APC June 2021

Right now I’m immersed in my favourite part of this job – along with the rest of the team we’re putting together our annual Australian PC Awards. The best thing about PC tech has always been the extraordinary pace of innovation and technological advancement. Every single month we’re served up evolutions of existing products, or brand new gear that raises the bar (hopefully!) once again. It’s not always easy to keep abreast of the vast landscape of tech that the PC encompasses, and that’s why the APC team is a collection of expert know-it-alls across a range of areas. I think you probably appreciate their skills, and how well they explain things as you digest our magazine articles and reviews. So, once again, we have asked the team to distill the many…

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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. We know most people aren’t wed to a single brand’s products and use a variety of devices. And, like you, APC’s journalists want to…

VESA released a statement denying recent claims that two monitors are “DisplayHDR 2000” certified because, well, there’s no such thing as DisplayHDR 2000. The statement was issued in response to listings on Taobao, a popular Chinese retailer, for an updated Samsung Odyssey G9 and a new Acer EI491CRG9 monitor. VESA said that it “has no knowledge of the origins of the DisplayHDR 2000 logo currently posted on these display listings,” adding that it “takes any misuse of our trademarks and logos seriously,” which suggests the logos won’t be there long. A DisplayHDR 2000 certification probably isn’t going to debut any time soon, if only because it would be awkward for VESA to release such a strongly worded statement about these logos right before the new certification is officially revealed.…

Alienware is releasing its first laptop with an AMD CPU since 2007. Its parent company, Dell, announced the Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5 laptop in April. The Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5 will use AMD’s Ryzen 5000 H-series chips paired with Nvidia GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs. Like the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 SE, it will go up to a Ryzen 9 5900HX. The new m15 Ryzen Edition R5 will also be the first 15-inch Alienware laptop going to DDR4 memory at 3,200 MHz, and that memory will be user-replaceable. The last Alienware laptop to pair with an AMD CPU and an Nvidia GPU was the Aurora mALX, last seen in 2007.…

Apple’s successor to the M1 chip, commonly referred to as the M2, has now entered mass production, better positioning the tech giant in its goal of completely replacing Intel chips in Macbooks with its own bespoke hardware. Reported by Nikkei Asia, the Apple M2 could be integrated into consumer products like the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro 13-inch from July onwards, meaning interested consumers should look towards the latter half of the year for MacBooks with improved specs. It’s noteworthy that the M2 is likely to be a different chip than the rumoured M1X, which is said to be a more powerful, business-oriented processor tailor-made for specialist computers like the Mac Pro and MacBook Pro 16-inch. Apple’s M2 would come hot on the heels of the M1 SoC (System on Chip), the company’s…