PC Magazine July 2022

I’m writing this in PCMag’s New York City office. It’s the first time I’ve been back here—and to NYC—since I moved to Pittsburgh in mid-2020. The office is very, very quiet. The last time I was here, it was packed with staff; few of us had private offices. Most of us sat out on the main floor at family-style tables of six. The surrounding streets, subway trains, buses, restaurants, and stores? Also full of humans. Although I am ecstatic to be visiting (finally!) and to see great friends and wonderful colleagues again, I have to admit the lack of crowds is disconcerting. I know that all kinds of activities here have picked up a lot since the height of the pandemic. Still, it’s very different from the city I remember. But…

THE 20 MOST INFLUENTIAL PCS OF THE LAST 40 YEARS The Compaq portable (aka “luggable”) PC was a game-changer for me. The amber screen was easier on the eyes, and with the 300bps modem, I could log into TSO on the mainframe through the Yale ASCII emulator and start data extractions (Easytrieve + HASP) in the middle of the night without going to the office. The next day, using the network card, I could load the round tapes onto our LAN server for our analysts. And I read PC Magazine.—Bruce Fryer I think the generic IBM-compatible had a major influence on the markets. My first PC was a generic XT with a hard drive and a monochrome monitor. Bought it for $900 at an appliance store!—Mike McKeaney Sr. The GRiD Compass had a…

BEST CHEAP TABLET DETACHABLE Microsoft has set the standard for Windows tablets, and the Microsoft Surface Go 3 proves that it’s still true for Windows 11, even on a budget. The low starting price belies the slate’s overall quality, with deluxe touches including a bright 3:2-aspect-ratio display, support for Wi-Fi 6, and well-engineered accessories (though you must pay extra for the colorful Type Cover keyboard). If you just need a great tablet, the Apple iPad (2021) is arguably a better deal, but for a Windows-compatible laptop alternative, you can’t do better for the cost. BEST CHEAP VOICE PHONE Candy-bar phones forever! The Nokia 6300 4G works on all US 4G networks and is an ideal replacement for an older 3G phone. Its quasi-smartphone operating system also supports Whatsapp, which unlocks better texting capabilities…

In early June, during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the company announced the launch of an updated MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro equipped with its second-generation M2 chip. Both laptops go on sale this month. The biggest changes are coming to the MacBook Air. Apple managed to reduce its overall volume by 20% when compared with the M1 MacBook Air the company launched in 2020. The product also measures only 11.3 millimeters thick, down from 16.1mm. As a result, the company is marketing the 2.7-pound laptop as “remarkably thin.” But the new MacBook Air also promises to pack a punch, thanks to the newly designed M2 chip inside. Apple is using a second-generation 5-nanometer process to fabricate the Arm-based processor. This allows the company to pack 25% more transistors on the silicon…

The world’s fastest supercomputer resides at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and counts as the first true exascale machine, with an HPL score of 1.102 exaflops per second. The Frontier supercomputer was announced as the fastest supercomputer in June, in the 59th TOP500 list. It uses the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Cray EX platform and consists of 74 purpose-built cabinets. Contained within them are a mix of AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors and AMD Instinct 250X professional GPUs. In total, the Frontier system has more than 9,400 CPUs and 37,000 GPUs, for a total core count of 8,730,112. The huge amount of processing performance achieved equates to 52.23 gigaflops per watt and more than 1 quintillion calculations per second. That’s combined with 700 petabytes of storage and HPE…

In the late 18th century, theorist Jeremy Bentham created the perfect prison. With cells laid out in a circle around a central guard tower, all the prisoners could be observed by a single guard—or, importantly, would assume they were being observed. He called it the “Panopticon,” but it’s best known (thanks largely to Michel Foucault) as a metaphor for the power of the surveillance state. In 2013, roughly 230 years after Bentham’s conceptual prison, a series of leaks eventually attributed to Edward Snowden blew the lid off the National Security Agency’s mass wiretap and intercept program. Shock, confusion, and anger followed. The furor led to the bizarre sight of the NSA head as a keynote speaker at the Black Hat security conference and the shuttering of the program. We all slept…