Maximum PC Holiday 2018

WHAT AN INCREDIBLE 12 months we’ve just experienced. 2017 pushed the PC forward at a stunning rate, and 2018 hasn’t eased back at all. We’ve had second-gen Ryzen, Intel’s ninth-gen chips, and then the small matter of Nvidia’s new graphics cards. On top of that, we’ve had some incredible SSDs, a whole swathe of quality peripherals, and some of the best chassis to ever grace our humble systems. For a full rundown of the best hardware, and there’s been a lot, turn to page 24. One piece of hardware missing from this feature is monitors, because we’ve dedicated a separate article to the subject. Screen tech has also bounded on at an alarming rate, and knowing what it all means, and what sort of screen is for you, is even more…

APPLE DOESN’T have a particularly hectic release schedule—some of its gear is untouched for years—but when it does make a major revision, people take notice. Whatever your views on Apple, it makes tantalizingly desirable stuff. It’s just launched a refreshed MacBook Air and Mac mini, but the star of the show is a brand new iPad Pro. It’s thinner, lighter, and much faster. The new iPad Pro comes in two sizes—11 and 12.9-inch—and the display goes that little bit closer to the edge. Its Liquid Retina screen first appeared on the iPhone XR. It’s not OLED, but as LED screens go, it’s good, boasting the most accurate colors of any in the business, and a 120MHz refresh rate. A 12MP camera faces outward, capable of 4K 60fps video, and a 7MP…

MICROSOFT SET ITSELF a goal of two major updates to Windows 10 a year, and it’s already gone wrong. The October update appeared, then was quickly pulled. It had a nasty habit of emptying people’s My Documents folder. It transpires that if you designated a My Documents folder on another drive, the update would clean out the original. A fixed version was readied, but that developed a bug of its own. The Unzip app proved erratic, replacing all the files with the same name without asking, or simply failing altogether. Fingers are being pointed at Microsoft’s testing process. In 2014, it moved much of this to third parties. The new structure was modern and smart. Waterfall development was out, and Agile was in. No more passing a project down through the…

NVIDIA’S GEFORCE RTX 2080 TI, the company’s latest and greatest graphics card, has picked up a less enviable reputation: Reports are growing that a noticeable number of them are failing. At $1,200 each, there is understandable anger. Nvidia claims that “it’s not an increasing number of users,” and it is “working with each user individually.” Suspicion is focused on the memory overheating under prolonged heavy load. Two GDDR6 modules sit right over major power tracks. Some cards have recovered themselves after cooling down, so a thermal issue looks likely. How serious is this? It’s difficult to tell; a small number of people can make a lot of noise thanks to the Internet. If this does prove to be overheating memory modules, it is relatively easy to fix, but how it got through…

PRICES FOR NAND memory have halved this year, and some sources are forecasting another halving of prices in 2019 (DigiTimes, for one). The solid state memory market has seen healthy growth, and prices have been fairly steady for years, but manufacturing capacity has more than kept pace, and now over-capacity looms. The main reason is 3D NAND tech, which increases data densities. You can get more memory from the same wafer; 64-layer chips are commonplace, and 96-layer is on the way from Samsung and other big players. Toshiba has a large fabrication plant coming online next year, too. Some stagnation in the smartphone market is also being cited, as people upgrade less often. The price drop has trickled down to SSDs; 500GB drives are now about $50 cheaper than they were six…

TRIUMPHS ✓ HUBBLE FIXED NASA appears to have fixed the telescope’s gyroscope by going old-school—shaking it about, and turning it off and on again. ✓ ARTIFICIAL MOON Forget street lighting, the Chinese city of Chengdu plans to use a reflective satellite 300 miles up instead. ✓ STEAM GAMES GO LINUX Valve has 2,663 games running under Linux, using Proton, a modified version of Wine. TRAGEDIES ✗ APPLE WATCHES KILLED The watchOS5.1 update turned rather a lot of Apple watches into mere jewelry—it’s been pulled and replaced. ✗ TWITTER IS OLD-HAT There’s been no growth for three years, and now it’s falling; the teenagers have moved on. ✗ FACEBOOK PORTAL SPIES Despite early denials, it transpires that the Portal does collect data to target you with advertising. Of course.…