Computex is a very interesting show. It started as a way for Taiwan companies to showcase their products and find companies to buy their products. As the show started to go mainstream the focus shifted from trying to make sales to basic product marketing, creating a brand message and raise awareness.
A good example is the GSKill booth where they have “show girl product shows” to highlight products, the overclocking stage and various casemods on display. These are the perimeter displays to draw you to the booth and it isn’t until you enter that you start to see the actual memory products and their individual presentations.
Zotac had a professional e-sports tournament one year and ASUS usually configures their booth like a mall showroom with the product being visible but very little in terms of documentation.
With Computex 2024 being all about AI, it makes sense that the booths would reflect this. While AI was at center stage there was a player missing from the party.
PC Gaming
Overclocking hardware made a mass exit several years ago and when it left so did support from the hardware makers and the various sites and vendors supporting the popular hardware niche. This was eye opening at the time but, we didn’t think much of it. Now, we have a mass exit of Gaming related computer hardware which, if history holds true, will mean the death of another hardware niche that actually drove a large part of the enthusiast PC hardware market.
This is not without prescient. Many services that required a personal PC have moved to the cloud, gaming is in the cloud, storage is in the cloud and most content creation tools are either app specific or, in the cloud. Because of this there is virtually no need to have a powerful gaming PC and what you would normally pay for a high-end computer just gets move to monthly service fees for the services you use.
This post apocalyptic vision of the new computer generation is wildly exciting and yet a little scary given that you are no longer is full control of your data or even access to your apps. It a way it will create a new age digital divide that is no longer determined by your computer smarts but, rather the deepness of your pockets.
Kind sounds like the competitive overclocking problem all over again.
Episode 160 featured music:
Little People - Start Shootin' (http://www.littlepeoplemusic.com/)
