An unexpectedly big year for tech

APC’s editor looks back at the big tech trends and issues of 2017.

To say that 2017’s been a year of surprises is a bit of an understatement. From just a ‘core hardware’ perspective, we’ve seen huge changes in the CPU scene, headlined by the return of AMD to the high-end desktop chip market, with Ryzen and then Threadripper proving that the underdog can indeed still hold its own against Intel when it comes to building CPUs for a wide spectrum of needs.

And AMD’s successful resurrection of its CPU business has certainly rattled Intel, who launched two mainstream desktop platforms — the 7th-gen/Z270 and 8th-gen/Z370 lines — which, historically, has finally pushed the chip giant to release its first six-core consumer processors. It’s hard to overstate what an important milestone this is: with AMD not offering much competition on high-performance desktop CPUs, Intel’s been happy to stick with a quad-core design for its mainstream chips for almost a decade now, since the first Core i CPUs were introduced way back in 2008.

Elsewhere, the continuing cryptocurrency mining gold rush has pushed up demand for graphics cards which has, in turn, seen a spike in the price of most midrange cards, but the trend has even bled a little into the edges of the budget and premium market sectors, too. I can’t remember any other year when the same GPU was actually cheaper in January than in December, but here we are...

Then there’s the other continuing tech news story that, I’m sure, many wish would go away: the effect of fake news on our political discourse, which experts agree has been used to influence major elections and issues from Brexit in the UK to the election of Donald Trump in the US.

On a less-controversial (or perhaps more, depending on how passionate a techy you are), this is also the time of year when we here at APC choose our favourite products. As was the case in 2016’s list, the majority of our recommendations have come from the pages of APC itself, but there’s so much tech out there that we’ve leaned on some of our sister publications (both online and print) including TechLife, TechRadar ( www.techradar.com) and PC Gamer ( www.pcgamer.com) for some of the final award-winners. If you’re looking to buy tech for either yourself or friends and family, we hope this feature will make selecting the right gear a little easier.

We like to think our choices are fairly definitive, but if you’ve picked up a great tech product in 2017 that’s not on our list, we’d be keen to know about it — flick us an email to apcmag@futurenet.com telling us why you love it!