PC Pro January 2021

WE APPEAR TO be in the midst of a weird outbreak of common sense. I’m as surprised to write that sentence as I suspect you are to read it, but such phenomena do occasionally happen. Just like “corrections” on the stock exchange, every second decade or so technology companies pause their headlong rush for faster, smaller and more expensive, and listen to what punters genuinely want. Crazy things such as phones with longer-lasting batteries and prices that don’t require a once-in-a-lifetime inheritance. This is most obvious in the Google Pixel 5 (see p62), a supposedly flagship phone that’s priced at a not-insane £599. OnePlus pulled a similar move with its 8T (see p63), and even Apple is getting into the act. While the base model iPhone 12 (see p58) is hardly…

Domain registrar Nominet is facing calls for a complete overhaul after a series of controversial decisions by its board. Angry members believe it’s been hijacked by directors who are paying themselves over the odds, whilst stripping charity donations and reducing member influence. “It’s looking and sounding like a for-profit enterprise, but without the levers of accountability you would expect,” said Emily Taylor, CEO of online governance consultancy Oxford Information Labs. “It’s a characteristic of some internet governance companies, [of] how incredibly cash rich, how profitable, they are. “When you say ‘not-for-profit’ people think ‘charity shop’, but if you look at turnover and salaries, where else is the money going to go? If you can’t distribute it to shareholders and you close down your charitable foundation, the only thing you can do is enrich the…

Businesses that have rolled out Chromebooks but occasionally need Windows apps can now get the best of both worlds with the launch of Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise. In a similar vein to the company’s well-known Mac software, the new virtualisation app allows business users to run full-blown Windows 10 desktops on selected Chromebooks. It’s pitched at power users who need features that you don’t find in mobile/web versions of apps, such as macros or sparklines in Excel. The software shares many of the same features as the Mac equivalent, including the ability to cut and paste between Chrome OS and Windows, the option to set Windows apps as the default for certain file types, and the option to share custom folders from services such as OneDrive or Google Drive. One key feature…

Public bodies are having to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds every year to prevent scams from dominating Google’s search results, a PC Pro investigation has found. Companies have previously complained that they feel obliged to buy advertising to avoid their brand being pushed below rivals that use their company’s name in search terms. Now official public bodies are falling into the same trap. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK’s regulator charged with protecting consumers from financial fraud, says it feels compelled to pay Google to run adverts to counter ads from scammers that appear above “organic” search results. “It’s a massive problem the way the scammers are able to pay Google to get top place on a search for important keywords in a regulated industry, jumping ahead of legal comparison sites…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 16IN Powerhouse laptop with a price to match, from £2,399 from apple.com/uk If you know you’ll take advantage of what the 16in MacBook Pro offers, you won’t regret buying it. The only question is where you draw the line, with options right up to 8TB SSDs and 64GB of RAM. Whichever specification you choose, you’ll benefit from an improved keyboard, spectacular screen and the very best audio setup on a laptop. REVIEW Issue 305, p52 ALTERNATIVES NEW ENTRY Alienware M15 R3 This is a powerhouse thanks to its Core i9-10980HK, 32GB of RAM, RTX 2080 Max-Q graphics and stunning 15in screen. It’s a winning combo. £3,499 from dell.co.uk REVIEW Issue 314, p86 Dell XPS 17 (2020) An excellent alternative to the 16in MacBook Pro thanks to a 17in IPS screen, bags of power, allround quality…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He’d be delighted if you coughed up £7.95 for his book at pcpro.link/315reality. One of my lockdown activities has been extending my reading of the great Italian writer Italo Calvino, including his If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, a serio-comic, postmodern novel about books. The narrator begins a novel that ends abruptly because it’s been wrongly bound with duplicated sections; returning it to the shop, he meets a girl with a similarly defective copy and together they set out to finish the story, which becomes ever more complicated. The bewildering sequence of partial novels by different (or not) authors about sex, war and spies is gripping, with none ever proceeding to an ending. It’s not another book about the dreaded abstraction “narrative”,…