Ikea revamps print catalogue with Augmented Reality X-Ray features
The latest edition of the Ikea home furniture catalogue will be packed with Augmented Reality features and interactive 3D models.
The Swedish flatpack giant has enlisted the McCann creative agency to help bring the pages of its printed catalogue to life with the aid of accompanying iPhone and Android applications.
On digitally-enhanced pages, waving your smartphone over cabinets, will allow to see see what's behind the doors, which the company hopes will reduce the customer's need to visit brick and mortar stores.
Printed symbols on the pages of the 2013 catalogue will also launch 3D models of products to interact with, further product information and digital how-to videos within the smartphone apps.
Adding a layer
McCann says that, before enlisting its services, Ikea had been considering ditching its print catalogue, which reaches a whopping 211 million subscribers worldwide, in favour of a digital-only offering.The Swedes decided that a better way forward was to add a digital layer.
"If you had a magazine that had 211 million copies in circulation, you just would't end it. That would be crazy," Linus Karlsson, Global Chief Creative Officer of McCann, told Wired.
"It became a really interesting exercise, and opened a whole world of opportunities. We realized we could tap into a whole new way of digital innovation."
The 2013 issue of the Ikea catalogue will be landing on doorsteps in the next couple of months.
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Google Nexus 7 16GB tablet sold out on Play Store
Google appears to have sold out of the £199 ($249) Nexus 7 16GB tablet.
The ASUS-built 7-inch slate went on sale to great acclaim last week but is now listed as 'coming soon' on the Google Play Store page in the US and the UK.
Interested customers can register to be notified via email when the device becomes available once again.
The £159 ($199) 8GB device, also loaded with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, is still available to order, with a shipping date of 3-5 days.
Limited availability
The uptake of the company's first Google-branded tablet has been extremely strong.The tablet sold-out at many retail locations on the first day and Google's own online portal has been struggling to keep up with the demand.
This will surely please Google executives. There's nothing quite like limited availability to push the demand of tech.
Just ask Apple; it has been using the same tactic to boost the mystique of its gadgets for years.
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Google thinks iPhone patents should be considered industry standards
Patented features on gadgets like the iPhone have become so popular that they should now be considered de facto industry standards, according to Google.
The search and mobile giant, currently embroiled in an ocean of patent litigation, says leaving certain, popular features out of its tech would be doing a disservice to the customer, regardless of IP issues.
In a letter to the US Senate Judiciary Committee Google's counsel Kent Walker says some of these proprietary innovations should now become de facto standards.
Consumer welfare or Google welfare?
He wrote: "While collaborative Standards Setting Organizations (SSOs) play an important part in the overall standard setting system, and are particularly prominent in industries such as telecommunications, they are not the only source of standards."Indeed, many of the same interoperability benefits that the FTC and others have touted in the SSO context also occur when one firm publishes information about an otherwise proprietary standard and other firms then independently decide (whether by choice or of necessity) to make complementary investments to support that standard in their products.
"Because proprietary or de facto standards can have just as important effects on consumer welfare, the Committee's concern regarding the abuse of SEPs should encompass them as well."
Nothing to do with standards, says Apple
Naturally Apple disagrees with Google's stance on the issue, as it would, considering the huge raft of complaints it has against the Android operating system.Apple General Counsel Bruce Sewell argues that just because "a proprietary technology becomes quite popular does not transform it into a 'standard' subject to the same legal constraints as true standards."
Sewell also highlighted the billions spent by Apple in order to create the proprietary tech on the iPhone and says that has nothing to do with standards.
He added: "The capabilities of an iPhone are categorically different from a conventional phone, and result from Apple's ability to bring its traditional innovation in computing to the mobile market.
"Using an iPhone to take photos, manage a home-finance spreadsheet, play video games, or run countless other applications has nothing to do with standardized protocols. Apple spent billions in research and development to create the iPhone, and third party software developers have spent billions more to develop applications that run on it.
"The price of an iPhone reflects the value of these nonstandardized technologies — as well as the value of the aesthetic design of the iPhone, which also reflects immense study and development by Apple, and which is entirely unrelated to standards."
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Apple issues developer workaround for in-app purchase theft
Apple has advised app developers to point in-app purchases to their own servers in a bid to combat the loophole that allows them to be easily stolen.
A vulnerability in iOS 5.1 has recently been exploited to enable in-app purchases to be stolen from App Store titles, potentially costing developers millions.
The hack works by convincing the app that the purchase request comes from the App Store's own servers, which means the item can be obtained for free.
In a Q&A on its website, Apple says that best practice "for validating receipts is to send the receipt to your server, and have your server perform the validation with the App Store server."
Not a problem in iOS 6
Apple has now suggested a number of ways developers can combat the theft, while confirming that the issue will not be present in the forthcoming release of iOS 6.A statement on its developers' website explains: "A vulnerability has been discovered in iOS 5.1 and earlier related to validating in-app purchase receipts by connecting to the App Store server directly from an iOS device.
An attacker can alter the DNS table to redirect these requests to a server controlled by the attacker. Using a certificate authority controlled by the attacker and installed on the device by the user, the attacker can issue a SSL certificate that fraudulently identifies the attacker's server as an App Store server. When this fraudulent server is asked to validate an invalid receipt, it responds as if the receipt were valid.
"iOS 6 will address this vulnerability. If your app follows the best practices described below then it is not affected by this attack."
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Gary Marshall: Why tech companies are totally evil
Have you ever wondered what it feels like to be evil? You don't need to be a moustache-twirling villain, cackling in a top hat as you tie a pretty damsel to some train tracks, and you don't need any sharks with laser beams or a house inside a hollowed-out volcano.
All you need to do is to buy a bit of tech, or buy something from a tech company.
Modern gadgets couldn't be much more evil if they were made from bits of humans and delivered to your door in a cart pulled by whipped and weeping five-year-olds. They're buggering up the planet, they're wrecking the economy and they're keeping people working in conditions you wouldn't wish on a robot.
It turns out that technology is like sausages: you can only really enjoy it if you don't think too much about how it's made or what it's doing to you.
One of the biggest problems with technology is that it's largely fashion-driven: by the time new hardware goes on sale, everybody's already focusing on the next generation. I don't know about you, but now that Intel's shipping Ivy Bridge processors I've realised that my Sandy Bridge-powered PC is a relic, and I must replace it immediately.
It's particularly pronounced with mobile devices. The iPhone 5 only exists in rumour form at the moment, but I'm drooling over it already, and my wife has to physically bundle me past electronics shops to prevent me from replacing my perfectly good, year-old tablet computer with something slightly better. Even if you're one of the sensible ones who only upgrades every second year, you're still getting shot of a perfectly decent bit of kit every 24 months.
Yes, you probably trade in the old one, or recycle it, or eBay it, but you're - I'm - still rushing to replace something that doesn't really need to be replaced, and whose manufacture involved mining all kinds of precious metals from the centre of the Earth.
And when you trade in, recycle or eBay your kit, you're in a minority. Many people simply chuck their old kit in the bin, and eventually it ends up in faraway breaking yards - places full of poison that look like hell with keyboards.
We're not responsible for that, of course. We're the good guys and girls, so we just stick to throwing children down the motherboard mines. Hurrah for us!
When you buy a new motherboard, it probably wasn't mined from the bottom of a well by a three-year-old. However, when employees of firms like Foxconn threaten to jump off the factory roof, as they did again this April, or when firms such as Apple bring in independent monitors to check for workers' rights abuses and underage assembly workers, it's clear that the tech industry isn't exactly saintly.
Apple gets the headlines, but everybody's at it. The reason most of our tech is assembled overseas is because that's where everything is. It's where the TFT panels, RAM chips and various other components come from. And in most cases, the reason all of those things are there is because of money.
It's much, much cheaper to make a PC in China than in California or Cambridge, because people in California or Cambridge expect better pay and better conditions. As a result, the electronics industry has moved east en masse, with foreign workers doing the jobs that used to be here.
Not all tech jobs can be outsourced, though. Big-name online retailers need distribution hubs, and those hubs need to be near their customers. That's good, because the big-name online retailer creates jobs here, but it's bad, because those jobs are awful.
Leak after leak shows people on temporary contracts working themselves to death in crappy conditions for crappy wages for crappy bosses so that we can get our mice a few pounds cheaper than in PC World. All of those workers pay tax. Their employers often don't.
Where's the money?
Here's a quick quiz. When you buy an iPad in a UK Apple Store, what country is your money in? If you answered "Ireland", you win a prize; Apple's retail sales are routed through an Irish subsidiary because Irish taxes are lower than British ones.Last year, Apple paid just £10 million in tax on £6 billion in sales. Amazon didn't pay UK corporation tax in 2010 or 2011. Google's UK income is recorded as Irish for tax purposes, and many other tech firms have similar arrangements.
This matters because tax pays for stuff: your gran's hip replacement, fixing potholes, ensuring people aren't turfed out of their homes if they're down on their luck. If firms don't pay it, then the rest of us have to pick up the tab - and if we won't, or can't, we have to slash services.
Tech firms avoiding tax also destroy jobs, because rivals who don't can't compete. To take one example, Amazon's ebooks are sold via Luxembourg, so it charges 3 per cent VAT. UK-based retailers have to charge 20 per cent.
Edmund Burke once wrote, "all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." The tech industry seems pretty evil to me. We're good people. What can we do about it?
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In Depth: Why Apple TV is more than a hobby
Apple TV: Movies and going beyond iTunes
When faced with the prospect of buying an Apple TV, a question many people ask is: "Why would I want one?"And, to be fair, Apple's black hockey puck does initially appear quite limited and restricted - a seemingly impenetrable box that doesn't even enable you to load apps, nor offer the freedom of watching whatever you want, whenever you want.
Critics often use it to bash Apple's 'closed ecosystem', arguing that the Apple TV is little more than a device designed to funnel more of your money to the iTunes Store and Apple's ever-growing cash mountain. Even Apple itself isn't particularly bullish about its tiny device, referring to it as a 'hobby', and usually only gives it the briefest of mentions during keynotes and earnings calls, before banging on about the iPad.
But there's clearly something to the Apple TV, otherwise Apple - notorious for its razor-sharp sense of focus - would have canned it a long time ago. We reckon its detractors often miss the point about what the device is for, and, importantly, what it has the potential to be.
For us, the Apple TV is an essential part of our Apple ecosystem. Even out of the box, it can impress in key areas, but add an iOS device to the mix and you have the potential to revolutionise your viewing habits. Bung in a Mac as well and you have the kind of media centre TV addicts would have killed for only a few short years ago.
This feature explains why we're hooked on Apple's tiny black box, and why its future is brighter than ever. By the end you won't so much be asking yourself why would you want one, but instead: why wouldn't you?
The Apple TV, which sets you back £99 in the UK, is a simple unit and it's very easy to set up. It connects to a TV via a single HDMI lead, optionally to an amp via optical audio, and to your network via Wi-Fi.
The latest interface revision's home screen is vaguely iOS-like, providing straightforward access to a number of sections and content sources.
Box of tricks
First up, you get Movies, which is essentially a rental service. Not every film you'd find in a brick-and-mortar shiny-disc rental shop finds its way to the iTunes Store (which is where the Apple TV draws its content from), but the selection is improving all the time.
Pricing isn't too bad either, at £3.49 per film. Although you can perhaps find better deals if you venture into your local town, the Apple TV wins out through immediacy: confirm a rental and it starts streaming. Assuming you have a reasonable broadband connection, even HD movies should be ready to watch within a few minutes at most.
If something crops up and you no longer have time to sit in front of your TV, you can delay starting the film for up to 30 days, but once you press play you've got 48 hours (24 in the USA) before the rental disappears. Note that you can also watch a film as many times as you wish during the limited window - handy if you fall asleep half-way through while the rest of your family remains glued to the screen.
The next option is TV Shows. Although Apple briefly flirted with TV show rentals in the USA, all shows are now purchase-based. You can buy shows by the episode or series, and cost varies depending on the network, the show itself and whether or not you're downloading HD. Expect to pay up to £2.49 per HD episode, although buying an entire season or series usually drops the per-episode price average, and the iTunes Store also offers regular sales on older shows.
If you're not all that fussed regarding picture quality, switch Video Resolution to SD in the iTunes Store section of Settings to save yourself a few quid.
Note that because the Apple TV is a device with limited storage (its guts essentially reveal a headless 8GB iPod touch), you don't store purchases on the device itself. Instead, TV shows are stored in Apple's iCloud service and streamed on demand. (This is also the case for an increasing number of movies in the USA, which can be purchased rather than just rented through the Apple TV. We assume this feature will eventually find its way to the UK.)
Beyond iTunes
The third option on the home screen is Music, which is also service-based, in that it's a link to iTunes Match. This is a £21.99 per year subscription that attempts to match the music collection stored on your Mac and then enable you to play it back through Apple devices, without having to sync myriad files between said devices.
This option works nicely if you're already using iTunes Match. If you're not, there are other ways to get your music - and, in fact, plenty of other non-iTunes Store content - on to your Apple TV. The fourth of the home screen's options is Computers, and this enables you to connect your Apple TV to the iTunes Library of any Mac (or PC) on your network that you've set to allow Home Sharing (Advanced > Turn On Home Sharing in iTunes).
Once connected to a Mac, you get a menu on the Apple TV that enables you to access all relevant content that's sitting in iTunes: music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, iTunes U content and photos. Although this does have the downside of requiring your Mac to be awake, the benefits are clear: you're not reliant on the iTunes Store.
If you've used the likes of Handbrake to convert videos to an iOS-compatible format, and stored the results in iTunes, the Computers section will enable you to access this footage. If you're not using iTunes Match, you get access to your music collection, for no cost.
The remaining items on the Apple TV home screen refer to specific online services, further expanding the content you can access via the device. Some of the options, such as YouTube and Vimeo, are free, whereas others, such as Netflix, require a subscription.
Towards the end of the list you'll also find several photo services, if you fancy turning your television into a massive, energy-guzzling photo frame.
Remote control
Whatever type of content you're trying to access, one thing will become clear before long: the remote control that Apple bundles with the Apple TV is dumbed down to the point of it being borderline useless in certain scenarios, and this is exacerbated by the nature of the Apple TV's linear-list menus.
For basic tasks, the remote is okay - you can use it to play and pause and it's fine for navigating the latest movies and grabbing one to rent. But it's very easy to lose your patience when entering search terms and passwords letter-by-letter, using the tiny direction arrows and clicking the play button to confirm each character. And if you've a big music collection, scrolling down a massive list of artists or albums gets old really fast.
For such tasks, Apple offers the Remote app. A free download from iTunes, it has two primary functions. The first is turning any iOS device into a gesture-based touchscreen controller. Menus are navigated by swiping and tapping, but more importantly, whenever you find yourself confronted by a text field, the iOS keyboard pops up. Typing on an iOS device might be slower than using a traditional keyboard, but it's certainly a lot faster to enter a password using an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad than it is to navigate around the screen with the Apple TV remote.
The Remote app has further gestures, too. When a video is playing, you can flick left and right to rewind and fast-forward, or drag-hold to scrub through footage; if you flick down, you'll gain access to chapter markers and can then flick left or right to skip.
Similarly, when playing music you can drag to scrub or flick to access the previous or next tracks. The other thing the Remote app is great for is navigating the media you have stored in iTunes. On the iPad in particular, Remote rather resembles a miniature version of Apple's desktop jukebox, and enables you to rapidly search a collection to find an album or video you'd like to listen to or watch.
You don't have to scroll down a massive list of artists (which can take some time), click an album, then click again to play a track; instead, you can slide your finger down the side of the iOS device's screen, tap an album's artwork, and then choose a track once it spins round on the iPad, or when the track-listing slides into view on an iPhone or iPod touch.
Although Remote is definitely the first app we recommend that new Apple TV owners download, it's far from the last, and that's because the App Store - in combination with the AirPlay feature - opens up a world of possibilities for the device.
Why Apple TV apps are the future
Apple's still fond of telling everyone "there's an app for that", and although most apps are designed for consuming or creating content on an iOS device, Apple's AirPlay technology can free video and audio from any one device and enable you to send it elsewhere.
In such situations, your iOS device becomes a kind of super-powered remote control, used for finding what you want to watch or listen to. And the Apple TV becomes a receiver and conduit, sending the output to the television, rather than it remaining locked inside your device.
In some cases, this can fix shortcomings with the Apple TV itself. For example, although the Apple TV has a Radio option on its home screen, finding a station you want to listen to can be tedious. Instead, it makes more sense to grab a dedicated radio app, such as TuneIn Radio. Find a station you'd like to listen to on that (which can subsequently be stored as a favourite), start playing, and then send the audio stream to your television by tapping the AirPlay button and selecting your Apple TV as the destination.
Elsewhere, apps provide plenty of content that you cannot access directly through the Apple TV itself. Some of these mirror traditional television in some way: for example, the BBC and Channel 4 provide AirPlay-compatible catch-up services in the form of BBC iPlayer and 4oD Catch Up, respectively. (It's worth noting that both of these apps use nonstandard players and so lack an on-screen AirPlay button - see the 'Use AirPlay with non-standard players' walkthrough for how to get AirPlay working with them.)
The awkwardly named Watch TV Free Live with TVCatchup app provides access to whatever's showing right now on over 50 channels. And then there are plenty of specialist video apps, such as TED. So-called TEDTalks are brief and typically entertaining presentations by intelligent, articulate geniuses, mavericks and gurus.
The app itself enables you to watch on your iOS device and save shows for later, but the built-in AirPlay support provides the means to get the videos to your Apple TV and so to your television and accompanying audio system.
Some apps go further into the realm of making something staggeringly complicated surprisingly simple. Air Video and streamtome both require you to install a piece of server software on your Mac, and select some folders. When the related iOS app is installed on your iOS device, you can access the defined folders, select a video, and have it stream over Wi-Fi to your device. This can then be sent on to your Apple TV.
If the format of the video isn't compatible with iOS, the server software will convert it on-the-fly. And so if you've a bunch of AVI files sitting on a hard drive, these apps provide the means to get them to your TV, without syncing, without converting, and without moving the files anywhere.
Work with it
Outside of entertainment, the Apple TV offers further scope, with many apps enabling you to send your work to the device. For example, Keynote presentations can be sent to a television, which might not be much use in the home, but it has clear benefits in the classroom or in business meeting rooms.
If the rumour mill is to be believed, Apple remains hard at work on an actual television, which fans of the company hope will revolutionise television in much the same way the iPhone totally disrupted the smartphone industry.
Much of the speculation originates with Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs. Within, Isaacson says Jobs wanted to make television sets "simple and elegant", like he'd done for computers, music players and phones. "It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it."
There's nothing to say Apple won't introduce a television set at some point, but who's to say Apple hasn't already cracked it? The Apple TV, after all, works with any existing television with an HDMI input. It makes it easy for you to rent and buy from the iTunes Store and, as we've seen in this feature, access almost limitless content from elsewhere: TV catch-up services, radio stations, online video repositories, and your own media collection.
Unlike any possibly forthcoming Apple television, the Apple TV also happens to be an affordable, small, simple add-on. Recently, the Apple TV was revised to support 1080p HD content (as opposed to the previous model, which only supported 720p). For those people who demand the highest possible quality picture, the upgrade would set them back £99.
But an equivalent technological leap with a full television set would have rather more impact on your wallet. So while we'll keep half an ear out for news of a magical new Apple product that can revolutionise yet another industry, we'll be keeping two eyes on our existing living room TV's screen, powered by Apple's unassuming but surprisingly powerful little black box.
How to use AirPlay with non-standard players
1. Launch an app
Apps like the depicted BBC iPlayer do not use the standard iOS playback controls, which means there's no one-touch way to access AirPlay. However, many of them nonetheless support the technology.
2. The multitasking bar
Double-click the Home button and swipe the multitasking bar right (twice on the iPhone or iPod touch) and you'll see playback controls and also an icon denoting the active app that supports background multimedia playback.
3. Activate AirPlay
Tap the AirPlay button and select Apple TV and, if the app's compatible, it'll soon send audio and video to your television. (Use the Mirroring switch if the app doesn't include built-in support.)
How to set up Air Video
1. Install the client
Download and install the Air Video client from http://inmethod.com or the iTunes Store. Once it's launched, you'll see the icon in your menu bar. Click it and select 'Preferences' to open the app's preferences.
2. Define shared folders
In the Air Video Server Preferences, select the Shared Folders tab. Click 'Add Folder', select a folder where you have stored some videos, and click Open. It will be added to the list. Repeat with other relevant folders.
3. Use the app
When the server's running (toggle in the preferences or the menu item), you can now access your shared folders from the Air Video app and stream videos within, which can be sent to your Apple TV via AirPlay.
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Review: HP Z1 WM429EA
Time for a spot of word association. We say workstation, you think big, black monolith. Right? That certainly used to be the drill for powerful systems that were aimed at 'professional content creators', as the ghastly industry jargon goes.
Well, that is except for mobile workstations, which are typically little more than flashy laptops with bespoke graphics drivers. What to make, then, of HP's new Z1 all-in-one workstation?
The most obvious comparison is Apple's iMac, a machine ostensibly intended for lightweight multimedia duties in the home or as a stylish office desktop, but often found doing much heavier lifting than that. We'll come back to it in a moment.
Open and shut case
As a physical object, the Z1 is simply awesome. We've seen some fancy engineering in our time. But as far as desktop kit goes, the Z1 represents a new high.
The most delightful aspect is the way the whole thing tilts over on its hefty stand until the chassis is completely horizontal. Pop a couple of latches and marvel as the screen surface rises with oily, damped precision, laying the innards bare.
You're then presented with the second most impressive engineering exhibition - the manner in which the Z1's components have been integrated into the all-in-one enclosure. It's a beautiful bit of work, not only in terms of the visual layout but also access to components.
Believe it or not, it's easier to swap the memory or hard drive in the Z1 than it is a conventional tower PC - it's that slick. There's even plenty of scope for expansion with no fewer than three mini PCIe slots.
Then there's the graphics installation. The Z1 sports what looks for all the world like a conventional PCI Express board, cleverly clamped flat to the motherboard. It's hilariously easy to pop it out, at which point you discover that the board is much smaller than you thought and is actually based on Nvidia's MXM mobile form factor, surrounded by extended cooling apparatus.
The downside there, of course, is that while the graphics pop in and out with ease, buying replacement or upgrade boards isn't straightforward. You'll have to source them from HP, and that's never going to be cheap.
What else can we tell you about the physicals? Well, the 27-inch LCD panel is located below a glass cover, which adds to the slick aesthetic but also increases reflectivity. Perhaps it's an inevitability given how shonky a recessed screen would look.
But with a workstation, you might think form would follow function. Another downside to the heavy engineering is sheer mass. The Z1 weighs a metric ton.
But the only real disappointment in this area involves the crap-tastic keyboard and mouse. Our workstation came with the wired items rather than the optional wireless kit, and they're cheap, nasty and completely ill at ease with the quality of the machine proper. That's a shame.
But what of the detailed specification? This is where things get really interesting. On the CPU side we have an Intel Xeon E3-1280. That's a 3.5GHz quad-core model that slides into the LGA 1155 socket, and it presents a problem.
Pound for pound, Xeon chips are more expensive than their Core cousins. In most workstations, that's forgivable because they give you more options. You can, for instance, have more than one socket. You can also buy Xeon processors with extra cores. Again, it all costs, but if you want maximum performance in a single box, a Xeon processor is the way to go.
The problem for the Z1 is that it's a single-socket system, and an LGA 1155 item at that. That means you can't have more than one CPU, and you can't have more than four cores. Which begs the question why you would bother buying a Xeon.
At this point, someone from Intel will pipe up about validation and error correction on the memory side. But aside from a few exotically mission critical applications, our reply is a simple: meh.
Next up is graphics. Here again we're talking workstation class kit - in this case an Nvidia Quadro 1000M chip. Workstation graphics can be a very different beast from desktop graphics. Apart from the different driver package, some workstation chips have much stronger double-precision performance which certainly does matter to a wide range of widely used professional applications.
Unfortunately, the latter doesn't apply to the 1000M. It's basically a re-badged GeForce 540M with 96 shaders, so there's no ECC memory support or turbo-charged double precision performance. Shame.
If that's a bit disappointing, the hard drive is downright insulting. It's a 1TB magnetic Hitachi 7,200rpm model, and not at all what we were expecting - especially now that solid-state drive prices have fallen so dramatically.
Having said all that, one area where HP has got it just right is the choice of LCD panel. It has used one of LG's 27-inch IPS jobbies and it's as gorgeous as ever. Along with the 2,560 x 1,400 native resolution, you get impeccable viewing angles, uber nice colours and super contrast. The only niggles involve that glass cover and the slightly grainy anti-glare coating underneath. It was ever thus with IPS panels.
All of which just leaves the minor matter of performance. Predictably, the storage part of the equation basically blows. Magnetic platters are no match for memory chips when it comes to random access. You could argue that's an easy upgrade, and it is, but surely a machine of this class should come with an SSD as standard?
Underpowered
On the CPU side, it's standard Intel quad-core fare, which means very, very good but not actually anything special - again in the context of the Z1's monumental list price. The graphics performance is nothing special, either. In fact it's quite poor.
While we only tested games, we're confident the Z1 will be no powerhouse when it comes to hardware accelerated rendering. There's much more bang for your buck available elsewhere.
And that brings us back to ye olde iMac. Even a basic iMac now has a quad-core Intel chip. Okay, it's not clocked as high as the Z1, but you won't feel the difference. It's a similar situation on the graphics side, where the 27-inch iMac packs more powerful 3D kit even if its Radeon chips aren't terribly workstation-app friendly.
And yet the Z1 still appeals. It's much more configurable, user friendly and upgradeable than an iMac, and offers much broader workstation validation. Of course, there's also the Mac OS vs Windows thing, though you do have the option of dual booting on the Mac. But money no object, we wouldn't blame you if HP got the nod.
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