Índex per October 2017 a PC & Tech Authority

It’s time to shine things up around here. We’ve been working on a bit of a redesign of the magazine, and you will see that next issue. Which just so happens to be the 20th anniversary of PC & Tech Authority! So, needless to say, we’re quite excited about that, and we have more than just page prettying to help us celebrate. The same PC & Tech Authority magazine content remains intact, albeit with some minor tweaking of some sections, but mostly the mission is to give it all a fresh new look. As part of that we’ve looked at readability and the fonts we use, and the coloured backgrounds we sometimes use them against. We know not all our readers have 20/20 vision so we hope we can address…

CPU INTEL REACTS TO RYZEN When AMD launched Ryzen, Intel to its credit never blinked. Instead giving AMD a long, cold and hard stare down, confident that its product line-up would withstand whatever AMD could throw at it. Not budging on prices once to lower itself to AMD’s undercutting ways. And to be honest, it has stood its ground well. However, cracks are beginning to show in Intel’s product offerings where AMD can demonstrate clear performance superiority, all thanks to simply having more cores on offer at the same price. Well it seems this great showdown has come to a head and Intel is finally reacting. Intel has officially announced the first products in its new eighth generation Core series. As has been the method since Intel dropped its infamous…

THE CAKE IS ALIVE Mwave Aperture 1060 Gaming PC $1,799 • https://tinyurl.com/ya3h9h3k This system is all about the case. Just look at it! A mini-ITX design that totally evokes the design cues of things made by Valve’s fictional Portal game company, Aperture Science Labratories. The portal gun or turret for example. While being cute and tiny and looking generally fantastic the case imposes some very serious space constraints to maintain that petite mini-ITX size. As a result, CPU cooling is a problem. With a slim HSF in use a lower spec CPU had to be used so as not to cook itself, making it one of the weaker parts of the system. Equally as weak is the graphics card. While fast, the 3GB model included will hamper longevity and rule…

Both AMD and Intel use clever multithreading technologies to allow a single CPU core to do the work of two. AMD’s approach, introduced in its latest Ryzen CPUs, is called SMT (simultaneous multi-threading), while Intel’s goes by the name Hyper- Threading. With these chips, each physical core appears to Windows as a pair, capable of running two processes at once. In reality it only actively works on one at a time – the trick is that it can switch almost instantly back and forth between two assigned tasks. So whenever there’s a delay in executing one task – for example, if a value has to be fetched from memory – the core simply gets on with handling the other. If you’re running fairly lightweight tasks, which don’t tax the CPU too…

To ensure our test results were as close as possible to the recent Core-X testing, we made sure to use the same gear, despite what AMD supplied. They had supplied the board with an M.2 drive, 32GB of memory, a new PSU and cooler. We took out the M.2 drive and used our standard Sandisk SSD, along with 16GB of Ballistix memory. Unfortunately we had to use their cooler and PSU, but in all other regards the systems were identical. As you can see from the productivity benchmarks, the Ryzen Threadripper still has the weaker single-core IPC than Intel’s design. However, load up all those cores and it’s a different story. The 1950X took out six of our ten benchmarks. One surprising result was the Handbrake video encode. In the…

WD’s Red series of NAS drives has proven to be a winner for the company, with excellent performance and reliability making them the NAS drive of choice for many system builders. Until recently, the largest capacity was 8TB, but WD has just bumped this to 10TB, making it one of the largest mechanical drives on the market. The new 10TB model is limited to a maximum of eight drives in a NAS, but that’s still a whopping 80TB of storage. It’s built using the HelioSeal heliumtechnology as prior WD Red drives, which replaces the air inside the drive with helium. This is one seventh the density of normal air, and allows for better performance and reliability. It’s built inside a standard 3.5-inch drive chassis, and also includes WD’s NASware 3.0…

T his is a security camera with one clear selling point: its 180-degree camera. The idea is that you can install one camera and take in the full view, as opposed to the 130 degrees or so of a regular camera. “Forget about pan and tilt cameras,” promises the D-Link website, “view everything instantly in real-time.” And it works. Unlike a typical fisheye camera, D-Link does a great job of flattening the view so that it looks normal. Walls will still look curved at the edge of the image, but overall it’s surprisingly effective. It records at 720p and the image is a little sharper than the Arlo Pro – you’ll recognise people even at the edge of the frame. Unlike the Netatmo and Omna, this feels more like a…

T he Arlo Pro takes a different approach than most. While all the other cameras on test connect directly to your router, the Arlo includes a base station in the package. This then connects, via the supplied Ethernet cable, to a port on your router, which means your cameras’ video streams don’t consume your network’s wireless capacity. And note the plural there, because Netgear thinks of the Arlo Pro as a camera system rather than a camera or two. You can connect up to six cameras to each base station, but don’t start thinking you’ll get economies of scale: each add-on camera costs around $320, and even the four-camera version costs $720. Each camera only measures 7cm high, and while the white plastic finish looks vulnerable, in reality they’re all…

$26 • www.gearbest.com A nother little gem from Gearbest, this is simply a USB fingerprint scanner for your laptop/PC/tablet. Here’s what’s tops about it: it’s tiny, it’s cheap and it works. We’ve seen add-on biometric scanners in the past, but they were relatively enormous things that rest on your desk. This is teensy. The function is natively supported in Windows 10 as part of Windows Hello (Win 7 and 8.1 may need a driver). After plugging it in, selecting fingerprint as a login method and scanning my finger, a quick restart it all worked. It scans in half a second and can handle multiple angles, so if your tablet, for example, is vertical or horizontal it all just works. When detached the PC simply goes back to password protection. I…

CONTENTS Acer Predator XB241H bmip 62 Asus ROG Swift PG248Q 63 AOC G2460PG 64 Dell S2417DG 65 AOC AGON AG241QG 66 Results graphs 66 HOW WE TEST Nvidia’s G-Sync technology was a revelation when it first arrived. In one fell swoop, it made games look and feel better by not only eliminating the screentearing that appears when you don’t use V-Sync, but also removing the stuttering introduced by V-Sync. Now, every frame of your game was complete, unbroken and delivered just as soon as it was ready. It only works with Nvidia GPUs, though, and it also adds a premium. An entry-level 24-inch 144Hz FreeSync monitor can be bought for under $380 (Acer XF240H), but the cheapest G-Sync display in this group is the $500 Dell S2417DG. G-Sync has some…

T he Drobo 5N2 offers a generous five drive bays, yet is barely any larger than some four-bay models. That’s thanks to its space-efficient design: to populate it, you simply pull offthe magnetic front cover and slide a bare 3.5in drive into one of the awaiting slots. Below, a row of LEDs shows how much space you’ve used – a thoughtful feature. The Drobo 5N2 embodies a unique design philosophy: it aims to make the world of network-attached storage accessible to non-technical users. All talk of RAID levels is banished: the unit automatically configures your installed media to provide the best balance of capacity and security, asking you only whether you want to be protected against a single disk error, or against two simultaneous failures instead. The principle of keeping…

Q nap’s TS-453B is an upmarket relative of the TS-251A. Not only does it offer twice as many drive bays, it features a more up-to-date quadcore Celeron J3455 processor – the same one as found in the Labs-winning Asustor AS6404T. The TS-453B’s high-end credentials are obvious: as soon as you turn the power on, a compact two-line LCD display lights up with a helpful overview of the system’s status. Two tiny touch buttons let you navigate through various information pages. The TS-453B’s drive bays, meanwhile, hide behind a tasteful smoked plastic door, which slides offto reveal four clip-in caddies. In use, the TS-453B is functionally similar to its diminutive cousin. You get all the same connectors, including the SD card reader at the front and the twin HDMI outputs, allowing…

T he My Cloud PR4100 is the fourbay version of the PR2100, and the family resemblance is selfevident, right down to the slot-based 3.5in drive bays. On closer inspection, a few differences come to light: where the PR2100 relies on LEDs to keep you informed, the PR4100 has a two-line LCD status display plus a pair of inset navigation buttons that let you cycle through the information on offer. There’s also an additional USB 3 socket around the back, making three in total. Fundamentally, though, we’re looking at a bigger version of the same system, and pretty much everything we’ve said about the PR2100 applies here. That’s no bad thing: all the important network services are supported, from Active Directory to Time Machine, with the mycloud.com website offering easy access…

• Our tests are performed by experienced reviewers in our Labs in accordance with strict benchtesting procedures • Our brand new benchmarks have been tailor-made to reflect realworld computing needs • We put tech through its paces – seriously. From processing power to battery life, from usability to screen brightness, our tests are exhaustive • We will always offer an honest and unbiased opinion for every review THE TEAM... Digital Editor Tech and Gaming David Hollingworth E dhollingworth@nextmedia.com.au T @atomicmpc Senior Labs Editor Bennett Ring National Advertising Manager PC&TA Sean Fletcher E sfletcher@nextmedia.com.au Group Advertising Manager Tech and Gaming Cameron Ferris E cferris@nextmedia.com.au Art Director Tim Frawley E tfrawley@nextmedia.com.au CONTACT US... Call us (02) 9901 6100 E-mail us inbox@pcandtechauthority.com.au Facebook www.facebook.com/pcandtechauthority Twitter @pctechauthority…

1 FALSE DAWN FOR PC SALES After a brief upswing in PC sales sparked hopes of a return to growth, Gartner figures for Q2 show a return to “business as usual”, with declining shipments for desktops and laptops. The company said 61 million units shipped in the quarter, with only HP showing growth, and the market overall was down 4.3% on the previous year – in part due to rising machine prices following higher costs for DRAM, SSDs and LCD panels. 2 FACEBOOK PUSHES ADS INTO MESSENGER Facebook’s efforts to alienate users continue apace, with the company revealing that it plans to insert adverts into Messenger, the breakaway app that Facebook has forced users to install if they want to chat on the platform. The company is hoping to monetise…

You won’t find better reviews anywhere in Australia! Like the look of the AMD Vega? Good luck finding one. Go to your favourite shop, online or otherwise, and peruse the long list of ‘SOLD OUT’ notifications. You can’t miss them. They’re just underneath the ‘Strict limit of one per household’ warnings. Sometimes a brand will show units in stock, but they’re usually gone by the end of the day. The same is true of the AMD 500-series, and mostly for the 400-series, too. Nvidia is seeing it with 1070s especially, which is its card that hits the sweet spot for price and mining performance. It is a known truth that AMD cards are better miners than Nvidia’s are, but in these times of GPU shortages and surging Bitcoin values it’s…

HP is best known for its reliable range of office and productivity PCs. It’s lesser known for is its gaming range, but over the last few years the company has really been pushing to get into the gaming market. The Omen desktop we’re reviewing here is the latest example, and best of all, it’s the first pre-made Ryzen system to cross our test bench. It’s also chock full of other high-end components, but it certainly comes at a cost, four grand to be precise. Unlike HP’s usual subtle and simple cases, the Omen Desktop is obviously a gaming machine from the first time you see it. The sharp angular lines are accented by glowing red LEDs and a huge glowing Omen icon on the front, all in the colour red.…

L et’s get one thing straight from the start: this camera is only worth considering if you’re already a dedicated Apple HomeKit user. There’s no Android app: it’s designed to work within an Apple-based lifestyle, and that’s reflected in its all-silver design. Not everyone will love its looks – for example, the Omna is chubbier than the Netatmo Welcome – but then again it offers two extra features compared to the Welcome that some might find vital. First, 180-degree video. Second, two-way audio. Image quality is as clear as you’d expect from a 1080p D-Link camera, but note you can only record clips to microSD cards – and one isn’t supplied in the box. Without a card, you’re limited to a live view, which almost begs the question of what’s…

$399 • www.flyingselfies.com I was excited to review this very niche and different product, presumably aimed at narcissists or people with too much money and who doesn’t know what a tripod is. Calling it a drone is generous, the flight controls are very difficult to operate with any precision, and are fundamentally broken as it simply won’t fly higher than about two meters. The app is brown and poorly explained, it took six or seven times restarting, reinstalling, reconnecting through the Rova application to actually get to the take-offstage, which takes the fun out of what should be something cool. Due to the whole unit weighing next to nothing, forget about using it outdoors if a light breeze is present. This is a severe limitation. It’s also $400, which is…

“It’s a fact of life that hard disks fail from time to time, and if that disk contains the only copy of your data, you’re in trouble” 1 HOW MANY BAYS DO I NEED? We strongly advise you to steer clear of single-disk NAS systems. It’s a fact of life that hard disks fail from time to time, and if that disk contains the only copy of your irreplaceable data, you’re in trouble. It’s much safer to go for a two-bay system, using two matching hard disks in a mirrored RAID1 configuration. That way, if one drive fails, you’ll still have a copy of all your data. Just be sure to replace the broken disk promptly, so the NAS unit can rebuild your array and restore your protection. Don’t be…

T he Netgear ReadyNAS 212 is a midmarket two-bay NAS device. While not as cheap as the Synology DS216j, it’s a cut above in build quality, with a sturdy metal enclosure and a door that swings open to reveal two tool-free drive bays. It also offers a handy front-facing USB 3 port, with a one-click copy button; round the back there are two further USB 3 ports and, slightly unexpectedly, an eSATA port. Netgear doesn’t offer an eSATA expansion enclosure, so we doubt you’ll find a use for this connector. Finally, a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports enables link aggregation and load balancing. Most expected network services are supported, including FTP, DLNA, Time Machine and iSCSI; all that’s missing is Active Directory, and not many customers at this end of…

Synology’s nimble DS216j is one of our favourite NAS appliances this month, and the DS916+ is built on the same platform – although it features a much beefier quad-core Intel Pentium N3710 processor. This happens to include a fairly capable GPU, but unlike the Asustor and Qnap systems, the DS916+ doesn’t support local video output. The basic unit comes with 2GB of RAM, which can be upgraded to 8GB, so there’s ample headroom for running demanding apps and services. Like its two-bay counterpart, the DS916+ supports the full complement of networking protocols, including iSCSI and Active Directory. There’s integration with half a dozen popular cloud services, and a good range of backup options; as with the DS216j, you can connect to two IP cameras for free, and there’s a whole…

T he choice of online backup providers has never been wider, resulting in a dizzying medley of prices, plans and acronyms. We’ve picked out five services for home and business that you may not have previously considered. ACRONIS For personal use, Acronis True Image 2017 – which, as the name suggests, creates an exact replica of an entire disk or partition – starts at a one-offpayment of $39.99. However, a one-year subscription with 50GB of cloud storage and free upgrades is $59.99, making it an attractive option. If that isn’t enough, a “Premium” subscription costs $139.99 per year and includes free upgrades, “premium support” and a few of Acronis’ other tools such as Acronis Active Protection and Acronis Notary. For businesses, Acronis Backup 12.5 is the way to go, with…

T he prevailing view is that Office 365 is rather good. Even Mr Honeyball says so, and he isn’t known for leaping to Microsoft’s defence. The company has created a technology and brand that successfully ranges from individuals through small businesses (O365 Business Essentials) and up to major enterprises with 100,000+ seats. It provides a genuine set of capabilities that’s well matched to the needs of this disparate group and it continues to improve. If you’re used to Microsoft tech, then I’d always favour O365 over the Google platform. But it isn’t perfect. In common with other tech firms, Microsoft often takes some fun internal project and launches it as a new component of O365. I’m all in favour of the “minimal viable product” approach, but not when it’s combined…

EVEN MORE PERFECT I’m always disappointed by your Perfect PC not containing a higher core processor, as the general purpose magazine your Perfect PC should be one optimised for both gaming and productivity. The 6700k is a good gaming chip and should’ve really been your pick for the game box – the 6600k being quite bad in modern games with its lack of threads causing frame stutter. Cameron Ben Mansill replies: Fixed! Thanks Cameron for writing in. We were waiting to test the i9 and Threadripper before updated the Perfect PC in particular, now that’s done we’ve tweaked the Perfect PC. And stay tuned, because next month (our 20th birthday!) Kitlog (and A-List) gets a major overhaul. EXPANDING KITLOG We are not all gamers, I’m sure I’m not alone as a…

Just for the fun of it For decades the film and music industries have enjoyed independent investment and production services to help independent artists bring their dreams to fruition, with film production companies such as Troma, IFC and A24 helping to produce a huge number of films without the restrictions placed on artists by larger studios, and independent music producers being a staple of the recording industry since the advent of recording. Now, in 2017, the independent gaming world is getting the same service from Good Shepherd. FROM DEVELOPER TO PUBLISHER Founded in 2011 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Gambitious Digital Entertainment, a combined crowdfunding portal and indie game publisher has so far signed, funded and released 18 games over eight different gaming platforms. 12 of these games attained profitability within the…

2D TESTS Desktop PCs and laptops are tested using our own custom bench testing suite, which has been carefully designed to test all aspects of a system and rate them in a way that’s useful to you. Our benchtesting cover three main tests: a typical video editing test, a demanding 4K video editing test and a multitasking test that stresses all aspects of the system. We look at the time it takes for each test to run, which is then compared to our reference PC to produce a normalised result. This score is shown on a graph, and to help you understand just where the PC we’re reviewing sits in the grand scheme of things, we will often include other system’s scores. PC&TA LABS BENCHTEST PC Intel Core i7-7700 CPU;…

FROM CORE I5 TO CORE I9 There are nine new CPUs in total, although the Core i7-7740X and Core i5-7640X are actually Kaby Lake quad-core CPUs in LGA2066 packages. The idea is that these will offer better overclocking potential than their mainstream counterparts, thanks to the more advanced CPU powermanagement capabilities of X299 motherboards. However, they lack quad-channel memory support, only have 16 PCI-E lanes and don’t support Turbo Boost Max 3. The CPUs based on the Skylake-X architecture are much more tempting. These chips start with the Core i7-7800X, which offers six cores and 12 threads; however, like its predecessor, the Core i7-6800K, it only has 28 PCI-E lanes, and it lacks Turbo Boost Max 3 support. The next step up is an 8-core CPU – the Core i7-7820X,…

A ny other manufacturer would have been accused of flogging a dead horse by now. Another year has rolled by without a significant change to the design of the iMac and yet it remains, categorically, the best-looking all-in-one computer ever made. While we will see the iMac Pro debut later this year, this update is all about incremental improvements. That’s fine by me. Even after three years, I only have two gripes with the iMac’s design. The first is that there’s no height adjustability: you can only tilt the iMac back and forth. The second is the 27mmwide bezels surrounding the screen. In 2017 these are starting to look chubby. The Retina display on the original model was already superb and there are still very few 5K monitors that you…

R emember when modular phones were supposed to be the future? Google and LG may have lost faith in that vision, but Motorola’s parent company Lenovo is still plugging away with the Moto Z2 Play. Which is great news. Not only is this the most convincing integration of custom modules I’ve seen, it’s backwards compatible with last year’s add-ons. At a glance, there’s little different from the Moto Z2 Play and the original, but that’s no bad thing: if the design had changed, then last year’s mods wouldn’t fit. Besides, there are a couple of changes. First, the phone has gone on a diet. At 6mm thin, it’s roughly 15% skinnier than last year’s Moto Z Play. On top of this, the back switches from a glossy fingerprintmagnet of a…

T he Netatmo looks more like an ornament than a security camera, and all its features revolve around convenience and user-friendliness instead of fine-grained control. Once paired with your phone – an odd process that involves turning the Welcome upside down for the first few minutes – it will start recording and look out for new faces. When it’s comfortable that it’s capturing images of the same person (typically after a couple of hours of them walking past) it will ask you to name the identified face and then confirm that the photos it’s taken are indeed them. The idea is that it builds up a picture of who’s in your family and is then able to flag the appearance of a stranger. You’ll then get an alert that something…

$299 • www.dlink.com.au H ere’s a handy tool if you’ve got a small child, a dog you like to check up on when you’re at work or if you’re just a craving some entry level home surveillance. By name (actual model is DCS-2530L), the camera leaves little to the imagination, but simplicity is a key draw here. Find a location you want to keep an eye on, plug the camera in, pair with your wi-firouter, download an app, sign up for a mydlink account, pair app using a QR code, connect to the camera and you’re good to go, for the most part. The quality and consistency of the camera’s video feed is highly dependant on its access to a strong Wi-Fisignal. A so-so link can cause frame jumps or…

$129 • www.cygnett.com P owerbricks packing a large charge aren’t unusual, but for a 20,000mAh device to be as small as the ChargeUp certainly is notable. It comes in at 136 x 71 x 28mm, which is about half the size of a typical 10,000 mAh powerpack. So, yes – twice the charge, half the size. That’s nice. It isn’t light, weighing in at 380g, but that’s to be expected. Its power to size efficiency comes via the use of lithium polymer batteries. 20,000 mAh is mighty useful for extended trips away from civilization or convenient charging points. That capacity represents about six full recharges for a current smartphone, and at least one full recharge for most laptops. Two USB ports allow 2.4 Amp simultaneous charging, or single port charging…

As usual, we’ve awarded star ratings out of five to the products in this month’s Labs. This rating takes into account each appliance’s strengths and weaknesses in several areas. The first is performance: we tested this by using the CrystalDiskMark benchmark and a selection of real-world file-copy operations on each drive, to get an idea of how quickly it could read and write both large single files and folders full of tiny files. As our graphs show, most models proved capable of saturating a Gigabit Ethernet link, but some fell behind the pace. We also factor in the range of features on offer. If a NAS unit offers a good selection of physical connectors, versatile management options and a wide range of apps, this contributes to a high score. Power…

T he TS-251A crams a lot of features into its compact two-bay frame. That starts at the front panel, where the standard USB 3 connector is joined by a micro-USB 3 port and an SD card reader. These make it tremendously easy to consolidate your media, regardless of where it’s all stored – and if that’s not convenient enough for you, the Qnap TS-251A will also accept USB Wi-Fiand Bluetooth adapters, for direct over-the-air transfers. More goodies are to be found at the rear: alongside a duo of Ethernet connectors, there are two HDMI sockets and a brace of audio jacks. While the Intel Celeron N3060 CPU isn’t quite as powerful as the newer chip found in the Asus AS6302T, it’s still capable of driving a pair of 4K displays,…

There’s a certain logic to getting your NAS appliance from the same company that makes the drives, and alongside the diskless unit, the My Cloud Pro PR2100 is offered in a variety of pre-populated configurations, or diskless. Installing drives is a piece of cake. Each of the bay doors at the front of the My Cloud Pro PR2100 pops open to reveal a gaping slot; simply slide your drive in, then close the door firmly to push the connector into place. However, while convenient, this does mean that you can’t use 2.5in drives. The PR2100 isn’t over-endowed with data connectors, but there’s USB 3 at the front and back, along with a one-click copy button for whatever’s connected to the front port. Twin Gigabit Ethernet ports serve up all the…

S o you’ve unboxed your shiny new NAS drive, and you’ve noticed that round the back there’s not one but two Gigabit Ethernet ports. Great news – that means you can use two connections at once and enjoy double the bandwidth for your file copies, right? Well, yes and no. It may indeed be possible to use two cables to get a faster link between the NAS box and the router, using a technology called 802.3ad link aggregation. You’ll find the option to enable it tucked away in your NAS appliance’s network settings – but there are several potential hitches to be aware of. The first is that not all routers support 802.3ad. It’s a business-grade technology that’s unlikely to be built into your basic, ISP-provided router. Even many upmarket…

T his is the motherboard that we received with our Ryzen samples, and was used across all of our CPU benchmarks. In hindsight we can see why AMD sent this board – when it comes to performance, this board is a ripper. One of the main reasons is that it appears to be one of the few boards that works properly with Intel’s Turbo Boost Max 3. It ran at 4.3GHz during most tests whereas the other boards would often top out at 4GHz. The automatic overclocking was even more impressive. To do so is simple – there’s a small rotating knob on the bottom left of the board that sets the speed between 4GHz and 5GHz in 100MHz increments. We initially got it to boot at 4.9GHz using this,…

A s I write this column in my home country, the UK parliament was recovering from a cyberattack. Nothing overly surprising about that, you might think, given that WannaCry impacted so many public sector organisations and the NotPetya attack has gone global after starting offtargeting government data stores in the Ukraine. Here’s the thing, though: the attack on parliament, or more accurately on MPs using the parliamentary network, wasn’t sophisticated – but it was both predictable and preventable. In a statement in the House of Lords, Lord Fowler (the Lord Speaker) stated that the “Parliamentary Digital Service discovered unusual activity and evidence of an attempted cyber-attack on our computer network. Closer investigation confirmed that hackers were carrying out a sustained and determined attack on all parliamentary user accounts in an…

I magine the biggest thunderstorm you’ve ever been in. Then double it. Picture the relaxing waterfalls you associate with the mountains in summer suddenly turned into muddy, writhing pillars of grit – or leaping, 100m-high jets barely contained by concrete diverter culverts. Then think about putting a data centre into this environment. That’s the Swiss Supercomputing Centre in Lugano, which clings to the steep rocky slopes above the shore of the lake of the same name. I’d received an invite to take a look around, which I’d deferred due to poor health. It’s one of those tantalising targets you want to tick offyour list, especially when on the map it looked to be only a couple of hours’ drive from my usual Swiss haunt, over in the Engadin. It’s hard…

When Satya Nadella took over as boss of Microsoft, I heaved a big sigh of relief. The rampaging elephant on the Microsoft board, Steve Ballmer, had finally moved on. It was time for a new era, a time for respect for the customer. I’m not foolish enough to suggest that all Ballmer did was wrong – there is enough material from his reign to fill multiple MBA courses at Harvard – but he brought an oppressive bullishness to the business that was unpleasant and unnecessary, and certainly tainted the memories of his successes. One of these was getting Microsoft to reach out into the retail community with the Microsoft Store. That it is a clear rip-offof the Apple Store is neither here nor there. Apple was first, and the later…