Now that the gang’s picks for the best PC hardware of 2020 have been crowned, it’s time to gaze into the crystal ball. In this episode of The Full Nerd, Gordon Ung, Brad Chacos, Alaina Yee, and Adam Patrick Murray make bold predictions about what to expect from the world of computing in 2021, even though 2020 has proven that trying to guess what the future holds is a fool’s game.
It’s not impossible though. We start things off by revisiting our PC predictions for 2020, made twelve long months ago—before AMD toppled Intel’s desktop gaming dominance, before Apple migrated Macs to ARM (with fantastic results), before next-gen graphics cards instantly sold out, and before we launched our sweet Full Nerd merch. We still got a lot right! In fact, we anticipated AMD and Apple’s moves. But we also got a whole lot wrong in yesteryear’s escalating debate, and predictions aren’t any fun without consequences. For the ones we got wrong, we literally eat our words. Each of us brought our punishing delicacy, but the failures still taste bitter with every bite.
With our bellies full, we turn to fresh predictions, and somehow, the lingering paper between our teeth doesn’t render us surprisingly gun-shy. By the end of the show, we issue over 50 different bets—some bold, some not-so-bold, some downright insane—on Intel’s long-delayed 10nm processors, on how Windows 10 responds to ARM Macs, on PCIe 5 and DDR5, on the future of graphics cards and their clever upscaling tricks, and much, much more.
You can witness it all in the video embedded above. You can also watch The Full Nerd episode 163 on YouTube (subscribe to the channel while you’re there!) or listen to it on Soundcloud if you prefer the audio alone.
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Have a PC- or gaming-related question? Email thefullnerd@pcworld.com and we’ll try to answer it in the next episode. You can also join the PC-related discussions and ask us questions on The Full Nerd’s Discord server. Finally, be sure to follow PCWorld on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch to watch future episodes live and pick our brains in real time!