Google broke with a decade of tradition and launched the Pixel 9 in August — six weeks before Apple's event — to claim the 'AI phone' label first, shipping Gemini deep in the OS while Apple Intelligence remained a promise. Cisco underlined how brutally the networking hardware business is being reshaped, cutting another 7% of its workforce — its second major layoff of the year — to redirect spending toward AI and security. And in the Southeast, 17,000 AT&T technicians walked off the job in what would become a month-long strike across nine states.
Mobile World Congress opened in Barcelona with one product on every stand: the 'AI phone,' as Samsung, Google, and every chipset vendor raced to define what on-device intelligence should mean before Apple showed its hand. Apple, meanwhile, was clearing the decks — canceling its decade-long electric car project and redirecting much of that talent to generative AI, the clearest signal yet of where Cupertino believes the next platform fight is. And the White House opened a new regulatory front, issuing an executive order to stop bulk sales of Americans' sensitive personal data — genomic, biometric, financial, and location — to China, Russia, and other countries of concern.
Samsung fired the first shot of the AI-phone war: the Galaxy S24 launched with 'Galaxy AI' — live call translation, generative photo editing, and Google's Gemini built into the camera — making AI the headline feature of a flagship phone for the first time. Microsoft closed the week by disclosing that Midnight Blizzard, the Russian state group behind SolarWinds, had spent weeks reading senior executives' emails after a password-spray attack on a legacy test account with no MFA. And Apple, forced by a patent ruling, began selling Apple Watches in the U.S. with the blood-oxygen sensor switched off — a $3 trillion company shipping deliberately degraded hardware rather than paying a licensing fee.