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We review the technologies and hardware that may or may not succeed this year 2017. Some due to novelty will break it, others due to circumstances will die and some, despite not being on the market, aim to arrive with great force.
It is usually quite common that at the beginning of the year people talk about the technologies that can succeed this year and at the end of the year about those that have not. We want to do a little bit of everything and analyze what could break this year, what could end in failure or disappearance or what could happen without pain or glory. The truth is that the list could be very long and we could talk about many things, but we will reduce the list by talking about gaps in technology and some hardware.
Hardware that will last little
RAM DDR3
The life of this type of memory is finished. This year we could say that it is the death of DDR3 RAM in an official way. The arrival of the AMD Ryzen at some point of the year will end with this type of memory, alive in part because AMD did not have processors that would support the new memories. Logically it will not be seen and not seen, since in this hardware, nothing dies from one day to the next, it will be a gradual death, let's say, that right now they are going to start digging their grave and in two years it will be very difficult to find DDR3 modules .
U.2 and SATA Express ports
They are relatively new ports, which are between the M.2 SSD and the SATA, but as happened with the FireWire, they are in the middle of two technologies implemented in a notorious way and it is quite possible that they will not last a year, two at most.
Intel Kaby Lake
Some will be surprised when they see this, but it makes sense. The Intel Kaby Lake are a rehash of the Skylake, with a very high price compared to the little performance improvement they offer, being a better option to even buy a Skylake before a Kaby Lake at the moment. What kills her before leaving is that AMD Ryzen is right around the corner and if they perform well and have a good price, they will eat the Kaby Lake with potatoes. Intel also plans to launch the Cannon Lake 10nm FinFET on the market in the second half of the year, and before that the Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X, the extreme range. So the Kaby Lakes are in a very bad position.
Hardware that can break it
M.2 SSD and Intel Optane
The M.2 SSDs are already on the market and this year may be their year with the arrival of new motherboards and processors, which will already have these units, similar in price to SSDs and much higher performance. Intel Optane on the other hand, are memory units of the same format as the M.2 SSD, but that offer much more performance and that promise a duality of use, as a hard disk and as a RAM memory. Impressive, but first they must start to reach the market and since they are half as good as Intel says and they come at good prices, they can go up very quickly.
AMD
A luxury opportunity for AMD with the arrival of Ryzen and VEGA. It has what we would call a golden opportunity for this year to split the market with new processors and graphics cards. It would be great if it were so, for everyone, because competition would increase and prices would fall, this will allow with the same money to have better and more powerful configurations, time will tell, logically.
4K HDR
FreeSync 2 from AMD and G-Sync HDR from NVIDIA are the two new technologies for monitors that will allow us to enjoy video games with higher graphic quality. AMD will have VEGA for 4K gaming with HDR and we assume that NVIDIA during the third or fourth quarter of the year will launch new graphics cards that support 4K gaming with HDR. It will not be the year of the bombshell, but this year will be the beginning of a very interesting movement.
Neither cold nor hot
VR (Virtual Reality)
It will still be there, but it is something that is not going anywhere, at least for now. The price of virtual reality glasses such as Oculus Rift or HTC VIVE and the fact of needing a fairly new computer with an NVIDIA GTX 1070/1080 graphics card (to go well and waiting for the arrival of AMD VEGA), cause that We are around € 2000-3000, to enjoy and use this technology, something certainly absurd. It will remain an unpopular and minority technology and it will remain so as long as something does not change.
3D printing
3D printing, far from what different media wants to sell, such as television or digital press, is not a technology for all audiences. It is not enough to assemble or buy a 3D printer, they require maintenance and calibration, not to mention enough knowledge to create parts and export them for printing. Not everything is to download models published on the internet and put them to print, without further ado.
External graphics cards
Despite the insistence of the industry, it is unlikely that this year will be the year where a large number of chassis developed for graphics cards connected to the computer through Thunderbolt 3 are sold. The first thing is the price of the investment, that between cable, dock for graphics and graphics card right away we get to € 800-1000 and more importantly, there are not many computers that have Thunderbolt 3 and most are high-end gaming computers that already have internal graphics. They can be given for MacBook, to improve performance in graphic design or video editing tasks, but they are not for the average user.
Pokémon Go
It is logical that the Nintendo and Niantic game for Android is on this list. After an outing last summer that broke records, it has gone into free fall, going up at Christmas for free time and a more or less interesting event, but it will fall again until Easter possibly, if not until summer, when the students return to have summer vacations and the weather is good. We do not think it will disappear, but far away is that short period of time where people almost got hit by a Vaporeon.
Gaming laptops
They will not stop coming out, but we will be logical, among the nonsense of some brands that launch 10Kg 'laptops' for € 9000 and things like that and gaming laptops of approximately 4-7Kg to play and € 5000 at most, is the middle ground. They are not a product for everyone, they are designed for people who travel a lot, to have it on the desk they are not, for that the brands compress the hardware more and it is cheaper to buy a computer with pieces that you can update. They will be sold, but none of the manufacturers of this type of notebook will get rich from them.
What more would you like, brown
We are done with desktop computers. A few days ago the report appeared that said that we have been falling for five years in the sale of computers. This has an explanation, beyond the crisis, people invest to have equipment for several years, especially if it is for gaming and it is only changed if it is broken or is too old. Education is also committed to tablets, cheaper and more portable (we are talking about modern centers, of course).
We passed this fashion of killing desktop computers. Casual games on mobile phones or the low graphic quality and power of consoles will never be able to compete with a desktop computer, not to mention hardware updates. Don't ask a tablet to do the work of a desktop computer, which it cannot, but a desktop computer will be able to do the same or more than a tablet. To work with mobility, the laptop is better. They are statistics with little sense, for us, because what do they count, the sale of pre-assembled computers, the specific hardware for a custom configuration computer? Who knows.
