The PC is interesting again
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 <i>mean</i>. tl;dr, they suck<p>Start with the premise of Windows 10. It&#x27;s horrible. Not just the interface, which doesn&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s lame, it&#x27;s annoying, it sucks. It&#x27;s Windows, Okay?<p>The thing you&#x27;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.<p>Next there&#x27;s the fact that there&#x27;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.<p>Intel has, for the past 8 years, been slogging through a series of combinations of performance &quot;tweaks&quot;, which have resulted in sometimes faster, sometimes slower, generally uninspiring computing platforms. Between mobile and PC there&#x27;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, <i>but not quite</i>, because PC and mobile design changes just enough to make the new products disappointing.<p>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.<p>The Dell XPS 13, which has been given every conceivable blowjob by every reviewer i&#x27;ve found, is an underwhelming and overpriced notebook. It&#x27;s not the fastest, doesn&#x27;t have the longest battery, isn&#x27;t the coolest, isn&#x27;t the thinnest, yet year after year it&#x27;s supposedly the best mobile there is. And every year, a machine with comparable specs from two years before is 1&#x2F;3 the price and still works fine. The whole market is a sales con.<p>And let me tell the whole god damn industry something: <i>hinges are not an innovation</i>. Room dividers from the 15th century had double hinges that let them move 360 degrees, this is not rocket science, and it&#x27;s certainly nothing to jump around and shout about. Magnets, amazing as they are, have been around forever. If you don&#x27;t use them in your design it&#x27;s because you were trying to rush a pointless release of your redundant platform. The industry has been holding back <i>basic, useful features</i> for <i>years</i> just so they can charge you more money the next year for something a kid in metal shop could make in an hour.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t place it on your lap. The &quot;tiny&quot; 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&#x27;s good for <i>drawing on</i>, and of course, it provides only a mild amount of heat from the back.<p>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&#x27;re stuck with a whopping <i>two cores</i>, 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&#x27;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&#x27;t have very good graphics. Unless the manufacturer &quot;turns down the TDP&quot; and makes it run like a slower, earlier CPU, which you can&#x27;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.<p>The RAM is of course &quot;tiny&quot; by today&#x27;s standards, but again, don&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s more infuriating and confusing than ever, and nothing is worth the money they&#x27;re asking because somehow it&#x27;s going to disappoint you.<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure the people downvoting paid full price for a recent PC and are mad that i&#x27;m telling it like it is.