Computex 2016: The PC Industry at a Crossroads 5u2m66

By Jamshed Avari | Updated: 9 June 2016 12:57 IST

Highlights

PC hardware took a back seat this year with no major mainstream launches.
Consumer tech is now being driven by companies outside the Taiwan supply chain.
VR might drive hardware purchases, but it doesn't highlight any innovations.

ment

Computex, the PC hardware industry's annual celebration of everything new and interesting, was unusually quiet this year. Everyone from exhibitors to the international press seemed aware of the distinct lack of buzz on the show floor and at private events last week in Taipei. The exhibition itself seemed smaller than it has been for most of the past decade, with one hall at the Taipei World Trade Center used for visitor registrations, and another converted into an event space, where there should have been exhibitors clamouring for attention.

The elaborate multi-storey booths of years past, with stages for live performances and cartoon-level decorations, were all but gone. Floor walkers handing out pamphlets and costumed mascots yelling slogans were few and far between. Even the customary trays of free ballpoint pens and candies or bottles of water for exhausted visitors had been tucked away. More importantly, exhibitors just didn't seem to have as much to show off this year. 2y81w

Perhaps the biggest and most noticeable misses this year were thanks to Kaby Lake launching later in the year than usual, there just wasn't much for Intel to show off, or for its downstream partners to build upon.

Instead of its usual massive booth right in the centre of the main exhibition floor with hundreds of products on display, Intel seemingly retreated to one small corner of the lobby of one of the show's peripheral venues with only a dozen or so exhibits and one obligatory VR demo. The official line was that Intel wanted to allow partners to show off their own products, but that might have carried more weight if there had been products to show off in the first place. Most of what there was to see was aimed at industrial or infrastructure-level customers, such as a car fleet management system and a real-time multi-stream video and VR delivery system.

Top company executives delivered Intel's traditional Computex opening keynote, but rather than unveiling new consumer products or product categories, most of their time was spent outlining a vision of connected devices, services and infrastructure. Kaby Lake (now confirmed to be called "7th Generation Intel Core") processors, the long-awaited next-generation Polaris GPUs to launch and that didn't happen. AMD didn't have a booth on the show floor either, and so there were no demos or examples of products to be seen.

All of this left the Taiwanese manufacturers with very few new PC products to show off. With no new Us, there can be no new motherboards - we got only a few new X99 models for Broadwell-E and new revisions of previous models with incremental updates or just new cosmetic touches to keep the market fresh. AMD, Gigabyte, MSI, ASRock and their smaller competitors all dedicated space to modders who created all kinds of outlandish and creative designs, which were certainly impressive, but ultimately didn't show off any new technology. Asus devoted most of its floorspace to the new ZenBook 3 and Transformer 3 products - some of which won't be releasing till Intel is ready to ship Kaby Lake in volume, but at least they offered some clue of the direction we should expect to see manufacturers moving in.

And Asus did have Zenbo, possibly the only surprise of the entire show. This rotund domestic robot might spur a few competitors or at least imitators, but it really was more of a curiosity, rather than a potential new market for the industry as a whole to tap. It remains to be seen whether anyone would actually want something of this kind in their homes, at least in its current form.

What everyone did have to show was modded PCs and VR. Modded PCs, no matter how outlandish, are always great fun. There were the sensible, functional mods which showed off what is possible thanks to hardware capabilities, such as a fancy cooling systems or extremely small components, and then there were the downright ridiculous ones with attached cotton candy machines, which exist just for fun.

Nearly every single large company had some sort of VR demo, and many of the smaller ones did too - whether or not there was any need to. The idea, ostensibly, is that VR is one of today's most demanding computer applications and so a VR demo shows that these companies have the kind of gear needed to run it. However, the uncomfortable truth is that a lot of the demos felt the same on everyone's hardware and didn't really serve to show off any unique capabilities. We've had this kind of power for a while now - maybe not as affordable as it is now, but it isn't new. Moreover, everyone was using Vive headsets - essentially showing that they can power other companies' experiences rather than delivering their own.

That's still fair enough for Nvidia, Asus, MSI and the like, but when Cooler Master tries claiming that its latest chassis help folk come up with more creative VR experiences, we can't help but think the entire industry is in trouble. VR might be the next big thing that spurs PC upgrades and hardware sales, but it won't stretch to cover the entire supply chain.

We were expecting to see a lot of CES have become more important. Computex still has a huge role to play when it comes to infrastructure, OEM/ODM sourcing, and manufacturing, but it isn't where companies were able to show off any major innovations this year.

Disclosure: Asus sponsored the correspondent's flights and hotel for the event in Taipei.

Comments

For the latest reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.