
The PC is interesting again - DiabloD3
http://www.theverge.com/ces/2017/1/4/14167980/microsoft-windows-10-pc-laptops-desktops-interesting-again-ces-2017
======
delegate
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.

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

That's not a gaming pc. That looks more like a gaming-capable Workstation.
Absolutely overkill CPU (games are seldom cpu bound), and too much RAM (games
don't care).

I suggest a glance at Logical Increments [0], which is definitely biased
towards gaming, to see what you can do at a given price point. Note that just
because of the gsync fiasco and the cloud-connected drivers nonsense, I'd
gravitate towards an AMD GPU if I had to buy now.

[0] [http://www.logicalincrements.com/](http://www.logicalincrements.com/)

~~~
onli
If I may, Logical Increments is nice, but sometimes leads astray. I develop a
hardware recommender, and this is in my eyes a good gaming PC for 1440p:
[https://www.pc-kombo.de/share/OqqYoLX](https://www.pc-
kombo.de/share/OqqYoLX). i5-6600K with 16GB DDR4-3000 on a Z170 board, good
psu and good cooler. When playing on a lower resolution like the usual 1080p,
AMD with a RX 480 would be a good choice, otherwise there is no alternative to
the GTX 1070.

Intel just released the Kaby Lake processors which are tiny bit faster
(because they are clocked higher), currently integrating this. But does not
change much.

~~~
Const-me
Agree with the config you recommend except the storage.

Both HDD and SSD are IMO too small.

For HDD, the 1TB is inefficient: €51 for 1TB, €98 for 3TB — that is more than
50% difference in cost/TB (both for WD blue desktop series as listed on
computeruniverse.net).

For the SSD, the 256 GB is just too small. Sure that’s enough to boot Windows,
but not enough to fit more than a couple of modern games, they easily take
50GB/each. I’d rather recommend 480GB these days.

~~~
onli
You are right. The 1TB HDD is inefficient as price-per-gigabyte is a lot
higher than 2 or 3 TB. On the other hand, almost always when I recommend
bigger drives I get the feedback that 1TB is more than enough… Depends on the
usage.

Regarding the SSD, for Windows a 120GB or even a 60GB SSD would be enough (but
those are also slower). 250GB is already a lot of additional space for games –
again, it depends on the usage. A couple of games is what is the usual way of
thinking for what a SSD should be used, and for that 250GB is just right. But
if one wants multiple modern AAA games on it at the same time 480GB sure is
more useful.

~~~
xorxornop
There's another factor, though, which you missed entirely: larger SSDs have
muchz much faster write speeds, and also read speeds. The parallel NAND chips
provide a sort of intra-device RAID

~~~
onli
But I did mention that, for the smaller SSDs? It's also true for 250GB vs
512GB, but the main appeal of having an SSD does not get lost by getting a
smaller one – latency and faster load times than with a HDD.

------
stephengillie
So are suits.
[http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

~~~
wodenokoto
Who are "we" in the linked article? What company is Graham talking about? Y
Combinator?

~~~
ttam
the startup PG co-founded and that was sold to Yahoo: Viaweb

------
bluedino
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
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
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.

------
roschdal
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
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
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.

------
zouhair
When did they stop being interesting?

~~~
freehunter
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.

~~~
Taek
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.

------
codingdave
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
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.

------
agumonkey
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

------
muninn_
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.

~~~
gkya
> 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_
I do laptop only since I live in a small space, but I appreciate the
suggestion.

~~~
gkya
I used desktop to mean "desktop environment", not a desktop PC. I, too, use a
laptop.

~~~
muninn_
Ah. I'm currently using a MacBook that I love and not looking at the moment,
so I'll keep your suggestions in mind in the next few years. We'll see how
Apple responds.

------
douche
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
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.

------
viet_nguyen
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
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.

------
pier25
Depends on the country.

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

------
bane
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
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.

------
peterwwillis
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.

~~~
mwfunk
Downvoted for complaining about downvoting, as is tradition.

------
Spooky23
In other news, the suit is back!

