The Top 100 Tech Products of 2016
Here in late 2016, we've spoken with a whole host of fellow chroniclers of computer hardware—competitors and colleagues alike—about the trends that have dominated the year and that are bleeding into 2017. The conversation would invariably turn to one thing: Somehow, 2016 was different. Very different. Maybe even a turning point, of sorts, for personal tech.
It wasn't just the relentless pace of hardware releases, which ramped up in the first quarter of this year, and never let up. (Though that was part of it.) It wasn't just the emergence of radical technology like PC-based virtual reality, as nascent as it is and as elite the current pricing and access. (That's a hint, too, though.) It wasn't even the democratization of inexpensive tech, with the normalization of "good enough" laptops, cheap-but-able PC components, a hollowed-out market for tablets, and very good, modestly priced unlocked smartphones.
It's all of that, and more.
2016 was a year in which these trends started like a snowball that's now become twin avalanches of innovation and price pressure. Tech that would have seemed impossibly cheap five years ago? Now, it's taken for granted. A disruptive new technology—VR—is on the verge of hitting consumer price points, and it may well prove to be the biggest rift (pun intended) in the computing firmament since the rise of the Web. And that's not to mention its half-brother, augmented reality, or AR. AR has the potential to be even bigger for everyday use and in productivity scenarios, overlaying digital data on your real-life workspace or world via devices like Microsoft's HoloLens, and its eventual competitors.
And in the vast middle of the market, PC makers and their supporting cast have been refining and re-releasing iconic products—to the point where determining the best of the best is becoming a more nuanced art than ever.
That's where we come in.
Computer Shopper reviews hundreds of high-profile tech products every year—not to mention lots of under-the-radar contenders, too. At the end of every year, we winnow down the best of what we’ve seen into this blowout awards bash, chosen category by category. (Technically, it’s the best of what we’ve seen from Dec. 1 of 2015 to Nov. 30 of 2016; for more details on our pick criteria, see the full list of winners.) Our Top 100 is the best tech we tested this year—and that you can still buy.
What 2016 Was…
First, though, let us pontificate a little. What was 2016 in personal computing?
Like in 2015, data breaches hitting e-businesses, tech firms—even political campaigns—was huge news. The cybersecurity gold rush is on. Drones, wearables, and IoT devices continue to make advances, though they remain, to an extent, enthusiast-minded rather than mainstream items. (No single wearable, for one, has seized the public mind; even Apple and its Apple Watches haven't managed to light up this market.) Down on the ground, though, where our readers buy everyday laptops, backup drives, printers, and the like, 2016 stood apart for different reasons.
Windows 10, in its first full year of life, had its share of rocky spots, but Microsoft gets credit for quelling much of the tumult—and some of buyers' reluctance—that the controversial Windows 8 brought with it. And that, in turn, brought some signs of life to an overall contracting PC market. Beyond that, the wild price drops of late 2015 in some computer categories are now 2016's new normal, with—for example—some able-enough Windows laptops and Chromebooks duking it out under $250, and lots of very capable multifunction printers camped out around the $100 stakepost.
At the higher end, the price/performance ratios in PC graphics went off the established scale, thanks to stellar 2016 graphics-chip releases by both Nvidia and AMD, in both the desktop-PC and laptop spheres. And the usual buzz leader, Apple, saw a year of only incremental improvements to its lines of laptops, tablets, and smartphones, not the usual storm of "Follow me!" blockbusters. Even its reinvention of the Apple MacBook Pro, while no slouch, was more conservative than we expected. (A big question for 2017: Will Apple get its groove back?)
So, to our list. Even though our Top 100 products range broadly, from student-budget Chromebooks and vast, multi-kilobuck gaming PC towers to the top digital cameras, the best of the tech this year hewed to a few broad trends…
LAPTOPS AND 2-IN-1s ARE NOW DYNASTIES. In 2016, we saw fewer actual new lines of laptops and hybrids. Of late, the approach by most major makers has been to refine and re-release existing ones. Look at our Laptop of the Year, the Dell XPS 13, which has been relentlessly tweaked and improved for years now—in 2016, with new "Kaby Lake" 7th-Gen Intel chips, gold-chassis options, and a larger battery. We're seeing the same phenomenon with Lenovo's ThinkPad and Yoga machines, as well as HP's EliteBook, Envy, and Spectre lines.
One familiar brand that has fallen away, though, is the Satellite line from Toshiba (including its Satellite Radius convertibles). 2016 saw the Japanese giant withdraw from the U.S. consumer-laptop market, though it is still keeping its fingers in business machines, with its venerable Portege and Tecra lines.
DISRUPTORS: 2016'S GRAPHICS CHIPS. 2015 was the year it was first possible to drop a single graphics card into a desktop PC and play new, AAA-grade PC games at 4K resolutions with detail all cranked up. We saw some more progress there in '16 with Nvidia's awesomely powerful high-end "Pascal" cards, notably the GeForce GTX 1080 and Titan X. But the big story is the democratization of access to virtual reality—thanks to killer $200-to-$250 video cards from AMD and Nvidia—and the extraordinary progress made on cheap gaming at 1080p.
The latter is especially shocking. Today, it's easy for desktop-PC users to snag a nice 24-inch 1080p LCD monitor and a 1080p-capable video card, together, for less than $250. Think about that: A year ago, a good 1080p-capable video card like the GeForce GTX 960 alone cost about that.
IT'S OFFICIAL: WE HIT "PEAK TABLET." A brief history of tablets (so far): In the beginning—2010—there was the iPad. Then Android tablet makers rushed in to capitalize on a scorching market. Amazon got into the game, too. Prices plummeted on everything (except on iPads, of course). Then, just about everyone who wanted a tablet had bought one, and things slowed down—big time. Cue 2017.
Indeed, 2016 was a lean, lean year for those looking for innovations in Android and iOS tablets. All the action was in 2-in-1 Windows PCs, with a sideshow of Amazon playing price wargames, selling ever-cheaper Amazon Fire tablets as on-ramps to its store and services. (See our Best Budget Tablet Top 100 winner for 2016, the Amazon Fire HD 8.) Apple seemed to take a year off the iPad, with just some price tweaks (the iPad Air 2 is now $399 new, in its base model) and an emphasis on its 2015 Apple iPad Pro. Samsung and Lenovo remain the only two major names maintaining their Android lines in any big way. The stand-alone Windows tablet, meanwhile, is a mostly dead thing, replaced by "tablet-first" clones of the Microsoft Surface Pro and detachable or rotatable 2-in-1 devices.
THE CPU BUSINESS: “KABY LAKE” AND 10-CORE CHIPS...BUT EFFICIENCY REMAINS KING. Thanks to the wildly expensive (roughly $1,700!) pricing of Intel’s 10-core Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition, over-the-top power chips have become even more of of a niche. At the far other end of the market, meanwhile, Intel’s 7th-Generation “Kaby Lake” laptop CPUs made minor performance gains, mostly by ticking up the clock speeds over their 6th-Generation "Skylake" predecessors.
But the main CPU story in 2016 was the emphasis on power efficiency, with a few light laptops and convertibles reaching 14 hours or more of battery life in our tests. AMD was more or less absent from the conversation, with minor iterative updates to its existing, graphics-toting APU lines, and its promised "Zen" architecture kicked down the road to 2017.
PRINTERS: INK WARS NOW A COLD WAR. 2015 saw the emergence of the "new ink": radical new approaches to selling inkjet ink, from HP (via Instant Ink, a mail-order subscription service) and Epson (with its "supertanker" mass-ink EcoTank printers). Now, in 2016, Brother's joined the party (its "INKvestment" printers now include a large supply of cartridges in the box), while Canon seems to be staying out of this scuffle altogether.
On the laser side of the aisle, HP's proposed acquisition of Samsung's laser-printer business consolidates this stolid market even more, with as-yet-unknown effects on printer sellers like Dell that rely on Samsung for manufacturing certain models. And HP cracking down midyear on third-party ink across its Officejet line (and the resulting hue and cry from users) may be signaling a new hard-line approach in the ink wars against a different perceived enemy.
VIVE & RIFT: VR GETS REAL. Virtual reality (VR) was a big driver of tech headlines in 2016. And behind closed doors, it was also the source of plenty of tech-related fun, whether the experience was powered by the HTC Vive or the competing Oculus Rift. The Vive stood out by getting its immersive motion controllers to market several months before Oculus was able to deliver its competing Touch controllers, making the Vive the better option for VR games through most of the year.
Meanwhile, Samsung’s Gear VR and Google’s Daydream VR offered up lower-cost VR options, providing you already owned a compatible smartphone. And $299 VR and AR headsets have been promised in 2017 from the likes of HP, Dell, Asus, and others. These should bring virtual and mixed realities to more consumers. And then, of course, Microsoft is continuing to push its HoloLens development kit, which should help move these devices beyond gaming and virtual-tour experiences toward productivity applications, via digital overlays of Windows software on real-world workspaces. Ever wanted an endless amount of monitor space? That may become a (virtual) reality in the coming years.
THE RISE OF REALLY CHEAP SSDs (THANKS, TLC). Today's typical solid-state drive (SSD) isn't anywhere near as cheap on a cost-per-gigabyte basis as any given spinning hard drive. But 2016 saw the wider adoption by SSD makers of triple-level-cell (TLC) memory modules, which slashed pricing for these key upgrades. TLC technology allows more data to be stored per cell, reducing the cost of production and enabling greater data density in a given module.
In addition, TLC's rise has coincided with that of 3D layering technology, which allows for SSD flash memory to be interconnected and "stacked" in vertical space. Together, these two technologies have driven down SSD pricing and made possible ever higher single-SSD capacities. (See, for example, our winner for Best High-End Solid-State Drive, the 4TB Samsung SSD 850 EVO, which uses both TLC and 3D stacking.) Key players such as Samsung, Micron/Crucial, and Toshiba have adopted TLC in budget SSDs, and we're now seeing drives in the 240GB-to-250GB range for well under $100, and some 500GB models at just a little more than that. (And a tease: Within a couple of years, we should see the introduction of QLC, or quad-level-cell, memory that could keep these capacity and price movements going in the right direction.)
Our 100 Winners, by Category...
Let’s dig in and get down to our 100 individual award winners. Check them all out, broken out by category, below. Our 2016 winners’ list can be your shopping list for 2017 and beyond.
Source: http://feeds.computershopper.com/~r/ComputerShopperFeatures/~3/4ncE0eEi-Ug/the-top-100-tech-products-of-2016
No comments: