Some unc perspective: I paid ~$6,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars for a computer in 1996. Today, I can get the same power in a $6 single board computer. A powerful modern mini PC starts at ~$600.
However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.
The computing power available today is such a double-edged sword. We can do so much more so much faster, but then we (including myself in this) waste so many cycles on abstractions and frameworks and layers of libraries to make our development jobs easier.
If the absurd memory prices might have some positive outcome, it will be consumers demanding that all their basic pack of apps are able to run on 16 and even 8 GB of RAM, by means of avoiding those that hog their machines. And consequently (hopefully), developers and their managers being incentivized by market forces to have a modicum of care for performance and not wasting bytes. Dreaming is free...
All Electron devs, let's go back to native-er toolkits! Qt and Slint are already here for proper FOSS apps, while a new generation of research and development on the field of efficient GUI toolkits would benefit us all so much.
But how do I get to express that demand? Asking as a frustrated regular user of excel - excel is amazing software but if your laptop is not in airplane mode, the number of little delays that creep in is wild. It's all seemingly network delays, connecting to onedrive servers when i'm editing a field (why?!), 10s of connections to random microsoft domains as i flick between tabs in the UI (why?!) - each flick incurring a subtle but observable delay.
>> Dreaming is free... All Electron devs
I like your sentiment for sure but i reckon you might be barking up the wrong tree. I'll give the clearest counter example i know of:
When i scroll a buffer in Zed (it's a 120fps editor written in rust that i really want to like) i perceive micro stutters.
When i scroll a buffer in VSCode (an electron app) it's buttery smooth.
I've tried this many times over 1.5+ years of releases. It's a reliable finding on an m1 macbook pro and an m1 imac.
If the slow stack can be fast and the fast stack can be slow, then there's more to this than just tech stack.
I'm so glad it's not just me. M1 MacBook Pro, here, and I quickly gave up on Zed because it felt so laggy to me. Thought it was something wrong with my MacBook (or maybe me).
Excel doesn’t have microstutters it has full blown stutters. It is ridiculous that it takes 3 seconds to open Save As on my Dell Workstation let alone yesterday when it took 30 seconds for a local server.
Probably true, but maybe you should also ask them how much they would be willing to pay to fix that. I guess it would be less than $100 for the lifetime of their device.
That would pay for so many millions of dollars of dev time. It would be a big win-win if you could organize that deal. In the tradeoff between more dev time and better hardware, typical consumer software is way too tilted toward the latter and wasting lots of money.
If you don't think people are willing to pay, phrase it as $100 more for software and $200 less for hardware with better overall performance.
The problem is that hardware performance is easy to upgrade and software performance isn't.
That wasn’t what I meant. I am saying that the reason nobody offers better software is that people don’t want it enough. The average user is a little bit annoyed from time to time but not enough to actually care, so there’s no pressure to change.
> the reason nobody offers better software is that people don’t want it enough
I wouldn't say that's THE reason, or even a contender. The average user has little agency over what the established tools are. There is no pressure to change the tools because there is no competition. You use what your employer dictates. office and/or gsuite.
Whether or not people 'want it enough' has very little to do with whether something actually occurs.
> average user is a little bit annoyed from time to time but not enough to actually care
When you go buy a CPU you have twenty different points on the price versus performance curve to choose from, if not more. And they all have roughly the same feature list.
When you buy software to do some task, you have a lot fewer choices, they differ wildly in other features, and it's unclear which ones perform well.
That's because VS Code is hiding everything behind a bunch of non-real-time tricks of perception. Zed is giving you actual real-time feedback.
"Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give real-time data."
The overwhelming majority of the population cannot perceive anything over 90 Hz. Those that can are overwhelmingly skewed towards under 30 years old. Fighter pilots have a floor of something like 200hz for an idea of how rare it is. Just fun info.
I have 3 different displays on my desk, and they are 60hz 120hz and 240hz.
The difference between them when scrolling is.. obvious. I'm in my 40s. I'd love to see a study demonstrating that my ability to perceive this is some rare capability - that's very hard for me to believe.
Comparing side-by-side is always easier. The question is never that (should not be). The question is, would you approach a random coworker's desktop and really, sincerely, notice if they have a 120 vs a 144 Hz (or 240) monitor?
I'd say maybe if you are a professional in the sector of multimedia processing, you would be so accostumed to the smoothness of high FPS that a meager 60 fps monitor would be obviously noticeable. But for the untrained eye, I feel most people wouldn't even notice in a random scenario like that, whether the screen is 60 or 120 (and that's the range with highest ROI on FPS increments!)
I spent an admittedly tiny amount of time looking into the Zed scrolling stutters after experiencing them myself and I think it's just a matter of their line layout caching not being as good (perhaps unsurprisingly) as the Chromium/WebKit layout engine. It's especially noticeable if you have word wrapped files with lines >10kb in length (yeah, don't ask).
Zed is also at the bleeding edge of rust GUI development, which doesn't have the same mature libraries as other low-level languages. I'll give them the longer-term benefit of the doubt, but the attention to detail does matter.
To be fair, one could say the same for Zig, but Ghostty does extremely well in this regards. While it maybe doesn't have the same complexity that Zed does, it does have to deal with a lot of historical cruft of terminal emulation...
This is very optimistic. I see a future where high hardware prices push more and more stuff to the cloud and consumer hardware becomes largely a thin client. Soon doing anything with a computer will require an internet connection because the "local" portion of software will be an electron UI that makes API calls to a server somewhere to do any "serious" work.
I have a T430 that came out 14 years ago that does "serious" work for me. For almost everyone the computers they use are wildly over speced for what they use it for.
My 2nd hand ~$200 (minus a 256gb SSD upgrade) T400 was the best laptop I've ever had. Comfy everything, best laptop keyboard I've ever had, not worrying about dropping it on concrete from 2 meters (on the big extended battery, no less). Coil whine when switching p-states, no IPS, that's about it.
I don't think your average consumer has any idea how memory works, which apps are using it, or what a "reasonable" consumption is for a given task.
If things don't work, they will blame the computer. Developers will check and see that their electron app is only using 5GB of memory. They will test on 32GB memory M5 MBPs. Complaints to support will lead to recommendations to kill other apps.
What would make change is if MacOS killed processes above a certain limit, which obviously it would never (and should never) do.
There are a lot of things our devices could do to give users insight into basic things like which apps use a lot of resources, but they don't and it's a colossal failure for everyone (users, people who make efficient apps, pressure on people who make inefficient apps).
iPhone's battery usage screen is a microstep in the right direction, but it doesn't go far enough since the user has to know it exists, then visit it regularly and mentally calculate if the app's energy consumption is proportional to the amount they use it.
Just consider how an app can get stuck in a 100% CPU loop on macOS (Discord/Spotify used to do this to me if they had any animations on screen) and there's literally zero indication to the user that it's happening and which app is responsible. Best they get is that the computer's fans turn on, if it has them.
One improvement would be for the app-switcher view on iOS/macOS to show you the app's battery impact and average memory consumption. Anything would be an improvement.
I keep Activity Monitor in my dock for this reason. You can right click its icon and change it to be a real-time graph of a few different stats. I have mine set to CPU usage, it’s like a one-metric iStat Menus for the Dock
One of the first things I got Claude/ChatGPT to vibe-code was a minimal iStats-Menus-like menubar app that shows total usage of CPU, RAM, and bandwidth all in a single small vertical stack at all times.
Then I can click it to open a dropdown that ranks the top 5 processes of each category (CPU, MEM, NET) and the amount they are consuming.
It's this kind of thing that should be built in to the OS. Makes it trivial to eyeball whether something unexpected is going on.
> I don't think your average consumer has any idea how memory works, which apps are using it, or what a "reasonable" consumption is for a given task.
I had a brand new experience today. I emailed someone explaining to "right-click, then…" and got a reply saying that they are left-handed, so my instructions were not applicable for them.
Average consumers, for the most part, have a magic box. Only when someone is motivated to learn, like wanting to have a better gaming experience or having an interest in media production (or code), is there incentive to learn.
Oh but I have seen totally tech uneducated people saying that they are tired of so many apps in their phones that slow things down. People do notice, and as soon as you start asking around groups who use mid- to lower tier level of Android devices, they do develop a diffuse intuition of what is and what isn't a "heavy" app. It is unavoidable, the cruft and bloat can be observed very visually in some apps that don't care about performance.
To be fair to Apple, their best selling laptop runs on the same chip as their best selling phone, so they are rather surprisingly on the forefront of this efficiency in consumer-facing devices.
Not looked at Slint, thanks for the tip. Qt is OK-ish; things seem to improve on the Mac a lot beyond 6.8.
> To be fair to Apple, their best selling laptop runs on the same chip as their best selling phone
Technically, their best selling laptop has been the MacBook Air for some number of years. Maybe that changes with the Neo, which genuinely runs on a former phone chip, but a slightly older version than what's in their newest phones. Macs are running on silicon that builds on the phone architecture specifically intended to run in larger devices with larger batteries and (in most models, though not the Air) active cooling.
But they do all share a lot of design philosophy around performance per watt, and they're quite good at the moment.
The Neo is absolutely Apple's best-selling Mac; they've been caught off-guard in an epic way.
(You could make the case that they shouldn't have been; I don't really know why the pundit class ever entertained the idea that an A-class processor couldn't run a Mac)
This pressure works for pure software companies that don’t depend on hardware sales and that have competition. Unfortunately not all software vendors will respond to inflated RAM and SSD prices, since there are many important software vendors who have a vested interest in having users upgrade their hardware frequently. Microsoft still makes a good deal of money on OEM Windows licenses, Apple’s App Store and services revenue is built on regular sales of Apple hardware, and Google benefits from the sale of Android devices. The software needs to perform well enough on new hardware to not cause bad reviews, but sluggish enough (or with enough missing features) to motivate users to upgrade their hardware.
Additionally, software is often chosen based on market effects and not necessarily based on quality. If my colleagues use Zoom, then I need to use Zoom to avoid being difficult. If they use Microsoft Office and take advantage of features that LibreOffice and other competitors can’t support well, then I’m pressured to also use Microsoft Office for compatibility reasons.
The only silver lining I see is that these price hikes will effectively freeze current software requirements in the near future, since purchasing power has been diminished. The MacBook Neo has set 8GB of RAM as the standard for casual users. I’ve found that I don’t have a good time on Windows 11 with 8GB of RAM, but 16GB provides more breathing room and 32GB is great. I don’t expect software companies to revert to the days where they needed to squeeze every kilobyte of RAM like back in the 80s and 90s, but I do expect them to be more mindful of the fact that a lot of people will be using 8GB and 16GB configurations through at least the end of the decade.
In many contexts, compute and memory can be traded. Some apps prefer higher memory usage over higher CPU usage, because it requires less power and depending on the configuration, is overall less slow when many apps are contending for the CPU.
It's a good thing Apple's newest computers are so power efficient, because an industry-wide decrease in RAM bloat could theoretically lead to higher CPU usage and power consumption on average.
So I guess the price should come down substantially in about two years.
(Except if the data center demand keeps growing to eat up that increased supply. But at that point the bottleneck might shift somewhere else, e.g. to TSMC and processor manufacturing.)
Building a modern chip fab takes many years, and no one seems ready to take the plunge yet. The existing suppliers are happy to just keep raising prices instead.
Suppliers have ceased to exist in the past decades for building up fabs to satisfy demand and by the time they went online prices cratered. I’d assume is even riskier and more expensive now.
As a steam deck user I've become very bothered how some games run like a dream while others are unplayable, seeing beautiful games running perfect on the hardware proves it's more than possible, but studios aren't allocating the resources to make things run efficiently.
If anything good comes out of these insane prices I think it will be more effort allocated to efficiency rather than relying on consumers buying x% faster hardware every year.
I did my first ESP32 project recently and was amazed you can get a system that starts up Micropython, then a Wifi AP, DNS, and Web Server in a second or two total and uses less than 512kB RAM. And thats with a high level programming language.
Something I love about this AI era is how we are going to see companies actually focus on performance optimization again.
There’s a reason WWDC was all about apps launching faster on iOS. Apple doesn’t want to stuff more RAM in iPhones when it’s not even a spec sheet their users see or care about.
Apple has historically tried to avoid “spec” unless its a comparative for illustration purposes.
Apple always markets from a “what is the value to a consumer” angle.
So, they don’t usually lead woth “128Gigabytes of storage”, they’ll say “12million photos of your most cherished memories or 800 hours of video in high fidelity”.
Us techy people know what 128G will give us, so the marketing doesn’t land.
It's been nice that they don't have to play the specs game. Back when pixels were scarcer, it was like iPhone 4 720p video recording vs Nexus or whatever 1080p video, yet the iPhone's video was clearly better quality. Or the Apple Silicon chips have faster RAM and disk access that don't really get noticed in spec sheets or benchmarks.
The tradeoff isn’t dev job easy vs better performance. The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about instead of unobservably better performance.
Oh no, the devs back then were for sure taking all the shortcuts they could, there just weren't as many ways to leave problems for the users compute to solve.
C API was a shortcut. Extensive use of C was a sign of a lazy programmer who wouldn't send the time to write in assembly, which was much more efficient and performant.
I'd love if everyone that made noise about this would put their money where their mouth is and just do it. Make better alternatives to the slow bloated shitty software you decry, and reap the inevitable benefits since it's what users actually care about.
> The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about
I care about native macOS look and feel. Sadly the entire industry has pretty much decided that this is no longer worth the effort. I miss the days when Mac users demanded more from their apps, even if it meant that some apps were not available for the platform.
Which is such a capitalist lens to look at things through. Optimizing for a very small window of reality.
It's the same sort of optimization that drives behaviors where corporations feel no need to contribute to open-source projects. The same projects that enabled those very corporations to exist.
Yeah, I recently went to the DMV, the only way to even get a place in line in person was on a phone. Also needed some kind of web browsing device to get basic online-only services.
The problem isn't the necessity of a computer to participate in society, as those are everywhere in public for free(My library and unemployment office has PCs free to use), it's the mandatory need for smartphones, as the library has no public smartphone to borrow you.
Even beyond the library scope. I suspect most complaints in this regard are around electron/web tech, but a well developed modern C#/dotnet application is plenty fast for most use cases and you get the productivity of a high level GC language with it. Go has even a smaller footprint.
There's plenty of value in the abstractions. It didn't all start to break down until we collectively decided that javascript + chromium is the only way forward for literally everything.
not even that. you spend most cycles on thing you 1. don't want, 2. don't benefit from, 3. don't even know about.
your phone doesn't even need mention (whatsapp request the full contact list from the OS every minute. nobody knows that. google play service usea your phone as a WiFi scanner etc)
your browser churn proof of work every site you visit. cloudflare now probably waste more power than btc (and they don't save your site from bota, only set the bar at bots-willing-to-pay-to-run-canvas-fingerprints or something)
Yes, when you're used to using the modern web with all its bloat it can be a huge surprise when you build something in C or Rust - everyday computers are actually incredibly powerful.
On one of my machines I run Trisquel Linux (one of the FSF approved distros). In part is because in order to running fully FSF approved hardware, a Lenovo T400 is the top end. It is a Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM. With that, it is still a very functional unit as a lot of the bloat hasn't crept in outside of the browser.
Fully agree with you. I am a frontend developer. On my work machine spotify uses maybe 300mb of memory, but on my home pc with opensuse? Image what it uses... 1.1GB.. The same as my brave browser with 4 tabs open. What is going on.
I imagine your work machine, just like mine and everyone I've ever had, has application level limits to how much resources it can consume, spotify picks up on the limits, and adjusts accordingly?
As to what its doing with all those extra resources on your linux box... shrug maybe using your laptop to train its models or mine crypto?
It's interesting to contrast this with the attitude taken by the FFmpeg open source developers. They still hand write assembly code because performance and power efficiency is so critical that every clock cycle counts.
I was going to upvote the parent in agreement, but decided the put-down was uncalled for. "Reddit take" itself sounds like some jargon from Reddit, wouldn't know though.
It’s not really helpful in furthering good discussion, though, and it assumes too much.
To compare a reply to being akin to/belonging on Reddit is to say that it is low-effort or not intellectually rigorous, but this critique is self-defeating because it is itself low-effort and is usually not substantiated or justified, so it just rubs people on HN the wrong way.
This is especially true when it nearly bumps up against the part of the HN guidelines which admonish us to not compare HN itself to Reddit.
When saying an individual comment belongs on Reddit or is like those on Reddit, that is against the guidelines’ spirit in the small scale the same way as saying HN proper is becoming like Reddit is against the guidelines by the book in the large scale, so I don’t really think the comparison is helpful or defensible. It adds little to nothing to the discussion it accompanies, but rather undercuts it. When stated absent any other discussion, it’s nearly impossible to read it as anything but a bad faith swipe and/or flamebait.
I use it as shorthand for “this is received wisdom that you likely haven’t thought about critically and are just saying because it tends to please the reddit hive mind”.
Which is something I did indeed want to say in addition to my actual point.
But I also take your point that it is aggressive, is not related to the substance of the discussion, and is reasonable to not want to see on HN. Will avoid in the future :)
I'm fine with Electron, not so fine with basic websites being so bloated now that even a modern computer lags on them. Those were achievable in the past.
I recently liberated a couple of old Intel Mac laptops by installing Linux. These machines were not receiving system updates anymore. Even on the older machine with a dual core CPU and 4GB of RAM, GNOME runs well (XFCE would probably be a better choice to save RAM for programs, though). On the newer T2 machine with 8GB of RAM, GNOME feels basically as snappy as on my modern gaming PC.
Google Meet is trash. Camfrog from over a decade ago trashes it, Zoom, and any other multi-camera meeting room software. I was watching over 150 video streams at once on a Pentium 4 using Camfrog, and now you can't even have more than 5-10 before a computer starts choking.
Yep. My gaming desktop is an old Ryzen 5, 48GB DDR4 RAM and an old nvidia 1660 super. Plays every game I want to play just fine still at 1080p, and even a few modern titles no problem. Most of my library can be played natively at 1440p too with some settings adjustments.
I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.
I own both - there is a lot of work Arc's drivers need done to them to actually be able to use their supposed theoretical power. My GTX 1080 delivers more consistent framerates with less stuttering versus the B580.
Speed means nothing when you aren't delivering consistency.
I mean, surely this depends on what games you want to play. If you're playing mostly indies and retro games, an older desktop will be fine. If you want to play new AAA releases, probably much less so.
You don't have to go retro, just 5 to 10y old is fine.
I too built a budget gaming machine last year with a ryzen whatever it is cpu, 16GB of DDR4 and a radeon rx470 or 489 with 8GB of ram. I ignore news about new games and only buy games that are on sale and less than 20€ and everything works fine. These are AAA but not newly released ones. For example I recently started playing Skyrim for example.
Yeah that's pretty much what I play. Newer titles haven't interested me much lately except for a few. THis machine handles Diablo 4, Pragmata, all the elder scrolls titles, cities skylines, satisfactory, etc. just fine. Even managed to get AC:Shadows to run decently using the steam deck preset.
I hadn't considered Intel Arc though, the other comment's recommendation might be a good upgrade path for me without dropping $1k on a new GPU.
I bought a 2013 MacBook Air for $50 two years ago to take on a backpacking trip. It runs Linux and I use it all the time. I had a video meeting on it this morning.
You run OpenCode with Big Pickle on it with decent performance. So you can even vibe code on it for free.
Compared to current computers, the ones from 10 years ago are not that different, especially with all the software updates, unless you want an edgy graphics card or Apple processor. In terms of durability I guess the battery is the less durable part but the rest should be fine if handled with care
And with modern streaming software like Sunshine/Moonlight you can easily defer high performance tasks to a powerful machine at home. You are truly free to use any device from the last 15 years as a somewhat dumb terminal if you invest some time setting those things up... or even easier if you just need ssh.
I'm a fairly proficient linux user and I just can not get streaming to work properly and I've dedicated multiple hours to trying to set it up. The built in Steam streaming gets the closest but often just lags out for no obvious reason. Sunshine/moonlight seem to be close to working but weird display issues are constant. I've got it to the point where the steam big picture video streams perfect but when you launch a game the screen size seems to change where I can only see part of the screen on my target device.
Feels like a technology that is theoretically entirely possible but the current implementations need a lot of polish.
Oh boy, that app. I only use it once in a while, and it's slower and more enshittified every time. The last time I opened it, there was now a Verizon ad in the bottom left-hand corner asking me to watch a 30 second video to "win 200 Orbs!", whatever the hell that means.
Apple products are still luxury items. A cheap phone and a chromebook can replace most of the "base currency" features that you get when you buy Apple.
The perspective changes a lot when comparing with the prices of one year ago, or even with the prices of 10 years ago.
During the last 10 years the prices of computing equipment have been increasing slowly until this last year, when they have jumped upwards thanks to the AI companies and to the measures taken by the US government to sabotage the Chinese competition in the memory market.
Another perspective, if you compare it to two years ago, how much more expensive is it and how much better? we are paying the sAIm Taxltman.
Just see, you could buy the steam deck for 250 refurbished 2 years ago, now it's what 700$?
Try to buy 2 64GB dims of ram.
Performance was flying in the 90s. The last 1-2 decades if you bought a top end computer it'd easily last you the decade before it started to drag behind average. 3 decades ago if you bought a computer it'd reach the same point in 2-3 years.
I.e. computing is cheap compared to the past, but it only makes it that much more painful we went from "it'll be so much faster soon!" to "at least it's cheaper than it used to be" and now to "oh wow, it's like the reverse 90s these last 2-3 years!".
Ordinary people do not buy devices for their computing power, they buy them for their utility. People will look at this and see only a device that delivers the exact same utility as before, but now with higher cost.
its worth noting that you were much less restricted with this 6k computer in 1996. today we are paying ever more for walled gardens that will eventually become nothing more than a portal to cloud services. we are not returning to a previous position, we are moving to a world where everything will be a thin client.
True but you can also buy a RPI or other cheap computer and do literally whatever you want with it. Those walled gardens and portals serve a purpose for many users who don’t care about being restricted for the benefits that come with it.
Speak for yourself. I have a modern machine running Fedora. What walled gardens are you talking about? Buying a Mac is a choice that you may make, but I never will.
> However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.
Counterpoint: it's also become essential and poorly optimized.
Back then you could live quite well without ever using a computer, but during COVID you literally had to have a phone or the governments wouldn't let you move around in certain cases. Many services are restricted or inaccessible without a computer.
Computers have become cheap if you want to run 1996 software, but the two Gmail tabs have have open (work and personal) are costing me 2GiB and 779MiB of RAM respectively. I have no idea how it takes 2GiB to display an inbox with 4 emails in it.
I had a similar thought. I bought a computer for $3600 CAD 3 years ago and it shows no signs of limiting my work in any way. I have another from 2020 from my employer that is just fine, likely costing them about $2500 CAD when they bought it.
Over the lifespans of these devices, a few hundred dollars doesn't matter much. I don't really care.
I do care that the prices are a reasonable reflection of market realities and that their profit margins aren't expanded compared to the last several years', but assuming these increases are actually necessary: okay.
Another unc perspective: As that compute has become cheap, the value of what you can do with that compute, and sell in exchange for money, has also diminished.
I'm not complaining - this is the way of these things. But even 3 orders of magnitude of performance weighted price reduction doesn't pay for healthcare or education. An increase in the price of necessary tools we need for our day-to-day livelihoods is felt.
We paid like $3500 in 1995 money for a PC which was completely outdated after 4 years. The early to mid 90s were exciting times, but damn some of the machines were expensive and didn't last long.
Today, software can do insane things with video, AI, graphics.. But the basics have gotten fat. Browsers and OSes are hungry monsters demanding you to have as much CPU and memory as possible.
I am so glad this finally get mentioned and at least upvoted on HN. Many are taking hardware improvements and cheap pricing as granted.
Not to mention a lot of these price hikes will need to major improvements in the coming years that were either previously not possible / sustainable or pulled in a few years forward.
That perspective is misleading. By that logic someone in 1960 would have to pay $100k to have a vacuum computer that is equivalent to a random calculator today. So then any price below $100k is ok for a calculator and we shouldn't complain :).
The expectation was never that it would go back to being increasingly more expensive gen over gen especially at higher specs.
You could buy an m3-ultra with 512GBs of unified memory at around $ 14'000 3 years ago, and that's with the already insane nonsense Apple memory markup. As a reference, the same model with 96GB costed $ 3'999. 2'000, 3'000 $ more for the 512GB model? Okay... But 10?
Furthermore, you're lucky if you can get that 3 year old machine at 25'000 $, used! Let alone they haven't even provided a similar machine for two gens.
So essentially we're going both _backwards_ and more expensive, year after year, with zero signs of any reversion till the end of the decade.
Ffs, my colleagues brand new m2 had half the ram of my 2011 MBP. 12 years later!
M3 Ultra w/512 GB was released 1 year ago for $9500. I bought one (with a friend's Apple Employee Discount) and originally had a bit of buyer's remorse, because performance was less than some of the Cloud Providers - but recent releases of the quantized GLM 5.2 models are actually pretty speedy and are probably as good or better than any online model I had a year ago - and the discontinuation of the M3 512 has erased that remorse finally.
I think it was Jeff Geerling who brought back an Apple G5 server, very cool. But someone pointed out you could twice the performance out of a Raspberry Pi 5 and only use 5 watts doing it.
Even with these prices, we are still getting a lot of bang for our buck.
See perhaps this 1991 Radio Shack ad (from a 2014 article):
There are 15 electronic gimzo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket.
So here’s the list of what I’ve replaced with my iPhone.
* All weather personal stereo, [**US**]$11.88. I now use my iPhone with an Otter Box.
* AM/FM clock radio, $13.88. iPhone.
* In-Ear Stereo Phones, $7.88. Came with iPhone.
* Microthin calculator, $4.88. Swipe up on iPhone.
* Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone.
* VHS Camcorder, $799. iPhone.
* Mobile Cellular Telephone, $199. Obvs.
* Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone.
* 20-Memory Speed-Dial phone, $29.95.
* Deluxe Portable CD Player, $159.95. 80 minutes of music, or 80 hours of music? iPhone.
* 10-Channel Desktop Scanner, $99.55. I still have a scanner, but I have a scanner app, too. iPhone.
* Easiest-to-Use Phone Answerer, $49.95. iPhone voicemail.
* Handheld Cassette Tape Recorder, $29.95. I use the Voice Memo app almost daily.
* BONUS REPLACEMENT: It’s not an item for sale, but at the bottom of the ad, you’re instructed to ‘check your phone book for the Radio Shack Store nearest you.’ Do you even know how to use a phone book?
You’d have spent [US]$3,054.82 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone.
That US$1600 (in 1991) Tandy 1600 runs a 286 CPU and has a 20MB hard drive, and supported 640×200×16 resolution (720×350 mode for monochrome monitors):
A CB radio can’t actually be replaced by a cellphone, the phone doesn’t actually do voicemail that’s a separate service you’re paying for so it works when your phone dies, it’s also listening multiple different phones etc.
But it’s an add, obviously it’s trying to sell you something not actually be accurate.
Replaced yes, but with generally something worse. Enough to get by, just like a swiss knife is enough, but a ful toolbox would be way better. And with the advancement of technology, a current version would be way more palatable.
I have a digital audio player and it’s the size of a matchbox, with removable storage (now with a 512GB catd), and turn on under 10 seconds. And that tape recorder could be replaced with a very small device too. And I still have my casio calculator from college and that’s what I use if I need to if I need to do a series of computations.
Well I had to move music off a 10 year old laptop and I can assure you things aren't slower in the ways that matter. It was borderline unusable. I am happy with SSDs and not getting viruses off of websites, personally.
Until recently, it was always cheaper to forego software architecture optimizations and rely on faster hardware, but now with AI I think this changes that calculus.
What you don't get is a bus that enumerates itself so you need to use device tree instead of something like PCI that can enumerate itself leading you to having to recompile the kernel just to patch in DT information.
I agree. But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver. Today we spend years investing in masters and PhD-s to still live with roommates and consider buying food a luxury. Especially after the COVID hikes.
So even though chasing trends and always 'needing to buy' whatever new model Apple pumps out is idiotic, let's also not shill for big corporations.
I come from th blue collar world of the central valley California. Every mechanic, car salesman, construction manager if not worker, owns their own home and has two kids. It's interesting how 60 miles east is a whole new world where you need a crazy fancy job to buy a home.
We shouldn't! (Well, Americans shouldn't, anyways.) Americans used to spend almost a quarter of our disposable income on food, now it's more like an eighth.
> I agree. But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver. Today we spend years investing in masters and PhD-s to still live with roommates and consider buying food a luxury. Especially after the COVID hikes.
Are you sure you are not comparing top 10% back in time vs median worker now? Because people make much, much more nowadays in real terms across all deciles.
>But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver
you still can. Truck drivers, electricians and a lot of vocational work pays good salaries. The people who are broke with a masters degree chose a degree in something that doesn't pay. Nurses with a masters earn solid six figures. 90% of the time when I met someone with a PhD who couldn't pay rent it's a downward mobile middle class kid who thought that learning a trade was beneath them
Waste and sanitation jobs in Toronto start at $39k and get up to $120k+ if you’re driving the truck and leading a team
I would imagine we actually pay our municipal employees proportionally _more_ than we did back then.
There's many types. I sold Audi/Porsche and every now and then I'd sell a fancy car to a FedEx driver type that does long haul runs to other states (with a team driver next to him), and he'd be making $150k a year+. Not bad for 4 days a week work, and ability to live in a slightly lower cost area.
Truck drivers making $80k a year and home most nights is pretty common.
Well California automatically pays more than most of the country. And I believe FedEx has some Union drivers. And yes, just like the average software engineer salary isn't all that dang high, when we discuss the industry we tend to look at the most successful group we aspire to be in, not the burnouts that aren't that good at their job.
That is such an unfair comparison though. The reason we are now getting completely screwed on consumer electronics is because massive corporations just get to bully around the rest of the world and we have zero control over it.
Building a gaming PC right now is no longer affordable. I can't even upgrade my hard drives because they have tripled in price. And it's all because of good old capitalism.
As I understood it, chipmakers aren’t scaling up in record time because the last few times they did that the market fell out from under them, and a bunch of them went out of business.
If it were just that they’re enjoying the insane demand, they’d necessarily be leaving billions on the table for someone else.
That's great, but then can you ask the manufacturers of the devices to support them for 20 years? Raw numbers mean jack shit if the device itself is completely abandoned and cannot run any applications. Banking, authentication and bunch of services require the device to be on the latest iOS/Android version, which is hard to do because the manufacturer dropped it like a hot brick after 5 years.
However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.