All that glitters…

I’m very disappointed. I’m not an environmental evangelist, but when buying tech I’m always conscious that these shiny toys come at the great expense of precious and rare metals, truly horrible labour conditions in mines in Africa and manufacturing plants in China or elsewhere that allow tech companies such as Apple to generate a huge profit.

I’m always asking myself: do I really need this? I only replace tech when it doesn’t work or can’t cope with the work anymore. So earlier this year ( see issue 309, p130), I had hope when Jon Honeyball announced that “the appetite for shiny tech is going to feel old when we emerge from the lockdown” and he kind of promised that he won’t be so keen to buy new tech from now on.

Then, the next month ( see issue 310, p52), he went for the latest iPad Pro to replace his previous iPad, which I’m sure still works perfectly. My conclusion is that Jon’s tech OCD hasn’t changed, despite lockdown, and that he has a) piles of tech in working condition gathering dust in

his home and lab and b) very deep pockets to afford all those toys (Jon, nothing personal here – many of your colleagues at PC Pro seem to suffer from the same OCD!).

I, like most people, couldn’t afford all this and so I believe I’m definitely in the wrong business. Which brings me to my next observation: a lot of the tech reviewed in PC Pro is, I believe, too expensive for most people. I’m craving a good in-depth review of, for example, an “affordable” (under £500) laptop or desktop. How many people actually need a Intel Core i5 (to not even mention Core i7 or i9) to surf the web, send emails and do word processing? What really matters are a decent-sized SSD (256GB), a decent amount of RAM (8GB) and a Core i3 or Ryzen 3. I think that’s more than enough for such tasks. Hervé Boutin