Tell HN: In the old days, computers used to get constantly faster and cheaper
21 comments
I got my first MacBook in ‘06, the mid-range white one, when the black one was the max spec’. It was $899 with a .edu, and ~$960
with tax then, I might be off by a little, someone can check OWC.
In the last 2 months, I walked out of my local Target with a neo for just under $750 with Apple care (there was a special) so, cheaper, faster across most metrics a consumer cares about, plus longer battery life, lighter, aluminum over plastic, a USB-C shaped hole that will mostly somewhat work with something you have.
However, if you mean cheap in the sense that if it breaks I’m at the mercy of someone else. Yes. My ‘06 MBB had a data-doubler, and SSD upgrades, and maxed RAM, and I can and did replace and maintain many of its parts myself. Plus, firewire with target disk mode to just clone it onto another machine with SuperDuper that just don’t exist in the same way.
In the last 2 months, I walked out of my local Target with a neo for just under $750 with Apple care (there was a special) so, cheaper, faster across most metrics a consumer cares about, plus longer battery life, lighter, aluminum over plastic, a USB-C shaped hole that will mostly somewhat work with something you have.
However, if you mean cheap in the sense that if it breaks I’m at the mercy of someone else. Yes. My ‘06 MBB had a data-doubler, and SSD upgrades, and maxed RAM, and I can and did replace and maintain many of its parts myself. Plus, firewire with target disk mode to just clone it onto another machine with SuperDuper that just don’t exist in the same way.
We are in a blip. It will end when Big AI crashes and we can all go back to running stuff locally (on cheap VRAM).
Not at all, general computing has long been dead, hardware for domain specific tasks will keep improving. There instead will be a long unwinding of the decades of hasty abstractions and some "too big to fail WPU/DOMPU" hardware if we even use the web in 10 years.
Not sure they were becoming cheaper all the time.. prices flattened out around year 2000 I would say, but speed are still improving I would say. Software and OS is a factor in this also of course..
Programming peaked about the time of Visual Basic 6, Microsoft Office, and Borland's Delphi. Normal folks, especially domain experts, could use a GUI form designer, then add a few methods to wire up the behavior they needed.
We haven't had anything close since the Web came, and replaced the clean Win32 interface on a single system with an ever churning mess of mostly usable, but intermittent and unreliable, network layers, http protocols, and way too much javascript. Then of course there was the enshittification of IE6, and the browser wars, the demise of flash, and the rest of it.
All that extra code and muck served to eat up performance and all the hardware and network bandwidth that could be thrown at it.
We haven't had anything close since the Web came, and replaced the clean Win32 interface on a single system with an ever churning mess of mostly usable, but intermittent and unreliable, network layers, http protocols, and way too much javascript. Then of course there was the enshittification of IE6, and the browser wars, the demise of flash, and the rest of it.
All that extra code and muck served to eat up performance and all the hardware and network bandwidth that could be thrown at it.
In the old days, the rich didn’t think it was a good idea to burn the atmosphere to produce plausibly deniable child porn.
What did I just read? Which rich person is thinking this?
Elon (definitely), Sam (albeit obliquely), Donald (nepotistically), Jeffrey (previously), Peter (apocalyptically)… really it’s take your pick, or propose one who isn’t.
Can you give a concrete example? That's a very bold accusation (probably criminal if not true). Why would they "promote" this, if they love generating this kind of content, why would they even share it and not just keep it for them between their community?
This level of defamation is serious, maybe you could provide a link of any sort that proves they personally do so.
This level of defamation is serious, maybe you could provide a link of any sort that proves they personally do so.
Not worth engaging with people with RDS (rich derangement syndrome)
Their answer will always be communism (as long as they end up as one of the elites). About 8 years ago HN was very pro capitalist, but everyone is tik-tok brained now. It is a lot harder to find people with nuance.
Their answer will always be communism (as long as they end up as one of the elites). About 8 years ago HN was very pro capitalist, but everyone is tik-tok brained now. It is a lot harder to find people with nuance.
Orange man mentioned out of the blue, wow it's like I am really on reddit.com!
Out of the blue usually means “unexpected”… when asked for a list of rich people with interests in the intersection between generative AI and inappropriate sexualization of the underaged, can the good doctor’s name possibly be anything but expected?
Really now? You saw a thread about computing being better in the past and your mind immediately jumped to a bunch of "rich child porn producers". Does that sound normal to you? Because to me it sounds like reading something written by a terminally online person who has no idea how unhinged it sounds to regular people.
Funny, you seem to have [mis]read the thread as somehow being about computing being better in the past, when it’s actually about the trend being worse in the present and foreseeable future. Computers aren’t getting faster or cheaper today not because we’ve passed peak computer, but because we’ve collectively decided to let billionaires chase the next AI winter. An economic bubble that represents a colossal societal self-own — the actual effect of which is to generate enormous environmental and economic hardship in exchange for a very small real productivity gain, nothing even vaguely resembling AGI, and an unbelievably large amount of misogynistic wank material — coupled with the geo-political instability and violence required to stoke that fever is the actual reason compute isn’t following the trajectory of the past.
Could I have used a less sarcastic way of voicing the basic point that allowing the capitalists to capture and secure all the means of production drives up the cost of those means while simultaneously pushing down the quality of the capital, the product, and the lived conditions of the capitalist’s feed stock, sure… but then I’d really be spending too much time and energy on this throwaway thread (and, ironically, on producing more waste energy for less valuable compute time).
Could I have used a less sarcastic way of voicing the basic point that allowing the capitalists to capture and secure all the means of production drives up the cost of those means while simultaneously pushing down the quality of the capital, the product, and the lived conditions of the capitalist’s feed stock, sure… but then I’d really be spending too much time and energy on this throwaway thread (and, ironically, on producing more waste energy for less valuable compute time).
Yep, that's what terminally online means.
We’re all terminally online, the question is once we’re no longer online at all, who will be to blame? Hint: it’s the rich.
Please stop embarrassing yourself with these replies.
If only I had cause to be embarrassed.
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Cheaper and faster felt predictable.Now every new chip launch comes with the fine print and hype.
Alternatively we just run the software in a browser (again, the primary advantage being to the developers, not the user) and need hardware to run 'browser + suboptimal app' instead of 'optimized app'.
Essentially modern dev is doing what Visual Basic did in the 1990s, only more so. The impact of that is we buy faster computers to run slower software at a reasonable speed.
The thing is though, this is all a massive win. The supply of software is by far the most important part of tech. It doesn't matter how fast your computer is if the app you need doesn't exist. We shouldn't change it.