In 2021, the PC market as a whole continued the momentum of recovery, and with the larger-scale entry of mobile phone brands, it has also attracted more and more attention in the digital circle, and this issue will let us review in detail what new technologies, new hotspots and new trends are worth paying attention to in the PC field this year.
01/ Overall leap in screen specifications
The 2K screen is lowered to 4000 yuan.
In the field of thin and light, following the overall upgrade of mainstream price point products to high color gamut screens last year, this year it continues to move towards 2K ultra-high definition resolution. First of all, the RedmiBook Pro14 Ryzen Edition and realme Book two Internet brands fired the first shot of the 4,000 yuan 2K screen, and then the lenovo Xiaoxin Air14 Plus in the traditional brand camp also quickly followed up, enriching the user's choice, so that this price point is no longer only 1080P screen.
Hardware low blue light technology is gradually popularizing.
We know that the overall blue light of LCD is higher than OLED, and at the moment when online learning is quite popular, long-term exposure to high-energy short-wave blue light will cause greater stimulation to the eyes, especially for minors. In the past, the low blue light advertised in the notebook field, only a few are realized at the hardware level, and others often need to adjust the blue light in the color palette pixels through software, although there is a certain effect, but the price is to make the screen yellow as a whole.
Hardware low blue light technology is to adjust the main peak of the LED blue light, reduce the energy of the band from the root, effectively reduce the proportion of harmful blue light in the hardware, while retaining most of the beneficial blue light, to achieve the effect of eye protection without color deviation. Like the low Blu-ray certification we are familiar with, there is also a distinction between software and hardware. Nowadays, Brands such as Lenovo, Dell, and Honor have generally adopted hardware low-blue light technology in screens with resolution specifications of more than 2K.
13 to 16-inch OLED panels are shipped in large quantities, and notebooks equipped with OLED screens continue to emerge.
Among them, Asus and Xiaomi are the most radical, and a large number of OLED screens have been used in the main shipment products and high-end flagships, and the lowest price has reached the price of 5,000 yuan, while Dell, Lenovo and other brands have also launched some test products.
OLED screens generally have a wide color gamut and extremely high contrast, while having low blue light, low latency, low power consumption and other characteristics, it looks really attractive.
However, it should be noted that most OLED screens use low-frequency PWM dimming that is more irritating to the eyes; at the same time, OLED also has a variety of RGB sub-pixel arrangements, resulting in different display fineness; Windows native color management function is disabled, unable to correctly map the wide color gamut screen; OLED panel's own pixel characteristics plus Windows interface display is relatively fixed, easy to form a "burn screen". Therefore, when purchasing OLED screen notebooks, it is recommended to analyze specific products to understand whether there is a corresponding solution to these problems, so as not to experience the expected situation.
Mini-LED also began large-scale commercial use in the PC industry this year.
The biggest difference between mini-LED and traditional LCD LCD screens is the partition backlight, which can double the brightness of the screen (easily break through 1000nits) and achieve true HDR display effects. Compared with OLED, its advantage is that there is no sub-pixel arrangement and the problem of burning screen, and there are conditions for high-frequency PWM low-strobe, which may be an ideal choice for high-end notebook screens in the future.
The first batch of mini-LED notebooks have been launched last year, but before it was mainly to test the water with a small amount, the real large-scale application is still marked by the release of Apple's MacBook Pro 14/16 series this year, and the standard mini-LED of the whole series reflects its emphasis on the panel. At the same time, Lenovo, Asus, MSI, Acer, etc. have also launched products equipped with mini-LED, but the price of the panel is still significantly high, and the price of related products is often more than 10,000 yuan.
02/ Multi-screen collaboration has become an industry hotspot
In the modern office scene, mobile phones also carry a very large amount of information, while the wired transmission between PCs and mobile phones in the past has the limitations of cumbersome operation and single function, and the wireless short-distance transmission of mobile phones and PC products has become one of the focuses of each company.
Huawei first proposed the function of multi-screen collaboration on the notebook, so that the mobile phone and the computer can achieve screen projection operations, drag and drop file transfers, and even share notifications, screenshots, and clipboards without cables. This year, Xiaomi MIUI+ and OPPO cross-screen interconnection are also equipped with their own products, and Lenovo is also optimizing its Lenovo One experience.
For users of mobile phones that are not the above brands, they can also use the general software of the Mutual Transmission Alliance for wireless mutual transmission, such as vivo mutual transmission, which can be compatible with OPPO, vivo, millet, Black Shark, Meizu, OnePlus and realme mobile phones, although not as easy to use as specially adapted, but the basic functions such as screen projection and file transmission can be realized.
03/ Windows 11 system released
Win10, which was once known as the last major version of Windows, unexpectedly ushered in the Update of Win11 this year. The new system has made significant updates to both ui design and transition animations, as well as some optimizations for touch screens, while cutting out tiles and tablet modes, and will gradually eliminate obsolete interfaces such as "control panels" in the future.
In addition to the obvious appearance upgrade, the most important upgrade of Windows 11 is the introduction of the WSA (Windows Subsystem for Android) function, which adds an Android subsystem to the Windows 11 system to implement AOSP support, allowing users to run Android applications on the desktop.
WSA can make Android applications run on all devices including Intel, AMD and ARM, which can not only meet our current needs for mobile apps on computers (especially douyin, Pinduoduo, etc.) without a desktop version), but also may become a key part of the future PC transition from X86 architecture to ARM architecture. However, at this stage, the subsystem is still in the internal testing stage, and the performance and compatibility have not yet reached the level of full availability.
04/ Performance-level ARM architecture notebooks are available
The M1 Pro and M1 Max chips brought by Apple's MacBook Pro 2021 series are undoubtedly a pair of blockbusters in this year's PC circle. The two chips benefit from the M1 series' excellent process and architectural foundation, as well as the innovative unified memory design, so that the performance of arm architecture processors for the first time has the strength of the flagship X86 mobile processor (M1 Max performance is comparable to the mobile version of the 11th generation i9+RTX 3070), while there is a significant lead in power performance.
However, for the PC of ARM processor, the biggest problem at present is the software ecology. Even if the ecological control is as strong as Apple, the native software support of the new MacBook is still very limited, even if many software can be compatible through the translation of Rosetta2, but often in the performance will be greatly reduced, so its performance at this stage is only suitable for users who use MacOS native applications.
05/ The problem of lack of cores has not been solved, and the supply of popular models is still frequent
To this day, due to the new crown epidemic caused by the global supply of raw materials has still not been solved, while the PC demand dividend brought by home work and learning is still being released, so in the first three quarters of this year, a considerable number of popular models have successively appeared serious shortages, third-party sharp price increases, by everyone ridiculed as "void god machine".
Although this situation has eased in the fourth quarter of this year with the hardware about to be iterated, the supply of new generation products next year is still not optimistic. The industry expects that the fastest will not be until the end of 2022, so that we can return to the past, and we can freely choose products at any time without worrying about the problem of out-of-stock rush.
In general, this year, in addition to focusing on the screen, PC manufacturers are also trying to lay the foundation for eliminating the gap between mobile phones and PCs, X86 and ARM platforms through various software and hardware means. Looking forward to next year, in addition to the above-mentioned technology will be further popularized, there will be a mobile version of the size of the core architecture processor release, the layout of DDR5 memory will make PC performance step up to a new level again, while the official version of Microsoft's WSA is also expected to arrive, and the A15 series of Apple M2 series chips out of the same door is also worth looking forward to.