Says you.

I for one, was glad for the change from "Cyberdecks" to "Commlinks," and I'm miffed that they're going back.

Why?

Because quite simply, a cyberdeck is an uncool, cumbersome thing, whereas it's not too implausible to imagine that they could implant the business bits of something the size of a smartphone into your head. And since the interface is going to remain AR or VR, there's no need to go back to something with a huge surface area.

[e]Also, quite honestly, cyberdecks are a legacy of a time when people literally could not imagine that massive computing power could be held in the palm of your hand. They just couldn't imagine it.

Cyberdecks are a relic of 1980s futurism, where the computers they knew were large, bulky, cumbersome affairs, and to them shrinking something down to the size of, say, half a pizza box, was as awesome as it was possible to get and still have any real power. Nowadays, we know better. My new smartphone has more power, speed and capability than all of the machines in all of the office spaces of 1989 combined, and that may not actually be hyperbole.

It's rather akin to an ancient sci-fi story I once read, wherein evidently mankind had the ability to manufacture anti-gravity drives and superluminal starships, but using electromagnetic tape to do your voice recording and having the ability to compress a minute's worth of audio into a second for radio transmission was considered the height of communications technology. Not even really "Information" technology, communications.


Today, I think, we have a better handle on the way things will look and be in the future, simply because we're already reaching the point where the form factor of our personal electronics is being dictated by the interface technology and the size of human hands and fingers, rather than the size of the components that go within it. I think going back to Cyberdecks is a pointless gesture, an attempt to appease the "harromph, gettin' goddamn iphones in mah cyberpunk? NO THANK YE!" crowd, which will not work because they have already decided they'd rather live and relive the 2050s and early 2060s over and over again than get into the 2070s. Meanwhile, it's probably going to be a baffling step to the new blood that came in with SR4.

Me, I came in on the tail end of SR3. Like, literally a month before SR4 was announced. So I'm familiar enough with the way SR3 was to say that I strongly prefer SR4, and as an aesthetic choice, I strongly disapprove of the retrograde step back to cyberdecks. Cyberdecks should be the province of old characters pulling out some seriously chill old hardware, probably to show it off to the young bloods or have an old-school friendly cybercombat with another old guy who managed to preserve his hardware from the jormungandr worm.

You and I are in accord. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Um they had powerful computers in the palm of your hand in SR1, it was caled the pocket secretary. Now something that could put you in the matrix which includes full sensory submersion required a deck. This worked fine both setting wise(the matrix is far off enough who knows what you would need to hack it) and game balance wise. Making the deck a larger tool put it in the realm it was an assault cannon for the nerd on the team, and not the ultra concealable comlink which is more powerful than any gun.

Re: Cyberdecks -- In defense of Cyberdecks, the reality is that powerful computing has a footprint in the form of required space, and required energy. Any 2070 era Commlink will be outcomputed by a larger Cyberdeck with equivalent processing-to-space density.

Additionally, Commlinks have some reliance on cloud storage.

It sounds like Matrix 3.0 has some incentives for you to NOT rely on cloud storage, and instead maintain healthy local processing/storage capabilities. Hence, Cyberdeck.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

Uncool to you? Fair enough. Freaking cool as hell to me? Yup.

Any powerful computer is more powerful if you can make it bigger. This is as true today as it was in 1980.

Apparently you want small computers but encryption a toddler with a crayon could break is ok. I'm not sure how that gels but ok. You are picking and choosing what you want to 'advance', and that's ok, because so am I.

Don't act like it makes more sense.

Whoa there guys, desktop computers are bygone technology because tablets exist.

Tablets are excellent - for what they do best. There isn't one tool in a 2070s mechanics garage I'm guessing.

And decks these days are, perhaps not surprisingly, tablet-sized or smaller. Some of the lower-end decks are the size of a couple decks of regulation playing cards, in the neighborhood of a Galaxy Note II smartphone of today. The Excalibur is the size and weight of an iPad, give or take.

Interesting. I would have expected something around the same weight class, but thicker and not as wide. Do deckers actually use a screen on their decks rather than using AR/VR to interract with it?

Surely.

Considering that direct computer brain interfaces a la Shadowrun are probably still going to be farfetched in actual 2070, I think we're allowed to suggest they might need something the size of a briefcase in fake 2070.

The bottom line is that miniaturization is expensive, and there will always be a premium on making things smaller versus paying for extra real estate to house it.

Commlinks were an affront to realism, because literally everyone carted around the exact same technology, and it was the result of the smartphone being Johnny Come Lately in the mid-2000s. In reality, common people will use cheap tiny devices for common tasks, but real work will continue to be done on bulky machines. It's just cheaper that way.

That's cool. Even in SR3 decks didn't have a required bulk. I think one of the SR3 archetype deckers had a deck the size of about an old-school IBM keyboard.

I would have preferred bigger. they are more poweerful than any weapon a street sam will bring to bare and more concealable than his backup pistol, that seems off to me. But I guess cyber decks don't make much sense if they are the size of a keyboard.

This is excellent news. Thanks for the info.

Are cyber-implanted decks still possible with this increase in size, or are headware versions of decks not possible now in SR5? Or limited to only low-end stats or something?

Headware 'decks are totally a thing in SR5.

I still prefer the Synthesizer shaped and sized decks of SR 1 - 3.

You can totally still have one, if you want. Cyberdecks right now in the 2070s are still very makeshift, sometimes cobbled-together, affairs. Hackers are only just now catching up to the New Matrix, so there's all sorts of innovation and stuff going on (as has been mentioned about Gentry, the hacker from the SR5 cover). There's no reason you can't have an actual SR1-3 cyberdeck that your character's worked on to upgrade, gutted and replaced the innards of, etc, etc, if it's the older-style case you like.

Bull the Ork Decker carried around a Commlink the size and shape of a large keyboard all through 4th edition. In fact, it said Alpha ALlegiance right on the case. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

And no, they don't have to have screens. Patrick said it was the size of a tablet, not that it WAS a tablet. But a screen could be useful. Not everyone has DNI, a Datajack, or even Image-Linked contacts or Glasses. Sometimes you need to show someone pictures or some data, and a screen is really useful for those instances. But not necessary.

Thanks for the answer. How is the size difference handled (as it seems much less likely to be able to cram all of the necessary hardware for a tablet-sized device in a person's skull) ? If it just uses miniaturized components (costing a lot more), I would think a PC could also buy these smaller components to make a commlink-sized deck. Or is there reduced functionality for a headware deck vs. a normal one?

Guess it could be some kind of "distributed system" where pieces of the deck are normal-sized and scattered throughout the whole body...

Considering that Cranial Cyberdecks existed in SR3 allready, it would be quite ridiculous if they suddenly wheren't possible in SR5.
And really pieces of hardware that if combined inside a casing are the size of a 10" tablet(I'm assuming this so that there's a little bigger size difference from smallest to biggest) can quite feasibly fit inside a head, after all it's not like you would just try to implant a normal deck with casing and everything (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Silly like reaction enhancers and wired reflexes only communicating via phonecall all of a sudden? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

You mean "No you won't, because unh-UH!!"

My point is, given the population in SR4-5, and the law of large numbers, there's going to be somebody, somewhere, with the means, drive, and resources to break this tech's dependence on the Matrix, and a good chance at least one such person would be willing to go open-source or at least anti-corp. Data space is no longer an issue, and we're not dealing with megapulses here. You need atmospheric conditions? Atmospheric sensors will handle that without a full Matrix link. Need some additional processing power to give your cyberleg its basic ability to kick somebody/jump? Fine, install or plug in a co-processor module. Implants with no self-motive components and a DNI interface need wireless to communicate all the way to New York or Mozambiq and back just to work with each other? A firmware update will reduce that to DNI, or at worst your commlink. Why? Because I can do a day's worth of homework and provide real-world science that we already have, and SR's own pre-existing, in-universe logic to justify it. So far as I've heard, there's NOTHING in the books saying you can't build and reprogram things. Even a stupid reason such as was provided for the Smartlink to need to be "always connected to the Matrix" would be easily bypassed by a home-made firmware update and appropriate on-site or personal-sized sensors.

If we have the tech now, we easily have the tech in 2070. When the tech is "jail-broken," it's the new standard. And when an Anarchist can light that fire and bring down at least one pillar, you can be damn sure they'll do it, especially for something as stupid as this.

And his point is that the wireless bonuss crap has no fluff justification, so no matter how much fluff you come up with it doesn't matter one bit against developer fiat.