Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2023 i APC

WARREN BUFFETT DUMPS 86% OF TSMC SHARES An ominous sign? Warren Buffett’s holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, cut its position in TSMC by 86 percent, according to a CNN report citing a regulatory filing. The investment firm also purchased additional Apple stock. It’s not clear whether Berkshire dumped TSMC stock because it expects softening demand for consumer electronics and personal computers, or because it’s concerned about increased risks of China invading Taiwan, which would threaten the value of the world’s largest contract maker of chips. TSMC is the world’s largest foundry with indisputable technological lead and will remain No.1 for quite a while, but there certain risks for the company, including expanded competition as well as the risk of Chinese invasion. GPU SHIPMENTS DROP 35% But Intel’s Arc is gaining. As…

Consumer technology controversies come and go: this time last year everyone was talking about NFTs; this year it’s AI. Both are compelling topics worthy of reflection and discussion, but their prominence in the discourse ebbs and flows. There is one topic however, that neither ebbs nor flows but remains roach-like in the crosshair: Elon Musk. What is the bumbling tycoon up to now? Well in last year’s episode, space boy purchased Twitter for $44 billion. After sacking great swathes of its staff, initiating incomprehensible policy changes to its verification system, and all the while delivering some of the worst Tweets known to internet-kind, his latest genius move – at the time of writing, at least – is to charge for account security. Specifically, for the privilege of text message two-factor…

Running a small business isn’t easy – I know, I have two of them. My main gig is writing about technology, but the food company that I run with my husband Andre is different. This is public-facing, and it’s a lot of work to do marketing, trade and public shows, and operate an e-shop for direct sales to customers. We have two brands with two websites: Manfood at welovemanfood.com and Janda at jandafood.com. Now, I have been following the rise of e-shopping since its first tentative steps in the mid-1990s. Back in the day, setting up an e-shop was difficult and required a lot of code munging. Better still if you hosted your own server, with a database and a payment gateway. It was a lot of work and a…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS NEW ENTRY APPLE MACBOOK PRO 16IN (M2) STUNNING CREATIVE POWER All the upgrades to this 2023 model are within, as Apple’s M2 Pro and M2 Max processors take charge. Combine this power with the 16.2in mini-LED screen, superb sound system and phenomenal battery life, and you have the world’s premier workstation laptop. From $3,199, apple.com/au ALTERNATIVES DELL XPS 15 (2022) Surely the best Windows all-rounder money can buy, with a slim design, gaming potential and plenty of power courtesy of Intel’s 12th gen Core processors. From $2,924, dell.com APPLE MACBOOK AIR The MacBook Air M2 looks like a standout to us. A powerful and quiet ultraportable with an unbeatable battery life and a great pro display. From $1,899, apple.com/au MICROSOFT SURFACE PRO 9 APC rates the Intel model…

$6,999 | asus.com Tech companies need to break new ground to get a headstart in new markets, but anyone who has been in the game a while knows that it’s extremely risky to be the first to market with a radically different device. Asus has been toying with alternate laptop screen designs for ages now, and it has some pretty unique laptop offerings that work really well as a result of that, but the Asus Zenbook 17 Fold OLED is, arguably, its biggest and boldest step into novel laptop technology. On paper the idea of a 17-inch laptop screen that can fold into a 13-inch-ish form factor clamshell is a pretty amazing concept. And the Asus Zenbook 17 Fold OLED can do exactly this, folding perfectly in half to a…

$469 | msi.com In a lot of ways the MSI G274QFP-QD gaming monitor looks like a pretty standard 27-inch mid-range gaming display offering 1440p resolution with a 170 Hz refresh rate, but a closer inspection reveals it’s got some novel display tech to separate it from the pack. Most prominent of these is the Quantum Dot LED technology which you won’t get on older screens and should dramatically increase brightness and colour capabilities. The flat-panel WQHD monitor doesn’t disappoint in this department, offering Versa Display HDR 400 certification and 93 or 95 percent colour space reproduction of the respective AdobeRGB and DCI-P3 colour gamuts. This will be great for professional work in the sRGB colour space and will even be suitable for most creative tasks in HDR colour, making it…

$799 | www.synology.com/en-au Last year, Synology impressed us with its long-awaited, five-bay NAS (the DS1522+) and it impressed us despite a few caveats. Now here’s its new, two-drive sibling, the DS723+ which is generally similar but also introduces a long-awaited new feature: solid-state storage pools... kind of. The DS723+ takes many design cues from its older siblings. There are two SATA slots, two Gigabit Ethernet ports (which can be aggregated) and one stick of 2GB ECC RAM. The latter is a little low for memory-hungry functions like camera surveillance, but it can be upgraded to 32GB via an additional slot. Just note you need to use Synology’s own brand of RAM and it’s not cheap with 16GB modules costing around $550 each – that’s double the cost of third-party equivalents.…

Welcome to a particularly interesting edition of the Australian PC Awards. Unlike most years in tech which are clean, tidy periods where everything runs smoothly and we all buy loads of nice new things, 2022 turned that upside down with one drama after another, all in a market where actual products you could buy were scarce, expensive, or delayed. This is not to say the actual products were duds – au contraire – the tail end of 2022 in particular saw a spectacular period of new GPUs and CPUs, along with exciting new motherboard platforms. DDR5 got its act together and became good, and affordable, laptops leapt into new realms of low power and high performance, and some standout new techs blew us away, like QD OLED monitors. The editorial…

CPL ONLINE RYZEN 5 RTX 3060 TI DRAGON $2,369 |tinyurl.com/APC518CPL The CPU and GPU pairing in this system is great, and neither will hold the other back when gaming. The liquid-cooled CPU is no slouch even with a beefier GPU but with the extra cooling overhead available, and better AM4 CPUs available, upgrading this system later for more performance will be a cinch, especially with the X570 motherboard. The included RAM is also well chosen, being the sweet spot 3600MHz speed that Ryzen 5000 CPUs love. The oversized for this build PSU encourages future system upgrades too. Dual SSDs mean there’s a lot of mass storage to last you years. It’s a nice and well-considered PC for those looking to start gaming at 1080p or 1440p with good potential for…

These days many people don’t have to pay to get a new version of Windows – they simply upgrade for free. Perhaps that’s why Microsoft is now increasingly trying other ways to recoup its costs, including splashing adverts across its operating systems (both Windows 10 and 11). They’re popping up in the Start menu, Cortana, Action Centre, the lock screen and more. Most of the adverts originate from Microsoft itself, and are mostly offers for its paid-for subscriptions and suggestions to perform tasks within Windows, rather than promotions from third parties, but they’re annoying all the same. Here we explain how to block them. Block ads in the Start menu and on lock screen Let’s start by disabling adverts in the Windows 10 Start menu. Press Windows key-I to open…

FREE FULL SOFTWARE FOR A P C READERS 1 ASCOMP PHOTO ANONYMIZER Completely remove metadata and GPS information. Often photos taken with a smartphone or digital camera contain personal information that not only disclose on the location and time of the recording, but can also hold other sensitive information. In so-called meta-tags, in addition to the GPS location, information about the recording device and even the photographer can be stored. Photo Anonymizer helps you maintain your anonymity: Remove unclaimed metadata from your image files with just a few clicks! The free Windows software supports all common metadata standards, such as EXIF, DICOM, IPTC and XMP. Did you know that Internet browsers often store the source of an image download in the respective file and thus can be traced for years…

OpenAI’s Chat GPT has had a more significant impact on society than perhaps any other single AI breakthrough to date, thanks to its ability to quickly write custom, long-form responses to multi-part questions, but its potential to revolutionise web search is a function that is only just beginning to be understood. Web searches are used for a variety of reasons and outcomes, but one of the largest use-cases is searching for answers to questions. ‘Who is winning the Australian Open? or ‘When was Australia’s Federation?’, for example, but many questions we think of don’t have such simple factual answers yet still require a simple response: ‘Who is the deadliest person in history?’ or ‘What diseases cause sneezing, loss of smell, fever and difficulty breathing?’. Chat GPT is exceptionally capable at…

FUTURES WE EXPLORE THE TRENDS AND TECHNOLOGIES THAT ARE SET TO SHAPE THE FUTURE A cure for paralysis and blindness that could one day allow humans to level up their own cognition – and all you have to do is trust the tech’s most tempestuous CEO to plonk an implant into your brain. Elon Musk’s Neuralink has ambitions as lofty as SpaceX’s dream of a mission to Mars and Tesla’s fantasy of driverless cars. Founded in 2016, Neuralink is building an implantable brain-computer interface (BCI) that would allow computers to read neural signals. That could, in theory, help anyone suffering paralysis, blindness, dementia or other brain diseases, but Musk also sees the technology as valuable to boost human capabilities. “It’s like replacing a piece of your skull with a smartwatch,…

$1,059 | intel.com.au It wasn’t that long ago that we covered Intel’s NUC 13 Extreme compact gaming PC kit launch, but in 2022 the company launched an even more compact version for people who wanted a business-style device. The reduced demands of a standard workload means that the Intel NUC Pro can fit into a 12-by-12cm chassis that’s just under 4cm tall and weighs about 450g. That’s notably smaller than the 19cm squared, 1.18kg Apple Mac Mini , which is an impressive feat on its own, but it’s also competitively priced. Unlike its gaming sibling, there’s actually a wide variety of NUC 12 Pro PCs on offer ranging from a Barebone i3-1220P kit that requires you to add your own RAM and storage for $499 to an i7-1260P system with…

$2,999 | online.acer.com.au The Acer marketing pamphlet pitches the Predator X32 FP as a monitor targeted at ‘professional gamers’, but the E-sports space is still very much 1080p centric, so this 4K HDR monitor is more likely to appeal to creative professionals who also enjoy gaming than anyone who plays games for a living. The 165Hz refresh rate, which is more than enough for noobs (like me) and competent hobbyist gamers, but which is less than half the refresh rate of anyone actually attempting to compete competitively, is perhaps another indicator that Acer isn’t actually going after the pros. But while the company may have missed their target audience, it doesn’t mean this display is any less desirable. The 32-inch 16 by 9 panel isn’t large enough to look awkward…

$1,299 | rog.asus.com/au Asus is in a mad race with itself to produce the fastest, most overpowered, feature-laden wireless router. It must already hold at least nine of the Top 10 positions for super-premium gaming routers, yet the new ROG Rapture GT-AXE16000 is this week’s standard bearer. It’s big, brash, spikey and the wife hated it. The RGB top (and its seven pre-set patterns) illuminates half the house at night and there’s no timer to turn it off. Set-up is simple: just scan a QR code on it’s bottom with Asus’ phone app, set the network name and password and voila. The phone and browser apps are well designed. They’re responsive, show connection statuses, alert you to issues (and suggest solutions), provide extensive QoS options, include server-grade apps, enable mesh…

Never let it be said that APC doesn’t bring harmony to the world. This one article could clear clutter from your life, improve the quality of someone else’s and help save the planet from impending ecological annihilation. Well, you can’t accuse us of lacking ambition! We’ve got ten inspirational ideas about what to do with all that old gear you’ve been squirrelling away. We want to help you get the maximum value from your purchases by re-purposing them in ways that can save you money. Why buy an external hard drive when a cheap caddy and screwdriver could turn your old laptop drive into the same thing for a fraction of the cost, for example? We have information on how to donate your kit safely to people who are…

BUDGET A perfect balance between price and performance. Last issue, we paid more attention to the overall costs of the Budget builds and tried to level the playing field. With increases across the board for PC components, our costs had risen to the point where they weren’t exactly budget builds anymore. So we made a few adjustments to bring prices down while still offering well-rounded PCs. With changes to the PSU, GPU, SSD, and HDD for the AMD machine, we managed to bring the price down, but a few extra swaps this time around have lowered it even further. First, we swapped out our Asrock X570 Steel Legend ATX AM4 motherboard and replaced it with an MSI B550M PRO-VDH WIFI Micro ATX mobo. Although it’s a smaller Micro ATX form…

"Championing technology doesn’t mean we’re unrelenting yes-men and -women, however, and APC aims to be as objective as possible in all our coverage." APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for over 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…

Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling is nothing less than revolutionary. In short, it’s designed to increase gaming frame rates or allow you to increase your resolution with minimal sacrifices to image quality and latency. It uses everyone’s favourite 2023 buzzword – AI – to do it. Now a similar, yet different technology is coming to do the same for streaming video. But while DLSS 3.0 uses game engine data and can generate frames, streaming video is fundamentally different. Enter VSR. Nvidia’s latest 531.18 driver introduces Video Super Resolution (VSR) for the first time. VSR is able to take low bitrate or low-resolution video and improve its quality. A deep learning algorithm examines each frame in real time and is able to reduce compression-related artefacts, improve clarity or display it at…

From $3,199 | apple.com/au THE HOTTEST GEAR LABS TESTED Unlike the MacBook Air range, the new M2 updates of the MacBook Pro 14 and 16 inch laptops aren’t massively different to their predecessors. Obviously the devices come with new M2 Pro or M2 Max processors, which will bring respectable upgrades to overall performance, but other than this the devices only really get new Wi-Fi 6E networking capabilities, a new Thunderbolt spec, a faster AI chip and greater memory bandwidth. This isn’t a complaint, the 14.2-inch or 16.2-inch Liquid Retina XDR displays are still top of their game with high 3K-plus pixel resolutions, bright 1000 nit sustained screen brightness, 120Hz dynamic refresh rates and full DCI-P3 colour reproduction capabilities. There’s really not much more that you can get in a top…

$779 | https://hyperx.com We’ve never seen a gaming monitor arrive without a traditional stand. Nonetheless, HyperX believes there’s a market for such monitors and has dedicated its Armada range to supporting it. The 27-inch panel arrived in a large box that, on opening, seemed to be full of scaffolding. At first glance the multiple, solid, metal bars and connectors seemed bewildering. Then we realised that parts were included that both allowed for the armature to be clamped to the rear edge of a desk and also to fit into special holes that adorn some desks towards the rear. You sometimes see the latter built into corporate, office desks where executive types don’t want visiting clients looking at ugly desk clamps. If you want the extra neatness that this fitting affords,…

Alec Reeves had sadly passed away by the time global tech giants Sony and Philips jointly launched the Compact Disc in 1982. The optical disc that brought the world digital audio for the first time may well seem to be an invention of its time, but digital audio more broadly, and the Compact Disc in particular, owe much of their success to technology that was first used during World War II to secure secret phone calls between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Today, digital audio seemingly permeates almost every technology device, but like a good many inventions, it owes its existence to engineers whose names deserve greater recognition. Pulse Coded Modulation The son of a surveyor, Reeves was born in Surrey, U.K. in 1902…

Hard drives, once the mainstay of client computer mass storage, is now relegated to the backseat in current day PCs – if they’re included in the system at all. Solid state drives have surpassed the price and capacity hurdles which, over a decade ago, merely made them a novelty when hard drives were still ruling the capacity roost. It’s at a point now where the market has completely flipped, and most consumer PCs now only have a single SSD for mass storage. Cheaper systems can still have HDDs due to their continued price/capacity competitiveness, but they’re becoming few and far between now. With SSDs all but king in PCs, how is it that the likes of Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital are still selling tens of millions of HDDs a…

ANDROID & iOS Check if an online service has gone offline When you’re having problems accessing a website, app or your internet network, it’s useful to know whether the problem is at your end or caused by the service you’re using. One of the best ways to find out is to check Downdetector (downdetector. com.au), which lets people report issues they’re currently experiencing with online services. Downdetector has now been integrated with the brilliant free app Speedtest by Ookla, so you can quickly diagnose if there’s trouble with your connection or if there’s a more widespread fault. To use this new feature, install the Speedtest app for Android (www.snipca. com/44118) or iOS (www.snipca. com/44119) and tap the Status tab at the bottom of the screen (see screenshot 1 below). This…