PCWorld May 2016

DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS! The ghost of Steve Ballmer past lingers heavily over Microsoft’s annual Build conference, but despite ostensibly being an event dedicated to code monkeys, Build’s always brimming with consumer-friendly news about the future of Windows, Office, and more. This year was no exception—and it even managed to squeeze in a few eye-opening surprises. Let’s dig in to the biggest reveals from Microsoft Build 2016. Windows 10 keeps on climbing A mere four months after announcing that Windows 10 was running on 200 million devices after the holidays, Microsoft’s racked up another 70 million new users— Windows 10 is installed on 270 million devices now, the company announced at Build. Some of those are no doubt due to holiday purchases, and some no doubt stem from Microsoft’s heavy-handed upgrade tactics. (In fact, Windows…

IT FEELS LIKE an undercover operation: While Microsoft executives are rehearsing their keynote presentations for Microsoft Build 2016, I am in a hotel room next door to the conference venue, testing out what everyone is coming to see: the HoloLens Development Edition. This is actually the third time I’ve gone hands-on with HoloLens hardware, and it is clear Microsoft has used the last 15 months of HoloLens development to craft a remarkably polished experience. Microsoft has already detailed some of the amazing games and apps (go.pcworld.com/hololensapps) that will ship with the HoloLens Development Edition, but this time I demoed something new: a proof-of-concept HoloLens business app for Citi created by a company called 8ninths. (I’ll cover this experience in detail in an future article.) Microsoft plans to let Build attendees use the…

THINK YOUR EIGHT-CORE PC is cool? Not anymore. Intel is turning loose a 22-core monster of a CPU, dubbed the Xeon E5-2600 V4. The CPU’s 22 count is made up of Broadwell cores, which when combined with Hyper-Threading, amounts to no fewer than 44 threads in a single-socket computer. On a dual-socket machine, you’re looking at 88 threads in a workstation. Yes, cue Johnny Dangerously joke here. The new Xeon E5-2600 V4 hasn’t shown up on Intel’s ARK product list (ark.intel.com) yet, but the top-end part with 22 cores is the Xeon E5-2699 V4 with a base clock speed of 2.2GHz, 55MB of cache, and a TDP that isn’t that crazy at 145 watts. An enthusiast eight-core Haswell-E has a TDP of 140 watts, but runs at 3GHz and supports overclocking. The price?…

HELLO, BEAUTIFUL. Acer revealed its first-ever 14-inch Chromebook—the aptly named Chromebook 14 (go.pcworld.com/acerchromebook14)—on recently and it sure seems like it was worth the wait (at least on paper). The Google-licious laptop only costs $300, but offers premium touches missing from the majority of the plastic-clad Chromebook army, like an aluminum chassis, USB 3.1 ports, a trim sub–4 lb. weight, and a whopping 14-hour battery life claim. The Chromebook 14 comes in two main versions with either a 1080p or 1366 by 768 resolution IPS display. That luxuriousness extends to the display. The Chromebook 14 comes in two main versions with either a 1080p or 1366 by 768 resolution IPS display. The 1080p models feature a punier 12-hour battery-life claim, but on the other hand, 1080p IPS displays are a relative rarity among…

INTEL PROMISED SUPERFAST and high-capacity SSDs with 3D NAND chips last year, and the company announced the first of those drives at the end March. The new SSDs stand out for blistering speed, but top out at 2TB of capacity, which may be a disappointment to some customers considering the drives could potentially hold up to 10TB. The new lineup of SSDs with 3D chips includes the SSD DC P3320, SSD DC 3520, and SSD DC D3700 and D3600. The SSDs are targeted at data centers, workstations, and storage arrays. Intel remains far behind rival Samsung, which earlier announced the PM1633a SSD, which has 15.36TB of storage. The Samsung drive also uses 3D NAND chips. The Intel SSDs were built more for speed, durability, and reliability, which is a priority for enterprises, Intel said. The…

MICROSOFT’S LINUX LOVE affair continued at the company’s annual Build keynote, with the revelation that popular Linux command-line tool Bash is coming to Windows 10. Whoa. And no, it’s not running in a virtual machine, Cygwin, or an emulator. Microsoft partnered with Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, to build native Ubuntu binaries directly into Windows 10 that allow Bash to run. And Microsoft’s already brought SQL Server (go.pcworld.com/sqllinux and Visual Studio (go.pcworld.com/visualstudiolinux) to Linux, and embraced Red Hat (go.pcworld.com/redhatlinux) for Azure services—this commitment to open-source is starting to look pretty darn serious. The blog of Microsoft employee Scott Hanselman provided more details about Bash integration than the brief demonstration onstage. “This is a genuine Ubuntu image on top of Windows with all the Linux tools I use like awk,…