The future of PCs and Macs is expensive

[Onkel Neal]

The future of PCs and Macs is expensive

We've seen this coming for a while, people moving away from desktop PCs and to mobiles and consoles.

Mobile truly has eaten everything, and a very salient analogy is provided by cameras..... The new DSLRs of today are things like the $1,999 Nikon D500. I call them tractors: the number of people that need one isn't huge, but they couldn't get their jobs done without it. PCs are much the same.

Surface Pro and MacBooks are seriously overpriced for that they provide:

From Microsoft, we have the $2,999 Surface Studio, which scales up to $4,199 when you juice up the RAM to 32GB and the storage to 2TB. Also out of Redmond is an updated Surface Book with up to 16 hours of battery life and a $2,399 starting price. That portable computer maxes out at $3,299 with added storage and memory.


Apple’s new MacBook Pro family is universally more expensive than the one it’s replacing: the supposedly entry-level MBP, lacking a Touch Bar, starts at $1,499. To get a Touch Bar, the least you’d need to spend is $1,799, and if you want to go beyond 13 inches, the 15-inch MacBook Pro starts at $2,399. Upgrade the processor and graphics, opt for 2TB of storage, and you’ll reach the incredible heights of $4,299.

Dude, a top-flite Dell XPS will handle games and work, looks fantastic, and doesn't cost over $1800.

[Skybird]

I would not go with intel 7th generation chips currently, they are overpriced and offer not sufficient gain to give them performance advantage over 6th generation CPUs that does not show just in laboratory numbers, but is also visible to the user. Wait until 8th generaton, or buy 6th generation.

I also still tend to favour desktop PC over notebook, although my non-gaming stuff now all is run from notebook. That is only because space and plug concerns, I have not enough room to have two desktop PC set up. But repairing or maintaining a desktop always is cheaper, and leaves you easier options for upgrading and repairing. Also, typing at a desktop keyboard is much better than on a notebook.

The Surface line by Microsoft is haunted by hooks and issues, since beginning. Thats is what is to be read in non-pro Microsoft tech blogs and tech sites. Windows 10 did not make these things work more reliable, but added to their problems. Many W10 updates caused havoc for Surface users. The by now well documented battery issues did not make it any better.

Currently kind of a dispute is going on, on Microsoft's claimed numbers of Windows-platforms. It seems they are no good news for MS:

http://www.computerworld.com/article...-slowdown.html

http://www.businessinsider.com/right...e-2011-12?IR=T

500 million Windows 7 licenses sold in the last two years. It's a safe bet that more than 80% of those licenses were sold on new PCs, which means there are at least 400 million active Windows 7 users today. (Some licenses might have been bought by corporations for upgrades, but not yet deployed.)

Half a billion Windows users have gone amiss mysteriously, it seems:

https://www.askwoody.com/2016/the-my...windows-users/

To call PCs a "niche" now, is exaggerated, and will remain to be so for some more years to come. "Niche" to me sounds like something with a market share of 5% or less or so...

[Mr Quatro]

I'm not sure about America, are Mac's made in America at least they are produced here, right?

but I know Japan and China have little rooms where the elite meet and decide what the price of anything they make will be.

It's called greed

[Commander Wallace]

Originally Posted by Skybird

I would not go with intel 7th generation chips currently, they are overpriced and offer not sufficient gain to give them performance advantage over 6th generation CPUs that does not show just in laboratory numbers, but is also visible to the user. Wait until 8th generaton, or buy 6th generation.

I also still tend to favour desktop PC over notebook, although my non-gaming stuff now all is run from notebook. That is only because space and plug concerns, I have not enough room to have two desktop PC set up. But repairing or maintaining a desktop always is cheaper, and leaves you easier options for upgrading and repairing. Also, typing at a desktop keyboard is much better than on a notebook.

The latest generation of Intel processors offer a little more processing power but for most users, not enough to justify the costs as you said. The older generation Intel CPU's can also be overclocked to a point where they rival the latest offerings from Intel.

As an alternative, a number of our forum members have built their own computers utilizing multi core AMD CPU's and have reported excellent results. AMD CPU's ran inherently hot years ago and a rule of thumb in using the AMD chips was to have increased cooling systems. This is no longer the case as the AMD A8 Quad core runs incredibly cool in a laptop.

Top tier Lap tops that are built today, as Neal said, feature dedicated video cards and in some case, dual hard drives not to mention top of the line CPU's. These units are capable of everyday tasks and more than capable of playing most games on relatively high settings. The integrated video card on most units are also good enough to play most games on reduced settings if one has to make any changes at all.

Most hard core gamers however, still prefer the computer desktop where one can install a physically large video card and in the case of an SLI configuration, install 2 video cards to run in series to give top tier Video effects. Most people in this group also tend to run water cooled chilling units as well.

http://www.xidax.com/products/deskto...led%20Computer

Luckily, End users today have a vast number of options to choose from when considering a computer purchase.


Edit. Quote - SLI is an algorithm of parallel processing for computer graphics, meant to increase the processing power available for graphics. Further, this is for connecting 2 or more Video cards together. According to this article, 3 and 4 can be used.

Quote : Implementation[edit]

SLI allows two, three, or four graphics processing units (GPUs) to share the workload when rendering real-time 3D computer graphics. Ideally, identical GPUs are installed on the motherboard that contains enough PCI-Express slots, set up in a master-slave configuration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Link_Interface