25 Buy or Wait?

Take advantage of the January sales or hold fire on tech purchases?

Windows 10 PCS

Intel’s eighthgeneration Kaby Lake R and Coffee Lake processors are already in desktop PCS and laptops (see our ‘Do I Really Need?’ column in Issue 517, page 22), and performance improvements are substantial, particularly with the jump from two to four and from four to six cores. Quad-core i7-8550u laptops are great if you need speed. Don’t buy a seventh-generation processor now (numbers beginning i3-7, i5-7 or i7-7) unless the price is too good to turn down. Towards the end of 2018 we should see Cannon Lake processors, made with even smaller transistors for greater efficiency, but we don’t know exactly when, making it pointless to wait. AMD’S Ryzen processors (pictured) are also great value at the moment, so the time to buy is now.

SHOULD YOU WAIT? Probably not.

Printers

We’ve had a year of relatively big changes in consumer inkjet printers, with the likes of Canon and HP redesigning their ranges. The results are attractive, but features like double-sided printing, CD printing, thick paper handling and slots for USB sticks and SD cards are vanishing ng from budget models, so you might want to buy older units while they last.

SHOULD YOU WAIT? No, there are good deals around now.

Monitors

This year’s key innovation is HDR (high dynamic range), which will be coming to more affordable screens, bringing a wide range of colour and a more ‘real’ picture with more PCS and software that support it. Potentially, this also means near-perfect accuracy for photo and video editors. But be aware: ‘HDR’ means very little (sometimes only that a monitor will take a 10-bit HDR input and do its best), so read reviews before buying.

SHOULD YOU WAIT? Yes, if you can – prices are falling. lling.

Windows Window 10 laptop-tablet

Microsoft’s Microsoft’ ongoing success with its Surface Pro (pictupictured), a sort of ipad-plus-keyboard that runs Windows, attracted quite a few rivals in 2017. Ssome, like the £200 Linx 12X64 (see our reviewreview, Issue 516), are startlingly cheap. It’s now wortworth considering hybrids when shopping for a laptop, although the floppy clip-on kekeyboards won’t suit everyone.

SHOULD YOU WAIT? No. They are finally affordable and work well.

Mobile devices

2017 brought no big breakthroughs in tablets. Apple focused on its ipad Pro range (too expensive for most), while rivals dithered, but it was nice to see low-cost newcomers like RCA Venturer (see our review, Issue 509) as well as price cuts on Amazon’s Fire series. The top phones, meanwhile, got slightly better and eye-wateringly more expensive. Sadly, we expect more of the same in 2018. Rumourrumours suggest Samsung will laun launch a bendable phone, wh which would at least make a ch change from Apple’s br breakable iphone X.

SHOULD YOU WAIT? No – take advantage of di discounts on 2017 launches like the Samsung Ga Galaxy S8 (pictured).

Wi-fi

The big news in networking is 802.11ax, which massively boosts the maximum speed of Wi-fi to 10Gbps. Like the current 802.11ac, it’s backwardcompatible, so there’s no harm in choosing it, although you’ll only get the full benefit when more of your devices support it. Amid industry infighting, the standard won’t be official until 2019, but products will start to appear this year.

SHOULD YOU WAIT? You may have to, depending on what you’re buying.