Technologically unchallenged.

HP100+

One of the best indicators that the desktop PC has peaked is the falling sales of PC hardware and the poor upgrade rates to Windows 8, the latter as much a function of a mediocre product as it is of ‘free’ competition from the scummy people at Google in terms of their Cloud apps.

And while I have been diligent in seeking out the services of ace Hackintosh builder FU Steve in keeping my Hackintosh at 90% of the state of the art (90%, as Ferrari pricing takes over at anything higher and you get performance you cannot use) the state of play right now suggests that future enhancements will be few and far between.

Sure, while I could add a couple of silly priced EIZO monitors, which I would never do, there is nothing I can currently do to my Hackintosh, the HP100+, to improve it for my purposes, which leaves me without a tech challenge. Disappointing.

Desktops have peaked.

I could add a wild and crazy $$$$ GPU, but I do not game. I can scarcely tell the difference with the latest nVidia GTX 660 card installed on what I do, which is mostly LR and a bit of PS.

I use a SandyBridge i7 CPU and IvyBridge, the latest iteration, adds nothing in a desktop. Nor, I suspect, will Haswell in 2013 where the stated goal is lower power consumption. I’m green, but not so green that I’m about to rip out the guts of HP100+ to save a few watts in power consumption, installing a new motherboard and CPU.

I could have FU install a Xeon CPU and motherboard, at Rolls Royce prices, but the only plus of that is in massively multi-threaded math operations, and I have no need of that. LR and PS use four threads poorly, never mind sixteen.

I could ask El Supremo to add BluRay but the reason I passed on my BluRay player to a friend is that on the 42″ 720p Vizio TV (5 yrs old and it continues to delight daily) I could not tell the difference from regular DVDs, so BluRay is not something I could make use of.

The other thing which is currently useless is Thunderbolt, as so few peripherals support it. Those that do are overpriced, and I already have USB3, which is half as fast, running fine (not a pretty story, but I got there. As Churchill said of American democracy, we will try everything else before settling on the right answer, which is how FU got USB3 to work!). The only thing I use USB3 for where the speed is actually exploited, is to import images from SDHC and CF camera cards into Lightroom.

This sort of reminds me of film camera days. I was happy with my Leicas for 35 years because there was nothing else out there that was better for what I mostly do, meaning street snaps. And technology was only improving for film emulsions, not for hardware. Then digital came along and I have been chopping and changing, but seem to have stabilized on the two big Nikon DSLRs, both obsolete, and the two small Panny MFTs, the latter increasingly my son’s province. Then of course I got into converting old classic-era Nikkors with chips and that effort was super successful, the lenses are to die for and there’s nothing more I need optically. Forget believing that today’s optics are better. They are not.

Yours, technologically unchallenged ….