FEB 2022MAXIMU MPC 13
Jeremy Laird
TRADE CHAT
© SAMSUNG
Unbelievable bork
ASUS’S LATEST HIGH-SPEC TABLET PC hit my desk recently. Apart from its
snazzy box, the most striking thing about the Vivobook 13 Slate OLED was
a painfully obvious flaw. And that got me pondering how a fundamentally
borked product makes it through the planning process and into customers’
hands. You’d think obvious flaws or configuration errors would be filtered
out, these days. But that Asus tablet, well, let’s just say it has friends.
We’ll come back to the Vivobook, but first I need to
clarify the kind of fatal product flaws we’re dealing
with. I’m not talking about unintentional errors and
strategic missteps baked in years before a product
hits the shelves. Obvious examples involve certain
integrated circuits. Most agree AMD’s Bulldozer
CPU architecture was a train wreck, but during the
concept and design phase, it made sense.
When Bulldozer finally arrived, years after it was
originally conceived, the software environment
turned out not to be a great fit for the chip’s
strengths. You can argue AMD should have done
a better job. But, when you’re planning years in
advance, it’s easy to see how things can go wrong.
Something similar applies to Intel’s more
recent woes. Relative failures such as the Rocket
Lake CPUs were a product of problems with Intel’s
manufacturing division, forcing the chip architects
to cobble together yet another 14nm CPU using
design elements originally intended for 10nm. The
same applies to a product that was a good idea, but
conceptually wrote checks that existing technology
couldn’t cash. I’m thinking, say, Apple Newton.
As it happens, I’m also not talking about
products you could argue are intentionally crap.
Some of the biggest PC brands crank out truly
terrible desktop rigs full of proprietary parts,
including motherboards and PSUs that limit your
ability to maintain them out of
warranty or add upgrades. Hideous
stuff, but those PC builders want
to cut costs or lock customers
into pricey replacement parts. It
doesn’t happen by accident.
What this all boils down to, then,
are screw-ups that, at least in
the moment, were both avoidable
and unintentional. The product
wasn’t meant to be bad and nor did it need to be.
Which brings us back to that Asus tablet.The clue to its core selling
proposition is in the name. It packs
an OLED display. Sure, it has pen
input, a nifty detachable keyboard,
fast charging, and all that good
stuff. But so do a lot of other PC
tablets. Few others, however, have
a 13.3-inch OLED panel, the upside
of which, according to Asus, is that
this device doubles as a PC and an
OLED TV. Yeah, that’s the pitch.
The problem is that the
resolution is merely 1080p. The
immediate consequence is a pixel
density of 165dpi, which would
be pretty good on a monitor and
tolerable on a handheld device
viewed at close quarters. But like
many OLED panels, the Samsung-
made item in the Vivobook doesn’t
have conventional RGB pixels. So,
the sharpness and clarity aren’t
even as good as you’d expect from
1080p in a 13.3-inch device. Theimage quality is disappointingly
fuzzy and chunky, which defeats
the object of selling the device
based on its OLED screen tech.
One of the worst execution
errors in the last 12 months also
involved some Samsung screen
tech. The Neo G9 mega-monitor
promised so much thanks to an
upgrade to mini-LED technology.
But when I first spooled the G
up, I couldn’t quite believe what
I was seeing. The G9 has some
seriously skanky stuff going on
when it comes to the algorithms
controlling the mini-LED backlight.
As a journalist, you question
yourself in that situation. Could
Samsung really put something that
busted out the door, especially for
around $2,000? The answer to that
turned out to be yes, followed by an
eventual firmware update.
In hindsight, I was soft on the
Neo G9 in my reviews, probably
scoring the thing too high overall.
But it served as a reminder that
even the big boys screw things
up badly. With that in mind, why
not drop us a line with your own
picks for the biggest tech failures,
both ancient and modern. If we
get enough responses, we might
put together a greatest hits
compilation for your pleasure.Samsung $2,000 Neo G
really was that bad...Six raw 4K panels for
breakfast, laced with extract
of x86... Jeremy Laird eats and
breathes PC technology.