Mikes Rant Christmas Edition – How Did My 2022 Tech Predictions Turn Out?

As something of a tradition here at eTeknix, just after Christmas but before the New Year, I like to make a series of predictions as to what I think will happen in the tech world over the coming 12 months. I do, after all, work in the industry and should have a fairly solid opinion on such matters.

And in this regard, and somewhat surprisingly, in many instances, I’m often proven correct. I am, however, always willing to own my mistakes and fess up to what I got both right and wrong. So, with 2023 nearly upon us, how did my predictions for 2022 work out? – Well, let’s find out!

Prediction #1 – AMD’s Desktop CPU Market Share Will Plunge to Below 33%

Following the praise for Intel’s Alder Lake platform, I strongly suspected that AMD’s initial success with Ryzen 5000 was going to be relatively short-lived. Particularly since the Blue Team was kicking 2022 off with a number of fairly potent revisions to the platform. Given that AMD had effectively gained a near 50/50 split with Intel, however, I could only see their market share falling throughout 2022. – And as of Q1, it was looking like my bold prediction was going to be current as AMD’s market share slumped by nearly 10%.

It seems clear though that despite the recent lacklustre launch of Ryzen 7000, the 5000 series has continued to strike a solid chord with consumers. With their current market share at around 44%, my prediction here was way off. Then again, I didn’t know last year that AMD was cooking up the phenomenon that was the 5800 X3D so maybe I deserve some slack.

I don’t make lazy or easy predictions. Go big or go back to my crystal ball!

Result – Very wrong!

Prediction #2 – Intel Arc Alchemist is Going to Have a Huge Effect on the GPU Landscape!

I feel like just typing ‘oof’ and leaving it at that. I’m definitely not off to a good start here. In fairness though, I did offer some logic to my argument here. When I made this prediction, the situation regarding graphics card stock was bloody awful. As such, some inexpensive third-party competition from Intel did seem to represent a godsend.

Alas though, the Intel Arc series was mostly terrible (predominantly due to initially hideous driver support) and even just 3-4 months on from their very messy release, they’re largely forgotten now.

Result – Oof…

Prediction 3 – Windows 11 Will Not Even Achieve a 20% Market Share in 2022

Hurray, third time lucky as I finally get a prediction right. – And before you scoff and say ‘but that one was obvious!’, at the time, it most certainly was not. When I made this prediction, Windows 11 was barely 3 months old. Sure it had had some initial teething problems, but people were undoubtedly going to move to it. The question was by how much.

Well, a year on and we have our answer. The general desktop market share for Windows 11 is at a paltry 16.13%. Yes, the Steam figure is higher at around 28%, but I didn’t use Steam as my initial comparison. Whether you choose to believe me or not is up to you, but I promise you that I was referring to the overall market share as per Statcounter which, as you can see below, doesn’t just confirm my prediction, it writes it in stone!

Result – Right (but you may wish to quibble with me on this point!)

Prediction #4 – GPU Stock Will Improve, but Not Without Victims!

This is a bit of a weird one as while my prediction has been proven to be correct, I will concede that in many aspects, it was not entirely for the reasons I expected. – GPU stock did undoubtedly improve throughout the latter half of 2022. Did prices fall? No, but then I never said that would happen. Was Radeon 6000/Nvidia 30XX stock arguably at its best immediately prior to the release of next-gen models? Absolutely.

So, where did I kinda miss a key factor here? Well, the biggest reason GPU stock has improved over the last 6 months has undoubtedly been primarily driven by the transition of Ethereum to its new ‘proof of stake’ model. GPU cryptocurrency mining is, by all accounts, dead. At the very least, it’s a barely visible shadow of what it was during 2020-2021. I didn’t account for this in my prediction, and, in fairness, why would I have? At the time Bitcoin had just hit a new record value and there didn’t appear to be any notable signs at the time that things were set to slump and slump hard.

Slump it did though and while not entirely for the reasons I anticipated, I still wasn’t wrong!

Result – Correct (but admittedly more out of luck)

Prediction #5 – Nintendo Will Announce its Switch Successor

I’m just going to straight up own this. I was wrong. But even now, I’m genuinely surprised that this one didn’t happen. Given that the Nintendo Switch is nearly 6 years old now, I hugely suspected that Nintendo would announce the launch of its successor. Consoles do, after all, typically have a 7-year lifespan on the market with a pre-launch hype of around a year (just enough time for Nintendo to produce a shockingly low number of systems to artificially inflate demand).

With that being said, however, 2022 has clearly been a fantastic year for Nintendo. While Switch sales are undoubtedly slowing down, major gaming releases such as Bayonetta 3 have clearly proven that there’s still plenty of life left in the system yet. – Will Nintendo announce its next-gen console in 2023? Almost certainly. At this point though, my prediction failed and I’m not going to make the same one twice!

Result – Wrong, and I’m genuinely surprised!

Mike’s Rant Christmas Edition – How Do You Think I Did?

Ok, so in conclusion, I have to admit that overall I haven’t done particularly well this year. In fact, I did notably worse than last year. – As above though, I’d rather make a big prediction and be wrong than make a safe one and be boring. All going well though, with 2023 on the horizon, who knows, I might actually be onto a winner with my predictions.

What are my predictions for 2023 though? Well, you’ll have to check us out tomorrow to find out!

For more of Mike’s Ranty Christmas/New Year 2022-specific content, you can check the link here!– They’ll be one every day over the holiday period, but there are only 2 days left if you need a quick catch-up!

NB. Mikes Rant is a semi-comedic opinion piece and may not reflect the opinion of eTeknix as a whole!