Every December we look back and ask: what actually mattered? 2025 gave us no shortage of candidates — record-breaking console launches, AI models that stopped being chatbots and started being co-workers, and a smartphone thinner than most wallets. Here is our shortlist of the stories that defined the year in tech.

AI Became Infrastructure

If 2023 was the year AI amazed us and 2024 the year it embedded itself in our apps, 2025 was the year it became infrastructure — treated by companies and governments less like a gadget and more like electricity. The year opened with a shock: China’s DeepSeek released a reasoning model rivaling the best from OpenAI at a fraction of the computing cost, briefly wiping billions off chipmaker valuations and proving the AI race is global. By August, OpenAI’s GPT-5 had brought frontier-level AI to every free ChatGPT user. AI stopped being a feature; it became the layer everything else sits on.

Nintendo’s Historic Launch

June belonged to Nintendo. The Switch 2 sold 3.5 million units in four days — the biggest hardware launch in video game history — and simply never slowed down, crossing 10 million units by the end of September. In a year when pundits kept declaring dedicated gaming hardware dead, Nintendo delivered the loudest possible rebuttal.

Apple Went Thin

September brought the iPhone Air, Apple’s thinnest phone ever and its most interesting new product in years. Wrapped in titanium with a 6.5-inch screen, it bet that after a decade of bigger-heavier-more, consumers were ready for elegance again. Meanwhile Meta doubled down on smart glasses, and wearables across the board got smarter health tracking — the gadget world quietly reorganising itself around AI.

The TikTok Saga Finally Ended

After years of bans, delays and courtroom drama, the TikTok question was finally settled in the United States: a deal approved in September transferred the app’s US operations to American ownership, keeping it alive for its millions of users. A reminder that in 2025, geopolitics and your For You page are never far apart.

What It Meant for Mauritius

Locally, the year’s biggest shift was access. Free frontier AI, cheaper mid-range phones with flagship features, and an ever-growing digital nomad community discovering the island meant Mauritians ended 2025 with more technological capability in their pockets than ever before. The tools of the global digital economy are no longer imported luxuries — they are the default.

Looking Ahead

2026 promises AI agents that act rather than chat, a new generation of foldables and smart glasses, and — if the rumours hold — some blockbuster tech IPOs. Whatever comes, we will be here covering it. Thank you for reading NouInfo this year, and see you in January.