10 ms·

The PC is interesting again

85 points by DiabloD3 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
bluedino 10y ago
Are we in a time machine? 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.
- chrismorgan 10y ago
  I’ve had my Surface Book for over seven months now, and it’s superb. I use it as a laptop the majority of the time, but a laptop with touch and a pen. And then I use it as a tablet some of the time, but a tablet with a pen as well, and a large tablet at that (which is normally desirable for me, though not always). Not everything is perfect about the device, and it’s expensive, but I consider it to be a good investment in my productivity and comfort. I even switched away from Linux because of the excellence that is the Surface Book.
  - sbuttgereit 10y ago
    Yep. I have a Surface Book as well. I am reversed from your usage pattern though, I work out of my home most of the time... due to that I use a nice beefy workstation day-to-day... so I use the Surface Book more as a tablet and am happy to do so. I notice my wife who only has the surface book is about 50/50. She'll use the screen portion in portrait mode as a tablet for reading in whatever room we're in, but otherwise uses it as a laptop for basic work. The only thing I miss (which my first tablet, the Xoom, had) is mobile data support. Yeah I could probably buy an addon device for that, but I think that would be self-defeating for tablet use. Anyway, Surface Book is a fine 2-in-1 and demonstrates that proper engineering can make the format work.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    > I even switched away from Linux because of the excellence that is the Surface Book. That happened to me when Windows 7 got released. I was using only laptops and as a gamer, UI/UX fan, former demoscener, game programmer, came to realise I would be having more fun, using Windows again full time as desktop. Now GNU/Linux lives on a VM and on a travel netbook.
- vvanders 10y ago
  Yup, I would argue that the surface book is actually more interesting(I'll admit that I'm based since I snagged one recently). The combination of tablet and PC is fantastic and really well executed. I had a similar reaction to most of the CES news. I wonder if it's more of a reflection on Apple's lackluster products lately.
- alexkavon 10y ago
  The author most likely never uses/used a 2-in-1. The Verge is known for its heavy Apple bias going so far at one point to indicate that most of the staff writes on a MacBook (single port nonsense version). They also usually make a similar claim to "The PC is interesting again" around CES and usually have a "The PC is boring and tired" article in the early fall before the usual fall hardware events. This is because The Verge promotes a lifestyle level knowledge of technology rather than in depth overview about the industry and its products/services.
  - petecox 10y ago
    I visited an Apple store recently. Comparing side-by-side an 12.9" iPad Pro with a 12" Macbook - the former is definitely 'sexier' by a wide margin. Would not the same journalists with a "heavy Apple bias" not reach the same conclusion? (skip both and get a Surface Pro?)
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  Maybe they are starting to get good and suck less? The first yoga and surfaces aren't exactly held up as very successful, but we seem to be turning a corner...finally. Sometimes incremental improvement over a few years is all that is needed to push something over the edge of success. Course, some ideas are probably going nowhere even with incremental improvement.
  - bluedino 10y ago
    >> Sometimes incremental improvement over a few years is all that is needed to push something over the edge of success. Very true, even the Verge would admin the MacBook Air went from a novelty item to one of the best laptops in 2-3 years worth of improvements.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  > Are we in a time machine? No, we're in the midst of a marketing push by Microsoft after a relatively weak Apple year. All tech product news is fake news.
- Brakenshire 10y ago
  A lot of the improvements which make 2-in-1's useful rather than mediocre are incremental. Just as both the smartphone and tablet concepts for years before hardware existed which could make it work well. I'd say the two major hardware barriers up to this point have been i) having a fast processor which is also efficient enough to operate within a small thermal envelope, and have a decent battery life, ii) keeping the weight down so that the device is comfortable to read from. We've just got to the point where you can get desktop-class processors that fit within the thermal envelope, in devices which are 700g. Now it's just about software.
- stephengillie 10y ago
  Everything that's new is old already.
codingdave 10y ago
I think this article misses the point of what we are seeing. Input and output devices are changing for the first time in decades. At the same time, cloud computing is disconnecting the computing power from the input and output devices. 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.
- freehunter 10y ago
  I just wrote a very long and pointless comment trying to express this very idea. It's not that the PC is any more interesting than it has been, it's that a lot of interesting things are happening in tech, and the PC is the way to access them. It's like saying that cars are interesting again because the city built a new stadium. No, the stadium is interesting. The car is just how you get there.
Spooky23 10y ago
In other news, the suit is back!
stephengillie 10y ago
So are suits. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- bronz 10y ago
  wow, thank you for posting that.
- amelius 10y ago
  I think people have finally figured out the scheme: 1. Make a product in the premium segment, that sends out signals of status and fashion. 2. Wear a turtle-neck to promote the product, as a cover-up. 3. Win over developers and designers. 4. Profit!
  - draw_down 10y ago
    Mm. Clever.
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  Who are "we" in the linked article? What company is Graham talking about? Y Combinator?
  - ttam 10y ago
    the startup PG co-founded and that was sold to Yahoo: Viaweb
- rxlim 10y ago
  But the situation here is direct opposite of the article you are linking to. Every year for the last 15 years or more, I have read the PC is dead. If every year I was reading that the PC was NOT dead, then the article would make sense.
muninn_ 10y ago
That Dell has a nice looking screen, but then they go and ruin it with the carbon-fiber-looking body. I'd also have to be able to run some operating system that isn't Windows (I'll never use Windows again) without having to screw around with drivers or other annoying quirks. Until it's beautiful and comes with a non-junky operating system I'm stuck with Mac. 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.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  I don't know what the options look like but Dell sells Linux laptops too. So does System76 but those ones looked a little clunky last I checked them out.
- gkya 10y ago
  > I'd also have to be able to run some operating system that isn't Windows (I'll never use Windows again) without having to screw around with drivers or other annoying quirks. Since like ten years the only time I have to mess with drivers is when I install Windows to someones computer (and I used Arch linux for ~3 years and since last May I'm on FreeBSD). You can go for Ubuntu or Elementary OS if you're looking for a nice desktop.
  - muninn_ 10y ago
    I do laptop only since I live in a small space, but I appreciate the suggestion.
    - gkya 10y ago
      I used desktop to mean "desktop environment", not a desktop PC. I, too, use a laptop.
douche 10y ago
I'm not sure PCs are really any different than they ever have been. It's always incremental improvements, year over year. Maybe with Intel essentially stonewalled on Moore's Law improvements, graphics cards pretty well maxed out, and ssds becoming relatively standard, there's not a whole lot of room besides going after different form factors and better efficiency.
- tyingq 10y ago
  I suspect the only near-term actually interesting innovation will be docking stations (keyboard/mouse/video screen) for our phones so that we're always carrying around the same PC. That doesn't seem too far off in the future to me.
delegate 10y ago
Yep. 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.
- ebbv 10y ago
  Really? This tired old argument again? Nobody buys an iMac as a gaming machine. I have an iMac and a gaming PC. You don't need to spend even $2k for a capable gaming PC. Also you don't have to spend $4k for a 5K iMac. Mine was about $2k.
- freehunter 10y ago
  Ridiculous argument. Macs have never been the value proposition, especially when they get fully loaded. Any literally any point in the history of the Mac, you could say "but you can get a comparable PC cheaper!" and it would be true. Macs have always been expensive, everyone has always complained that they're expensive, and they will continue to be expensive. This isn't new.
  - 0x0 10y ago
    Nah. In 2013, macs were slightly more expensive than a comparable PC spec-wise, but still a fairly good deal. In 2016, the prices appear to have almost doubled and is totally unreasonable, while the specs are... malnourished. They even took away the escape key and the magsafe port. :(
    - freehunter 10y ago
      According to their Amazon product page, the XPS 13 has a 2.5Ghz i5 and 8GB of RAM. It has a 256GB SSD and a 3000x1800 screen. It's selling for $1,350, original price $1,799. The 13" MacBook with touchbar has a 2.9Ghz i5 with 8GB of RAM. It has a 256GB SSD and a 2560x1600 screen. It's selling for $1,699, original price $1,799. I know people love to complain about the new MacBook and believe me, I have some complaints about it too, but it's hard to argue with the numbers. If the MacBook is overpriced, Dell is getting away with the same thing, while somehow being highly recommended in every thread on HN. MacBook: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01LTHXAEU/ref=dp_ob_neva_mobile?th=1&psc=1#featureBulletsAndDetailBullets_secondary_view_div_1483809436874 https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01LTHXAEU/ref=dp_ob_neva_mob... Dell: https://www.amazon.com/Dell-XPS9360-3591SLV-Laptop-Generation-Silver/dp/B01LQTXED8 https://www.amazon.com/Dell-XPS9360-3591SLV-Laptop-Generatio...
zouhair 10y ago
When did they stop being interesting?
- immigrantsheep 10y ago
  this! exactly what I wanted to write
- freehunter 10y ago
  I would actually argue that this is the least interesting that PCs have ever been. The only thing they're doing that's interesting is copying features from more interesting form factors like tablets and cell phones. The PC (laptop/desktop, doesn't matter the OS) is complete. This years fastest processor is exactly the same speed as last year. This years video card plays the same games as last year. What interesting things do we have? A touchscreen? It's interesting because it turns out PC into a tablet. Folds over on itself? Turns the PC into a tablet. 4K is nice but it's not any more interesting than any other resolution. VR is nice but that doesn't make a PC more interesting, it makes VR interesting. You can do VR without a PC. PCs are commodity products with little compelling reason to upgrade anymore. VR is the most interesting thing happening, and most people are doing it on their phone instead of on a PC. They sell the Gear VR at Walmart, for crying out loud.
  - literallycancer 10y ago
    High refresh rate screens are quite interesting. Which also means you need better components to run things at reasonable FPS.
  - Taek 10y ago
    I disagree. Good VR needs a good video card, and the recent 1080 from Nvidia is a strong improvement to the previous generation. You will notice a difference. Have you tried a Vive? GearVR vs Vive is like 2012 Chromebook vs modern MacBook pro. You need a modern desktop to drive the Vive. And I feel like a lot of people who say VR doesn't excite them haven't tried the Vive, it's much more exciting than any other product on the market. SSDs are getting much faster. 4K monitors are cheaper, and better. If you don't game, modern processors can drive multiple 4K monitors. Running a Bitcoin full node on a desktop is reasonable, running it on a laptop is noticeably detrimental. You need too much juice. Plus the 100GB hurts a lot more on a laptop, where in a desktop you can get 5TB for $100 during sales. Torrenting, Tor nodes, media centers, all things that don't work as well on laptops as they do on desktops. As a software developer I can very confidently say that my desktop is much better for development than my laptop. Both the processor and the SSD make a huge difference.
agumonkey 10y ago
The only computer that interests me today: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip I know I know
roschdal 10y ago
I agree. As a developer, a desktop PC gives me the most value and peformance. I recently replaced my Asus zenbook laptop with a new desktop PC that I built myself, with an Intel i7 CPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD and a great nVidia graphics card, at a price that no laptop could ever compete.
- wyclif 10y ago
  Just today I was listening to more grief and complaints about the new MBPs (I develop on an older one now), and I got so tired of it all and said to myself, "the way out of this cycle might be to build a desktop PC and put a Linux distro on it." I don't take my current rig out of my office very often these days, though if I were living somewhere else I might. But I can get all my work done in my office for sure, so this is looking like a good way out for me. Did you price your components out on NewEgg?
  - roschdal 10y ago
    Yes, the price of a new MBP is outrageous compared to a custom built desktop PC. I would think companies and startups would see the value of desktop PCs again. > Did you price your components out on NewEgg? I bought the components in Norway on komplett.no. The price was about 33% of a new MBP with 15" screen, but I got significantly better specifications.
peterwwillis 10y ago
This is effectively a ridiculous lie. I just spent three whole days researching 2-in-1s and tablets and hybrids and laptops, just to understand what the fuck the offerings today actually mean. tl;dr, they suck 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.
pier25 10y ago
Depends on the country. If you live outside of the US even big manufacturers like Dell give you very limited hardware options.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
viet_nguyen 10y ago
I've never lived without a laptop since 2002, and this year I'm going to get Razer Blade 14". 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.
- jay_kyburz 10y ago
  I will be upgrading to this as my main machine as when my current MBP pro dies. It's 4 years old now. I will miss macOS though. I have a Surface Pro 3 and its just horrible to use - both as a tablet and laptop. edit: A bit more detail: I've done a lot of reseach into gaming laptops in the last month as I'll be starting a job using unity in Feb. The Blade seems to be just a little bit better than ASUS and MSI offerings. I think the Alienware machines just look like cheap junk so didn't really look into them. They are all priced incredibly closely it really does come down to your preference for style and minor feature variations.
- readams 10y ago
  People think laptops have desktop-like performance only because they haven't used desktops much. It's actually not even close.
bane 10y ago
Lots of comments here about custom desktop builds being cheap. But what about the portability you've sacrificed? No big deal, the tremendous savings you just made can go into a cheapo use-it-for-travel laptop and you'll still have money left in the bank.
jakebasile 10y ago
As a passionate core PC gamer (who has dabbled in consoles) for the past 20+ years, I can confidently say that right now is the greatest time it has ever been to be a PC gamer. A non-exhaustive list of reasons why this is true (some of these apply to more than just the PC): - 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.

85 points by DiabloD3 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Are we in a time machine? 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.

chrismorgan 10y ago
I’ve had my Surface Book for over seven months now, and it’s superb. I use it as a laptop the majority of the time, but a laptop with touch and a pen. And then I use it as a tablet some of the time, but a tablet with a pen as well, and a large tablet at that (which is normally desirable for me, though not always). Not everything is perfect about the device, and it’s expensive, but I consider it to be a good investment in my productivity and comfort. I even switched away from Linux because of the excellence that is the Surface Book.
- sbuttgereit 10y ago
  Yep. I have a Surface Book as well. I am reversed from your usage pattern though, I work out of my home most of the time... due to that I use a nice beefy workstation day-to-day... so I use the Surface Book more as a tablet and am happy to do so. I notice my wife who only has the surface book is about 50/50. She'll use the screen portion in portrait mode as a tablet for reading in whatever room we're in, but otherwise uses it as a laptop for basic work. The only thing I miss (which my first tablet, the Xoom, had) is mobile data support. Yeah I could probably buy an addon device for that, but I think that would be self-defeating for tablet use. Anyway, Surface Book is a fine 2-in-1 and demonstrates that proper engineering can make the format work.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > I even switched away from Linux because of the excellence that is the Surface Book. That happened to me when Windows 7 got released. I was using only laptops and as a gamer, UI/UX fan, former demoscener, game programmer, came to realise I would be having more fun, using Windows again full time as desktop. Now GNU/Linux lives on a VM and on a travel netbook.
vvanders 10y ago
Yup, I would argue that the surface book is actually more interesting(I'll admit that I'm based since I snagged one recently). The combination of tablet and PC is fantastic and really well executed. I had a similar reaction to most of the CES news. I wonder if it's more of a reflection on Apple's lackluster products lately.
alexkavon 10y ago
The author most likely never uses/used a 2-in-1. The Verge is known for its heavy Apple bias going so far at one point to indicate that most of the staff writes on a MacBook (single port nonsense version). They also usually make a similar claim to "The PC is interesting again" around CES and usually have a "The PC is boring and tired" article in the early fall before the usual fall hardware events. This is because The Verge promotes a lifestyle level knowledge of technology rather than in depth overview about the industry and its products/services.
- petecox 10y ago
  I visited an Apple store recently. Comparing side-by-side an 12.9" iPad Pro with a 12" Macbook - the former is definitely 'sexier' by a wide margin. Would not the same journalists with a "heavy Apple bias" not reach the same conclusion? (skip both and get a Surface Pro?)
seanmcdirmid 10y ago
Maybe they are starting to get good and suck less? The first yoga and surfaces aren't exactly held up as very successful, but we seem to be turning a corner...finally. Sometimes incremental improvement over a few years is all that is needed to push something over the edge of success. Course, some ideas are probably going nowhere even with incremental improvement.
- bluedino 10y ago
  >> Sometimes incremental improvement over a few years is all that is needed to push something over the edge of success. Very true, even the Verge would admin the MacBook Air went from a novelty item to one of the best laptops in 2-3 years worth of improvements.
pessimizer 10y ago
> Are we in a time machine? No, we're in the midst of a marketing push by Microsoft after a relatively weak Apple year. All tech product news is fake news.
Brakenshire 10y ago
A lot of the improvements which make 2-in-1's useful rather than mediocre are incremental. Just as both the smartphone and tablet concepts for years before hardware existed which could make it work well. I'd say the two major hardware barriers up to this point have been i) having a fast processor which is also efficient enough to operate within a small thermal envelope, and have a decent battery life, ii) keeping the weight down so that the device is comfortable to read from. We've just got to the point where you can get desktop-class processors that fit within the thermal envelope, in devices which are 700g. Now it's just about software.
stephengillie 10y ago
Everything that's new is old already.

codingdave 10y ago

I think this article misses the point of what we are seeing. Input and output devices are changing for the first time in decades. At the same time, cloud computing is disconnecting the computing power from the input and output devices. 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.

freehunter 10y ago
I just wrote a very long and pointless comment trying to express this very idea. It's not that the PC is any more interesting than it has been, it's that a lot of interesting things are happening in tech, and the PC is the way to access them. It's like saying that cars are interesting again because the city built a new stadium. No, the stadium is interesting. The car is just how you get there.

Spooky23 10y ago

In other news, the suit is back!

stephengillie 10y ago

So are suits. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
bronz 10y ago
wow, thank you for posting that.
amelius 10y ago
I think people have finally figured out the scheme: 1. Make a product in the premium segment, that sends out signals of status and fashion. 2. Wear a turtle-neck to promote the product, as a cover-up. 3. Win over developers and designers. 4. Profit!
- draw_down 10y ago
  Mm. Clever.
wodenokoto 10y ago
Who are "we" in the linked article? What company is Graham talking about? Y Combinator?
- ttam 10y ago
  the startup PG co-founded and that was sold to Yahoo: Viaweb
rxlim 10y ago
But the situation here is direct opposite of the article you are linking to. Every year for the last 15 years or more, I have read the PC is dead. If every year I was reading that the PC was NOT dead, then the article would make sense.

muninn_ 10y ago

That Dell has a nice looking screen, but then they go and ruin it with the carbon-fiber-looking body. I'd also have to be able to run some operating system that isn't Windows (I'll never use Windows again) without having to screw around with drivers or other annoying quirks. Until it's beautiful and comes with a non-junky operating system I'm stuck with Mac. 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.

nommm-nommm 10y ago
I don't know what the options look like but Dell sells Linux laptops too. So does System76 but those ones looked a little clunky last I checked them out.
gkya 10y ago
> I'd also have to be able to run some operating system that isn't Windows (I'll never use Windows again) without having to screw around with drivers or other annoying quirks. Since like ten years the only time I have to mess with drivers is when I install Windows to someones computer (and I used Arch linux for ~3 years and since last May I'm on FreeBSD). You can go for Ubuntu or Elementary OS if you're looking for a nice desktop.
- muninn_ 10y ago
  I do laptop only since I live in a small space, but I appreciate the suggestion.
  - gkya 10y ago
    I used desktop to mean "desktop environment", not a desktop PC. I, too, use a laptop.

douche 10y ago

I'm not sure PCs are really any different than they ever have been. It's always incremental improvements, year over year. Maybe with Intel essentially stonewalled on Moore's Law improvements, graphics cards pretty well maxed out, and ssds becoming relatively standard, there's not a whole lot of room besides going after different form factors and better efficiency.

tyingq 10y ago
I suspect the only near-term actually interesting innovation will be docking stations (keyboard/mouse/video screen) for our phones so that we're always carrying around the same PC. That doesn't seem too far off in the future to me.

delegate 10y ago

Yep. 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.

ebbv 10y ago
Really? This tired old argument again? Nobody buys an iMac as a gaming machine. I have an iMac and a gaming PC. You don't need to spend even $2k for a capable gaming PC. Also you don't have to spend $4k for a 5K iMac. Mine was about $2k.
freehunter 10y ago
Ridiculous argument. Macs have never been the value proposition, especially when they get fully loaded. Any literally any point in the history of the Mac, you could say "but you can get a comparable PC cheaper!" and it would be true. Macs have always been expensive, everyone has always complained that they're expensive, and they will continue to be expensive. This isn't new.
- 0x0 10y ago
  Nah. In 2013, macs were slightly more expensive than a comparable PC spec-wise, but still a fairly good deal. In 2016, the prices appear to have almost doubled and is totally unreasonable, while the specs are... malnourished. They even took away the escape key and the magsafe port. :(
  - freehunter 10y ago
    According to their Amazon product page, the XPS 13 has a 2.5Ghz i5 and 8GB of RAM. It has a 256GB SSD and a 3000x1800 screen. It's selling for $1,350, original price $1,799. The 13" MacBook with touchbar has a 2.9Ghz i5 with 8GB of RAM. It has a 256GB SSD and a 2560x1600 screen. It's selling for $1,699, original price $1,799. I know people love to complain about the new MacBook and believe me, I have some complaints about it too, but it's hard to argue with the numbers. If the MacBook is overpriced, Dell is getting away with the same thing, while somehow being highly recommended in every thread on HN. MacBook: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01LTHXAEU/ref=dp_ob_neva_mobile?th=1&psc=1#featureBulletsAndDetailBullets_secondary_view_div_1483809436874 https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01LTHXAEU/ref=dp_ob_neva_mob... Dell: https://www.amazon.com/Dell-XPS9360-3591SLV-Laptop-Generation-Silver/dp/B01LQTXED8 https://www.amazon.com/Dell-XPS9360-3591SLV-Laptop-Generatio...

zouhair 10y ago

When did they stop being interesting?

immigrantsheep 10y ago
this! exactly what I wanted to write
freehunter 10y ago
I would actually argue that this is the least interesting that PCs have ever been. The only thing they're doing that's interesting is copying features from more interesting form factors like tablets and cell phones. The PC (laptop/desktop, doesn't matter the OS) is complete. This years fastest processor is exactly the same speed as last year. This years video card plays the same games as last year. What interesting things do we have? A touchscreen? It's interesting because it turns out PC into a tablet. Folds over on itself? Turns the PC into a tablet. 4K is nice but it's not any more interesting than any other resolution. VR is nice but that doesn't make a PC more interesting, it makes VR interesting. You can do VR without a PC. PCs are commodity products with little compelling reason to upgrade anymore. VR is the most interesting thing happening, and most people are doing it on their phone instead of on a PC. They sell the Gear VR at Walmart, for crying out loud.
- literallycancer 10y ago
  High refresh rate screens are quite interesting. Which also means you need better components to run things at reasonable FPS.
- Taek 10y ago
  I disagree. Good VR needs a good video card, and the recent 1080 from Nvidia is a strong improvement to the previous generation. You will notice a difference. Have you tried a Vive? GearVR vs Vive is like 2012 Chromebook vs modern MacBook pro. You need a modern desktop to drive the Vive. And I feel like a lot of people who say VR doesn't excite them haven't tried the Vive, it's much more exciting than any other product on the market. SSDs are getting much faster. 4K monitors are cheaper, and better. If you don't game, modern processors can drive multiple 4K monitors. Running a Bitcoin full node on a desktop is reasonable, running it on a laptop is noticeably detrimental. You need too much juice. Plus the 100GB hurts a lot more on a laptop, where in a desktop you can get 5TB for $100 during sales. Torrenting, Tor nodes, media centers, all things that don't work as well on laptops as they do on desktops. As a software developer I can very confidently say that my desktop is much better for development than my laptop. Both the processor and the SSD make a huge difference.

agumonkey 10y ago

The only computer that interests me today: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip I know I know

roschdal 10y ago

I agree. As a developer, a desktop PC gives me the most value and peformance. I recently replaced my Asus zenbook laptop with a new desktop PC that I built myself, with an Intel i7 CPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD and a great nVidia graphics card, at a price that no laptop could ever compete.

wyclif 10y ago
Just today I was listening to more grief and complaints about the new MBPs (I develop on an older one now), and I got so tired of it all and said to myself, "the way out of this cycle might be to build a desktop PC and put a Linux distro on it." I don't take my current rig out of my office very often these days, though if I were living somewhere else I might. But I can get all my work done in my office for sure, so this is looking like a good way out for me. Did you price your components out on NewEgg?
- roschdal 10y ago
  Yes, the price of a new MBP is outrageous compared to a custom built desktop PC. I would think companies and startups would see the value of desktop PCs again. > Did you price your components out on NewEgg? I bought the components in Norway on komplett.no. The price was about 33% of a new MBP with 15" screen, but I got significantly better specifications.

peterwwillis 10y ago

This is effectively a ridiculous lie. I just spent three whole days researching 2-in-1s and tablets and hybrids and laptops, just to understand what the fuck the offerings today actually mean. tl;dr, they suck 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.

pier25 10y ago

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

deleted 10y ago

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viet_nguyen 10y ago

I've never lived without a laptop since 2002, and this year I'm going to get Razer Blade 14". 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.

jay_kyburz 10y ago
I will be upgrading to this as my main machine as when my current MBP pro dies. It's 4 years old now. I will miss macOS though. I have a Surface Pro 3 and its just horrible to use - both as a tablet and laptop. edit: A bit more detail: I've done a lot of reseach into gaming laptops in the last month as I'll be starting a job using unity in Feb. The Blade seems to be just a little bit better than ASUS and MSI offerings. I think the Alienware machines just look like cheap junk so didn't really look into them. They are all priced incredibly closely it really does come down to your preference for style and minor feature variations.
readams 10y ago
People think laptops have desktop-like performance only because they haven't used desktops much. It's actually not even close.

bane 10y ago

Lots of comments here about custom desktop builds being cheap. But what about the portability you've sacrificed? No big deal, the tremendous savings you just made can go into a cheapo use-it-for-travel laptop and you'll still have money left in the bank.

jakebasile 10y ago

As a passionate core PC gamer (who has dabbled in consoles) for the past 20+ years, I can confidently say that right now is the greatest time it has ever been to be a PC gamer. A non-exhaustive list of reasons why this is true (some of these apply to more than just the PC): - 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.