In a few days, we will usher in the Spring Festival in 2022. Friends who follow our three easy lives may remember that every year at this time, we will launch some content designed to summarize the market changes and technological changes in the year, and predict the industry trend in the next year.
But today is a little different, because before we start talking about those lofty achievements and progress, we want to talk about the consumer electronics products that were once in the industry for a while, but are likely to disappear in 2022, and why they disappeared.
SLR camera: Its decline is an inevitable change in technology and demand
First of all, the first product we want to talk about is a SLR camera that may make many "photographers" listeners sad and smellers cry.
Yes, the facts in this area are quite cruel. Among the current three major camera manufacturers, Sony has stopped the replacement of its alpha series SLR several years ago and focused on micro-singles. Now that they are playing well in the field of micro-singles, they may never remember that they once did a SLR.
On canon's side, Chairman and CEO Fujio Mitarai just confirmed some time ago that the EOS 1D X Mark III will be its last flagship SLR. At the same time, just a few days ago, Canon also closed most of its production lines at the camera production plant in Zhuhai, announcing a sharp reduction in its camera production capacity.
As for Nikon, although they have not yet made a clear statement, but look at the rapid iteration of Z series products now, the market and word of mouth double harvest situation, and then look at the D850, the traditional high-end SLR has not been replaced for nearly five years, saying that Nikon has not concentrated on micro-orders, perhaps no one will believe.
So, why do camera manufacturers generally stop paying attention to SLR? There may be two main reasons.
First of all, in terms of structure and working principle, the only difference between sLR and micro single is that the SLR has an additional mirror and an independent focus sensor. This allows the SLR to not work when the main CMOS is in focus, and also causes the main CMOS to theoretically have a lower residual charge and less noise when taking pictures (sensitivity).
As a micro-single flagship, the ISP performance and many functions of the Nikon Z9 surpass its own SLR D6
However, with the advancement of CMOS and ISP technology, the noise problem of micro singles has long been solved, and some flagship full-frame and even medium-format micro-singles can fully "break the wrist" with the top SLR in terms of picture quality performance. This also directly prompts manufacturers to expand the functional positioning of micro-single from the previous main home civilian to today's professional level, incidentally relying on a larger fuselage and a larger capacity battery, and also solves the previous endurance shortcomings of micro-single.
An ultra-small full-frame video camera like the Sigma FP is unthinkable in the era of SLR
On the other hand, the imaging principle and body structure of the SLR are also destined to be more suitable for still photo shooting. The micro-single mirrorless plate and small size give it stronger scalability and better compatibility for video shooting. Therefore, when a large number of consumers have functional requirements for "professional cameras" from static recording to VLOG and video shooting, the rise of micro-single has become inevitable.
The home fever CPU: once a top symbol, now no longer makes sense
If the decline of SLR is due to the change of demand brought about by technological progress, then the disappearance of the home fever CPU reflects the stagnation of the underlying technology in the related industry in recent years.
See here may be friends will wonder, this year Intel did not just release the 12th generation of Core, AMD's 7000 series of Ryzen is not also previewed, how can you say that the home fever CPU is gone?
The symmetrical memory bits on either side of the CPU socket are the most typical feature of an audiophile-grade motherboard
In fact, what everyone does not know is that whether it is the 12th generation of Core, or the 5000 series or 7000 series of Ryzen, it cannot be regarded as "fever" in product positioning. Because the real audiophile platform has four obvious characteristics, one is that the number of CPU cores is particularly large, 28 cores, 32 cores, and even 64 cores; the second is that the memory is definitely more than dual channels, the early start is three channels, and now it is a four-channel or eight-channel configuration, so the memory bandwidth is particularly large; the third is that the number of PCIE is particularly sufficient, at least 2-3 full of blood x16 slots, unlike ordinary home high-end platforms, buckle cables give an x16; fourth, the motherboard life is particularly long, Basically, a generation of motherboards corresponds to 2-3 generations of CPUs, and will not correspond one-to-one like ordinary home platform CPUs and motherboard chipsets.
Judging from these four characteristics, the only ones that really meet the requirements of the "home fever platform" are Intel's Core-X series and AMD's Ryzen Thread Ripper series. According to the latest breaking news, now these two series have stopped updating, and although the corresponding new core will still be out in the future, there will be no new products for gamers, and all will be changed to the professional workstation product line (that is, Xeon and Thread Ripper PRO) that focus on productivity.
Why do these two manufacturers invariably "cut" the audiophile household CPU product line? First of all, looking at the latest Xeon and EPYC (AMD's server-level CPU) product lines, it will be found that the power consumption of today's top ultra-core CPUs has actually shown an explosive upward trend compared with the past.
For example, the latest Xeon8380 (40 core 80 threads) and EPYC7773X (64 cores 128 threads), the default TDP has been as high as 270W-280W, which is higher than the power consumption of ordinary high-end CPUs full core full core overclocking. If you increase the frequency on this basis and open up the overclocking, it is easy for the power consumption to exceed 400W. At this point, even if it is a 360mm triple fan water cooling, the probability is already unstoppable, and only the violent fan of the server chassis can "work". And the server fan noise, can it still be used at home?
Secondly, from the perspective of memory performance, although as mentioned earlier, the number of memory channels in audiophile-level CPUs is usually particularly large. However, the disadvantage of ultra-multi-channel memory controller design is that the memory overclocking compatibility of these CPUs is often very poor. What is this concept? To put it simply, as far as we know, the ordinary 12th generation Core i9 built-in memory controller can theoretically support up to 12800MHz DDR5 overclocking memory (but the current motherboard and memory can not keep up), at this frequency dual channel DDR5 memory, has been comparable to the audiophile CPU + 8 channels DDR4 memory read and write bandwidth.
Of the 30 Series graphics cards, only the 3090 and 3090Ti retain support for SLI
Finally, friends who pay attention to graphics cards may know that today, whether it is NVIDIA, AMD, or major game manufacturers, they are no longer enthusiastic about supporting the application of multi-graphics card parallel technology in games. This means that the advantage of the "PCIE channel foot" of the fever-level CPU is not much use in actual use. Moreover, the price of the current graphics card, it is estimated that not many players will buy several graphics cards, just for the parallel play of the game.
Folding folding screen: It is inevitable that immature technology will be eliminated
The last thing we want to say is a technology that was once in the mobile phone industry, and it is also a branch of the current folding screen model - the folding folding screen.
What is an out-of-the-box? Simply put, it is a design that folds, the fuselage is inside, and the screen is outside.
On the surface, the biggest advantage of the folding folding screen is that when it is folded, it can achieve the effect of "front and back double screens" of the device, and compared with the folding screen mobile phone, the folding screen means that the folding state and the unfolded state can share a screen, without the need to design both internal and external screens for the mobile phone, which theoretically helps to reduce costs.
But on the one hand, whether the folding screen is folded or unfolded, the soft screen is exposed to the outside, which greatly increases the risk of damage to the screen due to hard objects squeezing and collision (especially when you put the folded device in the bag or pocket).
On the other hand, from the principle of the "folding screen" itself, a very important performance indicator is the folding radius, that is, the size of the bending part of the folding screen when it is folded. For the folding screen, in the case that the screen is not damaged, the smaller the folding radius means that the relevant technology of the screen is more perfect.
From this point of view, the reason why many of the folding folding screens we see today use the "water drop" bending design is because in addition to reducing creases, there are actually factors that the screen folding radius is not small enough. For the folding folding screen, its folding radius is equivalent to half the thickness of the entire mobile phone, and the folding radius is very large.
This means that if the screen that is completely 180 degrees inward "folded in half" is the final form of the ideal folding screen device, then the folding radius of the outer folding folding screen can be said to be the initial stage of the commercial use of the folding screen, representing the form of immature technology.
In other words, with the improvement of the upstream screen factory in the material and folding performance, the elimination of the folding folding screen is completely logical. This is not only because the related equipment is more easily damaged, but also because the technology (or design) itself is only a "transition solution" in the early days of flexible folding display technology.
【The picture of this article comes from the network】