Yeah, I know…it’s PC Mag. They can’t get out of their own way, and they refuse to walk the clarity-between-advertising-and-content walk that they (rightly) expect everybody else to walk. Such is publishing today.
Still, there’s some good tech content there, and the reviews are useful, and sometimes they still do that fun web thing of pointing people in new and interesting directions. If you’re in the mood to explore, take a look.
My fave for the upcoming holiday? Cake Wrecks.
Happy Thanksgiving.
– Mark Barrett
Every once in a while I do a survey of the PC landscape to see what’s selling and what’s changed. In the heyday of the personal computer tech advances were routinely amazing. Today, computers are lifeless commodities, differentiated more by colors on laptop lids than by anything inside. And that’s fine: there was really only one performance requirement for computers, and that was that they be able to do what we want them to do without having to wait for anything to spool up or refresh or crunch. Now we’re there.
As with all else these days, this commoditization has put tremendous price pressure on manufacturers. While Apple still commands a premium because of its snob appeal, everything else is being squeezed to the nth degree. (I configured a couple of PC’s last night, and on one I had the option of upgrading my hard drive by 500GB for $39.) Margins are shrinking to nano levels, meaning corporate profits must be driven elsewhere. Which brings me to Dell. Read more
(Although the job title certainly fits, I don’t believe all the wild talk that this is a bold move on the part of the New England Patriots.)
– Mark Barrett
