It's time for the annual PC Pro Podcast's festive quiz extravaganza!

Dust off your Santa hats and grab a glass of eggnog! Darien Graham-Smith returns as our grand-quizmaster, presiding over a chaotic and hilarious battle of the wits. He’s challenging the elite PC Podcast team of Tim Danton, Rois Ni Thuama, Jon Honeyball, Nik Rawlinson, and Lee Grant on the biggest tech stories of 2025.

Across 13 grueling rounds of abbreviations, classic computing, and the ever-evolving world of AI, our experts face off in two rival teams: Moore’s Outlaws vs. Control-Alt-Defeat. From the physical specs of 1980s Macintoshes to the inner workings of modern chatbots, this episode is a high-stakes, buzzer-beating test of technical dominance.

Who will claim bragging rights for the next year?

The team debates Australia’s ban on social media for under-16s, the return of smart glasses and a US proposal to require tourists to hand over a trove of personal data – including social media posts. Our Hot Hardware candidate is the Hoxe Air Tracker, a neat little tracking tile that does basically the same thing as an Apple AirTag for a third of the price.

Joined by special guest Geoff Campbell, the team discusses the arrival of advertising in ChatGPT, Apple’s apparent defiance of the Indian government and whatever the hell is happening to RAM prices. In a podcast first we also pilot not one but two “Rants in Brief”; our Hot Hardware candidate is Geoff’s self-specified “Mega-UPS” system, which slashes server-room power costs by loading up on cheap energy in the middle of the night and discharging it by day.

After a six-month absence, we welcome back Rois Ni Thuama to the PC Pro podcast. What's she been up to? Well, it all started when she helped a woman who had collapsed on a beach... 

Joined by Tim Danton and Nik Rawlinson, the team dissects the good and the bad of the UK's budget from a tech perspective, argues about the role of supercomputers and discusses an EU proposal to stop kids from accessing social media, before Rois explains why the insider threat to data security can't be ignored.

This week's Hot Hardware candidate is the Cherry Xtrfy K33 - could this (kind of) mechanical keyboard break the drought and win the award? Listen to the end to find out.

The team discusses new “agentic” features being added to Windows, debates the merits of AI-generated podcasts and asks how angry we should be with Cloudflare for accidentally taking down a significant proportion of the internet earlier this week. Our Hot Hardware candidate is the Logitech Muse, an ingenious spatial stylus for the Apple Vision Pro that lets you point, trace and draw virtual objects in three dimensions.

This week the team discuss the state of computing within the UK education sector, the forthcoming trio of gaming goodies from Valve: the Steam Controller, Steam Machine and Steam Frame then take a look at a new virtual production studio built by Sony Professional.

Our Hot Hardware of the Week nominee is Blackmagic Camera ProDock

The team discusses the pleasant surprise of Affinity making its creative software suite completely free, an unfortunate bug in Windows 10 and the smalltown data-centre boom. We also look at a new approach to manufacturing chips that packs in the transistors more densely than ever before, and welcome the Logitech MX Master 4 mouse as our Hot Hardware candidate.

To learn more about the data-centre controversy, read the report that Lee was referring to: https://stpp.fordschool.umich.edu/sites/stpp/files/2025-07/stpp-data-centers-2025.pdf

There's no getting away from the march of AI this week, whether it's Elon Musk's AI-generated Grokipedia, how OpenAI is dealing with searches related to suicide (and more), the sweeping loss of jobs thanks to AI or Adobe's move to embrace other image-generation models beside its own.

Too much AI for your liking? Luckily, our Hot Hardware this week has nothing to do with artificial intelligence. Instead, Barry nominates the Raspberry Pi 500+, a Raspberry Pi PC baked into a mechanical keyboard.

The team discusses the massive AWS failure that took down some of the internet’s biggest sites and services, and look forward to the AI-powered future of Windows. We also search our feelings about Amazon’s increasing use of automation to replace human workers, and try out OpenAI’s new ChatGPT-powered web browser. Our Hot Hardware candidate is the BOOX Note Max, an A4-sized e-Ink tablet for reading and note-taking.

This week the team discuss Windows 10's role in the battle against software obsolescence, Clearview's slap down by the Information Commissioner’s Office, Equity's fight with AI and a return to pen and ink for British business.

Our Hot Hardware of the Week nominee is the Unifi UNAS-2