HYPOTHESIS: while Moore's Law dominated performance in laptops, the rule was "cheap, fast, low power—pick any two".
Moore's Law is coming to an end. The Macbook Neo says "why choose?"
Nobody needs a laptop with a 40 hour battery life. Nor does anybody needs 200 cpu threads and an AI coprocessor and 256Gb of RAM and 8Tb of SSD. So we're finally seeing the sweet spot in the phase diagram drift inexorably towards the corner labelled "cheap".
I checked hardware prices for servers yesterday, and a 16 GB DDR5 RAM module had a purchase price of €1600.
How long will "cheap" remain an option under current market conditions?
@juergen_hubert @cstross, ouch.
The last RAM which I bought (2×8GB DDR4 3200) cost about £40, though that was 2½ years ago. If the increase in price were in line with inflation, it'd be somewhere around £43 to £45 – but no. From the same supplier, it now costs £145.
Let that popping sound be heard soon…
Charlie Stross
Jürgen Hubert
lp0 on fire 