The PC is interesting again

Yesterday was the first time in many years when I decided to check out how much a good gaming PC would cost me today.

The price for a i7 6700K 4.1GHz, 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD and nVidia GTX 1070: €1515 EUR (case and CPU cooler included).

Add a €360 27" Monitor and the total goes to € 1875. Let's round that up to €2000.

A similarly powered iMac (i7, 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD and an inferior Radeon R9 M395X) costs exactly: 4.189,00 €

More than double the price! Granted, the iMac monitor is much better, but the price difference gives you 2000 EUR to splash on monitors and still be up 189EUR ! Or maybe splash it on VR helmets and a new bike ?

And that thing gives me all the games plus VR and the pretty powerful Visual Studio IDE for hacking.

Lenovo released the Yoga, the first convertible that you could put in tent mode or tablet mode, and Microsoft released the Surface, back in 2012. Intel announced the Ultrabook in 2011.

Today you have the same things. They've been revised and improved in the areas of screen, battery life, graphics performance, switching from HDD to SSD, but it's all been incremental.

>> 2-IN-1S SUCCEEDED BECAUSE THEY MARRIED THE BEST OF MOBILE WITH THE POWER OF THE PC

Has the author ever used a 2 in 1? They can be marginally useful when sharing a document with someone but they bad tablets and they are mediocre laptops.

You now can select from keyboards, mice, touch, voice, and use local or remote computing power, to get results delivered in real time or async to screens, devices, messages, VR, voice, or IoT devices. And that is not even getting into what robotics can do.

So it is not that the PC is interesting. It is that EVERYTHING is now decoupled, and we can mix and match like never before. It should be interesting to see where people take it.

I know I know

With that being said, I'm very glad to see other manufacturers are putting effort into catching up after like 8 years of serious sub-par machines. All we need now is for one of them to drop Windows and seriously support a Linux distribution and then we could have a real Apple competitor in 3-5 years.

I'm a big fan of the port decision on the new MacBook Pros, but the cost, the obsession for thinness at the expense of battery life, etc... isn't acceptable and they're learning that this year, hopefully, or they'll be on the ropes in 5 years. Or perhaps they kill the Mac themselves. It's not a problem to make a laptop thinner every year. Just don't sacrifice performance and battery life to do so.

Laptops are getting desktop like performance with the portability of a small backpack and the weight of under 2kg. Full HD with 14" laptop looks just right.

With the human size not changing at all, I see that there's always a need for a PC.

If you live outside of the US even big manufacturers like Dell give you very limited hardware options.

- There are very few exclusives that matter anymore. The cost of making a AAA game is high enough that publishers can rarely afford to exclude a good part of their market. Of the two consoles that matter, many Xbox exclusives are coming to PC anyways.

- The quality of the PC versions of most games has gone up. There was a transitional period in the mid 2000s where gaming switched from being PC centric to console centric and the PC versions of many AAA games were awful. This has mostly passed. Even Japanese developers are releasing good stuff on PC now, and that group of developers have long seen the PC as alien.

- The digital download market is sane. Valve and Steam are a mostly benign monopoly, and Valve being privately held assures me this will remain true for a while. Problems down the line are problems for future Jake, though. Even so, the individual publisher stores are usually not too bad. Ubisoft's uPlay is fine and integrates with Steam pretty well, and EA's Origin has a big leg up on UI design and actually led the pack on refunds. GOG exists for people that want older games or draw a hard line on DRM.

- There is a range of hardware available for any budget, and the value and reliability of that hardware is the best it's ever been. You can get a $150 GTX 1050 Ti and have modest performance at 1080p on most modern games, or you can drop $650 on a GTX1080 and play most anything at 4K/Ultra, and there are many steps in between. As usual, the sweet spot of performance per dollar is somewhere around the $250 "mainstream" card, but the options exist.

- The Steam Controller and Steam Link are amazing. They open up a whole range of games that previously could only be played with a mouse and keyboard on your desk into your living room. Many games have native support for the XInput controller standard but the Steam Controller takes it even further. The Link steps in if your PC and TV are too far away for an HDMI cable.

- There are tons of games now in every niche. Consoles stay mostly to AAA games (which is fine, I love AAA games), but the range of AA and indie games on PC is amazing. If you want a simulator for something like farming, trains, or driving a truck - PC is your destination. How about managing a bloodline through medieval Europe? Tons of stuff that just isn't possible with a controller alone or that wouldn't be financially viable with the cost of console licensing is available, often with much more direct lines of communication to the developer.

- Digital distribution makes it simple to acquire any game you want at any time, often at a discount over physical stores. I can get a game in a few clicks on Steam and if it's on sale I may save anywhere from 50-90% off retail. I know that the modern consoles have this as well, but it is something I love about PC.

- eSports are fun and they are centered on the PC. I was initially skeptical, but I do enjoy watching some now, and it is undeniably a large market. But the related idea of streaming (Twitch, et al.) is also really cool. I like watching and interacting with some smaller streamers on Twitch, and it is a new way to be involved with gaming.

Like I said, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a gamer and especially a PC gamer. With consoles taking a more PC-ish "upgradeable" route, I wonder how the market will change in the next decade.

Start with the premise of Windows 10. It's horrible. Not just the interface, which doesn't give you anything you want or need when you want and need it, forces you to reboot against your will to install updates you can't choose to install, crashes apps regularly with no real understanding of why, hogs resources unnecessarily, spams you with meaningless notifications, and of course, leaks metadata everywhere. Still with no meaningful stock firewall or application security or value-driving base apps or functionality. It's lame, it's annoying, it sucks. It's Windows, Okay?

The thing you're bound to do the most on a computer in 2017 is surf the web, and you need a fucking Supercomputer to load 10 tabs, even though five years ago you needed a machine much less powerful and with much less RAM than the ones today and could load 50-100 tabs without it breaking a sweat.

Next there's the fact that there's really one chipmaker dominating PCs right now: Intel. AMD comes up short performing poorer and making up a tiny part of the market, this is not even close to the good old days when Intel and AMD were in a constant arms race.

Intel has, for the past 8 years, been slogging through a series of combinations of performance "tweaks", which have resulted in sometimes faster, sometimes slower, generally uninspiring computing platforms. Between mobile and PC there's a whole complicated universe of CPUs and GPUs designed to be somewhat impossible to compare due to their constantly almost making the old products obsolete, but not quite, because PC and mobile design changes just enough to make the new products disappointing.

More power? Less battery. More battery? Annoying form factor. Good form factor? Less power and battery. Low heat dissipation? Poorer performance. Otherwise good everything? No modern connectors, or display, or storage. No matter what year it is or what revision it is of the same exact model from the last 3 years, something about it is going to suck.

The Dell XPS 13, which has been given every conceivable blowjob by every reviewer i've found, is an underwhelming and overpriced notebook. It's not the fastest, doesn't have the longest battery, isn't the coolest, isn't the thinnest, yet year after year it's supposedly the best mobile there is. And every year, a machine with comparable specs from two years before is 1/3 the price and still works fine. The whole market is a sales con.

And let me tell the whole god damn industry something: hinges are not an innovation. Room dividers from the 15th century had double hinges that let them move 360 degrees, this is not rocket science, and it's certainly nothing to jump around and shout about. Magnets, amazing as they are, have been around forever. If you don't use them in your design it's because you were trying to rush a pointless release of your redundant platform. The industry has been holding back basic, useful features for years just so they can charge you more money the next year for something a kid in metal shop could make in an hour.

I just bought a Lenovo IdeaPad Miix 700 Core m5-6Y54 4GB 128GB (?!), a 1-year old stupid portable, for less than half its old retail price. It's a 2-in-1 with a 4 cell battery, which means it is too heavy to hold as a tablet, so they bundled a tiny keyboard, which of course has no rigid hinges so you can't place it on your lap. The "tiny" 4 gigabytes of RAM, and some weird bug with the touchpad, cause Chrome to crash constantly. And the keyboard stops typing randomly. For all of this inconvenience you get a high-ish resolution display that's good for drawing on, and of course, it provides only a mild amount of heat from the back.

The CPU is an m5, which is an already-obsolete ultra-low-power version of a hybrid between a Pentium and an i5, which inexplicably has more L3 cache than anything but the highest performance CPU models available, yet less clock speed, with the main goals not being performance but less heat and power draw. Just forget that CPU exists since Intel no longer makes it (unless you do want higher L3 cache than other CPUs today). And of course you're stuck with a whopping two cores, because how can we fit any more than two cores on a CPU when we have to use a gigantic 14 nanometer process? Oh, AMD and virtually every smartphone ships 4 to 8 cores in its chips? Don't worry, you can still totally get a high-power, 6-core (!!!), i5 6440 HQ, which has the same cores and L3 as an i7 from last year, and performs the same, and sucks as much power, and doesn't have very good graphics. Unless the manufacturer "turns down the TDP" and makes it run like a slower, earlier CPU, which you can't really change, all to make it slightly less hot. And of course, whatever the performance is, it will slow down quickly and consistently as the machine gets hotter.

The RAM is of course "tiny" by today's standards, but again, don't worry, you can pay a $200 premium for them to put a $30 stick of RAM in the thing to make it barely usable again.

After comparing benchmarks and battery life and processor specs and graphics and form factors and price for two days, I can tell you one thing about the PC (mainly mobile) market: it's more infuriating and confusing than ever, and nothing is worth the money they're asking because somehow it's going to disappoint you.

I'm pretty sure the people downvoting paid full price for a recent PC and are mad that i'm telling it like it is.