APC January 2023

Well, I hope you made it through December with few party after effects, your budgets unbruised and at least a few days of down time, with perhaps more to come. My December is just commencing as I write this, but I’m somewhat confident all things will be well. At the very tail end of a long year it’s easy to sit back and take stock, except the gods of tech don’t seem to have received the memo about slowing things down… In this issue we’ve got some nice treats. Nvidia’s RTX 4080 arrived in the Labs, and Chris has once again been running a marathon to test them and share his impressions with you. The performance is, as expected, exactly in the right place relative to the 3000 series and…

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"Championing technology doesn’t mean we’re unrelenting yes-men and -women, however, and APC aims to be as objective as possible in all our coverage." APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for forty years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the personal computer the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and apps to peripherals, accessories, and beyond. We have two goals: to find the best modern tech and to help you make the most of it. We’re also an open church in terms of platforms.…

Australia may be the next country to take legislative action against loot boxes in videogames, as MP Andrew Wilkie has introduced a bill calling for a mandatory adult classification for any game that contains a “gambling-type feature.” Introduced on November 28, the bill says loot boxes come in many forms but share some common characteristics, including that they can offer competitive advantages in games and may also have resale value, which collectively confers on them “significant value for players.” “By tempting players with the potential to win game-changing items, encouraging risk-taking for possible reward, delivering random prizes on an intermittent basis, and encouraging players to keep spending money, loot boxes give rise to many of the same emotions and experiences associated with poker machines and traditional gambling activities,” Wilkie’s explanatory…

For decades Intel’s relationship with chipmaking rivals such as AMD and Nvidia has been a feisty one, often seeking to exploit its domination at all costs. "We should have an open programming language… that can run on Intel, AMD and Nvidia GPUs without changing your code" In 1999 for example, the company got into a tangle with America’s Federal Trade Commission over how it was protecting technical information and patents. And a decade later, the European Commission found “abuse of dominance” as Intel paid retailers and computer manufacturers to only use Intel CPUs. So it’s perhaps a little unexpected that Intel is now suddenly singing kumbaya and effectively saying to its rivals “can’t we all just get along?”. “We should have an open programming language… that can run on Intel,…

When Deliveroo announced it was exiting the Australian market in November, it was difficult for critics to resist a smirk. Part of the ever-expanding gig economy model, where self-employed independent contractors work on a piecemeal basis, it seemed to presage a larger contraction in that notoriously precarious employment model. Like Uber and Amazon, Deliveroo didn’t employ food delivery drivers per se, but instead used a smartphone app which workers, on a self-employed contractor basis, would log into to pick up jobs and shifts. At first glance it’s an appealingly flexible system, but the reality is bleak. In Deliveroo’s case, workers were beholden to an algorithmic approach to their work suitability. If, for example, they cancelled a shift too many times, their selection for future shifts was algorithmically rendered less likely.…