Month: December 2020

Enlarge / Basking sharks in the aquarium, Loro Parque, Tenerife, Canary Islands, 2007. (credit: Heritage Images | Getty Images)

Picture the scene. Swimming off Scotland’s west coast during a summer holiday you notice a large dark shark nearly 10 metres long headed towards you. A prominent triangular dorsal fin cuts the surface, the powerful rhythmically beating tail driving it silently through the cloudy green depths. You’re transfixed by a cavernous mouth large enough to swallow a seal.

Musing this may be your last swim, it might be surprising to learn this leviathan of the deep is a harmless yet endangered gentle giant. It has little interest in humans, focusing on some unseen bounty of the warmer summer waters: zooplankton, the tiny creatures found near the surface of the ocean.

This is the basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus), once common off western Europe, feeding on the annual plankton bonanza of the European shelf.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Here at Ars Technica, we would like to formally congratulate you for surviving the year that was 2020. COVID-19 may have changed everything about normal life in the last 12 months, but things are looking up for 2021. A vaccine is currently rolling out, a more science-friendly US administration will take office in January, and maybe we can even look forward to a return to normal public gatherings sometime this year. We're going to be fine. [Editor's note: We're trying to be optimistic here.]

Unfortunately, you probably can't say the same for some of the companies we write about as we head into 2021. The pandemic year has taken a toll on the tech industry, too, delaying some things we thought were happening in 2020 (like a conclusion to Oracle v. Google) and accelerating other changes we all saw coming (like record streaming numbers). So to walk you through the companies staring down a rough new year, welcome back to the annual Ars Technica Deathwatch, 2021 edition.

If you haven't previously visited the Deathwatch during Ars Editor Emeritus Sean Gallagher's tenure, please know: As usual, we're being a bit dramatic with the name "Deathwatch." This list is not predicting that the following companies will drop dead precisely within the next calendar year. Bankruptcy laws, acquisitions, and other accounting shenanigans make exact corporate death dates either very unpredictable or agonizingly slow, but we can at least make some educated guesses about the companies, products, and services that are facing down a terrible 2021.