the iPhone 7 this year. It added a camera lens on back, but in a controversial move it took away the headphone jack.
That wasn't the only controversy in which Apple was involved in 2016. Word came from the FBI that the San Bernadino shooters had iPhones that may have contained key evidence in the case.
Federal officers asked Apple to help break the encryption on the phone. Apple refused, setting off a debate nationwide as to what should be the protocol in these types of cases moving forward.
And we ended the year with news from Yahoo! — and it wasn't good news.
In September, the tech giant announced 500 million user accounts had been hacked back in 2014.
A few months later, Yahoo! admitted that more than a billion accounts were hacked back in 2013. And adding to the concern here, early reports are starting to point to the attacks as likely being state-sponsored.