Picking winners And, losers.
One of our feature stories this month is a fun look back at some of the more notable tech flops. I’m sure you have had many sour experiences with tech that looked great, made promises, then just plain disappointed. After reading through Christian’s article a couple more came to mind.
The first, and biggest I think – especially now with so many of us working from home – is lamenting what could have been with the NBN. Just imagine if we were living with a fibre to the premises NBN. Sending large amounts of data up and down the line generally functions with an average 50Mbps NBN connection and its 20-30Mbps upload, but it could have been so much better.
Speaking of WFH tech fails – just as the COVID emergency was gaining momentum and lockdowns were ordered, and the video conferencing thing exploded overnight – pity poor Asus, which launched its ROG Zephyrus G14 laptop right at the time. To save some money, excused by a claim that not everyone needs this – it does not have a webcam. It’s not the only one, either. You can bet that little attempt at a new trend will disappear basically forever.
And, an obligatory word on Star Citizen, of course. It’s now been almost seven years since I sunk over $1,000 into buying a fleet of jpegs. I had high hopes of enjoying the space-faring life within a couple of years of that late-night internet shopping splurge, and my fleet was carefully selected to do it all. Here we are in 2020 and yes indeed the beta persistent universe is getting bigger every year, but it’s still beta, and usually all progress is lost when there’s a new update. It’s years from completion and feature creep went into out of control territory several years ago, with too much emphasis (IMHO) on making it an FPS.
And all the rest. The trick is to know what’ll fail when it first appears, which isn’t always easy... let us hope that the products we’ve recommended in this issue last the distance!
BEN MANSILL
“An obligatory word on Star Citizen, of course. It’s now been almost seven years since I sunk well over $1,000 into buying a fleet of jpegs.”