So this week gave us two very different pictures of where computers are at right now, and I can't stop thinking about how badly they clash.
On one hand: CES wrapped up in Vegas on Friday, and the big splashy headline gadgets were, as always, a little unhinged. Kohler was showing off the Numi 2.0, a toilet that talks to Alexa and costs something like six grand. Sony had aibo wandering around a booth, the new robot dog, cute as anything, priced at levels that make a real dog look like a bargain. Samsung had "The Wall," a 146-inch modular MicroLED display that they're clearly hoping rich people will just put in their living rooms like its a normal thing to do. LG showed a TV that rolls up into its own base like a window shade. Its all very "the future is here," except none of it is actually in anyone's house yet, its just a booth in a convention center that a thousand journalists photograph and then everyone forgets about by March.
On the other hand: I spent about four hours on Wednesday night trying to get my own desktop to boot again.
Quick recap for anyone who's been offline since New Year's — Google's security researchers found these massive chip-level flaws, Meltdown and Spectre, that affect basically every processor made in the last decade. Intel's CEO used his CES keynote on Tuesday to promise patches for 90 percent of the chips shipped in the last five years by the end of the week, which is a genuinely fast turnaround for a hardware company, I'll give them that. But the actual rollout has been a mess. Microsoft had to pause the Windows patch for a chunk of AMD machines because people were reporting their PCs just wouldn't start up anymore after installing it. Mine is an older AMD box I built back in 2014, and sure enough, update installs, reboot, black screen, nothing. Safe mode wouldn't even catch it. I ended up having to boot from a USB recovery drive I hadn't touched in two years and manually pull the offending update out of the update history, which is not exactly a weeknight activity I had planned.
And look, I get why the fix is messy. This isn't a normal bug where you patch some code and move on. Meltdown and Spectre are baked into how modern processors do speculative execution, the trick where the chip guesses what instructions it'll need next and runs them ahead of time to save cycles. Patching around that at the software level means you're basically telling the chip to stop doing one of the things that makes it fast. Early benchmarks floating around this week are showing real slowdowns on some workloads, particularly anything hitting the disk a lot. My gut says the CES gadget-of-the-week cycle would be a lot more interesting to actual normal people if any of these companies spent half as much stage time on stuff like this instead of racing each other to put a voice assistant into every object with a power cord. Alexa was in literally everything at CES this year, someone on Twitter was joking they saw it in a showerhead, and I believe it.
None of this is to say gadget season isn't fun to read about over coffee, because it is, I had three tabs open Tuesday morning just gawking at the rollable TV. But there's something a little absurd about a smart toilet demo happening the same week that half the tech-owning public is quietly nursing bricked machines because the actual foundational hardware in our regular boring laptops turned out to have a design flaw nobody caught for a decade. The stuff that matters is rarely the stuff on the big stage.
Anyway. If you've got an AMD system and you haven't updated yet, maybe hold off a few more days until Microsoft sorts out the blocklist properly. I'm not saying don't patch, Meltdown is a real problem, I'm just saying don't be me on a Wednesday night with a USB stick and a headache. Back to regular posting soon, I've got some thoughts on this years crop of laptop announcements once I've actually seen a few in person instead of through a press photo.