14 DAY TRIAL // I've been mentioning repeatedly how mankind seems to be inventing ways of circumventing the need for a home PC. Here's the latest example.
QNAP has launched the TVS-x71 class of Turbo vNAS network-attached storage devices. Normally, this would not be so odd or unexpected, since NAS devices debut all the time.
Also, NAS units are technically known to be full PCs, but they usually have only as much hardware and software capability as needed to run the installed HDDs/SSDs, in RAID or otherwise. And maintain a network link of course.
The new TVS-x71 series Turbo vNAS units use the 10 GbE network and powerful CPUs (Intel Pentium, Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7) to truly act as PC replacements, up to being capable of 4KL video playback, transcoding and on-the-fly editing.
That means you can have a (Smart) TV with a mouse and keyboard attached and pretend it's actually an all-in-one computer if you have it linked to the NAS via Ethernet.
QNAP will be selling the Haswell CPU-powered 8-bay tower form factor TVS-x71 soon, for an unspecified price. Not that it's important, given by how many levels of magnitude the HDDs will exceed the cost. 4-bay and 6-bay models are also going to show up in stores.