Exiting 2022
With great hopes for 2023
Well, I hope you made it through December with few party after effects, your budgets unbruised and at least a few days of down time, with perhaps more to come. My December is just commencing as I write this, but I’m somewhat confident all things will be well.
At the very tail end of a long year it’s easy to sit back and take stock, except the gods of tech don’t seem to have received the memo about slowing things down…
In this issue we’ve got some nice treats. Nvidia’s RTX 4080 arrived in the Labs, and Chris has once again been running a marathon to test them and share his impressions with you. The performance is, as expected, exactly in the right place relative to the 3000 series and the 4090, but oh my the price, son, the price. Here we are being subjugated by the Australia Tax again. And this time it’s a bad one. In the US you can pick up a 4080 for US$1,199. But at launch the cheapest we could find here was a brutal $2,439. That’s just outrageous, and a lot of the blame falls on Nvidia and its rather ambitious pricing attitude. There’s no doubt this company is taking the market for every penny it can, despite ongoing whining that it has no choice.
Well, let’s see what AMD says about that, as the new Radeons are, we hope, in the back of a courier truck on the way here for testing, and based on the announced US pricing of under a grand, the Australian RRP we hope is somewhat saner.
In brighter news, now that Darren wrapped up his absolutely fantastic Tech that changed Australia – and the world series, he’s off and running again with a new series, the first part of which appears in this issue. This time he’s tackling the fascinating history of portable audio, and we’re starting with early radio, then moving through all the common ways in which we have enjoyed music and voice over the years, wrapping up with the iPod era. It’s off to a great start so do please enjoy this with me, I can’t wait to read the rest as Darren pulls it all together masterfully.
And lastly, there’s some nice holiday history reading for you in this issue, with the story of the first ‘actual’ PC, the IBM 5150, as well as the TSMC tale, which is central to our hobby and so interesting. Stay safe you all, and enjoy the summer!
“In the US you can pick up a 4080 for US$1,199. But at launch the cheapest we could find here was a brutal $2,439. That’s outrageous, and a lot of the blame falls on Nvidia and its rather ambitious pricing attitude.”